In November 1951, a public-relations executive named John W. Hill met Herbert Hoover at a dinner in New York City. It was an unhappy time in the United States, especially for conservative Republicans. Abroad, the Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate that Pres. Harry Truman's administration seemed unable to end. Earlier in the year, the president had abruptly dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a conservative hero, from America's Far Eastern military command, to the consternation of Hoover and millions of others. At home, Truman's liberal Democratic administration was under furious assault from conservative critics of its policies toward Communist regimes overseas and Communist subversion within our borders.
How quickly the world had changed since the close of the Second World War a few years earlier. Then the future had seemed bright with promise. Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had been crushed; fascism as an ideology had been discredited; the birth of the United Nations had appeared to presage an era of global peace. Now, a mere six years later, in Asia and along the Iron Curtain in Europe, a third world war — this time against Communist Russia and China — seemed a distinct possibility.
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