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    guy to soothe its pain.  In the late '60s the Russian economy was in trouble,

    their agricultural system was bogged down, and frustration was running

    rampant.  The best way for a leader to boost his popularity: mount a foreign

    adventure...preferably against someone small and helpless.  When the

    Czechoslovakian uprising came in 1968, it was a godsend.  Russian leaders

    sent in the tanks.  And the Soviet populace cheered wildly.49

    More frequently, however, the victim is someone right at home.  In the

    early '50s, America suffered seriously from pecking order problems.  We had

    been humiliated in Europe, where the Soviets had grabbed eight countries50

    and walled them off behind what Winston Churchill called an "Iron

    Curtain."51  China, the keystone of our plan for Asian security, fell to a

    Marxist revolution.  We had lost nearly a quarter of the world's population to

    our adversaries in only a few short years.  Americans were desperate for

    someone to blame.  A slightly alcoholic senator from Wisconsin offered to

    satisfy their hunger.  There had been Communist infiltration of the

    government, but by the time the pixilated legislator showed up President

    Truman had eliminated it.52  Nonetheless, the senator cooked up fantasies of

    a Communist plot within the American State Department.  His claims were

    so filled with fraud that nearly every major American newspaper revealed

    their absurdity.  But the public couldn't have cared less.  They swept the

    tipsy Senator up as a hero.  And for nearly four years, Joseph McCarthy was

    one of the strongest men in Washington, able to make or break careers with a

    single word.53

    Our problems, however, were not in Washington.  They were overseas,

    where Mao Zedong had ousted our allies in China, and Soviet-sponsored

    Eastern European "leaders" had seized power in one state after another.  A

    few years earlier, when World War II had ended, we had disbanded most of

    our military forces.  The Soviets had kept theirs at full strength.  In what

    historian William Manchester calls a "near mutiny," servicemen had thrown

    massive demonstrations demanding demobilization.  And they'd gotten it.

    The result: by 1950, the Russians had four times as many soldiers as we did,

    and thirty tank divisions to our one.54  Confronting the Russians would have

      The Soviet Union long indulged in the habit of beating up on the little

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