Perhaps one of the best cinematic expressions of the “Red” scare during the 1950s is The Way We Were, in which we see the paranoia, fear, and propaganda that gripped Hollywood and the rest of America during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch-hunts” to expose all communist and communist-sympathizers in the U.S. A direct reaction to the Cold War being waged between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, in the film we see friends snitch on friends, people go to jail, violence erupt, people’s careers ruined, and a host of other ills because they were somehow connected to communism. In The Manchurian Candidate, an even fuller expression of the paranoia, fear, and propaganda of the period is portrayed, a film laced with the very paranoia, fear, propaganda, political self-serving and violence of the period. This analysis of The Manchurian Candidate will argue that the fear and paranoia over communism during the Cold War were more of a threat to American freedom than any actual threat posed by communism.
During the fifty years after World War II, the Cold War was waged between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. While the Cold War never erupted in direct military conflict between the two superpowers, there were military conflicts between the two, like the Korean war in which the communist government of North Korea was supported by the Soviets while the South Korean democratic government was backed by the United States. That conflict ended after three years in an agreement between the two sides that left the prewar borders pretty much the same as they were before the war. However, another crisis during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly erupted into a nuclear arms confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. While the Cold War ended as the Soviet economy collapsed during the late 1980s and 1990s, ideological differences still separate the two nations. Yet, it is this former era of fear, paranoia, and p...