The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, mental health professionals grew concerned about the future of Europe and sought an understanding of Nazism. Psychoanalysts Walter Langer and Erik H. Erikson formulated the psychology of Hitler for William Donovan and the OSS. Langer emphasized Hitler’s psychodynamics, while Erikson focused on cultural issues in Germany and on Hitler’s appeal to his followers. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis triumphed after the war, yet as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare came to dominate the landscape, liberal émigré psychoanalysts came under suspicion. A few, like Erikson, declined to sign loyalty oaths or became critics of American society. Newspapers seemed to flourish, but circulation actually lost ground in relation to population growth. The rise of television changed the news business, but like traditional media, it had differential effects by region. TV was available sooner in the urban areas of the East, and the liberal editorial stance of the large urban dailies had less appeal in the small towns of the Midwest and West. Drawing on these regional differences, Barry Goldwater came to prominence as a presidential candidate.