This is CBSi and the world. I'm John Batcher continuing with a historian Nick Bunkert, his new book in the Shadow of Fear, America and the World in 1950.

The quote from Bertrand Russell, all at present, all except the most thoughtless

live under the shadow of fear.

It is January 1950.

These events, among many the Korea bill is defeated in Congress.

The B-36 is in abeyance as a plane that's too slow and will be easily shot down by the

mid-15 just introduced in Moscow. The president approves research for the

super bomb, the H-bomb. The U.S. The

U.S.S. Missouri, the last battleship in the fleet runs a ground because they mistake

mistake buoys in Virginia. Everybody laughs at the president. That of course is where the peace deal was

signed in 1945 in Tokyo Harbor. And Carl Mundt and Joe McCarthy and I'll take advantage of an event that we're going to go to right now.

January 25th, Manhattan, the courthouse, and the way Nick presents it is vivid. A tall, elegant

looking couple, she in a green dress, approached the courthouse for sentencing.

Who are they, Nick?

These are Alger and Priscilla Hiss.

Now what had happened was that Alga Hiss had been convicted a few days earlier

of perjury. He had been convicted of perjury in his

testimony to a federal grand jury a couple of years earlier relating to

allegations that he had passed documents to the Soviet Union when he was a State

Department official in the 1930s. So January 25th 1950 having been convicted he

then comes back to the courthouse to be sentenced and he's sentenced to years in prison, actually two counts for five

years in prison but to run concurrently with each other. And the Alta his affair

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