This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

Continuing with a historian Nick Bunkard, 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 MiG-15 just introduced in Moscow. The president approves research for the

super bomb, the H-bomb. The USS, Missouri, the last battleship in the fleet,

runs aground because they 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 Munt 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.

And what had happened was that Alger 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,

...