This is CBS I in the World. I'm John Batchel. I'm with Nick Bunker, the historian. His new book

is in the shadow of fear, America and the World in 1950. There are future players present on the scene.

We've mentioned Eisenhower, who will be elected in 1952 and take

office in 1953. The governor of Illinois is important here, Adley Stevenson, who's seen as a

moderate Democrat, a man who is part of the middle way that Professor named Schlesinger identifies as the

success that America needs to find, a middle way, not the right, not the left. There's William

F. Buckley, a young man just leaving Yale, who's been stifled momentarily by the leadership at

Yale for giving a speech that if you

read it today, you find it very, very even tempered. But in those days, it would have been

understood as God and man at Yale is the book that comes from it. But we need to concentrate on a man

who doesn't get a great deal of credit given that his genius

is still with us. Paul Nitsa, who was tasked with constructing NSC 68. Nick, who was Paul Nitsa and

what was NSC 68 to his understanding? Thank you. Well, Paul Nitz, he was a former investment banker. He'd been

an investment banker at the 1930s, and then he'd gone into interwar service in Washington,

where he was very involved in planning of logistics. And by 1950, he was the head of policy

and planning at the State Department. He'd taken over from his predecessor, the very famous Sir George Kennan. And the two of them conducted a kind of debate about foreign policy

for the next 30 or 40 years. Now, Paul Nisi, as head of the Policy and Planning Department

of the State Department, had the job of creating a strategic document, which came to known as NS668.

It was, NIC was the principal author of that document, but it was also something that he worked on in conjunction with Dean Atchison. So really, it was kind of a joint document between Nitsy and Dean Atchison. Now, it was marked top secret, but I like a lot of things in Washington, although it was marked Top Secret. In fact, there were people outside the stadium,

at the time and outside the Pentagon who had some inkling that there was some big rethinking going on inside those two buildings.

Now, the core of NSC 68 was this.

Now, it really flowed, first of all, from something else to which we haven't mentioned,

...