ABSTRACT
The greatest consequences of the red scare did not manifest in domestic affairs; after all, a mere six years after McCarthy's fall, the moderately liberal John F. Kennedy was elected president and after his assassination in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson brought the country into what was perhaps the most liberal period in its history. For the United States in the postwar era the threat—real, imagined or invented—of possible communist takeover became the standard excuse for interventions. To American policy-makers, however, it was the fact that Diem was a Christian that marked him as an outstanding candidate for leadership in Vietnam. All that was left in the State Department after the red scare purges was a rigid anti-Communist dogma, an attitude of racist condescension toward the peoples of Asia and an unthinking bias in favor of Christian leaders as leaders for countries overwhelmingly not Christian in their demographic makeup.
