ABSTRACT
Fifty years ago on October 1, Mao Zedong stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) and proclaimed the People's Republic of China: "China has stood up," he memorably said, but China also "leaned to one side"—the Soviet side. That event, coming only a few weeks after Moscow tested its first atomic bomb, amply justified Premier Zhao Ziyang's statement four decades later that the founding of the PRC "shook the world." 1 These two milestones detonated fundamental policy changes in Washington over the next several months, resulting in National Security Council (NSC) document 48, which brought containment to Asia and military aid to the French in Vietnam, and NSC 68, the essential U.S. blueprint for fighting the Cold War. To build the U.S. global position against communist expansion, NSC 68 called for a trebling of defense expenditures. There was, in short, an intimate relationship between this prodigious revolution and the rise to global preeminence of the United States.
