Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

the U.S.-led bloc found itself a consistent defender of the Third World’s archaic authorities: priests, landowners, kings, sheikhs, chiefs, husbands, fathers. Suddenly many white Americans felt they had a stake in the world struggle. They mourned not just the draw in Korea but the victory of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial control of Kenya, a fight the United Kingdom lost in the mid-1950s despite its use of asymmetrical airpower. And though this concern manifested itself in ways most Americans now recognize as hysterical (exemplified in Stanley Kubrick’s Strangelove cabinet), the Red Scared whites weren’t exactly wrong.