Comparing The Manchurian Candidate And Mccarthyism

Although The Manchurian Candidate film starts with a flashback to the proxy war with the Communists, known as the Korean War, the film centers around the present day United States Presidential Elections several years after the war had ended. As World War II came to an end, there were two competing political forces at work: capitalism and communism. In the United States, fear was rampant as European governments became puppets controlled by the Soviet Union. The United States saw a rise in Soviet espionage. The Alger Hiss espionage conviction and the revelation that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were stealing atomic secrets for the Soviet Union caused anxiety in America. Americans were afraid what was happening behind the Iron Curtin could happen

Senator McCarthy was shown in two different lights. “Although McCarthy was an ideologue buffoon, he was not although wrong about the conspiratorial immensity of communism and the peril it represented.” The film showed that a communistic plot may not be our only threatening conspiracy. There are people who are not Communist who threaten our way of life. Even though Mrs. Iselin was Communist, her husband, Senator Iselin, was not. He was only interested in power. The producer conveyed this point by borrowing and modifying real life events from Senator McCarthy’s assault on the top levels of the State Department, Defense Department, and the US Army. Many of Senator McCarthy’s supporters also used the situation to further their own

Just like Senator McCarthy, Senator Iselin does the same thing in the film instead he said they were in the Department of Defense. Senator Iselin went on to claim that he had ‘the names of 205 Communists working in the Defense Department.’ Senator Iselin kept changing the number of ‘Communist’s until finally stopping at 57. The fact that the number was strictly arbitrary, since it was conceived by Mrs. Iselin based on the Heinz 57 bottle that Senator Iselin was using on his steak, “provided the only comic relief in this tense thriller.” The Manchurian Candidate showed that Senator Iselin preferred to infringe upon the freedoms of Americans if that meant a single Communist would remain alive and free.

The greatest irony of all was Senator Iselin was actually being duped. His wife, using the cover of patriotism, had been scheming to seize political control for a while. In Mrs. Iselin’s final scene with Shaw, she tells him that for the last eight years, this operation has been in the works. At the time this film was depicted it was 1954, which meant that the Communists were plotting to take down the United States just as the United States was helping the Soviet Union defeat the German