Nick Bunker

Nick Bunker is the award-winning author of four innovative books about American and global history. In 2015 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History with his book An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America. Centered on the Boston Tea Party, and drawing on research in archives including those of the British East India Company, its account of the origins of the American Revolutionary War won the George Washington Prize for 2014’s best book about America’s founding era.

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Nick’s new book In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950 – tells the story of ten fraught and dramatic months during the early Cold War. Beginning on Labor Day, 1949, when the Soviet Union had just tested its first atomic bomb, In the Shadow of Fear weaves the many strands of the era’s history into a multi-dimensional narrative centered on the United States but also reaching out to Britain, France, Mao’s China, the Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh and the India of Nehru.

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In the fall of 1949 the dollar reigned supreme and the United States stood at the zenith of its power and prestige. After his election victory the previous year, President Harry S. Truman hoped to use the nation’s economic might to build on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But in the months to come Truman and the Democratic Party that he led would be overtaken by the unforeseen.

As Mao Zedong’s army swept through China and Asia became the new front line in the Cold War, at home in America the age of FDR gave way to the beginnings of a new conservatism. An aggressive Republican Party, desperate to regain power, seized on rifts among its opponents, and Truman’s program for universal health care and civil rights reform went down to defeat. Amid labor unrest, big city corruption scandals, and the fear of Communism, the Democratic Party lost its way. On Capitol Hill the Republican Senator Joe McCarthy ambushed Truman and his colleagues with a style of politics that aroused powerful emotions and polarized the country. While the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his client Kim il-Sung laid plans for war in Korea, America descended into embitterment and fear.

The dawning of the Taiwan question, the origins of America’s involvement in Vietnam, and the birth of NATO, the hydrogen bomb, and the European Union are among the episodes Bunker describes. IN THE SHADOW OF FEAR is a book whose themes still resonate, giving us characters who personify the conflicts of its era. They include not only Truman, Stalin, McCarthy, and the young Richard Nixon, but also such half-forgotten actors on the stage of history as the labor leader John L. Lewis, “Mister Republican” Senator Bob Taft, and the fallible mayor of New York, William J. O’Dwyer.

Nick Bunker’s first book – Making Haste from Babylon – was described by the Washington Post as “a remarkable success” and long-listed for the UK’s Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Young Benjamin Franklin: the Birth of Ingenuity, his account of the dawn of scientific research in America, appeared in 2018.

A graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, Bunker began his professional career as a newspaper reporter in Liverpool, England and then at the Financial Times, before working as an investment banker, chiefly for the HongKong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

For many years he was a board member and then the chair of the Freud Museum, London.

Pictures: Lower Manhattan Skyline, March 1 1951: Courtesy, Municipal Archives, City of New York

Herbert Block, “He Doth Bestride the Narrow World Like a Colossus,” Washington Post, September 20 1949: A Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb Block Foundation

Daniel Fitzpatrick, “The Great Flop,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, March 15 1950: Courtesy, State Historical Society of Missouri