For poker player and later president Richard Nixon, the "red scare" of the late 1940s and 1950s provided an inviting context into which to launch a career in politics.
We discussed last week how the highlight of Nixon's early poker playing days was winning thousands of dollars off of fellow Naval officers while stationed in the south Pacific during WWII. Nixon would use some of those winnings to help fund his first Congressional campaign in 1946. He would also use growing post-war fear about the spread of communism as reason to become an early "cold warrior" known as a strident opponent of the "red menace.