By the 1956 election campaign, preoccupation with the Red menace had measurably declined in party politics. In 1954 Richard Nixon celebrated the exodus of Communists from government, but McCarthy was disappearing and the genre was dying. Two years later, it barely breathed. Republicans raised the ghost of Alger Hiss, but this theme owed its brief and only prominence to ex-President Truman's snap remark that he did not think Hiss had been a spy. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for President, was taxed to disown Truman. Once Stevenson affirmed Hiss's guilt, Nixon commended his "forthright, direct statement" and the story faded. In the 1956 Idaho Senate race, McCarthy's pal Herman Welker reverted to redbaiting but lost to the liberal Frank Church. Anti-communism was even less evident in 1958, when a more potent election totem was the "labor boss." The late Joseph Stalin had one weird cameo role in Arizona's Senate race. Anonymous pamphlets depicted the grinning dictator asking, "Why Not Vote for Goldwater?" The conservative Goldwater could hardly be redbaited, and his opponent disavowed the handbills.

The identity of the 1960 presidential candidates might have heartened the nostalgic. Nixon was an old anti-Communist pro. John F. Kennedy had once assailed Yalta and China's fall; he had tiptoed around the McCarthy issue; his family had befriended McCarthy. Yet the dead domestic Red menace did not revive. In their first TV debate, the two candidates barely nudged the bait. Quizzed about the domestic Communist menace, Kennedy pledged to "be continually alert" but located the chief peril abroad. "Maintaining a strong society" at home would spike any internal danger. "Generally" agreeing with JFK, Nixon noted that Moscow's schemes did not spare the home front, but he too preached the need to combat "injustices" on which communism fed.

Thus while anti-communism did frame the rhetoric of 1960, both candidates agreed that the danger flowed from Moscow, not from some federal agency. After eight years of GOP rule, Red infiltration was a forgotten issue. Cuba, however, was not, having been taken over by Fidel Castro in 1959. For a change Democrats could ascribe a "loss" to the Republicans, although the Right did levy blame on those who duped Americans into thinking Castro was a reformer, not a Communist. New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, who had interviewed Castro in 1957, was the Right's prime target. Said William F. Buckley, Jr.: Castro could claim "I got my job through the New York Times." Still, "Who lost Cuba?" never rivaled the China postmortem as a political issue.

Indeed, both candidates did their best to edge away from the McCarthy legacy in 1960. Kennedy worked hard at wooing liberal Democrats to whom McCarthyism had been a gut issue. Alluding to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Eleanor Roosevelt wished he had shown less profile and more courage during McCarthy's heyday. As for the Republican candidate, he became reincarnated as a "new Nixon" and shunned the stridency of old. Once HUAC foe rejoiced that Nixon, "a shrewd ear-to-the-grounder[,] has suddenly remembered that he told McCarthy to change his ways and no longer talks about how he ( Nixon) caught the wicked Alger Hiss." Contrasting his Communist-hunting with McCarthy's, Nixon termed it vital "to shoot with a rifle in this area and not a shotgun." Some Republicans did claim that JFK's constant "running down" of America aided the Soviets. Ex-GovernorThomas Dewey said Kennedy "echoed communist propaganda" in claiming that the Soviets were overtaking America's economy. However, the domestic Communist issue hardly flickered in opinion polls.

The Red menace retained marginal utility on some Issues. It tinted Hawaii's politics. Prior to becoming a state, that territory had enough Communists, notably in the ILWU, to rate a Smith Act trial and visits by HUAC and SISS, which provided ammunition to opponents of statehood. A 1950 draft of a statehood bill banned Reds from public office. Senator Joseph O'Mahoney hoped thus to "solve the most difficult question" about Hawaiian statehood. Yet critics kept flailing at communism. In 1958 Congressman John Pillion charged that Harry Bridges "rules a Communist collectivized kingdom in Hawaii." Statehood would "invite four Soviet agents to take seats in our Congress." Pillion also opposed Alaskan statehood lest that territory "run interference" for Hawaii; even in Alaska, Bridges had created "a Communist beachhead" and was biding his time. Nonetheless, Hawaii and Alaska joined the Union in 1959.

By the 1960s, the domestic Communist issue had grown quaint, and momentum had shifted to foes of virulent anti-communism. Senator J. William Fulbright won kudos for criticizing Army-sponsored seminars mounted by anti-communist extremists. Where once conspiracy theories had been the domain of the Right, now liberals saw bogeymen in the sometimes secretive rightist groups that flourished in the 1960s. The ultra-conservative John Birch Society, with its cell-like organization and infiltration tactics, became liberalism's equivalent of the Communist Party.

Old Red-hunters fell on evil days. At its 1960 San Francisco hearings, HUAC met with massive student opposition. Rehearsing for the coming decade, police used fire hoses and billy clubs and dragged students down steps. Through the distorted film Operation Abolition HUAC portrayed the riots as Red-inspired, but the film only added to the ranks of committee critics, particularly on college campuses. "We are indebted to the Committee for that film," said a leader of the emerging radical group, Students for a Democratic Society.

HUAC's 1962 hearings on Women Strike for Peace also earned ridicule. Members of that group showed up in force to cheer subpoenaed witnesses, presented them with bouquets, nursed babies, and by acting in a fashion that was stagily feminine and motherly as well as politically astute, got the committee's goat. Eric Bentley, a noted scholar of the history of drama, called the episode "the fall of HUAC's Bastille." These tactics in some ways foreshadowed the costumed, burlesque appearances of New Left leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin later in the decade. . .