Commies Under Every Bed

Calling someone a Communist back in the 50s and early 60s did not always have political connotations, sometimes it was used as a generic insult, kind of like "you suck" would be used today. Nevertheless, there was a certain amount of paranoia about the Red Menace. Some of it may be attributed to government propaganda, both ours and theirs, but many people were genuinely concerned about it with good reason. Joe Stalin was probably at least as mean as Hitler had been, and Hitler had come uncomfortably close to accomplishing his dream of global conquest. I don't think it was unreasonable to assume that Stalin had similar ambitions. Looking back on it, Khrushchev probably wasn't as dangerous as Stalin, but we had no way of knowing it at the time.

The Birchers did go off the deep end at times, but I believed it was better to err on the side of righteousness than on the side of evil, and I still do. When I was a card carrying Bircher, they were always complaining about "the news blackout". It seems that, some time previous, there were allegations made about the Birchers being everything from crooks to Commies. People were calling for a congressional investigation but it never happened, even though the Birchers themselves wanted it so they could clear their name. Eventually the Birchers persuaded the California legislature to investigate them, and it reported that it couldn't find anything wrong with the Birchers. After that, the new media lost interest in the case and moved on to something else. The Birchers called it "the news blackout" because they found it increasingly difficult to get their name in the paper. Looking back on it, there probably was no conspiracy involved. To this day, the media is more interested in publishing allegations than they are in publishing the results of the investigations of allegations, especially if the allegations are proven to be false.

I didn't look Cincinnatus up on Wiki or anything, I was going by something I had read somewhere a long time ago. The way I remember it, Rome was still a republic in the time of Cincinnatus. They did appoint a dictator from time to time during a crisis, but they always reverted to a republic when the crisis was over. When Cincinnatus refused the crown three times, it wasn't just because he was too old and lazy to do the job forever, it was also because he believed that Rome would be better off in the long run if it remained a republic. The other stuff you mentioned may be true for all I know, but I was unaware of it till now.