I've had some awareness for awhile about how, in the early days of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, it was something of a hotbed of unconventional politics and social attitudes. This mostly being from the perspective of Jack Parsons (the notorious occultist) or Qian Xuesen, who was cast out of the United States, only to wind up presiding over the PRC's rocket program. While those men are important in this book, the essential focus is on Frank Malina, the man who was main technologist behind modern, high-power, solid-fueled rockets, besides being (along with Parsons), the founder of the Aerojet Corporation.

The question MacDonald has with Malina, seeing as he managed to avoid the worst of the "Red Scare" crackdown by going into exile, was the extent of his commitment to "Socialism as it is," and the government that embodied it, or whether he was mostly an anti-fascist and a genuine believer in internationalism who was latching onto the best available option. MacDonald's suspicion was that there was a serious intellectual interest at the time, but that Malina was too skeptical of state power to really be a security risk. That said, MacDonald also doesn't treat Malina, Powers, and Qian (among others) as naïfs, as they were involved in a security-sensitive situation where they were taking risks by even appearing to compromise themselves. MacDonald's main point being that, at this point in time, we ought to be able to handle a situation where there were shades of grey about personal motivation. ( )