The historical camp is irrelevant, as that has the benefit of hindsight. Those in power were operating with limited knowledge at the time, but what they did know was that Stalin had increased his sphere of influence many times over in the aftermath of WWII, and that he completely ruined all of Eastern Europe, decimating their economies and enslaving millions of people. That's not manufactured propaganda; that's historical fact. This may not in itself be a justification for our nonsense in Latin America and Southeast Asia, but in my opinion it's a bit unfair to call communism overblown. The world could have been a much better place in the 20th had Stalin not taken over Eastern Europe (to say nothing of Mao's nastiness, but of course China wasn't really a security threat to us at that time). All that said, there's certainly no denying that many individuals and corporations used the threat of communism as a pretext to rob a lot of sovereign nations of a lot of national wealth.