Riesel's attacks on fascism lessened after World War II, and he focused almost exclusively on communism after 1950. Riesel's attacks on communism extended beyond labor unions. He attacked folk musician Vern Partlow for promoting communism and undermining American national security with his 1945 talking blues song "Atomic Talking Blues" (also known as "Talking Atom" and "Old Man Atom"). In 1949, he was named a director of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China, a part of the China Lobby. At least one author alleges that Riesel even cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in the early 1950s, providing information on liberal politicians and union leaders. In the early 1950s, he supported a movement to stop the importation of goods from the Soviet Union into the United States, and for a time longshoremen on the East Coast refused to unload Soviet ships due to Riesel's campaign. During the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, he also became interested in purging homosexuals from federal civil service. He publicly called for a "preventive war" with the Soviet Union in 1951, and demanded that President Harry S. Truman drop the atomic bomb on Russia and China. He strongly criticized Malcolm X for meeting with Shirley Graham Du Bois and Julian Mayfield in the mid-1960s, and accused Malcolm X of fomenting communist conspiracies. In the early 1970s, Riesel became an unofficial advisor to President Richard Nixon. He supported Nixon in his column, discussed labor union issues and outreach to working-class voters with him personally over the phone, and occasionally met with Cabinet members. Even as late as 1973, Riesel was defending COINTELPRO, a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations in the U.S.