| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt. By Michael J. Ybarra. (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth, 2004. 864 pp. $35.00, ISBN 1-58642-065-8.)

Academic Freedom Imperiled: The McCarthy Era at the University of Nevada. By J. Dee Kille. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004. xiv, 139 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-87417-593-3.)

Michael J. Ybarra has written a broadly researched, grand-scale life and times of Patrick A. McCarran, who emerged from childhood poverty on his Irish Catholic immigrant parents' Nevada sheep ranch to become a successful attorney, judge, and ultimately Democratic U.S. senator (1932–1954). McCarran (1876–1954) succeeded by dint of strong ambition, dogged persistence, and above-average ability. He built his political career on opposition to the reigning powers of his own Democratic party, whether in Nevada or Washington. In the Senate he used pork and patronage to secure his Nevada base while deploying formidable parliamentary skills and accruing seniority to oppose New Deal liberalism and internationalist foreign policy and to bedevil Democratic leaders, especially Harry S. Truman. Expressing his western populist roots through a xenophobia tinged with anti-Semitism, McCarran fought to limit postwar European immigration severely.

For Ybarra, McCarran's role in the Cold War Communist hunt was more important than Joe McCarthy's. The latter "spoke of twenty years of treason [while] McCarran spoke of treason for twenty years" and left behind "his fears and obsessions embedded in a stack of laws" (p. 759). That legacy, generally since repealed or repudiated, included the Internal Security Act (McCarran Act) of 1950; the McCarran-Walter Act (1952); his work as chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to ruin Owen Lattimore and the State Department China hands whom the anticommunist Right blamed for "losing" China; and the dismissal of many United Nations employees. His efforts were aided by means of ad hoc alliances with conservatives on both sides of the aisle and with like-minded federal officials such as J. Edgar Hoover and the State Department Passport Office chief Ruth B. Shipley.

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