THE CONGRESS: The Products of Patience

Pat McCarran’s once-booming voice came in whistles and wheezes as he pleaded for unity in the Nevada Democratic Party he himself had split and splintered. He finished his speech, stepped down from the stage of the City Hall auditorium in Hawthorne (pop. 1,861), and threaded his way through the miners, gamblers, shopkeepers and housewives who were his faithful followers. As he stopped for a moment to listen to a constituent’s problem, he was still a picture-book Senator: generous girth, flashing blue eyes, and silver hair curling down around his collar. Then his knees buckled, and as he fell to the floor, his heart stopped. Pat McCarran, one of the most powerful political figures in the U.S., was dead at 78.

His father was Patrick McCarran, who left Ireland as a stowaway at 16, joined the First U.S. Dragoons, went to Nevada to fight Chief Winnemucca’s Paiutes, and stayed on as a homestead rancher. His mother was Margaret Shea of County Cork, who came to Nevada as a domestic servant. From his parents young Patrick Anthony inherited a fighting spirit and a love of politics. In addition, he cultivated a trait not generally associated with the Irish: patience.

Portents. Pat was valedictorian of his Reno high-school class (1897) and holder of the school record for the 100-yd. dash (10.2), but had to withdraw from the University of Nevada to take over the family ranch when his father suffered a crippling injury. Soon Pat was carrying Blackstone in his saddlebags while riding out to herd sheep. In 1905 he was admitted to the practice of law; within ten years he was chief justice of the Nevada Supreme Court, and in 1920 he achieved national attention as counsel for Mary Pickford in her divorce action against Owen Moore (Mary got the divorce, and Pat ended up with her Nevada ranch).

After one unsuccessful try at the Senate, McCarran rode to Washington on the Roosevelt tide of 1932. In his early Senate days he generally voted with the New Deal, e.g., for the Wagner Act and the NRA (which he later denounced), but Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Hyde Park could not long remain the leader of Patrick Anthony McCarran of Reno. Their great split was over the 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court, but long before then there had been portents of things to come. Within a week after being sworn in, McCarran made a Senate speech against an Administration-backed cut in veterans’ pensions. The bill passed, and McCarran learned a lesson he never forgot: he discovered that Senate power flows not from oratory on the floor, but comes slowly from the tedium of the committee room.

Patronage. McCarran was in a perfect position to benefit by this lesson; on reaching the Senate he had been assigned to two of its most powerful units, the Judiciary and Appropriations committees. Under the seniority system, he had only to wait for time to run its course. He buttered up the Appropriations Committee chairman, Tennessee’s Kenneth McKellar, who named Pat chairman of the key subcommittee dealing with funds for the State, Justice and Commerce Departments, thereby giving McCarran a stranglehold which he never really relinquished.

Using his strategic committee positions as patronage levers. McCarran built a personal political organization in both Washington and Nevada. He brought scores of aspiring young Nevada lawyers to Washington, financed them, trained them, got them jobs and finally sent them home as devoted McCarranites. “What the hell,” said one recently, “McCarran took me off the street when my belly had wrinkles in it. He fed me and clothed me and put me through law school and helped me get started in practice. What kind of a jerk would I be to turn on him now?” In sparsely populated Nevada, it didn’t take many such faithful men to make an unbeatable machine.

Power. His relationships with fellow Senators were unamiable: he liked to call Tennessee’s Senator Estes Kefauver “Mortimer Snerd”; he once hastily changed his vote when he found himself and New York’s New Dealing Herbert Lehman the only Democrats voting in opposition to a bill. Despite these foibles, by the time he took over the Judiciary Committee in 1943, McCarran was recognized both at home and on Capitol Hill as a political titan. He even managed to exude power while sitting in the Senate restaurant eating milk-soaked graham crackers.

The McCarran influence can be measured in terms of the legislation he authored. Items: the first bill (1933) introduced in Congress for a separate Air Force; the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938; the Reorganization Act of 1945, which authorized the consolidation of many of the Government’s sprawling independent agencies; the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which required bureaucracy to make public many activities previously conducted in secret; the Internal Security Act of 1950, which shored up the nation’s shaky anti-Communist structure; the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, for which his name will forever be associated with U.S. immigration policy.

Neither in Nevada nor in Washington was Pat McCarran widely or warmly loved. But he made his mark on political history—and he was widely feared. That seemed to be what he wanted.

Within hours after Senator McCarran’s death, Nevada politicians were locked in close combat over a successor. Democratic Attorney General William Mathews ruled that the vacancy must be filled at the November 2 election. Republican Governor Charles Russell retaliated by appointing Ernest S. Brown, a lawyer and a Republican, to fill the term, which does not expire until 1956. The argument will probably have to be settled in Nevada courts.