Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt

The title of the book (a phrase of columnist Joseph Alsop) has to be understood as ironic. The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent examination of its secret archives -- the Venona project -- reveals the 'paranoids' like McCarran and Nixon were right about the Communist penetration of the New Deal. From the post-Cold War perspective, Pat McCarran looks mighty perceptive. It is a flawed greatness, of course. This is mainly a book about Nevada. Ybarra has written one of the first twenty-first century histories of Nevada. The book turns upside down all of our received wisdom of Nevada history. This is a story of Nevada's maturation into full statehood after a long struggle to survive. Modern Nevada history begins in Tonopah, and Ybarra has given us a wide-ranging account of its political history. Tonopah men Tasker Oddie, George Wingfield, Key Pittman -- and McCarran -- are all authentic expressions of Nevada. And who else but a Nevadan would give election speeches into the 1940's on the value of Silver. "The Great God Pat," my dad still calls him. When McCarran writes of Nevada (in his letters) it is with the loving voice of a native. Nine out of ten readers will misunderstand this book because they are so unaware of their Cold War blinders and the conventional wisdom they carry around with them. Sorta like the reviewer who has missed the Venona revelation that Hiss was a spy and not a victim. McCarran wasn't a saint. He was extremist but not deranged. I think Michael Ybarra writes with great style, and this is a very well researched book. The publisher could have done a better proofreading job. (The Truckee flows westward at one point, and McCarran travels by train from Reno to D.C. in a day.) Probably, the publisher failed to appreciate the historical magnificence of this work.

It probably says a lot about Pat McCarran that he grew up in a world where men learned to castrate sheep with their teeth. We think of the post-war period as the McCarthy Era. But McCarthy was, at the end of the day, a buffoon and a drunk. Even his advocates will concede that he didn't have the staying power for the long haul. By contrast, as Ybarra makes wonderfully clear, it was McCarran who had the energy, the persistence, the focus, to stay on issue and to get what he wanted-to congeal the forces of paranoia and xenophobia that go so far to make us what we are today.. McCarran's toughness and endurance surely owe something to his sheepherder past. His background influenced him other ways perhaps not so obvious. One is that it equipped him to be a loner who really didn't care for anyone else's good opinion. Better to be both loved and feared, said Machiavelli; but if you must choose one, choose fear. Another McCarran quality was the sense of permanent outsidership, the conviction that he was one of life's insulted and injured. Finally, we have that favorite of the Freudians: an impassioned mother, convinced that her son might grow up to be a hero. Ybarra is not a graceful stylist. But he is a dogged researcher which, in the end, is a virtue perhaps more to be valued than style. Others have remarked that he goes on a bit long. This second criticism seems a bit harsh: in the age of biographies as heavy as anvils, Ybarra is no more than a middleweight. He does have a bit of a weakness for going of on tangents: he seems not to know how to tell a McCarran story without giving the entire history of the issue that led up to it. Some may regard this as a disadvantage, but I must say, as one who obsesses over the history of the postwar period, I found every page a pleasure to read. For specialized tastes, surely, but for the right audience, this one is hard to beat.

This book contains something missing from almost every other book on the subject of the spy hunts of the 1940's...dispassionate fairness. There are no angels or devils here. Even Americans who spied for the Soviet Union like Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Elizabeth Bentley, Earl Browder, Harry Dexter White, and others, are shown in the context of the times and as almost ordinary people. The good guys have their faults and the bad guys their virtues. Judgements are left up to the reader. Even the main character, Pat McCarran, comes across, at best, as a kind of anti-hero. If, like me, you're tired of writers who try to push their point of view on the reader, then you're find this book a refreshing change of pace.

This is another book yearning to be the definitive word on a particular political era. Mr. Ybarra wants to explain how the New Deal of the 1930's indirectly lead to the Red Scare of the 1950's. He uses the political career of Senator Pat McCarran of Nevade to highlight his thesis. He traces the early days of this now-forgotten Senator to concentrating on the post-war years. Democratic Senator McCarran (1876-1954) was the worker ant of anti-Communist legislation in contrast to his better known counterpart Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. Corrupt and a law only to himself, Senator McCarran answered to no one and acted as he saw fit to do. This biography is well-written but long (over 800+ pages) with a lot of legislative details and cultural background of the 1950's. Frankly some of this material has very little to do with McCarran's life and can be skimmed without losing any of the story. Overall, for the reader with a political interest, I recommend this book as a primer on American politics.