Backstory: McCarran's long Shadow

By Michael Green

Sept. 28 marked an anniversary that changed Nevada and reflected how it's always changing. On that day in 1954, Sen. Pat McCarran died.

Since Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man" before McCarran was even born, that obviously isn't who he had in mind. But McCarran and his shadow towered over Nevada during his lifetime, and tower over us still.

Just in time for commemorating the passage of 50 years since McCarran's death, freelance writer Michael Ybarra has published a brilliant new biography of the man you know as an airport: Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt. Ybarra examines how McCarran was staunchly anti-communist to the point of being obsessed--and willing to soil the Bill of Rights to satisfy his obsession. He also captures McCarran's ambition--not only to serve in the Senate and to accumulate power once he was in it, but to serve Nevada and to dominate it.

Two decades ago, Jerome Edwards, a longtime University of Nevada, Reno history professor, published a fine study of McCarran as Nevada's political boss. Edwards discussed his national role and reputation, but in the context of what they meant in Nevada.

Alone among Nevada political figures--at least until recent years--McCarran has deserved a major, detailed biography that delved into his part in vital national issues and their relationship to his personal life and his political activities at home. Ybarra has provided it. It's a big book about a big subject, putting McCarran into the perspective of the ups and downs of communism and liberalism from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Not that you will come away from the book loving McCarran. The man who cast the lengthened shadow was great, but not always good. He could be petty, vindictive, downright mean, anti-Semitic, blindly loyal to the wrong causes and, at times, seemingly insane. His ignorance and stubbornness hurt his country--and if you think he's unique, just look at the occupant of the White House.

You also may come away feeling sympathetic. He overcame many obstacles, from dropping out of school to run the family's sheep ranch to battling Nevada leaders determined to bring him to heel. He did his best to help and protect his friends and family, who sometimes disappointed him and sometimes vexed him.

Yet no one influenced modern Nevada more than McCarran. He was more responsible than anyone else for bringing significant federal money into Nevada through a variety of projects: military bases near Las Vegas (now Nellis), Reno, Tonopah and Fallon; Basic Magnesium in what is now Henderson; and the Nevada Test Site.

Perhaps more crucially, McCarran protected the then-fledgling, disreputable gaming industry. He disliked gambling and gamblers--he called them tinhorns and saw them as detracting from Nevada's real gift to the world, which was gold and silver. But he wanted his state to prosper and considered a controlled vice preferable to an uncontrolled one. So, when Sen. Estes Kefauver and his allies tried to tax and cripple the industry, McCarran used his considerable power to stop them.

He also used that power to help Nevadans. Serving as a senator brought him patronage jobs, at home and in Washington. Chairing the Judiciary Committee, and his seniority on Appropriations, brought him even more.

This enabled him to bring more Nevadans to the capital to work part-time while they went to law school--which they couldn't do in Nevada because UNLV's law school wasn't even on the drawing board; come to think of it, neither was UNLV. His colleagues maneuvered similarly, but none more ardently than McCarran. Consequently, he sired a generation of Nevada leaders: Sen. Alan Bible, Gov. Grant Sawyer, Justice Jon Collins, a Laxalt here, a McDonald there, attorneys like Ralph Denton and Cal Cory.

They, in turn, changed the state as officeholders and influential behind-the-scenes players. They also produced the next generation. Bible and Sawyer helped successors like Harry Reid and Richard Bryan. Denton and Cory practiced law together; their sons serve together as District Court judges.

McCarran protected not only his political offspring, but himself. George Wingfield, Nevada's political boss for most of the early 20th century, helped keep McCarran out of the Senate. Once McCarran obtained power, he understood its importance and defended it ferociously.

His intolerance of dissent would make John Ashcroft jealous--and look almost reasonable. McCarran once threatened the liquor license of a bar owner who hired one of his political opponents as a bartender, for heaven's sake. When Hank Greenspun took him on in the Las Vegas Sun, McCarran's friends organized a casino advertising boycott. Only because U.S. District Judge Roger T. Foley believed in applying the law fairly did Greenspun overcome it and win a settlement.

Yet McCarran would do almost anything for those who mattered to him, from his real children with his wife to his spiritual children whom he helped with patronage jobs--and the state he loved. He was a complex man, and Ybarra captures the complexity. Nevada today, for good and ill, is part of his legacy. We still stand in that shadow, and it is long, indeed.