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

Ybarra, Michael J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586420917 ISBN 13: 9781586420918

Publisher: Steerforth, 2005

Synopsis

This celebrated work of political history – featured on the covers of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times Book Reviews – adds a new chapter to our understanding of the U.S. in the twentieth century and does so with rigor and verve. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada was a force of nature in American politics, one of the most shrewd and powerful – and vindictive – lawmakers ever to sit in Congress. Joe McCarthy gave his name to the cause of zealous anti-Communism, but it was McCarran, a lifelong Democrat, who actually wrote the laws, held the hearings, and cowed the State and Justice Departments into doing his bidding. “An earth-shaker,” Lyndon Johnson once called McCarran, “who impressed his personality deeply and indelibly upon the institution of the Senate and upon the history of the nation.”
But McCarran’s career is not only the story of one man’s extraordinary drive to power – the son of illiterate immigrants, McCarran was a sheepherder who taught himself the law and became a great defense attorney – it is also the epic journey of America from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Unlike many other writers who have examined this most contentious of periods in American history, either ignoring or exaggerating the existence of hidden Communists in the federal government, journalist Michael Ybarra takes a different approach. He vividly recreates the world of McCarran’s conservatism and its collision with the worlds of radical politics and Soviet espionage, bringing to life the people and ideas that convulsed America for two decades, culminating in the tragedy of McCarthyism. Like a great Russian novel, Washington Gone Crazy seeks not to condemn but to explain, to show how men can both make history and be trapped by it. It is a masterful work of storytelling but also essential history, Pat McCarran’s story but also America’s.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

IN THIS SWEEPING, monumental work of American history, journalist Michael J. Ybarra tells the story of Senator Pat McCarran’s extraordinary career for the first time, and he vividly re-creates a passionate era of politics that reshaped America and echoes to this day. Brilliantly researched and energetically written, Washington Gone Crazy makes a significant new contribution to our understanding of the United States in the twentieth century.
McCarran was one of the most shrewd and powerful — and vindictive — lawmakers ever to sit in Congress. Joe McCarthy gave his name to the cause of zealous anti-Communism, but it was McCarran, a lifelong Democrat, who actually wrote the laws, held the hearings, and bullied the State and Justice Departments into doing his bidding. McCarran was consumed with looking for Communists in Washington and his obsession almost consumed the country.
The son of illiterate Irish immigrants, McCarran was born in 1876 in Nevada, where he grew up to be a sheepherder who taught himself the law around the campfire, becoming a legendary defense attorney and judge. After struggling for years against the local Democratic political machine, McCarran rode Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide into the U.S. Senate in 1932 — and broke ranks with Roosevelt during the New Deal’s first week. But it was President Harry Truman who would become McCarran’s real nemesis. A master of parliamentary procedure, McCarran turned his Senate Judiciary Committee into a virtual government within the government. McCarran worked with J. Edgar Hoover to undermine the Truman Administration before McCarthy even got to Washington. He created the most far-reaching anti-sedition law ever enacted in America (the McCarran Internal Security Act), which filled Ellis Island with immigrants alleged to be subversives and set up concentration camps to hold suspected traitors in the case of a national emergency. McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee cowed the State Department into sacrificing the careers of diplomats accused of helping the Communists take over China. McCarran virtually blackmailed more than one attorney general into carrying out his policies. From Capitol Hill to the United Nations, from union halls to Hollywood, McCarran’s wrath broke careers and lives and ultimately, in a self-destructive fit of pique, cost his party control of the Senate. Ybarra’s even-handed narrative shows that McCarran was ultimately half right: There really were Communists in Washington — but it was the hunt for them that did the real damage.

From the Back Cover

"A truly landmark study." -- Douglas Brinkley
"A triumph of historical reconstruction." -- Sam Tanenhaus

About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1586420917
• ISBN 13: 9781586420918
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 880