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Patrick Anthony "Pat" McCarran (August 8, 1876 – September 28, 1954) was a Democratic United States Senator from Nevada from 1933 until 1954, and was noted for his strong anticommunism. He is also the namesake of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.
McCarran was born in Reno, Nevada, the child of Irish immigrants. He attended the University of Nevada, Reno, but withdrew to work on the family sheep ranch when his father suffered an injury. He studied law, and served in the Nevada House of Representatives in 1903. He was admitted to the bar in 1905, and served as district attorney of Nye County (1907–09).
(Some sources incorrectly state that McCarran received a bachelor's degree in 1901 and a master's degree in 1915.[1] In fact, he did not receive a bachelor's degree. He received an
Pat McCarran remained in the Senate until his death in Hawthorne, Nevada in 1954. In 1960, the state of Nevada donated a bronze statue of McCarran to the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol.
The immigration provisions of the act were later superseded by the 1965 Immigration Act, but the power of the government to deny visas for ideological reasons remained on the books another 25 years after that.
In June 1952, McCarran joined Francis Walter in instigating the passing of the McCarran–Walter Act, a bill that imposed more rigid restrictions on entry quotas to the United States. It also stiffened the existing law relating to the admission, exclusion and deportation of "dangerous" aliens as defined by the McCarran Internal Security Act. In response to the act he made a well known statement:
In September 1950, he was the chief sponsor of the appeals, the act was never enforced, even with regard to the United States Communist Party itself, and the major provisions of the act were found to be unconstitutional in 1965 and 1967.[6]
McCarran made much of these records when questioning a Sinologist, Owen Lattimore, for 12 days in acrimonious testimony in February 1951. McCarran subsequently pushed very strongly for Lattimore to be indicted for alleged acts of perjury during his testimony. Lattimore's lawyer Abe Fortas accused McCarran of deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s in the hope that Lattimore would not be able to recall them properly, thereby giving grounds for a perjury indictment because of discrepancies between the records and Lattimore's testimony.
After World War II, McCarran established himself as one of the Senate's most powerful anti-Communists. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, McCarran created and was the first chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that investigated the administrations headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. In 1951, investigators from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee seized the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
An admirer of Francisco Franco in Spain, McCarran was nicknamed the "Senator from Madrid" by the columnist Drew Pearson because of his efforts to increase foreign aid to Spain. McCarran's other favorite foreign leader was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of China, whose loss of mainland China in 1949 was blamed by McCarran on alleged Soviet spies in the State Department. In 1952, McCarran attended a dinner hosted by the Kuomintang Chinese Ambassador to Washington together with Senators Joseph McCarthy and William Knowland that began with this toast: "Back to the mainland!"
He sponsored laws concerned with the nation's security, including the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, the Federal Airport Act of 1945 and the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. He was also an early advocate of a separate air force, sponsoring legislation in Congress to that effect as early as 1933.[5] He was co-sponsor of the McCarran-Ferguson Act in 1945, a law that exempted the insurance industry from most federal regulation including antitrust regulation.
McCarran was also Nevada Chief Justice (1917–1918), chairman of the Nevada State Board of Parole Commissioners (1913–1918) and chairman of the Nevada State Board of Bar Examiners (1919–1932). A member of the Democratic Party, McCarran ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1916 and 1926. In 1932, he ran a third time, securing the Democratic nomination and defeating Republican incumbent Tasker Oddie, becoming Nevada's first native-born U.S. senator. During the 1930s, McCarran became well known as one of the few congressional Democrats who totally rejected the New Deal.
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