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.