Congress and the Cold War

Between 1949 and 1954, the revisionists coupled their Asia-first strategy with an increasingly vehement contention that the fundamental threat posed by Communism came on the home front. Though McCarthyism and the HUAC remain the best-known instruments of this effort, the most important legislative player was Pat McCarran, who returned to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee after Democrats reclaimed Senate control in 1948. The committee, to which 40 percent of the bills in the 81st Congress were referred and which longtime Lyndon Johnson aide George Reedy described as “an independent empire under McCarran's jurisdiction,” provided a perfect forum for a crusade to stifle internal dissent.

In 1950, Time labeled “the silver-haired spokesman of the silver bloc” one of the eight worst members of the Senate. With a visceral dislike for the president from their time together as senators and a 26 percent party unity score during the Truman administration – 22 percent lower than the next lowest Senate Democrat – McCarran occupied the fringe of Democratic thought during the late 1940s. (The Nevada senator explained his voting record by asserting, “I never compromise with principle, [and] almost everything is principle to me.”) McCarran built his influence by placing supporters in various executive agencies and through the operations of his staff, described by one writer as “the finest intelligence service on Capitol Hill.”

Motivated by a thinly veiled anti-Semitism, McCarran used his committee position to frustrate initial postwar attempts to allow more Holocaust survivors to enter the United States.