Pat McCarran unquestionably did a great deal for his state, but he was an anti-semite, and not simply one who thought Jews were different and who could not understand the difference. He was comfortable in private making virulently anti-Semitic statements—and friends of his felt equally comfortable in doing the same with him, which certainly would not have been the case if he had discouraged them.

We are increasingly conscious as a people, as human beings, of hatred. Pat McCarran was as entitled as any of us to his personal views, as he expressed them in private and sometimes, yes, in public. But he made them a part of law, and legislation, and that is a significant difference.

In the wake of World War II, a refugee crisis affected Europe. There were about 400,000 “displaced persons.” Harry Truman sent Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner and law school dean, to report on it; Harrison came back saying, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

Truman sought to increase the number of people the United States would accept. A significant number of senators preferred not to do that, or even to reduce the number. The bill that emerged from the Senate, which McCarran’s biographer Michael Ybarra described as having his “fingerprints […] all over” it, would admit only 100,000, and limit the number to those who had been in a refugee camp before December 22, 1945, thereby excluding most of the Jewish refugees.

Truman signed the bill in 1948, and called on Congress to improve and expand the provisions the next year. When a new bill came up, McCarran formed a subcommittee of opponents of admitting Displaced Persons to take the teeth out of the bill further. He requested a leave of absence to investigate the problem and traveled through Europe, finding occasional examples of corruption or dishonesty to bolster his claims, which even the National Catholic Welfare Conference dismissed as lies.

McCarran told his administrative assistant, Eva Adams, “They are displeased persons rather than displaced persons. Eighty-seven percent are of one blood, one race, one religion. You know what that is without my telling you.” The bill for displaced persons eventually passed, although McCarran delayed it for more than a year and amended it several times, and then cut the agency’s budget and the number of Jews permitted to enter the U.S.

[…]

In private, McCarran told his daughter Mary, a nun, “You say you want to go to Holy Land. The Jews and Arabs are at war over there. And you can’t see the barn where He was born any way. They tore it down and the Jews sold it for firewood and made one hundred percent profit on it a long time ago […] And the sheep that the shepherds were tending are all old bucks and made into baloney long ago, and they don’t herd sheep there any more. Under the Taylor Grazing Act all grazing rights have been allotted to the Jews and all the Arabs can do is tend camp for the [insert slur here] so what’s the use.”

…wow.