Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and Great American Communist Hunt Paperback - 2005

Media reviews

Winner of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library's D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress

“Michael Ybarra, in an impressively researched and meticulously fair-minded first book, has shown us an era and a person both as recognizable today as ever.”
—Chuck Leddy in the San Francisco Chronicle

“Thanks to Michael J. Ybarra’s magisterial and beautifully written book, McCarran’s disquieting place in our history is restored.”
– Ronald Radosh in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (front cover)

“Unlike the legislatively lazy McCarthy, McCarran performed the heavy lifting of shepherding major anti-Communist laws through Congress. . . . Ybarra chronicles these Senate showdowns with gusto, with a Robert Caro—like love of Senate maneuvering, and with an eye for detail that enhances his account.”
—David Greenberg in the New York Times Book Review (front cover)

“A richly researched, endlessly entertaining chronicle of what might have been the 20th century’s most tragic, self-destructive politics. Ybarra traces the origins of the period’s hysteria to ‘a conservative reaction’ to the New Deal fueled by ‘rural rancor toward urban elites, nativist dread of encroaching minorities, fundamentalist anxiety over the spread of secular values, and Jeffersonian scorn for a growing and activist government.’”
– Robert Sherrill in the Washington Post Book World

“Refreshingly, Ybarra understands that millions of decent Americans detested FDR and that not every critic of the New Deal had two heads. . . . The pre—Cold War Pat McCarran stood for peace, limited government, and federal aid to Nevada. But by the late 1940s he had lost his way. . . . The erstwhile champion of dissenters was now J. Edgar Hoover’s staunchest ally.”
– Bill Kauffman in the Wall Street Journal

“Ybarra’s case for McCarranism over McCarthyism is so strong that this book might become the standard revisionist treatment of high-level hate-mongering in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. For those who study the craft of biography, Ybarra could become the heir to Robert Caro.”
– Steve Weinberg in the San Jose Mercury News