Pat McCarran: The Real Senator Geary Whose Name Left the Vegas Airport

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Pat McCarran, the Nevada senator who helped inspire the corrupt Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather Part II, was born in Reno in 1876 to Irish Catholic immigrants Margaret and Patrick McCarran. The 1897 Reno High School valedictorian left Nevada State University to run the family sheep ranch after his father was injured, read law on his own and passed the bar in 1905. He served in the state assembly, as Nye County district attorney and on the Nevada Supreme Court, becoming chief justice in 1917. After losing Democratic Senate primaries in 1916 and 1926, he won in 1932 and became Nevada's first native born senator, feuding with fellow Democrat Key Pittman over New Deal patronage and taking control of the state party by 1938.

As Judiciary Committee chairman, with roughly 40 percent of Senate bills passing through his committee, he held other senators' bills until they backed projects in Nevada. He sponsored the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, the Federal Airport Act of 1945, the McCarran Ferguson Act and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which he called a bill of rights for people regulated by federal agencies. He also led the 1950 Internal Security Act past President Truman's veto, pursued Owen Lattimore through his Internal Security Subcommittee until a judge dismissed the perjury charges, and co-authored the 1952 McCarran Walter immigration act. He died in 1954 after a speech in Hawthorne, Nevada, and in 2021 Clark County renamed the Las Vegas airport Harry Reid International.

• He intervened for a Nevada teenager who stole 150 volumes from the Library of Congress.
• He pressed the State Department for a prisoner exchange to free a Reno couple's son captured by Japan at Wake Island.
• Beginning in 1933 he pushed legislation to separate the Air Force from the Army.
• A 1949 trip to Spain, where he sought U.S. aid for Francisco Franco, drew Truman's anger over a senator running his own foreign policy.
• His record on immigration, including efforts to keep out Jewish Holocaust survivors, fueled the reassessment that removed his name from the airport.