Message from the Cloakroom

On the floor of the Senate one afternoon last week, Nevada's Pat McCarran made a sign to Missouri's Tom Hennings, and the two headed for the Democratic cloakroom.

There McCarran asked Hennings to act as an emissary to Utah's Republican Arthur Watkins, who was managing the Administration bill to admit refugees from NATO and Iron Curtain countries outside the rigid quotas of the 1952 McCarran Act.* The President, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Psychological Strategy Board had advocated the measure as an effective tool of U.S. foreign policy. McCarran, backed by several Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans, had fought the bill hard. Giving ground slowly, he had offered to compromise at 120,000 refugees, then 124,000, then 185,000, then 194,000. Turned down each time, he was ready, he told Hennings, to make a "final" offer: 200,000.

Hennings found Watkins on the Senate floor, gave him McCarran's message. Watkins thought awhile. The Senate Judiciary Committee had reported out a bill to admit 220,000, and it had a good chance of passage. On the other hand, crafty Pat McCarran could still do a lot of road-blocking if he chose, and the Senate was already in a squeeze to get through before the scheduled end-of-the-month adjournment. To show that they planned to stir up a big storm, McCarran and his two chief Republican allies, Indiana's Jenner and Idaho's Welker, had dropped 70 amendments to the refugee bill into Senate hoppers.

So Watkins decided to compromise. He told Hennings he would accept 200,000-- plus special quotas for 4,000 orphans and 5,000 Europeans who entered the U.S. legally as visitors, and were then stranded when their native countries fell to the Communists. Hennings went back and reported to McCarran. Pressed by Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to avoid a messy floor fight that might hurt some big-city Democratic candidates in 1954, McCarran agreed to accept Watkins' 209,000 offer. That assured the bill's passage in the Senate.

*A maximum of 154,367 immigrants a year, 83,117 of them from the British Isles.

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