The amazing saga of Tom Mechling and his historic race for the U.S. Senate
A young anti-Mafia reform candidate takes on Nevada's McCarran-Blitz machine
Above is a screenshot of a partial memorandum that Tom Mechling of Washington Watch Editors sent me on November 4, 1988. He told me this wonderful story a few years later.
Tall and slim, Tom Mechling was a popular 31-year-old crusading journalist based in Washington, whom everyone in the D.C. media community knew as an All-American boy. On New Year's Day 1952, he packed up his life and loaded it in his 1947 Chevrolet. Accompanied by his wife, Margaret, a brunette beauty whom he had married five years earlier, the couple drove across country over the next four weeks, arriving in Las Vegas in early February.
A fun-loving guy with a wry sense of humor, Mechling hadn't dragged his wife 2,500 miles for a good time. Instead, Mechling—a Denver native and decorated Army-Air Corps war hero who spent World War II in the South Pacific—had come up with a seemingly crazy idea. He had decided to run for the United States Senate in Nevada against Republican incumbent, Senator George Malone.
At the time, Nevada was the sixth largest state by area but with only the same population as Bridgeport, Connecticut. 87 percent of all state land was owned and operated by the federal government. Other than providing for tourists who had come to the state to gamble, the only other two major industries were mining and ranching.
Mechling—who had earlier only briefly visited Nevada, where Margaret had been born and raised—had little money, no organization, and no support. He didn't know anyone in the state outside of his wife's family, and no one knew him.
And, to complicate matters, before facing off with Malone, Mechling had to get past 42-year-old Alan Bible, the state's attorney general. Bible, his opponent in the Democratic primary, enjoyed the full support of the political machine of Nevada's senior U.S. senator, 76-year-old Pat McCarran, whom many believe was later portrayed as the corrupt politician in The Godfather II.
McCarran, an infamous and unforgiving red-baiter and blacklister whose "state's rights" beliefs made him appear more as a Republican, ruled the state with an iron fist. Margaret Mechling had worked as a stenographer for McCarran in Washington. Through her, Tom Mechling learned about McCarran's corruption and arrogance of power.
Mechling also discovered that much of the big money behind McCarran came from 50-year-old Norman Blitz, perhaps Nevada's wealthiest citizen who owned enormous amounts of land, as well as casino, mining, and ranching interests. A Republican, Blitz, who worked completely behind-the-scenes, operated hand-in-glove with the Democrat McCarran and flat-out owned Senator Malone and Nevada's Republican governor Charles Russell, whom Blitz had specifically handpicked for the job. It was Blitz who had been earlier responsible for lobbying the state legislature to forsake both state income and inheritance taxes—and for making Nevada a wide-open state.
After fulfilling the state's liberal six-month residency requirement—using his wife's parent's home in Wells, Nevada—Mechling filed his petitions with Nevada's secretary of state and became an official candidate.
Refusing to accept any campaign contributions, Mechling and his wife decided to use their entire life savings, a total of $7,600, to finance his bid for public office.
Although Bible, McCarran and his county bosses, and Norman Blitz refused to take Mechling seriously, the young candidate remained unbowed and undaunted. He and Margaret drove from town to town with a trailer in tow, shaking hands and talking to Nevada's 175,000-voter electorate. Working seven days a week and eighteen hours a day, they met over 60,000 voters—with the exception of his time off for an emergency appendectomy that he underwent amid his "shoe leather, rubber tire" campaign.
At first, he found himself serving as the foil for jokes told by political insiders. Then, after he began sending personal letters to everyone he had met, whom he had placed on a growing mailing list, voters began to take him seriously. They discovered that through his unique grass-roots campaign, Mechling had the common touch and struck a chord in state politics with his "Open Book" election theme.
Running as a reform candidate, Mechling concentrated his campaign on a handful of basic issues: supporting President Harry Truman's Fair Deal while fighting against Senator Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt, the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and illegal gambling, as well as his personal crusade against the Mafia.
Also, instead of attacking Bible, Mechling made McCarran a big campaign issue, denouncing the old political boss's "dictatorial control" of the state.
Oddsmakers in Las Vegas and Reno offered gamblers 100-1 odds against Mechling, whom McCarran and Blitz had already labeled "a carpetbagger."
Then, on September 3, 1952, Mechling—still without ever taking a single campaign contribution—shocked the state by defeating Bible in the Democratic primary by 664 votes, 15,915 to 15,251. Incredibly, he carried only three of Nevada's seventeen counties—but that was enough.
"This is not my victory," Mechling said gleefully after his upset win. "It is a victory for the people—the working people of Nevada. . . . It is a reaffirmation of faith in our democratic way of life."
In a front-page news story about his big win on September 4, "'Upstart' Defeats McCarran's Man for Senate Nomination in Nevada," the New York Times stated that Mechling had "caused a political earthquake in Nevada."
The Associated Press added, "In a stunning David and Goliath drama, a politically unknown young newspaperman has pulled the political upset of Nevada history. . . . Mechling not only won the nomination from Alan Bible, one of the State's best-liked citizens, but upset veteran Senator Pat McCarran's powerful political machine in the process."
United Press asked in the lead to its news report: "Is it still possible in this age of television . . . for a political unknown to appear from nowhere and win [the] nomination to one of the nation's highest political offices?
"Many of the skeptics would probably say 'no.' But lanky Tom Mechling of Nevada—who did it—says 'yes.'"
Mechling was among a remarkable crop of first-time Democratic senatorial candidates around the nation, who included John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Mike Mansfield of Montana, all members of the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as Stuart Symington of Missouri, Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, and Thomas Fairchild of Wisconsin.
But all these Democratic candidates, who had won their primaries, too, enjoyed the complete support of their state's Democratic parties.
Mechling wasn't so lucky—especially after he rebuffed an offer from Senator McCarran's emissaries four days after the primary to join—and to be under the control of—McCarran's team.
Furious over Mechling's victory, the humiliated McCarran and Blitz threw the full weight of their corrupt machine behind Mechling's Republican opponent, Senator George Malone. And in a statewide radio address on October 23, McCarran bitterly and falsely described Mechling as "unfit, untrustworthy and untruthful."
Blitz told Time magazine: "Mechling is just bad inside. He wants to knock down everything. He criticizes the state and the government and all the things we believe in here in America. . . . I love this state, and I'll do any damn thing I can do to keep it the way it is."
The Las Vegas Sun, which was enthusiastically behind Mechling's candidacy and had begun to call him "The Boy Wonder," reported: "For several days’ past, Sen. McCarran has been in and out of some downtown casinos, in which he insisted club bosses 'get behind Malone.'
"Aside from the gamblers, McCarran has prodded a number of heretofore prominent Democrats into similar action."
In spite of the pressure he received from McCarran, Alan Bible, whom Mechling had defeated in the primary, refused to support Malone and supported Mechling.
Hank Greenspun, an ex-New Yorker and the Sun's publisher, had decided to use the Mechling campaign as a means of challenging McCarran's stranglehold over Nevada politics.
Retaliating, the Nevada gambling community, at the behest of McCarran and Blitz, pulled its ads from Greenspun's newspaper. Consequently, Greenspun sued McCarran and the casino industry for conspiracy to drive him out of business—and later won an $86,000 settlement.
Upon hearing that McCarran, a life-long Democrat, had thrown his considerable weight behind the Republican George Malone, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, held a press conference in Albany, New York, attacking McCarran for refusing to support Mechling.
In response to a reporter's question about Mechling, Stevenson, who was challenging Republican nominee General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the presidency, said, "Mechling seems to me a splendid man. I am very gratified that the Democratic Party has such a good candidate up in Nevada." Stevenson also lauded Mechling for his "fine clean campaign . . . fighting against great odds."
Responding to Stevenson's charge that McCarran "used to be a Democrat," McCarran went to war with Stevenson, launching his red-baiting assault and charging that the Democratic candidate for U.S. President "had been consorting so long with the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), that he wouldn't know a Democrat if he saw one."
Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and John Kenneth Galbraith, among other high-profile liberals, ADA was a progressive organization and a favorite target of redbaiters and blacklisters, like McCarran.
For McCarran and Blitz, the Mechling and Stevenson campaigns went from strictly business to deeply personal, especially after Stevenson and Mechling began making appearances together during Stevenson's Western campaign tour.
McCarran and Blitz viewed them as complete threats to their fiefdom. Determined to destroy both, McCarran and Blitz kicked their political machine into overdrive, personally supervising its operations.
Despite everything thrown at him, Mechling waltzed into the general election as the clear favorite in the U.S. Senate race. In fact, Nevada's Boulder City News had already written an editorial, published the day after the election, which stated prematurely: "Senator Mechling goes to Washington. . . . The handsome young man with a typewriter, a trailer, a comely wife, wins because he was in the right place at the right time. He capitalized on some public squabbles that automatically allowed him to jump into the role of the hero while the other side became a bunch of villains and sad sacks."
However, in the end, McCarran, Blitz, and the other "villains and sad sacks" prevailed. On Election Day, November 4, during accusations of widespread voting irregularities, George Malone, riding the sweeping tide of General Eisenhower's Republican juggernaut, won another term, defeating Mechling by 2,218 votes, 41,906 to 39,688.
Adlai Stevenson also lost the general election, as well as the state of Nevada by 18,814 votes, 50,502 to 31,688. It was the first time in twenty years that Nevadans had voted for a Republican for president.
Disappointed but remaining in good humor, Mechling was summoned to Washington to answer questions asked by the U.S. Senate's elections subcommittee, which was considering an investigation of Nevada's election results. For instance, 1) in some polling areas, fewer votes were cast for senator than in other federal contests; 2) that more voters were registered than population figures indicated; and 3) that, in some precincts, more votes were cast than the number of registered voters.[1]
On December 15, Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, the chairman of the elections subcommittee, announced that a formal probe had been authorized by the panel.
After a thorough investigation, the subcommittee voted to overturn the Nevada Senate election. However, the vote by the full committee ended up in a tie, throwing the matter to the full Senate.
After a lengthy debate, the vote by the 96 senators also ended in a tie.
The tie-breaking vote was cast by the new Vice President of the United States and President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate, Republican Richard M. Nixon, who, of course, voted for his fellow Republican, George Malone.
I first met Tom Mechling on April 16, 1982, the day before his 61st birthday. We had lunch together at Childe Harold in Washington’s Dupont Circle. Tom—who had earlier worked as a consultant for a 1980 NBC News “White Paper” on gambling in America—was then doing research for the NFL Players Association. He was also working as a consultant for PBS which was planning to launch a news documentary series called Frontline. The premiere episode on January 17, 1983, was titled, An Unauthorized History of the NFL.
Notably, Tom was an essential source of information for my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (Morrow).
Tom died at 80 on September 28, 2001 and is buried in Wells, Nevada. He was a good man and a true reformer.
[1] Three months later, the Nevada State Legislature passed and Governor Russell signed the McCarran/Blitz-inspired "Mechling Law," prohibiting anyone from seeking office in Nevada unless they had lived in the state for five years. In fact, the law had been aimed at one man: Tom Mechling, who was rumored to have been considering a run against Russell for governor in 1954 or McCarran's senate seat in 1956.
Washington columnist Drew Pearson wrote: "Senator Pat McCarran is so scared that young Tom Mechling, who almost defeated Senator Malone, will run against him, that McCarran's political cohorts have passed a special bill aimed at barring Mechling from holding office in Nevada."
But, soon after the legislation was enacted, the Supreme Court ruled the "Mechling Law" unconstitutional.
Great Story
Fascinating!