old from California—the youngest ever to hold the post of majority leader—and an ambitious, politically naïve, and inflexible politician who consistently disappointed Eisenhower as a congressional ally. Knowland had long been a rival of Nixon’s, and he held a grudge against the administration. Harry McPherson, a longtime staffer for Senator Lyndon Johnson, acidly noted that Knowland’s “mind had a single trajectory—flat—and a point-blank range.” He was conservative, unimaginative, bullish, and proved deeply hostile to any interference by the Executive branch in McCarthy’s Senate activities.
