Word: halleck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...seats were the same, but the sitters were different. Into the Cabinet Room chair at Dwight Eisenhower's left, long occupied by Senate Republican Leader William Knowland at the President's weekly legislative conferences, popped Indiana's Charles Halleck, newly installed as House G.O.P. leader. In the chair at Ike's right, reserved in the past for Cabinet officers or other Administration aides reporting to the legislators, sat new Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen. New G.O.P. Senate Whip Tom Kuchel took the place where deposed House Leader Joe Martin had always sat. And before the conference...
Born & Bred G.O.P. Halleck's mother and father, both lawyers and Lincoln-loving Republican workers, christened him (Aug. 22, 1900) Charles Abraham Halleck, called him "Little Abe." At 14 he worked furiously in local campaigns, hauled voters to the polls as soon as he was old enough to drive a car. In 1917 he signed up as an infantry private, developed his parade-ground voice (the House's second loudest, after Illinois' Noah Mason), won lieutenant's bars Stateside before flu struck him down. At Indiana University, one of the big playing fields for future Hoosier...
Fighting Rooster. Rushing into a death-created vacancy, Prosecutor Halleck won the Second Congressional District seat in 1935, thus became the only Hoosier among the 103 House Republicans left after Democratic landslides. "I felt like a banty rooster in a barn lot full of Percherons," he says. "I said, 'Boys, let's be mighty careful about stepping on one another.' " But caution was never Hoosier. His all-out kicks at New Deal and Fair Deal "regimentation and extrava gance" won him toe hold enough in the national G.O.P. to give a practical political push to the campaign...
Party Regularity. Conservative and isolationist by background (he voted against fortification of Guam and against the draft just before Pearl Harbor, still has to defend the votes in every election), Halleck soon broke with the defeated Willkie on foreign policy, but not before he outraged Indiana's Taft regulars by revealing a key political trait: in the interest of party unity and strength, he would battle for men and policies far more liberal than himself. His party-first drive, tirelessly applied after he became chairman of the Congressional Campaign Committee in 1943, paid off by 1947 in the party...
Follow the Leader. Eisenhower Backer Halleck (who golfs with Ike at Burning Tree more than anybody else on Capitol Hill) became majority leader for the second time after Eisenhower's 1952 victory. His party loyalty code soon led him to support policies of the middle-roading Administration, e.g., public housing, reciprocal trade, foreign aid, with the same narrow-eyed gung ho he had mustered against the same programs for 17 years. He did not flinch. "Damn you, you've got to be with us on this one," he twanged at reluctant colleagues. "The President needs your support...