(4 of 6)
Turk in Albany. Back in Nassau County he was a buoyant young lawyer who made friends and influenced politicians easily. A gregarious extravert, he liked to sing in his high tenor and to mystify people with his parlor magic tricks. He was soon well known around the county, and at 26 he went off to Albany as a Republican assemblyman. Together with a group of like-minded Young Turks, he helped overthrow the speaker, one Irving M. Ives (now U.S. Senator), and replace him with Oswald Heck, who, nearly 20 years later, is still speaker.
Since 1932 Hall has never lost an election. He served seven terms in the assembly, broken only by a three-year hitch as sheriff of Nassau County. As a freshman in politics he met James Dowsey, also a Nassau County Republican. At Dowsey's home in Manhasset, Hall met his host's daughter, Gladys, a pretty mother of two, who was separated from her husband. After her divorce Hall courted her over the parcheesi board in the Dowsey parlor until the summer of 1933, when Gladys went to her father's camp in the Adirondacks. Lonesome Len chartered a small plane and took off in hot pursuit. In the mountains the pilot had trouble finding a landing strip, finally came down on a baseball diamond, after buzzing it until he broke up the ball game. Len made the last, 38-mile lap by taxi and boat. "When I saw him then," recalls Gladys, "I knew. And he seemed to, too." The next spring they were married.
In 1938 Congressman Robert Low Bacon died, and the G.O.P. bosses tapped Hall to replace him. That November Hall won the first of seven successive terms in the House of Representatives. In 1941 he was one of 21 Republicans who crossed party lines to vote for the Selective Service Extension Act—which was passed by a single vote. "In questions of war and peace," says Hall, "if you think your party is wrong, you must vote your conscience."
As a party loyalist and a skilled compromiser of divergent opinions, Hall ventured into national politics. In Thomas E. Dewey's 1944 presidential race he managed the Republicans' national Speakers Bureau, booking Republican speeches all over the U.S. During the 80th Congress he chaired and drastically reorganized the Congressional Campaign Committee. Three years later he ran into the biggest political fight of his career by refusing to vote for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. William De Koning, Nassau County's racketeering labor boss, called on Hall in a rage. Hall still quivers with indignation when he recalls it: "This labor thug—he is just out of jail—came to see me to raise hell about Taft-Hartley. Finally, he took the position I had to go along with him against the Act or else. I told him to get the hell out of my office."
Then Hall learned that Russel Sprague, Nassau's Republican leader, a member of the national committee and a close friend of Dewey's, was friendly with De Koning. Hall decided to buck both the political boss and the labor boss. "I attacked De Koning as a Little Caesar and directed my campaign against him. The people supported me."