(See Cover) Through the cloakrooms and corridors outside the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives the seam-faced, stumpy, blue-eyed man moved restlessly, relentlessly. Trying to collar enough votes to sustain the presidential veto of a budget-busting. Democratic-sponsored rural electrification bill, he took fresh aim at each of his Republican colleagues. To one he snapped: "Don't you forget that in 1960 you're going to have to run on Eisen hower's record." To another he appealed: "This is a straight political issue. Are you going to let the Democrats get away with it?'' With a farm-state critic of Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, he agreed: "All right, he is an s.o.b. — but he's our s.o.b." When the vote was taken, the veto stood. Indiana's Charles Abraham Halleck, 58, minority leader of the House of Representatives, had won another victory for the Eisenhower Administration. He had done it by doing what, by birth, training and inclination, comes naturally. "I," says Halleck, "am a gut fighter." Praise from the Top. As one of the roughest, most highly skilled infighters in U.S. politics, Republican Halleck, in less than six months as the House minority leader, has given his party its most effective legislative leadership in years, and in the process spotlighted one of the most professional of personalities among the battle-scarred old pros in Congress.
He has done it under almost impossible circumstances. He took over the leadership job after the worst Republican defeat since the sunflower campaign of Kansas' Alf Landon went to seed in 1936. Dwight Eisenhower, barred from seeking a third term, looked like lame-duck soup to the lopsided Democratic majority in Congress. House and Senate Republicans were fighting among themselves, seemed incapable of forming a line of defense against the war-dancing Democrats.
In this, his darkest political hour. President Eisenhower determined upon an all-out drive for a balanced budget. Only by maintaining a strong, healthy domestic economy, he said, could the U.S. maintain its world leadership. With spending bills blooming in every congressional committee room, the President's budget seemed as doomed as a wounded impala before a pack of hungry leopards. Ike's no-retreat stand has helped ward off the fiscal marauders ; the economic boom has made pump-priming seem fatuous. Yet, most of all, under Charlie Halleck's House leadership, spending bill after spending bill has been either trimmed to size or killed by vetos the Democrats could not override. With the 86th Congress, first session already past the midway point, the balanced budget appears not only possible, but probable.