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While carrying out the Eisenhower program, Halleck has also helped bring White House and congressional Republicans closer together than at any other time during the Eisenhower Administration. As never before. Congressmen are informed about Administration aims, and the President gets an accurate and detailed picture of congressional sentiment. Under Halleck's predecessor. Massachusetts' doughty old (74) Joe Martin, and the Senate's obstructionist G.O.P. Leader William Knowland, it hardly seemed possible for Ike to keep his congressional fences in good or der. This year, with Halleck, and with Illinois' Everett Dirksen replacing Knowland in the Senate, the Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill work as an effective team. The weekly legislative conference has passed from pain to pleasure. "These sessions are getting to be so much fun." Ike said recently, "that they're running overtime." In passing out praise for the change that means so much to his Administration, the President points straight at House Leader Halleck. Wrote he in a recent note to Halleck: "You are a political genius."
Success After Failure. Such recognition of legislative skill has been a long time coming, and to Halleck an agonizingly hard time. Whipped by a furious ambition, he has shaped his life toward national political leadership. Time and again he suffered setbacks. At one point, frustrated beyond endurance, he withdrew from his friends, took on Scotch as his closest companion, even talked of quitting Congress. Yet in the ambition that drives him and in the absolute determination not to fail again lies the key to Charlie Halleck's success as legislative leader.
Charlie Halleck is a true son of a state famed for its political gut fighting. By general tradition, an Indiana infant's first gurgles can be freely translated as: "I do not seek public office, but if in their wisdom the people see fit to elect me, then . . ." Rensselaer (pop. 5,500) is Halleck's boyhood town, a farming village in the northwest part of the state that inspired the song Back Home Again in Indiana. The seat of table-flat Jasper County, Rensselaer is as Republican as Vermont and twice as tough. Charlie's father. Lawyer Abraham Halleck * was a two-term Republican state senator who preached Republicanism as gospel. But if his party faith is a legacy from Father Abraham. Charlie Halleck inherited his energy and ambition from his mother, Lura ("Birdie") Halleck, a remarkable woman who taught herself to type legal abstracts, ran Abraham's law office, drove the family's National, managed an eleven-room house, and raised a brood of five children.
In Rensselaer, Charlie Halleck led a pleasantly Tarkingtonian life, hunting coons and skunks in the nearby Kankakee marsh, mowing neighbors' lawns for spending money, playing halfback on the high school football team and run sheep run in the meadow back of his home. In political fact. Halleck was running as soon as he learned to walk. He cannot remember when he first decided to spend his life in pursuit of high office. But his ambition was plain for all to see. Said Rensselaer High School's yearbook:
Charles Halleck, our editor in chief, One in whom we have much belief, Has hopes and ambitions today Of becoming President of the U.S.A.