National Affairs: HOOSIER POLITICIAN

OUTNUMBERED nearly 2 to 1 in the 86th Congress, the Republican minority in the House of Representatives—as well as the embattled Eisenhower Administration —will lean heavily upon the political talents of the new G.O.P. floor leader, hard-hitting Charlie Halleck, 58, of Rensselaer, Ind. (pop. 5,000). Hoosier state professionals, players in as rough a practical political game as the country knows, rate curly-haired, paunchy Charlie Halleck a tough and ruthless performer, who has been often battered but never beaten in 35 years of office-holding. Old hands in the House, where he is a twelve-termer and twelve-year veteran as G.O.P. No. 2 man, rank him as "an Indiana politician with brains," a blunt, hard-driving scrapper.

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 politcos, he maneuvered his way to student-union president, helped earn his own way (food manager for Beta Theta Pi fraternity), made Phi Beta Kappa, graduated (A.B., 1922) sixth in a class of 600. At I.U. Law School he graduated first in his class, dashed home to northwestern Indiana's Jasper County to win the first of five consecutive terms as prosecuting attorney of the Jasper-Newton county circuit.

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 of volunteers that got Indiana's Wendell Willkie (I.U. '13) the 1940 presidential nomination.