The Mahout from Oyster Bay

(See Cover)

When President Eisenhower announced his decision to run again, the Republican elephant on which he will ride was well-fed, laden with campaign fodder, and already lumbering off on a well-plotted course toward the campaign of 1956. Around Republican National Committee headquarters in the Cafritz Building, just three blocks from the old State Department building where Ike made his announcement, there was a lively hum of activity as the President spoke. The staff numbered 125 workers (up from the off-year complement of 75), and was rapidly growing to its campaign peak of 300. In a large, pale-blue, partitioned-off room, young writers turned out speech kits and campaign slogans. Researchers diligently probed the records of Democratic candidates for campaign ammunition. The committee's regional traveling men slammed in and out of the office with the latest cardiograms of the public's political heartbeat. Office boys lugged big bundles of outgoing mail; in the past month nearly 400,000 pieces of G.O.P. propaganda have been mailed to all parts of the country. Tickers kept up a sporadic jabber of political news from all over. And filed away was precious provender for 1956's electronic election: $2,000,000 worth of contracts for prime TV time next fall.

The Jangling Summons. In the midst of this busy scene a burly, quick-moving man barked directions, flopped restlessly around his office from one chair to another, longed for the 4 1/2 daily packs of Viceroys he had given up last fortnight, conferred endlessly with associates, and paid minute-to-minute obeisance to the jangling summons of his telephone (in one normal day, recently, he received 94 incoming calls, not counting interoffice conversations). At 10:52 a.m., the precise moment when the President's press conference broke up, Leonard Wood Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, fastened a gold-colored Ike pin on his lapel and made a prediction. "This," he said earnestly, "is going to 'be one of the hardest campaigns we ever fought. Now that Ike has done what he has done, we're all going to have to come up to it by working harder than we ever did before."

For Len Hall the President's decision was the payoff of a political bet made five months ago. After Ike's heart attack, when nearly everybody else in the U.S. wondered whether the President would be able to finish his first term let alone try for a second, Hall foresaw how much havoc Ike's failure to run would play with the Republican Party. "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," he said, "and when I come to it, I'll jump off." On Sept. 26, two days after the heart attack, Hall announced: "There is no change as far as I am concerned in campaign plans and strategy."

Len Hall's unwavering conviction enabled him to keep the Republican elephant moving forward at a time when most Republicans were sucking their thumbs. Before the President had made up his own mind, Hall decided that he just had to run again if it was humanly possible, because there was no other Republican available who could touch him as a candidate. Adding his political facts, the chairman concluded that Ike, as a cardiac case, could never undertake another exhausting whistle-stop tour of the nation, and that, anyway, in the era of telecommunications, the 21-in. screen was the best political platform ever devised.

Accordingly, Hall scheduled the "Salute to Ike" dinners around the country last month (TIME, Jan. 30) and raked in a neat $4,000,000 profit, which he split with the 48 state committees--an unprecedented campaign fund to have on hand nine months before Election Day. Meanwhile, Hall shopped around for radio and TV time next fall, shrewdly reserving strategic time segments before or after such top-rated shows as This Is Your Life and The $64,000 Question, when he could count on audiences of 50 million or more. Through the foresight of his party chairman, Ike is certain to have the greatest audiences in political history when he goes before the electorate.

Three-Ring Circus. In his capacity as mahout of the Republican elephant, Len Hall has one of the most sensitive jobs in politics. As G.O.P. chairman, Hall is the producer of a circus with three rings: the National Committee, which handles the presidential and vice presidential campaigns and maps out overall party strategy, and its two auxiliaries on Capitol Hill, the Senate and House Campaign Committees, which concentrate on local congressional campaigns.

As head of the party, Dwight Eisenhower is the supreme commander of the National Committee. He has delegated much of his authority to Hall and welcomes Hall's advice. The Capitol Hill committees, on the other hand, are run by the Senators and Representatives themselves, pretty much after their own independent fashion. Most of the top Republicans who control the Campaign Committees are men who rose to power on their own efforts during the long Democratic years when the Republican National Committee could give them little or no help. They have maintained themselves in office by do-it-yourself methods, and they feel little allegiance to the National Committee or to Leonard Hall.

Chairman Hall would like to come to the aid of his party in two specific ways. First, he hopes to regain some of the lost party discipline on Capitol Hill and throughout the nation. His best weapon in this effort is the popularity of the President, who now numbers among his supporters some leaders, e.g., Ohio's Senator John Bricker, of the party's right wing.

The other hallmark which the chairman would like to put on national politics is the extension of the two-party system into the South. Hall believes that Ike will carry both Florida and Texas again this year. He is working to enlarge the G.O.P. enclaves of 1952, last week had two organizational task forces working in South Carolina and Mississippi. "I am determined," says Chairman Hall, "that we are at least going to have sound, healthy organizations in all of the 48 states."

The Coachman's Son. Leonard Hall was born and bred on the North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island, a baronial strip of land that was sacred to Republicans. ("In the Hoover campaign," Hall recalls, "the finance people set quotas for the 48 states and Nassau County.") But the Halls were no landed GOPatricians; Father Franklyn Hall was the coachman at Theodore Roosevelt's Oyster Bay estate, Sagamore Hill. Leonard, the youngest of eight Hall children, was born on Oct. 2, 1900. When Len was an infant, his father's employer was elected Vice President of the U.S., and a month after the election Teddy Roosevelt noted the new baby's arrival in a letter to his old friend and Spanish-American War commander (the Rough Riders), General Leonard Wood.

"You may be amused to know that my coachman, Franklin [sic] Hall, who has a large family of small children (including a small boy named after me), has recently been presented with another small boy, and my little girl Ethel, who acted as its godmother, selected Leonard Wood for its name. This was done purely on her own account and I never knew of it until a few days ago. Tell Mrs. Wood."

Before Len Hall was a year old, President McKinley was assassinated, and President Theodore Roosevelt brought his coachman to Washington to be chief messenger at the White House. Franklyn Hall kept his job until his death in 1915, but left his family behind in the roomy house he had built in Oyster Bay, returning home for vacations and occasional holidays. From childhood Len was immersed in politics, and Teddy Roosevelt became and remained his political ideal.

The Hall children had a robust country upbringing. In the winters there was coasting on the slope of the big hill where their house stood, and skating on the pond at the bottom. On summer days the family often picnicked on the beach, where father Hall had built a brick oven for feasts of winkles and horseshoe crabs. There were few luxuries, and the Hall boys chored around the neighborhood for spending money, but it was a happy, close-knit life. His mother taught Len how to handle a gun (he is still a skilled trap-shooter), and tutored him in his studies so expertly that he skipped to the third grade a month after he entered school.

In 1916, the year after his father died, Len went to Washington, drawn there by Franklyn Hall's vivid stories of life in the capital. The lanky boy's life was far from vivid. He got a $50-a-month job with the Potomac Electric Power Co., thus managed to support himself while attending night classes at the Georgetown University Law School. It was not easy. Hall often wore old clothes ("I invented the idea of wearing pants and coat that didn't match"), worked out a complicated route to school so he would not have to spend more than a nickel streetcar fare. After three years, at 19, Hall got his law degree.

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."

Absentee Candidate. In 1952, rather than face another tough primary fight against the Sprague organization, Len Hall decided to run for the surrogate court in his county--a cushy job that paid $30,000 a year. Just as he was getting ready to campaign, he got a call from Candidate Dwight Eisenhower's headquarters in Manhattan. "Len," barked Sherman Adams, "you're taking the train." And so Hall rode with Ike, took care of his schedules and appointments, and acted as a jovial maitre d'hotel aboard the campaign train. On Election Day, without ever delivering a speech for himself, he easily won his judgeship.

The surrogate's job, involving only a few hours' work a day, gave Hall time to pursue a longtime hobby. For years he has puttered happily in his basement, accumulating good tools (he values his layout at $4,000) and turning out inlaid wastebaskets and other knickknacks for his friends and family. Over the years he has established a pleasant puttering partnership with his next-door neighbor and longtime friend, Ralph Davis, a lighting company inspector. Davis plays an Art Carney support to Hall's Jackie Gleason, and their weekend rituals usually follow the same pattern. On Saturday mornings, until recently, Hall would get up around 5 a.m. and look over at Davis' house to see if the kitchen light was on. If he decided his friend was out of bed, Hall would go next door, and over a pot of strong coffee the two would discuss big do-it-yourself projects. After another round of coffee and more planning in the Hall kitchen, they would go to work. In their time Hall and Davis have: stripped down and reassembled Davis' Ford; lowered the ceiling and completely modernized the Hall kitchen; enlarged Davis' porch; built bookcases and a large storage closet in Davis' house. Nothing, from plumbing to electrical work, is too complicated or too large for the pair to tackle. "If he called me from Indiana or India," says Davis, "I'd go."

The 15-Hour Day. Hall's happy life as a judge and carpenter was short-lived. Just three months after he became surrogate, a call came from Washington. National Chairman Wes Roberts had resigned under fire after his operations as a ten-percenter were disclosed, and the party's leaders--especially Hall's old friend, Speaker Joe Martin--wanted Hall to take over. Hall was elected on April 10, 1953.

In his job Len Hall is a study in perpetual motion. In three years he has traveled an estimated half a million miles around the U.S., consulting the party brass, greeting the voters (he has an elephantine memory for names, faces and telephone numbers), giving pep talks to sagging local organizations, and keeping the Republican machine in good working order. In Washington he has exercised his talent for lowering ceilings by consolidating the national committee's office space, whittling down the permanent staff, thus saving $300,000 a year in rents and payroll costs. He meets nearly every day with the President or one of the top White House aides, keeps in daily telephone touch with G.O.P. congressional leaders. Almost every problem of the party and the Administration concerns him in some way. And on top of his workaday schedule there are official parties almost every afternoon and night which the national chairman is obliged to attend.

Outwardly, Len Hall seems to thrive on his hectic regimen--and there is little doubt that he relishes his work. His geniality has not rubbed off under the stress. His singing and his original songs (sample title: The Squaws on the Yukon Are Good Enough for Me) are famous in Washington. Office staffers have learned to ignore his flagrant practical jokes--like the swollen and bloody fake finger he sometimes wears. He has to fight his weight (and at 225 Ibs., the weight is winning). To the casual observer he seems to be a bald and bouncy gladhander, as carefree as a prankster at an American Legion convention.

Rehabilitation Needed. Yet there are a few signs of the strain. He suffers from recurrent headaches. Sometimes Gladys Hall wakes up in the early morning to see her husband lying in bed, staring at the ceiling as he worries his way through the day's problems. In the months ahead, as Hall strives to keep the elephant on the path, the problems and the headaches will increase. "Are you running scared?" asked a reporter last week. Replied Chairman Hall: "We're running hard."

Hall's task is much broader--and harder--than the re-election of Eisenhower. Winning control of the House of Representatives is a tough goal--and control of the Senate a tougher one. Beyond the immediate electoral objectives of 1956 lies the long-range rehabilitation of the Republican Party, reduced to a minority by the Depression and the Roosevelt-Truman years.

Hall is well aware of Eisenhower's dissatisfaction with the quality of current Republicanism--its aged face, its timorous voice, its lack of political style and verve. Hall tries to carry out the Eisenhower insistence on more young faces and fresh voices in the party councils. As a man whose political ideal is Teddy Roosevelt, Hall knows well what the boss wants --and knows that the years remaining with Ike in the presidency are all the time the party may have to refurbish itself.

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