The Hoosier Pulse/Death of a Republican
Owen, Kent
THE HOOSIER PULSE ................................................................................. DEATH OF A REPUBLICAN by Kent Owen Plutarch would have found the late Charles Abraham Halleck,...
...There was no use in kicking against the pricks, or to put it in the Hoosier idiom, "Never kick a turd...
...136 pages...
...Not much of a sentimentalist about politics, Charlie Halleck didn't labor under the illusion of "vox populi, vox dei...
...There was no mistaking that Charlie Halleck was as stalwart a Republican as the party could muster, exacting proofs of loyalty from himself as well as others...
...367 pages...
...Yet with his bulbous, flanging nose, circumflexed brows, warily hooded gaze, and squatty frame, he looked like a farm-club manager in the Philadelphia Athletics system...
...Even so, he could resound the words of Lincoln with the best of them at solemn assemblies of the faithful...
...And he usually got there in a jalopy driven by one of his lieutenants, say, Lew Dellinger of White County, the only professional man ever to graduate from Idaville High School...
...This chilling story of the Allies' narrow escape from defeat at the hands of Nazi submarines documents the most critical months in the Battle of the Atlantic, the winter and spring of 1942-43...
...From his home town, Rensselaer, seat of Jasper County, he would go off to scour the countryside in search of constituents, often tramping across muddy fields in his cracked waders, old rumpled sack suit, a sweat-stained fedora jammed on his head...
...256 pages...
...Which, perhaps, is no more than what hundreds of congressmen have done over the years...
...prevailed upon Dwight Eisenhower to run for the presidency...
...He concludes that the ill-starred operation exposed serious deficiencies in the military decision-making process and offers proposals for change...
...If so, more's the pity...
...354 pages...
...He was assured by the Dewey camp that he would receive the candidate's endorsement for the vice presidency, but Dewey chose Earl Warren...
...Naval Institute, 2062 Generals Highway, Annapolis, Maryland 21401 YES...
...650-3 $18.95 REFERENCES DICTIONARY OF NAVAL ABBREVIATIONS, Third Edition By Bill Wedertz This volume contains over 45,000 abbreviations of the U.S...
...Glossary...
...Charlie Halleck accepted this in-gratitude with restraint, declining to complain about the Republicans he had supported in their public endeavors and private ambitions...
...It is an intriguing and unforgettable story...
...What happened to Charlie Halleck was that his energies, skills, and purposes were annealed to a new strength...
...296 pages...
...330-X $19.95 THE IRANIAN RESCUE MISSION Why It Failed By Paul B. Ryan The author draws together all the significant elements of this tragic episode to objectively analyze what went wrong and why...
...Despite the fact he was from a "safe" district (the loamy soil that was fine for cattle and even better for corn and soybeans produced bumper crops of Republicans from the Civil War on), he considered his seat a tentative and temporary trust he had to earn again every two years—and, for that matter, all the days in between...
...39 illus...
...If it had not been for Halleck's recognition of the crucial significance of civil rights legislation, the landmark act of 1964 might have faltered in the House...
...DEATH OF A REPUBLICAN by Kent Owen Plutarch would have found the late Charles Abraham Halleck, former Republican member of the U.S...
...With his operatives splayed over the Second District, Halleck stayed in-formed about local, even neighbor-hood concerns and could on short notice retrieve whatever information he needed...
...But somehow these troublesome fellows were checked by such men as Charlie Halleck who strived to keep matters civil...
...Yet for all his years in Washington, he never came to regard the folks back home as ill-informed, dim-witted yokels he could use at will for his own designs...
...Nonetheless, Halleck held his own, presenting his views on the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson years with plain-speaking trenchancy...
...All the same, the Hoosier conservatism that influenced his notions about man's ornery nature and the mutability of political arrangements made him leery of doctrinaire ideology...
...091-2 $14.95 MIDWAY The Battle That Doomed Japan By Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya An honest and factual ac-count of the battle from the Japanese point of view by two former officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 31...
...Fields, partnered Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen during the long-running "Ev and Charlie" show, which Republicans used to stage for the befuddling instruction of the press...
...344 pages...
...What went on in Mr...
...584 pages...
...60 illus...
...John M. Waters, Jr...
...Although the landscape of north-western Indiana that was the Hoosier congressman's district for thirty-four years might have struck him as unrelievedly dull, the Greco-Roman moralist would have been compensated for his attentions by the texture of Halleck's career...
...969-3 $16.95 BLOODY WINTER Second Edition By Capt...
...285-0 $14.95 #149-8 $19.95 N—I—ti-- NM =BM =I MI NW UM NW 1111•1 ME ENO ^ UM =I =I MI THE LEFT-HANDED MONKEY WRENCH Stories and Essays by Richard McKenna Edited by Robert Shenk This marvelous, first-time collection of short stories, essays, and excerpts from an unfinished novel offers a treasure chest of reading from the author of the best-selling novel The Sand Pebbles...
...Halleck himself had proved that hard-scrapping partisan-ship could co-exist with interparty mutual assistance, that party loyalty was in no wise lessened by honest camaraderie among members from both sides of the aisle...
...Halleck simply dusted himself off and went back to work in the House, becoming all the more effective and influential throughout the federal establishment...
...Exp...
...it was as much a matter of professional ethics as of personal integrity...
...Plutarch would have said it was a matter of character, both of the man and the institution...
...Illus...
...and Captain Edward L. Beach Contains a glossary of U.S...
...Dirksen was, of course, so picturesque and flamboyant that any-one who shared the platform with him, let alone Halleck, seemed drab...
...In a sense Charlie Halleck, as much as anyone of his day, made the position of representative a profession...
...But wherever blows for liberty were struck, high deliberations of representative democracy were made lighter and clearer by those too serious to let the nation's business be resolved by abstemious prigs...
...Halleck died on March 3, at the age of 85...
...Robert Debs Heinl, Jr...
...Naval Institute Press Books SBS: THE INVISIBLE RAIDERS The History of the Special Boat Squadron from World War Two to the Present By James D. Ladd The author has succeeded in penetrating beyond the mythology to reveal little-known aspects of the highly specialized force that spearheaded Britain's landing in the Falklands...
...He ran for one more term, then stepped aside to let the rising generation have its turn, conKent Owen is Indiana editor of The American Spectator...
...Book # Price Total NAVAL TERMS DICTIONARY Fourth Edition By Captain John V. Noel, Jr...
...Thus Lawyer Dellinger was invited to deliver the commencement address for almost thirty years until the school closed...
...Halleck was skeptical of highfaluting talk about ideals as the basis for political dealing, the gritty, grinding scut-work that makes American government at any level get its job done...
...This is to say that Halleck took his duties seriously and discharged them responsibly...
...Then in 1952 he was one of the Republican leaders who...
...Even without the aid of strong drink and salty talk, congressmen of the re-cent past would have carried out their duties in a spirit of comity and civility...
...But Plutarch's custom was to align "Parallel Lives" for the edification of his readers, and Charlie Halleck stands almost by himself in the modern annals of Congress...
...This he was minded to do perhaps because he had so often stood in the minority...
...But he did keep his ear to the ground without getting it full of mud...
...Navy colloquialisms, slang, and technical terminology, followed by five appendices that explain various equipment nomenclature and the enlisted rating structure...
...In any case, despite Willkie's impressive campaign against FDR, Halleck was tainted as unreliable in some party circles because of his loyalty to such a pesky outsider...
...So Halleck was passed over for Richard Nixon and with that gave up his ambi-tions for the White House and the environs, accepting as his lot and rightful portion the House of Representatives...
...Sam's chambers or the cloak-room may have been little different in quality of jest or profundity of thought from like gatherings at the Elks Club in Cedar Rapids...
...In point of fact, Halleck had a firmer grasp of what William James had intended pragmatism to mean: namely, the 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 POSTAGE & HANDLING charges are $2.25 for orders up to $15.00, $3.00 for orders of $15.01 to $30.00, and $3.75 for orders in excess of $30.00...
...Still Halleck held his tongue and chalked it up to experience...
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...This was plainly not the image the younger House Republicans wanted, and in 1965 they chucked him for Gerald R. Ford, their idea of what a modern Republican ought to look and sound like...
...288 pages...
...For his troubles, Halleck was some-times criticized in the press and among the GOP's seagreen incorruptibles for his "pragmatism," which to them meant his readiness to work with the Democratic leadership and to compromise on such issues as civil rights and Social Security, instead of opposing them to the bitter end...
...Zip Title SHORT STORIES OF THE SEA Edited by George Solley, Eric Steinbaugh, and David Tomlinson This anthology contains both familiar and not-sofamiliar works of nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers, that explore our unending fascination with the sea...
...But what made the difference was Halleck's determination to represent the interests of his district and at the same time to advance beyond them in the national interest...
...the past two thousand 388 pages...
...And do so, moreover, without smirking hypocrisy, because he saw no contradiction between the vision of freedom and the spectacle of politics...
...Hence he set his course ac-cording to the beacon of reasonableness—the attainment of the best possible good in light of the most service-able principles—and then went about persuading others to see things his way, really "their way," as he took pains to make clear...
...Air Force and Army terms in everyday use in Navy programs...
...House of Representatives, an apt subject...
...As it was, the coalition that included Halleck and Dirksen rallied enough Republicans in both chambers to pass the bill, but not without reproaches that Ev and Charlie had sold out their Southern allies...
...482-9 $14.95 WORLD WAR II U-BOAT COMMANDER A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic By Peter Cremer A true-life war thriller by famed U-boat ace "Ali" Cremer, this book presents an authentic view of the notorious wolf-packs and their encounters with the Allies...
...Illus...
...Although Willkie was eight years older than Halleck, he too was a chauvinistic Hoosier, a graduate of Indiana University and its law school, and a brother Beta...
...in fact, when he first went to Congress in 1935, Halleck was the only Republican in the Indiana delegation and one of only eighty-eight in the entire House...
...He soon got used to cooperating with Democrats because without their help he had little hope of gaining anything of substance...
...He did say in "Lysander": "Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men's private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large...
...This came back to haunt him in 1948 when Halleck supported Thomas E. Dewey over Robert A. Taft for the presidential nomination...
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...Senator James E. Watson of Indiana, former majority leader, put it nicely: "It's fine to take a whore into the church, but it's rushing things to let her sing a solo the first Sunday she's there...
...it might be your uncle...
...372-5 $14.95 Name Address City State Qty...
...Yes, of course, there were self-seeking wonders, sanctimonious pharisees, stiff-necked ideologues, party-line absolutists, bounders and rascals and scamps...
...vinced he should not overstay his usefulness, as had his predecessor in the GOP House leadership, Joe Mar-tin of Massachusetts...
...In the Indiana political tradition, no matter how fierce the fighting, a politican kept his word...
...867-0 $15.95 FICTION DICTIONARY OF MILITARY AND NAVAL QUOTATIONS THE HUNT By Col...
...From his years at Indiana University ("the roughest politics I ever saw," he often said) through his four terms as prosecuting attorney in Jasper and Newton counties, Halleck learned that the rigid application of abstractions to concrete problems resulted in divisions, not in useful resolutions...
...all those emblems disposed Charlie Halleck to favor the barefoot boy from Wall Street, even if Willkie had switched over to the GOP only several months before...
...There was no forgetting how he had been used by his fellow Republicans, and probably not much forgiving either, but he made no fuss about it...
...But now the party elders wanted a younger, less puffy face with a shadowy toughness to offset Ike's grandfatherly and benign manner...
...Apps...
...years...
...Index...
...Index...
...312 pages...
...23 illus...
...If that be true, then as now, he would surely have approved of the public practices of Charles A. Halleck, a statesman whose example the House would be wise to honor...
...The GOP's old guard may have been wary of Halleck ever since the Willkie campaign of 1940, when he joined forces with the Republican enlightenment (such tony chaps as Henry Luce, Russell Davenport, and John Hay Whitney...
...Illus...
...Through it all, Halleck kept whatever bitterness he may have felt to himself, for he had too much respect for the House of Representatives as an institution to let personal pique hamper its work...
...Illus...
...283 pages...
...345-8 $16.95 ^ My check or money order is enclosed...
...Nothing extraordinary about that, you say...
...Again he was given to understand that his time had come for the vice presidency...
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...Speaker Sam Rayburn had admitted him to that select company of whiskey-drinking, story-telling congressional cronies who revered the institution and made it work...
...send me the books indicated below .. . NAVAL HISTORY ICEBOUND The Jeannette Expedition's Quest for the North Pole By Leonard F. Guttridge Here is the riveting account of America's 1879 dash for the North Pole and the cover-up that followed...
...Perhaps the day has come when the animosities that sour much of public life have made the House as vituperative as college faculty meetings...
...Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, as well as U.S...
...Perhaps the purposes of the American nation have become so diffuse and faction-ridden that they can no longer be advanced through bipartisan coalitions of Congress...
...266 pages...
...FOR RED OCTOBER This collection includes over By Tom Clancy 5,500 maritime quotations A race between the Soviet from the speeches and writand American fleets to find ings of philosophers, adan errant Russian subma- mirals, generals, poets, prorine brings the superpowers phets, and politicians over to the brink of disaster...
...Americans of long memory will keep him in mind as the sometime House majority or minority leader, the orator who nominated Wendell Willkie in 1940, and the straight man who, vaguely resembling W.C...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
