In 1935, Halleck was elected to fill the House vacancy created by the death of Congressman-elect
Frederick Landis, and remained in that position until 1969. A prominent member of the
conservative coalition, he served as the
House Majority Leader after the elections of 1946 and 1952. He was
House Minority Leader from 1959 to 1964. As Minority Leader he was in charge of
House Republicans Halleck noted that a highlight of his career came at the
1940 Republican National Convention, when he nominated another person from Indiana,
Wendell Willkie. Noting the mixed reception he got, Halleck said, "I got more brickbats and more bouquets over that speech than any other I've ever made." In 1944, even before
Thomas Dewey was named as the Republican presidential nominee, Halleck, as the new chairman of the
National Republican Congressional Committee, addressed a party gathering in
Chicago. He rejected the Democratic "don't-change-horses-while-crossing-the-stream" mantra and declared that a Republican president would retain
George C. Marshall,
Dwight Eisenhower,
Douglas MacArthur, and
William F. Halsey in their military positions. He attacked what he called the
New Deal "snooping into our ice boxes," a reference to the
Office of Price Administration and
rationing. Halleck said that Americans should "live again as God meant us to live and not as some
bureaucrat in Washington... would like us to live." According to Halleck, he was rumored to be Thomas Dewey's vice-presidential nominee in Dewey's second general election campaign in 1948 if Halleck guaranteed the support of the Indiana delegation at the
1948 Republican National Convention. In the end, Dewey selected the
governor of California,
Earl Warren. The Dewey-Warren ticket surprisingly narrowly lost that November, to the Democratic
Truman-
Barkley ticket. In 1959, with the declining popularity of Eisenhower enabling Democrats to maintain their hold on the House, Halleck parlayed his following among Congressional Republicans and the frequent public approval of Eisenhower and
Richard Nixon into a successful challenge to the 20-year reign of
Joseph W. Martin Jr. as the leader of House Republicans, beginning a three-term stint as the official
Minority Leader of the
United States House of Representatives. He was a strong opponent of the liberal social proposals of Democrats
John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon Johnson and supported the
Vietnam War, but voted in favor of the
Civil Rights Acts of 1957,
1960, and
1964, as well as the
24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Halleck voted in favor of the initial House resolution for the
Civil Rights Act of 1968 on August 16, 1967, but voted against the Senate amendment to the bill on April 10, 1968. Along with Senator
Everett Dirksen, he was the face of the
Republican Party in most of the 1960s, and both made frequent appearances on television news and talk programs. The press jocularly nicknamed his joint appearances with Everett Dirksen as "The Ev & Charlie Show." After the heavy election setbacks of 1964, Halleck was defeated in his bid to remain Minority Leader by
Gerald Ford, who was the nominee of the
Young Turks. ==Legacy==