National Affairs: An Urge to Run

An Urge to Run Just back from an 8:30 a.m. appointment with the President, Leonard Hall called his Republican National Committee staff together one day last week to read off an announcement: he had decided to resign as national committee chairman. “You’re a great crew!” Hall boomed. Called a female voice: “You’re a great boss!”

Hall is undoubtedly the best chairman the Republicans have had in a generation: shrewd and eupeptic, confident about his political knowledge. He planned the famous “Salute to Ike” dinners, bringing a fat $4,000,000 into the party’s 1956 war chest, then spent half that buying up expensive “prime time” on TV. He never swerved from his conviction that Ike would run again despite heart attack and ileitis operation, thus preventing a unity fracturing scramble for delegate votes. His candidate won by a landslide, but his party failed to capture Congress.

Len Hall is bowing out of his job because he wants to run against Democrat Averell Harriman for governor of New York in 1958, and well knows that a party chairman, no matter how talented, is considered something of a political hack when it comes to a campaign for high office. Therefore, when Hall gets back from a month or more of sunning and fishing at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., he is expected to move into a high-level Washington job, where he can not only put his talents to work for the Administration that he helped reelect, but prove that he is worth electing himself.