Recruits for Nixon

Inside Room 832 of Washington's Shoreham Building the carpet had not yet been laid and workmen were still installing telephones. But even in the chaos of moving day, Room 832 was as busy as an anthill. Its mission was supposed to be a secret, but nearly everybody in Washington knew that staffers of the new Nixon Club were beaver-busy organizing a presidential campaign under the benign and smoothly efficient direction of the most successful Republican political cam paign manager in U.S. history--Leonard Hall of Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Until the day when Vice President Nixon makes a formal declaration of his candidacy, Hall and his recruits must operate underground, unofficially, and off the record. But by the time the announcement is made, a nationwide organization will be primed and ready to roll into political action.

Old Enemies. Hearty, hefty (6 ft. 2 in., 230 lbs.) Len Hall, 59, was a natural choice to run Nixon's campaign. As the 1956 campaign manager for Ike and past chairman of the Republican National Committee (1953-57), he knows more Republican politicians, and is more familiar with the intricacies of the party's machinery than any other man. The fact that he is no friend of the other G.O.P. candidate on the horizon. New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller (Hall clearly wanted the Republican gubernatorial nomination that went to Rocky last year), has put Hall even more solidly in Nixon's camp.

Since last spring, when Dick Nixon first tapped him for the big job, Len Hall has been carefully sorting out the professionals and organizing a basic training program for the amateurs who will work for Nixon. A longtime advocate of massive amateur movements, he has modeled the Nixon clubs after the highly successful Citizens for Ike organization. He has padded surefootedly on recruiting trips through Florida, North Carolina and Illinois in recent weeks, and his booming voice has reached out over the telephone to Washington, Oregon, Texas, New Hampshire and Iowa, to summon the faithful. In response to an urgent call from Hall, Seattle Mortgage Banker Walter Williams, national chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower in the 1952 campaign and longtime Under Secretary of Com merce (1953-58), is expected to go to Washington to join the campaign.

Non-Neutrals. Though President Eisenhower has taken a public position of neutrality in any contest involving Nixon, Rockefeller, or any other Republican candidate, his closest friends and associates have not. This was borne out emphatically at a stag dinner Dick Nixon attended recently in New York, heart of the Rockefeller domain. The guests were all intimate friends of President Eisenhower's --such men as Coca-Cola's Board Chairman William Robinson, General Electric's President Ralph Cordiner, Cities Service's Board Chairman W. Alton Jones, Financier Sidney Weinberg.

To a man, they assured Nixon of their allegiance, echoed Len Hall's own words: "I'll do anything I can for him."

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