During World War II, Yates served in the United States Navy for two years (1944–1946) as an attorney based in Washington, D.C.
After an unsuccessful run against Everett Dirksen for the United States Senate in 1962, in 1964 Yates was again elected to the House.
He was a longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee, where he became known for staunch U.S. support of Israel, and federal funding for parks, historical conservation, and the arts.
[8][a] He served in the United States Navy during World War II, assigned as an attorney for the Bureau of Ships in Washington, DC.
By the time he retired, his district also included Evanston, Des Plaines, Glenview, Rosemont and Skokie.
Yates was one of the first congressmen to speak out against age discrimination, arguing in 1951 that mandatory retirement of workers was wrong and deprived older people of their right to lead a proud, productive and independent life.
During the late 1950s, after a series of lurid magazine articles and Hollywood films helped to sensationalize youth gangs and violence, Yates called for legislation to ban automatic-opening or switchblade knives, melodramatically proclaiming that "Vicious fantasies of omnipotence, idolatry...barbaric and sadistic atrocities, and monstrous violations of accepted values spring from the cult of the weapon, and the switchblade knife is included in this.
Minus switchblade knives and the distorted feeling of power they beget—power that is swaggering, reckless, and itching to express itself in violence—our delinquent adolescents would be shorn of one of their most potent means of incitement to crime.
[12] Rep. Yates and other congressmen supporting the Switchblade Knife Act believed that by stopping the importation and interstate sales of automatic knives (effectively halting sales of new switchblades), the law would reduce youth gang violence by blocking access to what had become a symbolic weapon.
Yates remained on good terms with both liberal reformers and machine politicians in Chicago throughout his career.