As our 27th president from 1909 to 1913, and then as chief justice
of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930, William Howard Taft was the
only man ever to lead two of America's three governing branches.
But between these two well-documented periods in office, there lies
an eight-year patch of largely unexplored political wilderness. It
was during this time, after all, that Taft somehow managed to rise
from his ignominious defeat by both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore
Roosevelt in the 1912 election to achieve his lifelong goal of
becoming chief justice. In the first in-depth look at this period
in Taft's singular career, eminent presidential historian Lewis L.
Gould reveals how a man often derided for his lack of political
acumen made his way through the hazards of Republican affairs to
gain his objective.
In the years between the presidency and the Supreme Court Taft
was, as one commentator observed, "the greatest of globe trotters
for humanity." Gould tracks him as he crisscrosses the country from
1913 through the summer of 1921, the inveterate traveler
reinventing himself as an elder Republican statesman with no
visible political ambition beyond informing and serving the public.
Taft was, however, working the long game, serving on the National
War Labor Board, fighting for the League of Nations, teaching law
and constitutional history at Yale, making up his differences with
Roosevelt, all while negotiating the Republican Party's antipathy
and his own intense dislike of Woodrow Wilson, whose wartime
policies and battle for the league he was bound to support.
Throughout, his judicial ambition shaped his actions, with
surprising adroitness.
This account of Taft's journey from the White House to the
Supreme Court fills a large gap in our understanding of an
important American politician and jurist. It also discloses how
intricate and complicated public affairs had become during the era
of World War I and its aftermath, an era in which William Howard
Taft, as a shrewd commentator on the political scene, a resourceful
practitioner of party politics, and a man of consummate ambition,
made a significant and lasting mark.
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