Taft never wanted the White House as much as the Supreme Court
William Howard Taft is the only American to have been both president and chief justice. The second job was the one he always craved; yet he turned down repeated offers to join the Supreme Court because he judged his political work more important. Today, unfairly, his weight is what most people remember about him.
Taft was born in Cincinnati on September 15, 1857. His father Alphonso served as attorney general and secretary of war under Ulysses S. Grant, and his demanding parents pushed William and his four brothers hard. Not considered brilliant, he was a grinder: at Yale, which he entered in 1874, the jovial, heavyset student won the intramural heavyweight wrestling title and graduated second of 121 in 1878. He joined Skull and Bones, which his father had helped found.
His rise was fast. By 29 he was a judge on Cincinnati's Superior Court. Serving as solicitor general, he took 18 cases to the Supreme Court, won 15, and introduced confession of error, where the government concedes a case it won below but should have lost, a practice still followed. A seat on the federal appeals court in 1892 suited him better, and as a judge he backed workers' right to organise and strike more often than critics assumed. In 1901 William McKinley sent him to govern the Philippines, and Theodore Roosevelt made him secretary of war in 1904, then anointed him as successor. He married Helen Herron, known as Nellie, whose ambition for him was fierce, in 1886.
Taft beat William Jennings Bryan easily in 1908 but struggled in office. His push to cut tariffs produced a bill shaped by special interests, and fights over conservation and antitrust suits drove him apart from Roosevelt, who drifted toward the party's progressives. In 1912 Roosevelt challenged him, lost the nomination and ran anyway. The split handed victory to Woodrow Wilson; Taft carried only Utah and Vermont.
Vindication came in 1921, when Warren G. Harding named him chief justice. Taft modernised the court's administration, capped by the Judiciary Act of 1925. Historians place his presidency in the middle of the rankings but rate his judicial work more highly. He resigned in February 1930 and died the next month, the first president buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Source: William Howard Taft
