William Howard Taft
Paolo E. Coletta
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S parents were of moderate wealth and some political influence in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was born on 15 September 1857. He graduated from Yale College in 1878 and was awarded a law degree by Cincinnati Law School in 1880. For the next twenty years he received increasingly important judicial positions from Republican hands before serving Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as the first civil governor of the Philippines (1901–1904) and then as Roosevelt's secretary of war (1904–1908). He thus had excellent credentials for achieving his life's goal, a seat on the Supreme Court. However, Helen Herron, whom he married in 1886 and who bore him three children, sought high political office for him and obtained her wish.
More than six feet tall, weighing 332 pounds at his inauguration, Taft had an infectious chuckle and was usually even-tempered. Although thoroughly honest, he had certain deficiencies that detracted from success in politics. He was devoid of qualities of showmanship, unskilled in managing the fourth estate, conservative in his political and social views, and distrustful of the military viewpoint. In addition, he was afflicted with a craving for quiet, stability, and order that caused him to procrastinate in making decisions and forced him to devote a tremendous amount of energy to completing a task; a corpulence that made him sensitive to heat and increased his natural laziness; a lack of executive leadership, especially of the skill for achieving political compromises; and a perpetual tendency to depend for support upon others, first upon his parents, then upon Mrs. Taft, and particularly upon Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt became president, Taft parroted his ideas; such was his attachment to him that he several times declined his offer of an appointment to the Supreme Court. Yet he disliked politics, saying in 1904 that "a national campaign for the presidency is to me a nightmare."
