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. Although thoroughly honest, he had certain deficiencies that detracted from success in politics. More than six feet tall, weighing 332 pounds at his inauguration, Taft had an infectious chuckle and was usually even-tempered. However, Helen Herron, whom he married in 1886 and who bore him three children, sought high political office for him and obtained her wish. He thus had excellent credentials for achieving his life's goal, a seat on the Supreme Court. 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 graduated from Yale College in 1878 and was awarded a law degree by Cincinnati Law School in 1880.
In the epilogue Lurie explains why Taft is still regarded as an outstanding chief justice - if not a great jurist - and details why this distinction is important.WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S parents were of moderate wealth and some political influence in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was born on 15 September 1857. By early 1930 he was forced to resign, and his death soon followed. The second part of his tenure was in fact a period of slow decline, with his health worsening with each passing year. The high point of Taft's chief justiceship was the period from 1921 to 1925. Lurie examines key decisions while avoiding legal jargon wherever possible.
Lurie structures his study in parallel with the eight full terms in which Taft occupied the center seat. His missives contain an intriguing mixture of family news, insights concerning contemporaneous political issues, and occasional commentary on his fellow justices and cases under consideration. Furthermore he draws on the unpublished letters Taft wrote to his three children, Robert, Helen, and Charles, generally once a week. Lurie demonstrates that Taft's leadership on this tribunal, matched by his productive relations with Congress, in effect created the modern Supreme Court.
Although Taft was considered an undistinguished chief executive, such a characterization cannot be applied to his tenure as chief justice. Lurie considers how conservative trends at this time were reflected in key decisions of Taft's court. Taft joined the Court during the Jazz Age and the era of prohibition, a period of disillusion and retreat from the idealism reflected during Woodrow Wilson's presidency. In The Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft, 1921-1930, Jonathan Lurie offers a comprehensive examination of the Supreme Court tenure of the only person to have held the offices of president of the United States and chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
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