William H Taft

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Few men have ever had the background for the Presidency to equal that of William Howard Taft . His family heritage of legal accomplishment , his own early training in the law , his reputation for honesty and fairness and his friendly manner , all were natural stepping stones to the office of Chief Executive . As Governor General of the Philippines and then as Secretary of War , Taft so d President Roosevelt that he received Roosevelt 's full endorsement as the Republican Presidential candidate in the 1908 election . The election itself produced a

landslide victory for Taft and prefaced a four-year term fraught with problems and controversies

William Howard Taft--the one man to be both president and chief justice--has a secure place in American history . Only occasionally , and perhaps unfortunately , have ex-presidents remained politically active to the point of holding important public office : John Quincy Adams represented his district of Massachusetts in the lower house of the Congress after being president Andrew Johnson was reelected to the Senate , though he did not live long enough to take his seat and Herbert Hoover made a singular contribution at the head of the commission that bore his name and that helped to reorganize the federal government . Taft did much more . After four years in the White House he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States as chief justice in 1921 and presided over the Court for a decade . Some might contend that in passing to the Court he had taken a higher place . More than one respected voice - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes , Jr , among them--has been raised to argue that service on the Supreme Court is the supreme public achievement . Certainly Taft expressed himself in such terms from time to time , which is not to suggest that he contemned the presidency . He thought of himself , rather , as better suited to be a jurist than an executive . Such judgments , after all , are a matter of individual temperament , taste , and training , which in Taft 's case combine to explain his preference for the judiciary . His heritage , education , and early experiences were of the law , his inclinations and ambitions were judicial , and his learning was the offspring of these kindred elements

Insofar as his writings are evidence of Taft 's learning , they fall into three categories . His judicial philosophy is readily identified from his decisions both as a state judge and a federal jurist and from his Supreme Court opinions written during the 1920s . HYPERLINK "http /www .questia .com /reader /action /gotoDocId /142190 " 2 His several books and other extended observations on government and especially on the presidency show Taft to good advantage as both an erudite and thoughtful student of American government . Finally , his writings on international peace and arbitration extend the range of his mind demonstrating qualities of both judge and statesman . There is furthermore , a basic intellectual consistency threading itself through these sets of writings , along with a number of clues that point to the role that learning played...