President William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft moves across the American story like a large, courteous ship that prefers deep water to spectacle. He is remembered in cartoons as girth and in footnotes as an asterisk—only man to be both president and chief justice—but the truth is more intricate: he was a craftsman of institutions, a temperament tuned to law and procedure in an epoch that rewarded drumbeats and banners. He did not hunger for the presidency; he wanted the Court. Yet the republic, in one of its recurring experiments, placed him first where he was least comfortable and later where he was always meant to be. To understand the man is to watch intelligence and decency continually choose duty over desire and to see how that choice, repeated long enough, becomes a kind of greatness that the loud decades often mishear.

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