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Home , Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft This chief, not that chief

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: We're up to this week, and no, we are not going to talk at all about Taft getting stuck in a bathtub. I am Lillian Cunningham, and this is the 26th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I've got a bunch of wonderful guests for this episode. Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin is back; and also my Washington Post colleague Barnes will be joining us; and we have Michelle Krowl from the . But this is her very last episode with us after a marathon of helping out with these “Presidential” episodes.

So, we are going to send her out in style by having her kick off the William Howard Taft episode. He was born in , in 1857 and he was president for one term after , from 1909 to 1913.

MICHELLE KROWL: I think the key thing that propels him to the presidency is the family that he's born into. He's the favorite child. His father had a couple of sons by his first wife, who died, and then he remarried to William Howard Taft's mother and had four more children with her.

But of all of them, Will -- his nickname was Will -- Will was the favorite child. You know, all the other brothers and sisters just adored him. His parents adored him. And I think that created in him an expectation that he needed to please people -- that he needed to live up to family reputations. His father had served in Ulysses S. Grant's administration, was a very respected man in Cincinnati. His father had gone to Yale, and his two older brothers had gone to Yale, and they'd all been successful and very bright.

That seems to be a theme throughout his life -- he does have an idea of what would make him happy, but other people propel him into directions that either he's not comfortable with going or wouldn't have have done on his own.

So, I think he's ambitious in some ways, but he's not as ambitious as some of the other men that

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 we've encountered, particularly when it's involving the presidency and higher office.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, on a blind date with him, would he just do whatever I wanted us to do? Would I set the date?

MICHELLE KROWL: You know, with Will Taft, you probably would. From all accounts, everybody loved him. He was very genial. He's a very, very good-natured person. He's always popular personally with people. So, I think he would be a fun date, but I think he would be very amenable to doing what you wanted to do. So, if you suggested something, he would probably go along with it.

And that's where he ended up with his wife -- the woman that he ended up marrying was someone who had ideas and had ambitions, and she was a very untraditional woman for her time. If the Tafts had been living today, she would have been running for office, and he would have been a judge.

All the way along, he was happy being a judge, whether it was back in Cincinnati or on a higher plane. But that didn't match with her ambitions and where she thought that he should go. So, he doesn't have great ambition, but she will push him along -- partially, I think, to satisfy some of her own ambitions.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: In addition to that he has a wife who is steering him toward higher and higher political office, what else is kind of helping him rise?

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, and it's not just his wife. His elder brother Charlie is very involved in his life and is making it possible for him to be a public servant. As Taft goes into these judgeships or various positions higher up in the government, he never feels like he's making enough money to be able to support his family or do the entertaining that he should. And in all cases, when his family. and particularly his brother Charlie, feels that this is a good opportunity for him, then they supplement his income. And they do it lovingly.

They all feel that he has greatness in him and will do great things. And so, it's usually Charlie who says, ‘In celebration of this, we're going to give you X number of shares of stock,’ or, ‘I'm happy to give you a quarter of my income.' So, it's sort of a family honor that Taft brings to them, of all of these things that he's able to accomplish.

And what's interesting is, at various times when Taft is having to decide, 'OK, do I continue doing what I'm doing or do I take this other job?' It's not necessarily that he's just having an internal conversation with himself about, 'Is this what I want to do? Is this best for me?' Or even having a conversation just with his wife, Nellie. It's often almost having a family council -- 'OK, what does everybody think about this?' And if enough people say yes, you should do this, then he does it.

And then, of course, when he gets higher up into the government, then T.R. is pushing him into positions, too.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Taft was an assistant prosecutor in Ohio early in his career, then he was a judge of the Cincinnati Superior Court, then he was U.S. solicitor general and then a judge of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 And he loved all of these judicial jobs. But his wife and his family kept egging him on toward more political roles. So, when President McKinley offers Taft the position as first civilian governor of the -- and, remember, the Philippines had just come under U.S. control in the Spanish- American War -- when he's offered this, Taft feels pressured to say yes, so he accepts it.

MICHELLE KROWL: But it's worth noting that even though he gets kind of pushed into the role, once he's in it, he's very dedicated. His predecessor had been the military governor and had been very standoffish with the local population. They weren't very interested in having the actually participate in their own government. But when Taft comes in, he shakes that up a bit. You know, he and his family are going to learn Spanish; and they invite people into the governor's house for receptions, which is something that hadn't been done before.

And I think that's also a trait with him -- even if he doesn't go after these jobs because he has a burning passion for it, he does try to make the best of it and do the best job that he can and be as independent with his own thinking, within the confines of what the administration says he can do or what he feels like he can legally do.

Because that's one thing to always remember about Taft as we talk about leadership or how he he operates -- he is a judge at heart. If he does have a burning ambition for his own career, he wants to be chief justice of the Supreme Court of the . That is his dream job and that is his temperament. He's judicial. He goes along with the law. He weighs things.

Whereas Theodore Roosevelt may push the envelope just to the edge of the law and kind of dab a toe over, Taft is more of the [kind to say] 'What does the law say we can do rather than how far can we push things?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Taft was actually offered seats on the Supreme Court twice by Theodore Roosevelt while T.R. was president.

MICHELLE KROWL: You know, it's a job that he would have really enjoyed. But, he says no because the Philippines work is important to him. Plus, he also has his wife and his brother say, 'Well, you know, if you get stuck on the bench when you're this young, you're not going to advance your career. It might take a long time to become chief justice.'

So not only does he feel this pull of duty towards the Filipinos, he also has other people saying, 'This is not the right thing for you to do.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, instead he stays in the Philippines for a while longer. But then Theodore Roosevelt makes Taft his Secretary of War, which brings Taft back to Washington, and it kind of turns him into Roosevelt's righthand man. And so then, when Roosevelt decides that he's not going to run for a third term in 1908, he basically handpicks Taft to be his successor. And Roosevelt goes out on the campaign trail, rallying support for Taft.

MICHELLE KROWL: And again, it's a situation where Taft doesn't want to be president. Now, we're going back to those previous presidents – ‘well, OK, if I have to be.’ Another thing about about Taft, too, is that he's his own harshest critic. He will always say, 'Oh, my speeches aren't very good.'

But he does seem to realize that he is who he is. In 1908, while he's running for office, somebody

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 had suggested that he wasn't aggressive enough in his speeches and he says, 'I am sorry, but I cannot be more aggressive than my nature makes me. That is the advantage and the disadvantage of having been on the bench. I can't call names and I can't use adjectives when I don't think the case calls for them. So, you'll have to get along with that kind of candidate.'

And he says, 'If the people don't like that kind of a man, then they've got to take another.' So, you know -- I think he even recognized that the bench was more of an appropriate place for him, as opposed to the rough and tumble of politics.

He doesn't really want to be president and almost has to be talked into it. And again, his brother wants him to be president. His wife wants him to be president. T.R. wants him to be president. So, you know, then he will do that. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work out.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Taft enters the in 1909. But not long into his presidency, his wife, Nellie, has a severe stroke. Not only does Taft end up spending time caring for her, but he's also left feeling somewhat alone -- without the active support of the person who basically wanted him to be president and who, in many ways, had been his closest political adviser.

Nellie does start to recover as his time in the White House goes on. And just as a little aside, it's Nellie Taft who ends up orchestrating the planting of cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin. And year after year, people still come to D.C. in the spring to see them bloom.

Anyway, Taft's time in the White House quickly starts to confirm that he is not just a second Theodore Roosevelt.

I spoke to biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin on the phone about how this relationship between Roosevelt and Taft affected Taft's presidency. Doris's book, 'The ,' is basically all about their intertwined presidential stories. But their friendship actually started all the way back during the .

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, the relationship had been built on a friendship that had begun when they were in their early 30s. So, as young men, they had both shared their dreams to one another. I mean, interestingly those dreams would later show the problem, because Teddy always thought when they passed the White House that's where he'd like to be. When they'd walk together, Taft would point to the Supreme Court, thinking that's where he would like to be.

But when he brought him into his cabinet in 1904, Taft really became his number one closest adviser in the cabinet -- even though he was purportedly Secretary of War. I think what Teddy loved about Taft was that Taft could make anybody like him upon first meeting. And Teddy would say it takes a little longer for them to get used to me. Whereas Taft admired Teddy's fighting spirit and his ability to just speak out on any issue. So, it was a very close and very, very good, loyal, workable relationship during Teddy's presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, once Taft ends up president himself, how would you describe his leadership style in the White House and some of the notable differences between how he approached presidential leadership and how Teddy did?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think part of the problem was that -- and it should've have been a signal earlier -- that he really had never loved politics, per se. He loved executing public policy,

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 but that's different from loving politics and different from even wanting to be number one.

When Taft was solicitor general and Teddy was in the Navy Department, they had very different ways of dealing with things. When the attorney general was away and ill for some time and Taft had to become attorney general, he wrote in a letter that he couldn't wait until the guy was back - - until the attorney general was back -- so he could slip back into his solicitor general role. When Teddy was at the Navy, and his boss was away, he kept telling him, 'Stay away, it's very hot this summer. You don't really want to come back. 90 degrees here and everything's fine’ -- because he loved being in the center of attention. So that was part of the differences.

This big tariff bill was going through Congress, and Taft tried to do the right thing on it. He knew that the tariff could break the Republican Party in two. And he did make some , but the conservatives in the Congress really controlled the issue more than he did. And when the bill passed, it wasn't what Taft had originally even hoped, and the Progressives were furious.

And then, the other part of it was that Taft never really was comfortable as a public leader. He was used to being a judge where you make a decision and the decision then speaks for itself. And when he becomes president, of course, he has to defend not only the power of decision but other decisions he made. And he was not comfortable with the bully pulpit at which Teddy was of course brilliantly able to have those short phrases and sound bites that could explain and fight what he was arguing for.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right. If you were to ask both of them what good leadership requires and looks like, do you think that they both would have defined it the same way -- but Taft just couldn't execute on it the way that Teddy could? Or do you think Taft also had a different definition of what leadership meant?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: That's a really good question. No, I think Taft himself later was able to say that one of his defects was not being able to take hold of the public leadership dimension of the presidency. And it was interesting, because when he was secretary of war, he was open and friendly with the press. And so, it wasn't personality- wise. He was very much of an extrovert. But once he got into the presidency, there was just this sense that he had to worry about what he was going to say. He just wasn't at ease informally with the press. And he didn't know how to give the kind of rousing speeches that would mobilize the public.

I would think he wished he had that capacity. But he knew he didn't. And he recognized that failure but wasn't able to remedy it during that period of time. He believed that if he made the right decisions, that over time the people would see that they were the right decisions. He believed in the decisions he made. He believed he had made the tariff better.

Teddy had passed a series of executive orders on conservation, and he thought they should be made into laws. So, he was getting Congress to make legal these executive orders -- or make them more legal. But in the interim, the executive orders were not operating and there was some feeling that he had gone back on conservation, and that private enterprise was going to take over in that gap between when the law came.

So, he was a man who believed in the law; Teddy was a man who believed that you should do everything in the present you can, short of something illegal -- but he was willing to stretch the law and use executive orders and use the powers of the presidency and the bully pulpit to get

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 done what needed to be done.

And Taft, because he came from that judicial background, he wasn't even so much more conservative on the actual issues, per se, but on the way you could deal with the problems of the society. It had to be legal and it had to be laws, and he needed Congress to pass those laws. So, it meant it took a longer time for him to get done what Teddy could do more quickly.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And to some extent, perhaps, he was not quite understanding that, once you make a decision, there's still all the time you need to spend selling it -- rather than just that a decision speaks for itself.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: No, that's exactly right. You know, when Teddy was presenting something to Congress, for example, he would present a long passage to them, really outlining, even before they would be arguing about the law that needed to be passed, what this law was about.

When Taft sent his message out -- for example, on the tariff -- it was 22 words long or something. And he figured they would work it out. So, he had a different sense of the relationship between the president and the Congress. Whereas, I think Teddy had a much more intimate sense that he could shape the Congress's thinking.

I mean, Taft was such a good and decent man, but maybe his temperament wasn't fitted to be that person in the eye of the storm, the person who would have to mobilize the bully pulpit, the person who wanted to make the central decisions.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What then ends up being at the root of why the relationship between the two of them disintegrates?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: So, I think what happens is when when Taft first took over, Teddy went to Africa to give him space. I mean, at that time, there was still that sense of Teddy knowing that, 'I just want him to have his own room when I go away.'

And while he's in Africa, he hears from his progressive friends that some of the things he cared about were not being taken care of in the right way by Taft -- and that had to do with the tariff bill and the conservation.

And he comes home, and there's already some suspicion about whether Taft has really followed his legacy or not. Taft didn’t put as many of Teddy's people into the cabinet as Teddy thought he was going to. Probably from Taft's point of view, he needed his own men because he was already being sort of skewered in parts of the press for just being Teddy's guy. But Teddy had thought they were going to stay there, and they had thought they would going to stay there. So, that was part of the root of the struggle.

But then, once Teddy gets home and he's greeted by a million people in and they want him back in the presidency, it fires up his own desire to be in the center of things again. And he also believed that his progressive goals were not being carried out well enough by Taft. And it was partly that the country had moved even further left, and Teddy moved with that country while Taft sort of was where Teddy had been four years earlier.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, in 1912, Roosevelt decides that he is going to run for president again -- even though Taft is the incumbent and Taft is running for a second term.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: And it's heartbreaking for Taft. I mean, because that really did mean, obviously, it's a big rupture in their friendship. But Teddy knows that the only way that he's going to have any chance, because Taft headed the party delegates -- again, it has ominous overtones for this election now -- he institutes a call for creating primaries, which had not really been on the presidential level before that.

And I think there's like 11 states that do agree to held primaries, and he wins the overwhelming majority of those states. But Taft has all the patronage, all the power, and so the go into the convention pretty equal it in terms of delegates. But before that, when they're fighting for the primaries and the big convention, it's such a messy fight -- even worse than what we're seeing today. I mean, the supporters are trying to keep the other ones out of the hall with bats and balls. One Teddy supporter puts a gun to the head of a Taft supporter and writes an editorial saying, 'If this is the first presidential primary, we sincerely it's the last. This is not a rational way to choose the president. What must the people overseas think? This is a mob.'

And then when they get to the convention, there are policemen surrounding the hall, the delegations from either side are fighting each other in the hotel lobbies, and the first decision is: Which delegates have really won from each state? And most of the decisions go to the Taft delegates. Historians would probably say he did have the majority of the vote, but nonetheless, Teddy felt that it was rigged. So, he comes out to Chicago, and he leads his people out of the convention into what becomes the third party -- the Bull Moose Party.

And then, of course, even though Teddy and Taft together get a majority of the votes, they split the Republican Party, and Woodrow wins.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: If Roosevelt hadn't run -- or even if Roosevelt had just waited until 1916, and then run with the party's full backing as a progressive Republican -- it's possible that the Democrats and Republicans today might look very different.

Progressivism might have actually stayed and strengthened within the Republican Party. But when T.R. led Progressives out the door from the Republican convention that year, it set off a party realignment that would play out over the next several years and reshape our concept of what makes a Democrat or a Republican.

As Doris said, the Republican Party split that happened because of Taft and T.R. running at the same time -- that's what allowed the Democratic candidate to win the election. And that means that Taft, after just one term in the White House, was out.

But Taft's story actually has a happy ending for him. After leaving the White House and then teaching law for several years at Yale, Taft was offered the position of chief justice of the United States. He was offered it by President Warren Harding. He eagerly said yes. And he spent the rest of his life in the job he had always really wanted.

So, I have with me in the studio my colleague Robert Barnes who is 's Supreme Court reporter. So, I'm really grateful that you're taking some time today to do this.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 ROBERT BARNES: I'm glad to be here.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Thanks for being here. Well, when I first talked with you about doing something on Taft, you mentioned that you've actually heard Chief Justice reference him with some frequency over the years you've been covering the court. So let's listen to one clip from a speech that Roberts gave in 2010.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “It may not seem important to you at first blush, but it matters greatly where the court sits. You've seen the beautiful building. Do you really think that the Supreme Court would occupy the position it does today, as a co-equal branch of government, if it still met in the basement of the Capitol? An architecture is substantive, and it took a president who appreciated that, Chief Justice Taft, to know that the court needed a building of its own if it was to have that view in the public consciousness.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, Bob. What do you think originally was behind Taft's vision, or desire, for the court to have its own building? And why, 100 years later, would a chief justice of the Supreme Court still be thinking about that legacy?

ROBERT BARNES: Well, I think, in many ways, historians say that the Supreme Court was what Taft really wanted to do. And so I think the court was very important to him in a way that perhaps it wasn't to other presidents.

And so, in many ways, what the current Chief Justice talks about is the way that Taft brought the court into sort of the modern era and also made it more independent and more of an equal branch of government.

You know, the Marble Palace, as they call it, on First Street is an imposing Greek temple-looking place, and it serves as the seat of the third branch of government in a way that makes it a sort of symbol that it wasn't before.

But Taft also said some other things to bring the court in. He really lived up to the idea that the title is ‘chief justice of the United States,’ not ‘of the Supreme Court.’ And so, he's responsible for lower courts. And he helped with their budgeting. He helped establish them with Congress as a more independent group. He really took control over the regional courts of appeals in a way that hadn't been done before and sort of set up the framework of the modern judicial system.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And the building wasn't actually completed during his lifetime, but --

ROBERT BARNES: That's right.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: But he's there on the building.

ROBERT BARNES: He's on the building. If you look at the entrance and the pediment above, there are a lot of sculpted figures, and one of them -- perhaps because he was so big as a grown man -- is of Taft as a young boy.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Since up until this point in the podcast, we have unfortunately not really talked about the Supreme Court very much, I thought it could be useful if you could give the highlights reel of some of the most notable justices and decisions up until this point in the

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 presidency that we've reached—when Taft's appointed in 1921.

ROBERT BARNES: Well, I think really two cases stand out -- one for good and one for bad. The good was Chief Justice Marshall, who led the court for 34 years, in Marbury v. Madison he established the notion that the court got to say what the law meant -- that the court could decide whether an act of Congress was unconstitutional. And so, he really sort of set the stage for what the Supreme Court's role should be.

The unfortunate decision -- the one that everyone says was the court's worst decision -- was the Dred Scott decision, which decided that slaves and former slaves, people of African descent, could never be citizens and said that the territories could not abolish slavery, and thus ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unlawful.

It was a decision that a lot of people will say, including our current chief justice, the court tried to figure out a political decision -- tried to figure out a quandary for the country -- and failed terribly. It was a precursor of the Civil War. So, those who talk about judicial restraint often point to the Dred Scott decision as not just being morally wrong, but also a terrible decision involving the separation of power.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So when Taft becomes chief justice, what sort of a justice is he? And aside from some of the procedural changes, what's his legacy?

ROBERT BARNES: Well, he was there for nine years. And it was a time in which regulatory decisions came often before the court. And so, it was mostly a conservative court that he headed. And they often would strike laws of Congress. Now, one important one was a minimum wage for women that the court struck down. But in that case, Taft was in dissent -- one of the few cases that he was in dissent.

One thing that was interesting about Taft on the court is he was an adviser to President Harding and let him know before the election that he was very interested in being on the Supreme Court, but only if he could be chief justice. He said that he had appointed some members of the court and it would be odd for him to join them. And so the only position he wanted was chief justice.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, one thing that we heard about a bit earlier in the episode was how Taft not only had this interest from a younger age in being a justice, but also how temperamentally he may have been better suited to that than to the White House. From your experience covering the Supreme Court, what does a Supreme Court temperament look like and are there traits that strike you that would make someone a good chief justice but not a great president?

ROBERT BARNES: Well, you know, it's interesting that we tend to lump all public officials together and think that they are politicians. You can be interested in politics and not be a very good politician -- and I think that's probably where Supreme Court justices come in.

For instance, on the current court, there's not a single member who's ever run for public office. The last to serve who had was Justice O'Connor, who had been a legislator in . These justices are lawyers, and you often hear the Supreme Court described not so much as a group of nine that work together, but as nine separate law firms -- nine separate lawyers -- who go about their own work and then vote to see which side is going to come out.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 I don't think they're particularly good at taking criticism sometimes the way politicians would. They don't sort of mix it up. It's a very different set of skills, I think. You often hear, for instance, that former presidents who are lawyers might be good on the Supreme Court. It was said about -- maybe he wants to be on the Supreme Court. It's said about President Obama over and over that his next step should be the Supreme Court. And they both said that's not what they like to do. Obama has said that he doesn't think he's ready for the kind of solitary life that a justice often leads.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, I was wondering, actually, if there were any takeaways or interesting questions to ask about the fact that Taft has been the only president who went on to make the Supreme Court his post-presidency.

ROBERT BARNES: I think it goes back to the idea that this was his dream job to start with. And I don't think that's true of most presidents. They want to be president. That's their dream job.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, any particular cases that you would highlight that profoundly shaped or recast the powers of the presidency.

ROBERT BARNES: I think that that's a question that's ongoing, and we see practically every court and every president engaged in that kind of back and forth. We certainly saw the role of the president and Congress front and center when the court debated the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. During the Bush administration, we saw a number of cases that were about the president's power in war and in fighting terrorism. We saw the court unanimously tell President Nixon he had to turn over the tapes. We saw the court unanimously tell President Clinton that, yes, he could be sued while he was in office.

And so, in many ways, the court sort of takes that as a badge of honor, and also their job, to stand up to the president and his administration.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Taft retired from the Supreme Court on February 3, 1930. And the day after his retirement, he received a letter from , who was the architect designing the new Supreme Court building.

The letter said: “I have felt it to be a great honor to be selected by you as the architect of the new Supreme Court building, and I have endeavored to make a design which shall be worthy of its great purpose and of your . I shall always think of you as the real author of the project, and the one to whose vision we shall owe a suitable housing for the Supreme Court of the United States. It will, in fact, be a monument to your honored name.”

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10