THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS SERIES
Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson
Louis Auchincloss on Theodore Roosevelt
Jean H. Baker on James Buchanan
H. W. Brands on Woodrow Wilson
Alan Brinkley on John F. Kennedy
Douglas Brinkley on Gerald R. Ford
Josiah Bunting III on Ulysses S. Grant
James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn on George Washington
Charles W. Calhoun on Benjamin Harrison
Gail Collins on William Henry Harrison
Robert Dallek on Harry S. Truman
John W. Dean on Warren G. Harding
John Patrick Diggins on John Adams
Elizabeth Drew on Richard M. Nixon
John S. D. Eisenhower on Zachary Taylor
Paul Finkelman on Millard Fillmore
Annette Gordon-Reed on Andrew Johnson
Henry F. Graff on Grover Cleveland
David Greenberg on Calvin Coolidge
Gary Hart on James Monroe
Michael F. Holt on Franklin Pierce
Roy Jenkins on Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Zachary Karabell on Chester Alan Arthur
William E. Leuchtenburg on Herbert Hoover
James Mann on George W. Bush
Gary May on John Tyler
George McGovern on Abraham Lincoln
Timothy Naftali on George H. W. Bush
Charles Peters on Lyndon B. Johnson
Kevin Phillips on William McKinley
Robert V. Remini on John Quincy Adams
Jeffrey Rosen on William Howard Taft
Ira Rutkow on James A. Garfield
John Seigenthaler on James K. Polk
Michael Tomasky on Bill Clinton
Hans L. Trefousse on Rutherford B. Hayes
Jacob Weisberg on Ronald Reagan
Tom Wicker on Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ted Widmer on Martin Van Buren
Sean Wilentz on Andrew Jackson
Garry Wills on James Madison
Julian E. Zelizer on Jimmy Carter
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Lauren Coyle Rosen
More than I ever had hoped, what happiness I have been granted!
Love led me wisely through Rome, passing its palaces by.
—Goethe, Roman Elegies
Editor’s Note
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.
But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamilton’s proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” They thus envisaged a strong president—but within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term imperial presidency arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)
The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidency—“the vital place of action in the system,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.
Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, “There is properly no history; only biography.”
Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”
The men in the White House express the ideals and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”
At the start of the twenty-first century, forty-two men have made it to the Oval Office. (George W. Bush is counted our forty-third president, because Grover Cleveland, who served nonconsecutive terms, is counted twice.) Of the parade of presidents, a dozen or so lead the polls periodically conducted by historians and political scientists. What makes a great president?
Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion, as they grasp the helm, is to set the ship of state on the right course toward the port they seek. Great presidents also have a deep psychic connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of people. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act … under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”
“All of our great presidents,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington incarnated the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, said FDR, were both “moral leaders, each in his own way and his own time, who used the presidency as a pulpit.”
To succeed, presidents not only must have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking. Politics in a democracy is ultimately an educational process, an adventure in persuasion and consent. Every president stands in Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit.
The greatest presidents in the scholars’ rankings, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, were leaders who confronted and overcame the republic’s g
reatest crises. Crisis widens presidential opportunities for bold and imaginative action. But it does not guarantee presidential greatness. The crisis of secession did not spur Buchanan or the crisis of depression spur Hoover to creative leadership. Their inadequacies in the face of crisis allowed Lincoln and the second Roosevelt to show the difference individuals make to history. Still, even in the absence of first-order crisis, forceful and persuasive presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush—are able to impose their own priorities on the country.
The diverse drama of the presidency offers a fascinating set of tales. Biographies of American presidents constitute a chronicle of wisdom and folly, nobility and pettiness, courage and cunning, forthrightness and deceit, quarrel and consensus. The turmoil perennially swirling around the White House illuminates the heart of the American democracy.
It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. I hope that these lives will give readers some understanding of the pitfalls and potentialities of the presidency and also of the responsibilities of citizenship. Truman’s famous sign—“The buck stops here”—tells only half the story. Citizens cannot escape the ultimate responsibility. It is in the voting booth, not on the presidential desk, that the buck finally stops.
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Introduction
Judicial President and Presidential Chief Justice
In 1905, as secretary of war, William Howard Taft set out on a diplomatic mission to the Far East. Stopping off at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Taft received from the empress of Japan an elaborate tapestry for his wife, Nellie, a copy from the Gobelin original, showing the meeting of Columbus and Isabella. When Taft brought the gift home, Nellie protested that it was too large to be of use. “Oh well, never mind,” Taft declared. “I’m going to present it to the Smithsonian Institute anyway, because you know, my dear, it is against the Constitution for an official in the United States government to accept any kind of favours from foreign courts.” Nellie had often “met the Constitution face to face,” she recalled, but had previously accepted “its decrees with what I had hoped was patriotic resignation.” This time, however, she changed her mind. Nellie decided she wanted to keep the tapestry after all.1
Mrs. Taft then tried to persuade her husband, a former judge, that she was not an official of the United States government and therefore was not bound by the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution. Taft “stood firmly by the Constitution, as usual,” Nellie recalled with bemused exasperation, “and eventually I had to submit the question for arbitration to President Roosevelt, who agreed with me that I was a private citizen and had a perfect right to accept the gift.” After Taft became president, she hung the tapestry in the state dining room of the White House, where she took pleasure in watching guests attempt in vain to decipher its meaning.2
Nellie Taft’s verdict about her husband’s judicial scruples—“he stood firmly by the Constitution, as usual”—serves as a fitting epitaph for his entire career. William Howard Taft, the only president who went on to serve as chief justice of the United States, devoted his leadership of the executive and judicial branches to defending the U.S. Constitution above all. Earlier in his career, Taft had served as solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice, representing the United States before the Supreme Court. The experience quickened his judicial ambitions. His next appointment was to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which he found a kind of heaven; after eight years, President William McKinley persuaded him to resign to become governor-general of the Philippines, another appointment that delighted him because it cast him as Solon, a constitution maker applauded by a grateful people. He declined President Theodore Roosevelt’s repeated offers of a Supreme Court seat with the greatest reluctance and agreed instead to serve as secretary of war, a position once held by his revered father, where he endeared himself to the president for his deference and administrative efficiency. Yearning as always for the bench, he was persuaded by his wife to run for president in 1908, and his victory fulfilled her ambition while thwarting his own.
In the White House, Taft approached the presidency not as a politician but as a judge. He pledged to put Roosevelt’s policies, many of them enacted by executive order, on firm constitutional grounds by persuading Congress to endorse them. And he approached each presidential decision by asking whether it comported with the Constitution. Unlike Roosevelt, who declared that a president could do anything the Constitution didn’t forbid, Taft insisted that he could do only what the Constitution explicitly allowed. This caused a dramatic breach with Roosevelt, leading to the historic election of 1912, which Taft viewed as a crusade to defend the Constitution against what he considered the demagogic populism of Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The people disagreed, and Taft was defeated.
Nine years later, Taft fulfilled his lifelong dream when President Warren Harding appointed him chief justice. And he achieved on the Court many of the remaining constitutional goals he had set for himself as president, promoting consensus among the justices and establishing the federal judiciary as a modern, strong, and fully equal branch of government, ready to defend constitutional rights and liberties against the encroachments of the political branches and against new populist threats. To emphasize the independence of the judicial branch, he oversaw the construction of a new Supreme Court building, which allowed the Court to move from its cramped headquarters in the basement of the Capitol to a majestic Temple of Justice across the street. If Taft had chafed in the White House as a judicial president, he thrived on the Supreme Court as a presidential chief justice.
Taft is remembered today as an average president, and most ratings of presidential historians place him in the middle. The 2017 C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey, for example, ranks Taft overall at twenty-fourth—just below Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, but substantially below his rivals in the election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who rank fourth and eleventh, respectively.3 As chief justice, by contrast, Taft ranks much higher. A 1993 survey of judicial historians ranked him fifth among the sixteen chief justices who had served to that date, trailing only John Marshall, Earl Warren, Charles Evans Hughes, and Harlan Fiske Stone.4
When Taft’s constitutional achievements as president and chief justice are viewed of a piece, his significance comes into proper focus. As Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit told me, “William Howard Taft is the most underappreciated constitutional figure since George Mason, who refused to sign the original Constitution because it didn’t have a Bill of Rights.” As judge, colonial governor, cabinet secretary, president, and chief justice, Taft had a clear and consistent constitutional vision, and he achieved nearly all of the constitutional goals he set for himself, even if as a politician he often fell short. A disciple of John Marshall and the authors of the Federalist Papers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—Taft believed that the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary should be strong and independent branches, each exercising broad but limited powers within clearly defined constitutional boundaries. And he insisted that constitutional filters on the direct expression of popular passion were necessary to promote the “wise deliberation … which may constitute the salvation of the Republic.”5 Without these filters, he feared, America would degenerate from a representative republic into a direct democracy, and populist demagogues would flatter the people into subverting the constitutional order.
This short book offers an interpretation of William Howard Taft’s presidency as he himself understood it: in constitutional rather than political terms. There are many fine political biographies of Taft, and many reach an ambivalent verdict. Henry Pringle, Taft’s first biographer, wrote
of his subject in 1939 with stylish condescension, concluding accurately but waspishly that Taft “had a thorough mind rather than a facile or brilliant one” and that his judicial opinions, like his letters and presidential speeches, were “too verbose and rarely had charm.”6 Twenty-five years later, Alpheus Mason, in the most comprehensive study of Taft’s Supreme Court career, began by noting:
For Americans of my generation, the conventional image of William Howard Taft is unflattering. It pictures him as a stubborn defender of the status quo, champion of property rights, apologist for privilege, inveterate critic of social democracy—the gigantic symbol of standpattism. Weighing well over three hundred pounds, avoirdupois alone made him a cartoonist’s model of the bloated capitalist or political boss.7
Mason does not entirely dispel this caricature.
More recent studies—including superb books by Judith Anderson (on Taft’s psychology and character), David H. Burton (on his foreign policy), Doris Kearns Goodwin (on his relationship with Theodore Roosevelt and the press), Lewis L. Gould (on his presidency), and Jonathan Lurie (on his progressive conservatism)—view Taft as a man of rectitude who lacked political skills. “Widely admired in his day for his integrity and strong sense of morality,” Lurie writes, “Taft seems to have set a standard for personal conduct that later presidents have had, to put it mildly, some difficulty in attaining.”8 These biographers recognize that Taft had a judicial temperament that was ill equipped for the political demands of the twentieth-century presidency. But they take him to task for refusing to engage in popular leadership—precisely the kind of leadership that Taft’s constitutional vision of the presidency forbade.
Taft, however, was unapologetic about his embrace of a constitutional rather than a popular conception of the presidency. “I will not play a part for popularity,” he told his military aide Archie Butt, who served and admired both Roosevelt and Taft and whose letters provide the most intimate and balanced contemporary account of Taft’s presidency and character. “If the people do not approve of me or of my administration after they have had time to know me, then I shall not let it worry me, and I most certainly shall not change my methods.”9 And Taft was more successful in achieving his goals than many observers have recognized. He extended federal environmental protection to more land than Roosevelt and brought more antitrust suits in one term than Roosevelt brought in nearly two. Slashing federal expenses, he turned a budget deficit of $89 million in 1909 into a budget surplus of $11 million in 1911. As a moderate free trader, he passed the first reduction in the federal tariff since the 1890s, a political third rail Roosevelt had avoided. He persuaded Congress to pass a landmark Canadian free trade agreement (although Canadian voters ultimately rejected it), and he maintained peace with Mexico by refusing to send troops over the border despite cries in his own party to start a war. He defended judicial independence against the demagogic attacks of Roosevelt, who assailed individual judges by name and sought to overturn judicial decisions by popular vote.
William Howard Taft Page 1