Rule-Follower, Wrong Job
It may be that nobody wanted to be president less than Taft.
“I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.”
Everybody knows the type: the boy who would tattle in every class, who sticks to rules even when they don’t quite fit, honest to a fault and unwilling to bend even when a bit of finesse would make life easier. That’s Taft. The book makes clear that for two men who agreed almost entirely on policy, you could hardly find personalities more different than Taft and Roosevelt. It’s no surprise their partnership broke under the strain; one thrived on combat and theater, the other on procedure and order.
On substance, Taft accomplished more than his reputation suggests. He quietly built the legislative foundations that kept Roosevelt’s program alive. The narrative shows him less as an accidental placeholder and more as the man who codified what Roosevelt improvised. But the treatment is frustratingly short. Among the pre–World War I presidents, Taft may be the one who most deserves a fuller biography precisely because he is so different from the usual presidential script.
The biggest missed opportunity is judicial. Taft’s ideals, language, and later career all point toward the courts as the real center of his life, yet the book gives that dimension little more than a brief chapter. Taft would be a great lens on the judicial branch itself—how he thought about judges, institutional design, and constitutional limits.