William Howard Taft lost the White House and then got the job he wanted

Name the American who held both of the highest jobs in two branches of government. Not a hard question, and yet most people draw a blank, because the man in question is remembered, when he is remembered at all, for trivia instead of for his habits of mind. William Howard Taft served as President from 1909 to 1913 and as Chief Justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person ever to hold both. And if you asked him which job he preferred, he would have told you without a moment's hesitation: the second one.

That fact is the key to understanding him. Most politicians chase the presidency and tolerate everything else. Taft was a judge by temperament who got the presidency because his friend and patron Theodore Roosevelt wanted it for him, held it with visible discomfort, lost it badly, and then, at sixty-three, was handed the one office he had always craved. What he did with it shaped how the Supreme Court works to this day.

Let me take you through the career and make a case: that a president's most lasting legacy can be an institution he built after he left the White House.

The making of a judge

Taft was born in Cincinnati in 1857 to a family of Ohio Republicans, graduated from Yale and studied law. He was a state judge, then Solicitor General of the United States under Benjamin Harrison from 1890 to 1892, then a federal appeals judge on the Sixth Circuit from 1892 to 1900. The man who liked to sit and think and decide was in his element there.

In 1900 President McKinley asked him to go to the Philippines to lead the civilian commission set up after the Spanish-American War, and he became the first civil governor there in 1901. Roosevelt made him Secretary of War in 1904. All the while, a Supreme Court seat was the prize he wanted. Accounts of his life say he turned down chances at the Court while there was work to do in the Philippines. His wife and Roosevelt wanted something bigger. They got it. In 1908, with Roosevelt's blessing, he won the White House over William Jennings Bryan.

A president who kept losing the room

Taft's presidency is easy to dismiss and harder to summarize fairly. He was not a failure by the measure of what he got done. His administration brought more antitrust suits than Roosevelt's had, including the cases against Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company that the Supreme Court decided in 1911, ordering both broken up. His allies in Congress sent the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing a federal income tax, to the states in 1909, and he backed a tax on corporations that the Court upheld in 1911. He appointed six justices in four years, including Edward White, whom he elevated to Chief Justice in 1910, and Charles Evans Hughes.

He also did something that does not make the history books but should. In 1910 he set up a commission to study the efficiency of the federal government, and in 1912 he sent Congress a plan for an executive budget, with the President presenting one unified spending plan instead of a pile of separate requests. Congress said no. It took nine more years and a different President for the idea to become law, and you can follow that in How Washington learned to budget, from the 1921 act to the 1997 deal.

But politically, he kept losing the room. The tariff he signed in 1909 split the Republicans. And in October 1911 his Justice Department sued United States Steel in a case that touched a deal Roosevelt had approved. Roosevelt took it as an insult. In 1912, he ran against Taft for the nomination, lost it at the Chicago convention in June, and formed his own party. The result was a disaster for the Republicans. Woodrow Wilson won with about 42 percent of the vote, Roosevelt came second, and Taft finished third, carrying only Utah and Vermont for eight electoral votes. The sitting President of the United States won two states. For the full account of the break, read Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912, and for the Roosevelt side of it, Theodore Roosevelt busted trusts and saved forests, and the GOP forgot half.

Whatever Taft felt in that moment, the loss turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the Court.

The wilderness years, and the call

From 1913 to 1921 Taft taught law at Yale. In 1918, during the First World War, he co-chaired the National War Labor Board. He wrote and lectured on the presidency. And he waited.

When Warren Harding won in 1920, Taft saw his chance. He made it known to the new President and to Harding's circle that the Chief Justice's seat was the one he wanted, and when Edward White died in May 1921, Harding nominated him on June 30, 1921. The Senate confirmed him the same day.

Pause on that. A former President went from private life to Chief Justice without the delays and fights we associate with the process today. For how a vacancy normally moves from a letter of resignation to an oath of office, see Every Step in Confirming a Federal Judge, from Vacancy to Oath, and for how confirmations have changed over the generations, From 98 to 0 to Party Lines, a Timeline of Supreme Court Confirmations.

Premise one: a docket the Court controls is a Court that can do its job

Here is where Taft earned his place, and I'd argue it as a chain of reasoning.

One. In 1921 the Supreme Court was drowning. A great many cases reached it as a matter of right, whether or not they raised an important legal question, so the justices were deciding routine disputes while years of backlog piled up.

Two. A supreme court should spend its time on questions only a supreme court can answer: where the circuits disagree, where a federal law is in doubt, where the Constitution is at stake. Everything else is the business of lower courts.

Three. So the Court needed the power to choose.

Taft spent years lobbying for exactly that, and Congress delivered the Judiciary Act of 1925, often called the Judges' Bill. It cut back the categories of cases that came to the Court by right and shifted most of the docket to certiorari, a procedure under which the Court decides for itself which cases to hear. Every time you read that the Supreme Court "agreed to hear" a case, or "declined to take it up," you are watching Taft's law at work. That control is why the modern Court hears only a small fraction of the thousands of petitions it receives, and why a single vote to grant review can decide what issues the country will argue about.

Here is a hypothetical to make it concrete. Picture two federal appeals courts that read the same federal statute in opposite ways, so that a small business owner in one state is treated differently from an identical owner across the river. Before 1925 that conflict might sit behind a long line of routine appeals. After it, the losing side can petition, and the justices can pick the case precisely because the country needs one answer. Nobody has a right to be heard. The Court takes cases when the law needs settling, and that is a very different job from being the final stop for every dispute.

Taft also pushed to bring order to the lower courts. In 1922 Congress created additional federal judgeships and set up the Conference of Senior Circuit Judges, the ancestor of today's Judicial Conference, to coordinate the administration of the federal courts under the Chief Justice. Judges ran the judiciary rather than leaving it to ad hoc fixes. Whether the Chief Justice should be that powerful is an argument. But the structure we have is largely his.

Premise two: a court needs a home

For its first 145 years the Supreme Court had no building of its own. It met in rooms in the Capitol, including the old Senate chamber, and the justices worked partly from their homes. Taft thought that was undignified for a coequal branch and an obstacle to its independence. He lobbied Presidents and Congress, and in December 1929 Congress authorized a Court building. The architect was Cass Gilbert, and construction began in 1932.

Taft did not live to see it. He died on March 8, 1930, and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first President buried there. The Court first sat in its new marble building in October 1935, with the words "Equal Justice Under Law" carved above the entrance. If you visit Washington with the kids, stop there. It is the physical monument to a theory of government: that a court needs to stand apart from the other branches, in a place of its own.

What he decided

The jurisprudence matters too, and it was a mixed bag, which is why I think it deserves to be read rather than worshipped. Three decisions will do.

Myers v. United States (1926). Taft wrote the opinion holding that the President has the power to remove executive officers, in that case a postmaster, without the Senate's consent, and that Congress could not require its approval for removals. It is one of the great foundation cases for the idea of a strong, accountable executive. Nine years later, in Humphrey's Executor (1935), the Court limited it for independent commissions, and the argument about where the line sits has run ever since. If you care about who can fire whom in the executive branch, read Taft's opinion first.

Olmstead v. United States (1928). Taft wrote for the Court that wiretapping a telephone line from outside a person's house was not a search under the Fourth Amendment, because there had been no physical trespass. Justice Brandeis dissented in a famous opinion. The Court overruled Olmstead in Katz v. United States in 1967. A defender of Taft would say that he applied the text as it was then understood; a critic would say that he missed the point of privacy. I think both are right, and that this is a good example of why courts need to keep thinking.

Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923). Here is a surprise. The Court struck down a minimum-wage law for women in the District of Columbia, and Taft dissented, writing that the legislature had a right to try. The man we remember as a conservative's conservative was more willing to defer to elected legislatures than many of his colleagues. That is worth a thought from anyone who thinks judicial conservatism is just a mood.

If you want a primer on how to read opinions like these, try How to Read a Supreme Court Opinion Without a Law Degree.

The strongest objections

The case against Taft comes in two forms.

The first is that he was a mediocre President. I do not dispute it. Historians' surveys have often placed him in the middle of the pack, and a man who loses the party he leads in a single election has not run a masterpiece. But I'd note that his real failure was political, not intellectual. He was a better administrator than a salesman.

The second is more interesting. Taft treated the Court as a political project. He lobbied Harding behind the scenes for specific appointments. Harding named four justices, Taft himself and three others, and Taft pushed for men he thought sound. He worried constantly about the Court's direction. In the last years of his life, his declining health made him consider retiring, and he told family that part of what kept him on the bench was a concern about who would replace him and what the Court would become. By modern standards of judicial conduct, the amount of behind-the-scenes management he did would raise eyebrows. He believed he was protecting an institution. Others would say that a judge who lobbies is a judge who has stopped judging.

Both objections are fair. But neither erases the structure he left behind. A Court that controls its docket, a judiciary that administers itself and a building that signals independence are not small things.

Retirement as strategy

Taft resigned from the Court in February 1930, in failing health, and died a few weeks later. President Hoover named Charles Evans Hughes to succeed him, and the Senate confirmed him that month. The timing, a justice stepping down when he could no longer serve, is the oldest question in the field: when do you leave, and who will replace you? Taft's story shows why the question matters. A seat left too late can be filled in a way the departing justice never intended, and a seat left too soon can be filled by a President you distrust. If you want to follow the modern version of that watch, our How Republican presidents have done picking Supreme Court justices since 1953 tracks how Republican Presidents have fared at the game since 1953.

The bottom line

• Taft is the only man to be both President and Chief Justice, and he saw the second job as the real prize. Judge him by both.
• The Judiciary Act of 1925 gave the Court control over its own docket. That is why the Court hears so few cases and why a single decision to take one matters so much.
• Myers v. United States is the opinion to read if you care about presidential control over the executive branch; Olmstead is the one to read if you want to see how a court can get a big question wrong.
• A court is an institution, and institutions need homes, rules and caretakers. Support people who care for them, not only people who win with them.
• When the next retirement rumor hits, remember Taft: timing and succession are strategy, and a good conservative thinks about both.