William Howard Taft: This chief, not that chief

Presidential

The Washington Post

History, Government, Education

4.5 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2016

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of 'The Bully Pulpit,' along with historian Michelle Krowl and Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes discuss why President Taft made a better chief justice than commander-in-chief.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're up to William Howard Taft this week and nope, we are not going to talk at all about Taft getting stuck in a bathtub.
0:21.0	I am Lillian Cunningham and this is the 26th episode of Presidential.
0:37.0	This other sign of residency affecting you that knows about you.
0:40.0	It's like your country can do for you.
0:42.0	They date which will live in incoming.
0:50.0	I've got a bunch of wonderful guests for this episode.
0:58.0	Biographer Doris Kerns Goodwin is back and also my Washington Post colleague Robert Barnes will be joining us.
1:06.0	And we have Michelle Crawl from the Library of Congress.
1:11.0	But this is her very last episode with us after a marathon of helping out with these presidential episodes.
1:20.0	So we are going to center out in style by having her kick off the William Howard Taft episode.
1:28.0	He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1857 and he was president for one term after Theodore Roosevelt from 1909 to 1913.
1:41.0	I think the key thing that propels him to the presidency is the family that he's born into.
1:46.0	He's the favorite child.
1:50.0	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.
1:59.0	But of all of them, his nickname was Will. Will was the favorite child.
2:06.0	All the other brothers and sister just adored him, his parents adored him.
2:11.0	And I think that created him an expectation that he needed to please people, that he needed to live up to family reputations.
2:20.0	His father had served in the Ulysses S. Grants administration, was a very respected man in Cincinnati.
2:29.0	All of his father had gone to Yale and his two older brothers had gone to Yale and they'd all been successful and very bright.
2:36.0	That seems to be a theme throughout his life.
2:40.0	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 done that on his own.
2:54.0	I think he's ambitious in some ways, but he's not as ambitious as some of the other men that we've encountered, particularly when it's involving the presidency and higher office.
	...

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