A review by icgerrard
William Howard Taft: The American Presidents Series: The 27th President, 1909-1913 by Jeffrey Rosen

3.0

Interesting bio and made me wish I’d picked a longer book on Taft. The book's thesis is intriguing, however the epilogue is a bit heavy handed. The argument, repeated ad nauseum considering how short the text is, is that Taft was an unappreciated example of a (the only?) 20th century president to believe that the president could only act on specifically ennumerated powers. That in such scenarios, his powers were extremely broad, but that in everything else he was powerless essentially. This is repeatedly juxtaposed to Roosevelt and Wilson, and really all presidents after him, who erred more on the side that anything not explicitly forbidden is permitted. He held other weird opinions like thinking the president should be apolitical, and that representative democracy was opposed to swift action since it dulled the filtering effects on mob passion. This extended to a disdain for even using executive orders. Basically, his theory of the executive seemed strange to me insofar as he didn't seem to think of it as a method for reacting to present problems faster than the legislative and judicial branches can, something I thought Hamilton for one pretty clearly believed. All these flaws as an executive, however, made him a more well suited supreme Court Justice. Which is all he wanted out of life anyway. Nonetheless, I’m not sure we should find ourselves thinking of Taft as uniquely relevant to modern politics, as the epilogue insists. He was still lame as an executive, whatever you think of the modern age.