Chief Justice at Last.

William Howard Taft yearned so ardently to be chief justice of the Supreme Court that he prepared the groundwork during his own presidency. When Chief Justice Melville Fuller died a year after bungling the administration of Taft's presidential oath, Taft agonized over the appointment of his successor. As the president observed wistfully to Justice William Moody days after Fuller's death in July 1910, "It does seem strange that the one place in the government which I would have liked to fill myself I am forced to give to another."

The obvious candidate was Charles Evans Hughes, the former governor of New York and potential rival to Taft in 1912, whom Taft shrewdly had removed from the political arena by nominating him as an associate justice three months earlier. Just before making that appointment, Taft told his aide Archie Butt, "I don't know the man I admire more than Hughes. If I ever have the chance I shall offer to him the Chief Justiceship."

Yet, when the opportunity presented itself later that year, Taft could not bring himself to appoint the 48-year-old dynamo, whose youth and perfect health suggested that he would outlive Taft, denying the president any possible opportunity to succeed him. So, in December, after telephoning to cancel a White House interview with Hughes as the justice was dressing for the appointment, Taft instead elevated one of Hughes' colleagues, Justice Edward Douglass White, a Catholic Southern Democrat who, at the reassuringly advanced age of 65, was the oldest chief justice ever nominated. The only explanation for this unusual appointment was the president's hope that White would expire in time for Taft to take his place.

In the decade that followed, White inconveniently refused to perish. After Warren Harding's election in 1920, Taft visited the president-elect in Marion, Ohio, where Harding astonished and delighted Taft by asking, "Would you accept a position on the Supreme Bench?" Taft replied, with what must have been scarcely concealed emotion, that "it was and always had been the ambition of my life," but since he had twice declined the honor, "I could not accept any place but the chief justiceship."

After Harding reassured Taft of his intention to elevate him to the center chair, Taft hastened to Washington to pay a call on Chief Justice White. Appraising the 76-year-old jurist's declining health with a gimlet eye, he was disappointed to discover that White said nothing about retirement. Happily for...