Taft's Two Hats.

• Author: Rosen, Jeffrey
• Position: USA YESTERDAY

IN APRIL 1922, at his summer home on Cape Cod, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis asked his friend, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, "Felix, do you still think [William Howard] Taft was as bad a president as we thought he was? It's difficult for me to understand why a man who is so good as chief justice in his function as presiding officer could have been so bad as president. How do you explain that?"

"The explanation is simple," Frankfurter responded. "He loathed being president and being chief justice [is] all happiness for him."

Frankfurter's explanation was accurate, but incomplete. It is true that Taft--who was president (1909-13) and chief justice (1921-30)--chafed as a judicial president and thrived as a presidential chief justice because he worshipped the Constitution, had a judicial temperament, and deployed his presidential talent for administration to reform the judicial branch--and yet, viewing Taft's record as president and chief justice in isolation fails to acknowledge the magnitude of his constitutional achievements.

Taft's distinctive contribution was to work with Congress to create the "machinery of government," as he put it, that allowed checks on the excesses of monopoly power--from environmental protection to antitrust enforcement--without interfering with the free market.

As Taft wrote to his wife Nellie at the end of his term, "I have strengthened the Supreme Bench, have given them a good deal of new and valuable legislation, have not interfered with business, have kept the peace, and on the whole have led people to pursue their various occupations without interruption. It is a very humdrum, uninteresting administration, and does not attract the attention or enthusiasm of anybody, but after I am out I think that you and I can look back to some pleasure in having done something for the benefit of the public weal."

In calling his Administration "humdrum" and "uninteresting," Taft was being too modest. At his best, Taft shows what a constitutional--rather than a popular--conception of the office of the presidency can achieve. It was his refusal to compromise his principles for the sake of reelection that led him to denounce the northwestern farmers who threatened to oppose him unless he withdrew his support of Canadian free trade, or to buck the demands of his own party that he start a war with Mexico.

Moreover, his refusal to circumvent Congress' legislative authority by executive orders--in areas from foreign policy to the tariff--led to broad that they virtually broad bipartisan support that were sustained by the next Administration, even after the Democrats won the presidency and control of Congress. Woodrow Wilson's Administration completed the downward tariff revision that the Taft...