Taft was neither wicked nor particularly heroic, and he famously had no great love of the presidency into which momentum and the ambition of others ushered him. “They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time.” To bring home the point, Rosen himself quotes the Supreme Court: “Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.” “Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen,” series editor Arthur Schlesinger writes in his brief Editor's Note to this volume. He was not the stuff of heroic blank verse epic, and he knew it better than anybody. In addition to being a one-term president whose term fell between the dramatic administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Taft also suffers from what the 21st century would consider an “optics” problem: he was notoriously overweight, he sported exactly the kind of walrus mustache that's now become symbolic with bygone-era presidents, he shrank from controversy in a way that virtually spells out “caretaker,” and he tended to spend more time on the golf course than in the White House. The “American Presidents” series from Henry Holt's Times Books imprint continues its long and disproportionately magnificent run with a tough sell: law professor and legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen turns in densely-written and richly-researched 140-page biography of William Howard Taft, the nation's 27th President and its first Chief Executive to also hold the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
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