The Taft Story
by William S. White
Summary
William S. White had covered the United States Senate for the New York Times through most of Robert Taft's own time there, and he wrote this biography in the immediate aftermath of Taft's death, taking a two month leave from the paper in 1953 to turn years of firsthand reporting into a full portrait of the man known across Washington as Mister Republican. The book follows Taft from an unusually weighted inheritance, son of a president who was also a chief justice, through Yale and Harvard Law, where he finished first in his class at both, and into Ohio politics, the state legislature and then the state senate, before he arrived in Washington in 1939 as one of the Senate's most reliably conservative voices.
White centers the book on Taft's decades long role as the Senate's leading opponent of New Deal style government, culminating in the 1947 Taft Hartley Act restricting labor union power, and on his three failed campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, 1948, and 1952, the last of which went instead to Dwight Eisenhower after moderate party leaders maneuvered around Taft's candidacy. The book follows Taft's later opposition to NATO and his sharp criticism of Harry Truman's handling of the Korean War, positions that made him a genuine outlier among Cold War era Republicans, and closes with his brief tenure as Senate majority leader in early 1953, cut short within months by the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him while he was already being treated for pancreatic cancer.
White writes with a reporter's close, personal familiarity with his subject rather than a historian's distance, having watched Taft operate in the Senate chamber and its corridors for years before turning to write his life, and reading the book means getting Washington's own inside understanding of a man often caricatured from a distance as simply obstinate. It suits a reader interested in how postwar Republican conservatism actually operated inside the Senate, told by someone who had a genuine ringside seat to watch it happen.
Historical Context & Significance
The Taft Story won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, awarded a little less than two years after Taft's own death in July 1953. William S. White wrote the book quickly, taking a two month break from his New York Times reporting duties to finish it for Harper and Brothers in 1954, drawing on years spent covering the Senate as his primary beat.
A 1957 Senate committee charged with naming history's greatest senators placed Taft among its final five, a recognition that confirmed the same assessment White's biography had already made of Taft's standing among his colleagues even though his own party had passed him over for the presidency three separate times. White went on to a long career as one of Washington's most respected political journalists, remembered for exactly the close congressional access that shaped this book.