An American Politician

Upstairs in her Georgetown house, surrounded by the memorabilia of her family, Mrs. Robert Taft waited for the rites to begin on Capitol Hill. She had been with her husband through all his defeats --when Willkie beat him at the 1940 convention, when Dewey beat him at the 1948 convention, and finally, when Eisenhower beat him at Chicago last year. Taft had always lost the greatest, most venturesome battles of his career. Now he had lost this one, but without her.

He had insisted on Tuesday, when she flew to New York to visit him, that she go back to Washington. By that time she knew the whole truth of his illness, which for some two months he had kept from her. On Friday word had come to her that Bob Taft had died in a coma, of malignant tumors.

"I'm Going to Fight It." It was to spare her that Taft had so closely guarded the secret of his condition from the press, and from all but his sons and his most intimate friends. Martha was in precarious health, paralyzed by a stroke three years ago. The knowledge of his condition had come as sudden and shocking news to him. He had had himself checked carefully before his 1952 presidential campaign, and had been given a clean bill of health. Last spring he went to his doctor with the exasperating pain in his hip, which he had tried to alleviate with aspirin tablets, and had gradually learned, after many tests, that what he had might be very serious. In June the doctors told him that his case was "virtually hopeless." He told Mrs. Taft that he might have a malignancy but belittled the extent of it, and thereupon began a careful masquerade, playing the part of a man who had nothing wrong with him that the doctors couldn't fix.

It was a heroic and poignant performance. He continued to make a pretense of tending to his Senate duties. On the day he announced his retirement from the majority leadership, exhausted and scrawny-looking and badly in need of a haircut, he excused himself to a visitor in his Senate office and dragged himself out on crutches to take Martha Taft to a promised garden party. After an exploratory operation, he hobbled around the room to show a friend from Washington how much he had improved. He did believe, until near the end, that he might have a chance. "I'm going to fight it," he told a friend. But he lost to it (see MEDICINE).

And in losing, another Taft battle was imperiled. From January to June, as Senate majority leader, he had worked with just one goal in mind: the Republican Administration must be made to succeed. It was probably the last chance to reestablish the power of the G.O.P. For that goal, the political essential was party unity. Taft, every inch a partisan and a politician, knew that, and he had worked with all his driving energy for harmony between White House and Congress.

The Man from the Machine. "I am a politician," Taft once declared unabashedly. In a nation which always distrusts and sometimes despises politicians (while handing the responsibility of government over to them), it was an unusual admission, made without any qualification. Taft was a technician of government, a lawmaker, a man of astonishing integrity--but a hardheaded, practicing politician from the Midwest.

It was a curious chick from which the politician grew: a shy boy, with large round eyes in a large round head, born in 1889 in a gingerbready house in Cincinnati. The chick became a precocious young man who set his contemporaries an example in scholarship at Yale, who casually accepted the fact that his father was in the White House, ground his way to the top of his class at Harvard Law School, and fled from the opportunities open to him in New York ("I have a prejudice against New York," he wrote his father) to return to Cincinnati and handle, among other affairs, the fortune (in cast iron) of his Aunt Annie.

Bob Taft and Martha Bowers, who was the daughter of William Howard Taft's Solicitor General, fitted appropriately into Cincinnati. There Grandfather Alphonso had settled down 75 years before; Tafts had lent streets and buildings their name; Taft money bought memorials and largely supported the zoo; Tafts ran the Cincinnati Times-Star; and Tafts imparted to a whole urban society their own sedate, conscientious and self-assured characteristics. Taft could have stayed comfortably in the house he bought on Indian Hill and lucratively in the law practice with his younger brother Charles. Instead, the Taft sense of duty took him into politics.

He began his career as a precinct doorbell-ringer in Boss Rudolph Hynicka's notorious Ohio Republican machine. Taft believed then in party regularity, and was to hold to that belief throughout his career. It was not an opportunist's attitude. He believed in the party of his father as the only party founded on sound principle. "My theory," he explained, "was to work within the organization," in which he considered the Hynickas to be intruders. Brother Charles did not agree, and was active in Cincinnati's fusionist reform movement. The Hynicka machine elected Bob Taft to the state legislature. In a few years Bob Taft, and not the intruders, controlled the machine.

He served six years in the legislature and two years in the state senate. He was chiefly responsible for the heroic revision of Ohio's antiquated tax system. Beyond that, he left a modest record of supporting legislation in the field of human welfare, based on the minimum standards of living which he always believed it should be government's obligation to maintain. But it was a record that could not withstand the New Deal storm in 1932. Taft was washed overboard in the deluge.

The Man from Yale. From the trough of the waves in 1936, Taft cried out stoutly that he was Ohio's favorite-son candidate for President, and that he stood on a platform of being "100% against the New Deal." The cry was scarcely heard in the thundering triumph of Franklin Roosevelt over Alf Landon.

Two years later Taft stubbornly tried again, this time for the U.S. Senate. Grimly he talked his way across Ohio, seconded in more vivacious tones by the vivacious Martha. It was during that campaign that she made probably her most famous political utterance. "My husband is not a simple man," she said to a group of coal miners. "He did not start from humble beginnings. My husband is a very brilliant man. He had a fine education at Yale. He has been well trained for his job. Isn't that what you prefer when you pick leaders to work for you?"

It was a kind of political indiscretion which only a bold lady would commit in public. There before the voters of Ohio stood exposed a picture of the Taft aristocracy: diplomats, lawmakers, lawyers, judges, civic leaders and a U.S. President --men of property with respect for property, and graduates of Yale. To the surprise of political observers, the voters did not react with the leveling impulse of envy. They turned down a passionate New Dealer and sent instead the brilliant man of lofty beginnings to represent them in Washington.

The Understanding Enemy. Senator Robert Taft was never one to waste time in making his position clear. The flat Ohio voice that was to be heard uttering millions of words of protest in the next 14 years first sounded across the Senate chamber decrying the Federal Government's adventures in business and, on that score, protesting an appropriation for TVA. Tall, ungainly, eying the Senate through rimless spectacles, he hammered at the "vain, immoral and dangerous" precepts of the New Deal, demanding, the redirection of current tendencies, since otherwise "we cannot long maintain financial solvency or free enterprise or even individual liberty in the U.S."

Gradually, the New Dealers awoke to him. There was good reason why Taft was so widely attacked. The men around Roosevelt, New Deal apologists among the press, and the high-riding labor unions, unerringly spotted a potentially dangerous enemy. He was ridiculed and vilified. He was highly vulnerable to attack because of his thinking-out-loud type of speaking; his loose sentences could be lifted out of context and thrown back at him with deadly effect. It was no good for friends to point out that he was a man of decent motives who, in the years he served in the Senate, developed from his own careful studies legislation directed to improving housing (the housing lobby accused him of socialism), improving education, improving health. This was not the point.

It was often said that Taft was misunderstood. Many people misunderstood him, but not his enemies. They caricatured and distorted him before the public, but they understood him very well. Taft was against the spread of federal power; his welfare bills gave jurisdiction to the states. He stood in the way of collectivists of all varieties,-from the creeping to the rampant. He was against their kind of progress.

"When I Say Liberty." Taft stood for individual liberty. "And when I say liberty," he wrote, "I do not mean simply what is referred to as 'free enterprise.' I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and live . . . liberty of a man to choose his own occupation, liberty of a man to run his own business as he thinks it ought to be run, as long as he does not interfere with the right of other people to do the same thing . . . Gradually this philosophy has been replaced by the idea that happiness can only be conferred upon the people by the grace of an efficient government. Only the government, it is said, has the expert knowledge necessary for the people's welfare."

This was the idea he fought. He opposed centralization of power in government, in Big Labor, and for that matter, in Big Business, because such power finally destroys the liberty of men.

The accuracy of his enemies' assessment of Taft was borne out. In 1947 he pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act. In 1950, running for re-election in Ohio, he administered organized labor one of its most far-reaching political defeats. Union leaders thought they could beat him. In no state campaign had labor ever let loose such a concerted attack, determined as it was to punish the author of the Taft-Hartley Act, which they called the Slave Labor Act. Taft won by a majority almost twice the size of what he himself had predicted. It might have marked the high tide of labor's political influence. In any case, the C.I.O. and the A.F.L. have not been able to assert themselves since as an effective political force.

"I'm Not a Philosopher." Taft was not a reflective man. Once, when an interviewer tried to draw him into a discussion of the underlying philosophy of conservatism, he said simply: "I'm not a philosopher. These are questions I haven't thought much about." He was not at home in complicated theorizing. He operated from a fixed base of accepted principles and law, used his analytical mind to sift out the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act made no effort to establish new principles of labor relations. Rather, it was a great improvisation, intended to register a shift of public sentiment against the one-sidedness of the Wagner Act. It was not the last word on the subject, and Taft admitted it; he had none of the politician's usual prejudice against acknowledging mistakes. In 1949, at hearings on revision of the act, he faced labor's legal experts, countering their citations with citations he dug up from his exhaustive knowledge. Few men ever stumped Taft in legislative debates.

From fixed principles and some prejudices, he rushed headlong in & out of the great foreign-policy debates preceding World War II. He feared U.S. involvement in war as leading to the mastery of the state over the man. Further than that, he saw no national necessity for the U.S. to enter the war. He opposed aid to Russia after the breaking of the Soviet-Nazi pact when Russia was being invaded. "The victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the U.S. than the victory of fascism," he said then. "It is a greater danger to the U.S. because it is a false philosophy which appeals to many. Fascism is a false philosophy which appeals to a few." This was a weighing of hazards which was not well received in Washington in 1941.

He had no more, and sometimes he had less, prescience than other men. Four months before Pearl Harbor, he voted against an extension of the draft; two months later, he voted against a second lend-lease appropriation (as he had voted against the original lend-lease proposal); a month before Pearl Harbor, he voted against arming U.S. merchant ships; on Dec. 6, 1941, he demanded to know why a force of 2,000,000 men was justified. In that force, actually multiplied sixfold, Taft's four sons were to serve throughout the war.

A Charge of Appeasement. But if Taft's vision was sometimes more limited than other men's, it was also sometimes wider. As early as 1944, while Washington and London were still nodding approvingly over the Teheran conference, he pointed out its fatal fallacies. "The danger to the accomplishment of an association of nations," he said, "does not come today from so-called isolationists or any unwillingness on the part of our people to go ahead. It comes from the current policy of Mr. Stalin and the failure of this country to have any definite foreign policy at all ... [Mr. Roosevelt] seems prepared to sacrifice all principles of foreign policy to appease Russia."

He questioned the value of the United Nations, delimited as it was by the veto, its concept based solely on "peace and security," not on "law and justice." He took the unpopular position, as so many of his positions were, of denouncing the Nuernberg trials, which "violate the fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute ... In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials--government policy and not justice . . ."

He went along with Arthur Vanden-berg's leadership in the Republicans' postwar policy in foreign affairs, Van's so-called "unpartisanship." But Taft had misgivings, which Vandenberg also began to entertain before the end of his career. When the Michigan Senator died of cancer in 1951, Taft began to express himself with vigor on foreign affairs, attacking what he saw as defects and ambiguities in the NATO pact, challenging both the President's right and wisdom in committing large numbers of U.S. troops to Europe, fixing the blame for the Korean attack on the Administration's weak and vacillating policy in the Far East--the theme to which he returned in his last formal speech before his death.

What did Taft have to offer instead? In 1951 he wrote his book, A Foreign Policy for Americans. From it emerged his theory of a Monroe Doctrine protecting Europe, the concentration of U.S. might in the long arm of the Air Force, and a world organization founded on world law. It was hastily written, scattered, and not fully thought through--another headlong improvisation, but another example of Taft's ability to put facts together. It was a scathing review of postwar U.S. foreign policy, which had been bold and even brilliant in flashes of desperation, but without any firm core of consistent principle or steady purpose.

The Bitter Pill. The book was written as a weapon in Taft's last fight for the presidency. He entered it as the man who had earned and unquestionably held the leadership of his party--"Mr. Republican," no less. By the old rules of U.S. party politics, Taft would have won the nomination hands down. But the old rules had crumbled. Congressional leadership counted for less than it had in the past. Many Republicans disagreed strongly with Bob Taft. More opposed not Taft but the image which his enemies had fixed in the public mind. Still more understood that the image was a distortion of the man but held that, because of the image, he could not be elected.

The last argument was decisive against him. Taft, ever the practical politician, ever the party regular, was licked on a point of political expediency. If his party had been pretty sure of winning or pretty sure of losing, Taft would have been its nominee. But at convention time, it looked as if the general election would be close, and a majority of the delegates wanted to win badly enough to swing behind a candidate who was unquestionably more popular with Democrats and independents.

Taft took this bitter pill like a politician of principle. He believed in himself, but believed also in what his party stood for. On Morningside Heights, he and Eisenhower worked out a statement of agreed principles. Taft pledged his allegiance and he never wavered.

As Senate majority leader in a Republican Administration, the public began to see a new Taft. The nation which had overturned the Fair Deal to elect Dwight Eisenhower was ready to listen, at least with half an ear. There sprang up the hope that Taft and Eisenhower between them would evolve a foreign policy and a policy of national defense, a domestic policy and, indeed, a reconstructed and truly American idealism to which the nation could rally. This hope began to turn Taft into a popular figure. Whatever suffering they brought to him as a man, Taft's last six months brought him at last recognition of his stature as a public servant, or, as he would have said, as a politician.

In the Senate when the news came, the Taft desk stood piled high with papers and Congressional Records, and the empty chair was pushed back, as though the long-legged man from Ohio had just left it.

In the Capitol Rotunda. On the day of the funeral, a uniformed attendant wheeled Martha Taft into the rotunda of the Capitol, where for a day her husband's body, in a closed casket, had lain in state, visited by thousands of people.* There the dignitaries gathered: President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, members of Congress, the Cabinet and the Supreme Court, Taft's old friend, Douglas MacArthur. The muffled brass of the U.S. Marine Band echoed through the corridors, and Senator John Bricker spoke the eulogy. Taft, who had always gone armed with a sense of humor, would have appreciated the irony of such pomp and honor; in life, he had been more often damned than praised.

Quite alone in spirit, Martha Taft watched the honor guard carry out the casket. She had known very well the political Taft, a figure so often in contrast to the personal Taft: one argumentative, impatient with slow minds, the other amiable and tolerant; one stiff-seeming and standoffish, the other resonantly singing airs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, devoted to his four sons, playing with his grandchildren, who laughingly called him "the Gop." There had been contrast and sometimes conflict between the two tafts. She had not wanted him to campaign for the presidency in 1952; if he had won, she would have been deprived of much of his company, which she needed so badly in her own trouble.

She had courageously hidden her reluctance and gone along with him because she believed the presidency was his greatest ambition. Taft had not sensed her brooding fears until after he had thrown himself into the campaign, after he was committed. This week she summoned up her courage for the last ordeal and got ready to follow him back to Indian Hill.

* Only twelve others have lain in state in the Capitol rotunda: Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, John A. Logan, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Admiral George Dewey, the Unknown Soldier of World War I, Warren G. Harding, General John J. Pershing, and Robert Taft's father.

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