The 1940s was a low decade for the Republican Party in America. Still recovering from the damage inflicted on their image by the Great Depression, they struggled to win at the national level. Shut out from the presidency by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman’s victorious campaigns, they succeeded in controlling Congress for just a two-year period immediately after World War II. Such a dismal performance prompted much soul-searching among many of the party faithful about the path back to the national political dominance they had enjoyed just a few years before.

During these years, such figures as Thomas Dewey, Wendell Willkie, Arthur Vandenberg, and Herbert Hoover played prominent roles in leading the GOP. Yet only one of them was known by his contemporaries as “Mr. Republican”. That man was Robert Alphonso Taft. During his decade and a half in the United States Senate, Taft established himself as an unrelenting critic of Democratic policies and a staunch advocate for conservative values. Yet one of the great strengths of James Patterson’s biography of the man is his ability to go beyond the assumptions that came with his role during this period to analyze Taft’s ideas with nuance and insight, demonstrating in the process that his subject was a far more complex figure than his critics at the time gave him credit for being.

In many ways politics was in Taft’s blood. As a member of the Taft family, he grew up in a family that had distinguished themselves in public service. Not only did his father, William Howard Taft, enjoy a long public career that included stints as president and as the chief justice of the United States, but his grandfather Alfonso Taft, served as Secretary of War and Attorney General during the Grant administration. Young Robert was the beneficiary of his family privilege, enrolling at the prestigious Taft School before attending Yale and Harvard Law. At each institution he excelled academically, eschewing the social scene in favor of long hours engaged in solitary study. This reflected his serious, no-nonsense personality, which as Patterson demonstrates often hindered his political career yet helped him win much admiration for his dedication and sincerity.

After law school Taft followed his father’s advice and joined a law firm in Cincinnati, where he spent the next several years as an underpaid associate. When the United States entered World War I Taft moved to Washington, where he worked as an assistant counsel for the U.S. Food Administration. There he caught the attention of its director, Herbert Hoover, who brought Taft with him to Europe after the war to deal with food relief. With his principled, data-driven approach to solving problems, Hoover became a model for the budding public servant. Taft also shared Hoover’s disgust with the postwar settlement negotiations in Paris, which confirmed his conviction that the United States was better off avoiding involvement in European politics. This attitude would shape his response to global events throughout the rest of his career.

Soon after returning to Cincinnati in 1919 Taft plunged himself into politics. Winning a seat in the Ohio state legislature in 1920, he remained active in state politics throughout the decade while building a lucrative law practice. While his success as a legislator and his famous name ensured speculation that he would run for a statewide office, Taft declined to do so until 1938, when he challenged the incumbent Democrat, Robert Bulkley, for one of Ohio’s seats in the United States Senate. Taft’s victory that year was more a consequence of his hard work and the Republican electoral wave rather than any innate skills as a campaigner, as his cold manner and statistics-laden speeches won him respect rather than affection.

Once in the Senate, Taft quickly established himself as a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. This along with his famous name and the dearth of viable challengers quickly made him a leading candidate for the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. Taft’s ambitions to run for his father’s old job were soon undermined by the war in Europe, however, which made Taft’s isolationist advocacy too much of a liability as a nominee. Here Patterson identifies the recurring irony that would plague Taft’s presidential hopes. Though interested primarily in domestic issues, all three of Taft’s attempts to become president would be frustrated by foreign policy. Here he found himself out-of-step not only with the course of events, but with significant elements of his own party, who worried that Taft’s views made him unelectable nationally. So it proved in 1940, when Wendell Willkie succeeded in winning the nomination instead of Taft.

Deprived of the chance to run against Roosevelt, Taft settled into the role of his foremost opponent in the Senate. Here he proved to be an effective adversary, as he established alliances with conservative southern Democrats to dismantle many of the New Deal agencies. Yet Patterson demonstrates that Taft was far from a reflexive critic of federal involvement in public policy, as he was a consistent advocate of both federally-supported housing and federal aid for education. While such positions often alienated Taft from more hidebound members of his caucus, he was widely respected as one of the Senate’s most effective legislators, which he demonstrated most memorably with the passage of the Taft-Hartley labor laws in 1948.

Nevertheless, the greatest prize continued to elude Taft. His ambitions for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 were thwarted by Dewey, whose campaign outmaneuvered Taft’s forces at the convention. Truman’s unexpected victory that year provided Taft with one final opportunity for the White House, only for his hostility to America’s postwar military commitments in Europe to prompt Dwight Eisenhower to run the presidency as a Republican in 1952. Defeated for a final time, Taft nonetheless supported Eisenhower out of loyalty to the party, and had established a surprisingly effective relationship with him as president before Taft fell victim to cancer, dying just six months after his inauguration as president in 1953.

To recount the story of Taft’s life, Patterson draws upon the full range of Taft’s papers, as well as numerous other manuscript collections and dozens of interviews with his contemporaries. These he uses to provide an extraordinarily well-rounded portrait of his subject, one that balances effectively the personal and political aspects of his life. While his portrayal of Taft is a sympathetic one, Patterson doesn’t shirk from offering critical assessments of his subject’s personality and his thinking about public policy as a way of understanding the limits of his achievements. It’s this combination of diligent research and perceptive judgment that makes Patterson’s book one of the best biographies of an American politician that has ever been written, and one unlikely ever to be surpassed as an account of his career. ( )