William Howard Taft Quotes
…it has fallen to you to do a dirty job which your predecessors ought to have done before you.
William Howard Taft, 1857-1930, 27th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Statement to the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, 1912
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Stimson had been asked by party leaders to run for Governor of New York. He sought advice from his old colleagues of the Theodore Roosevelt Administration. This quotation illustrates two interesting things. First, that the governor of the State of New York was considered by most as the second most powerful public position in the nation. Second, like Roosevelt himself, Stimson was from a very wealthy family and was also an accomplished attorney. Prior to Roosevelt, men of this class had not entered politics for many generations. When route told him that if he were defeated “ so much the better for you personally” he was not referring to the fact that Stimson could make much more money which he could but to the fact that he would not have the hard work, hassle and aggravation of public life.
See Charles James Fox, John Milton, Jeremy Bentham, George Mason, Henry Clay, Benjamin Disraeli and Woodrow Wilson for similar expressions of this idea.
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
