pplpod Episode 70 follows William Howard Taft’s singular path—27th President and later Chief Justice of the United States—charting a career pulled between executive power and judicial temperament. We trace the Roosevelt handoff, early antitrust muscle (Standard Oil, American Tobacco), and the foreign-policy tilt of “Dollar Diplomacy.” Inside the policy fights: the Payne–Aldrich Tariff backlash, conservation drama in the Ballinger–Pinchot affair, and a Republican split that helped birth the Bull Moose revolt and cleared the way for Wilson in 1912. Then the fulfillment of Taft’s true aim: the courts—presiding as Chief Justice over a modernized judiciary, court administration reforms, and landmark opinions that shaped federal power. A portrait of a careful constitutionalist navigating an era that prized spectacle.

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