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Known throughout his life for his brilliant grasp of complexity, he was first in his class at the [[Taft School]] (run by his uncle), at [[Yale College]] (1910) and at [[Harvard Law School]] (1913), where he edited the ''Harvard Law Review''. He practiced law with the firm of Maxwell and Ramsey in [[Cincinnati, Ohio]]. On Oct. 17, 1914, he married Martha Wheaton Bowers, the daughter of Lloyd Bowers, who had served as his father's solicitor general.
Taft confessed in l922 that "while I have no difficulty talking, I don't know how to do any of the eloquence business which makes for enthusiasm or applause".<ref>Taft ''Papers'' 1:271</ref> Taft himself appeared taciturn anc dcoldly and coldly intellectual, characteristics that were offset by his gregarious wife, who served the same role his mother had for his father, as a confident and powerful asset to her husband's political career. They had four sons. Robert Alphonso Taft, Jr., served as a senator from Ohio. Horace Dwight Taft, became a professor of physics and dean at Yale. William Howard III served as ambassador to Ireland.
==Public offices==
Rejected by the army for poor eyesight, in 1917 he joined the legal staff of the [[Food and Drug Administration]] where he met [[Herbert Hoover]] who became his idol. In 1918-19 he was in Paris as legal adviser for the [[American Relief Administration]], Hoover's agency which distributed food to war-torn Europe. He learned to distrust governmental bureaucracy as inefficient and detrimental to the rights of the individual, principles he promoted throughout his career. He distrusted the League of Nations, and European politicians generally. He strongly endorsed the idea of a powerful World Court that would enforce international law, but no such idealized court ever existed. He returned to Ohio in late 1919, promoted Hoover for president, and opened a law firm with his brother [[Charles Phelps Taft II]]. In 1920 he was elected to the [[Ohio House of Representatives]], where he served as Speaker of the House in 1926. In 1930 he was elected to the state senate, but was defeated for reelection in 1932. As an efficiency-oriented progressive, he worked to modernize the state's antiquated tax laws. He was an outspoken opponenet of the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was a powerful figure in local and state political and legal circles, and was known as a loyal Republican who never threatened to bolt the party. He was a poor speaker and did not mix well, but his total grasp of the complex details of every issue impressed reporters and politicians. (Democrats joked that "Taft has the best mind in Washington, until he makes it up.")
