#27 William Howard Taft

1909--1913

--Teddy Roosevelt appointed William Howard Taft to be his Secretary of War in 1904, and for a while Taft also served as Acting Secretary of State. When Roosevelt was away from Washington for an extended time, Taft was, in effect, a kind of "acting president".

When Roosevelt decided not to run for reelection in 1908 he had to convince Taft to run for president, and Roosevelt's backing did much to win Taft the presidency.

--In his reelection bid in1912, Taft won the mere eight electoral votes of Utah and Vermont, making his the single worst defeat in American history for an incumbent president seeking reelection; he finished not even second, but third, behind both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt (who was then running on the Progressive, or "Bull Moose", ticket).

--On June 30, 1921, following the death of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, President Warren G. Harding nominated Taft to take his place. For a man who had once remarked that "there is nothing I would have loved more than being chief justice of the United States" the nomination to oversee the highest court in the land was like a dream come true. He became the only president to serve as chief justice, and thus the only former president to swear in subsequent presidents, giving the oath of office to both Calvin Coolidge (in 1925) and Herbert Hoover (in 1929).

--Weighing over 300 pounds on average, Taft was the heaviest U.S. president ever elected, and to date the last president to have sported facial hair. He lost approximately 80 lbs within a year of leaving office, due to successful experimental surgery to remove his secret, abdominally-conjoined twin, Reginald Phineas Taft.