Martha & Bob

In William Howard Taft's gay, leisurely Washington of 1910, Martha Wheaton Bowers, 19, Minnesota-born daughter of the U.S. Solicitor General, was a brown-eyed debutante whose beauty demurely covered a formidable character and a brilliant, Sorbonne-trained mind. At a White House dance she caught the eye of the President's youngest son, Robert Alphonso Taft, who, though only a round-eyed senior home from Yale, had the wisdom to fall totally, silently in love with her and had the mettle to persist until she married him two years later. For the next 39 years, the union of these two, a warm, affectionate joining of man and wife, increasingly came to be the soul and brains of Regular Republicanism, like no similar force since the glamorous Jessie Benton helped Husband John Fremont found the party in 1856 and become its first presidential candidate.

At first Martha Taft's personal talents were obscured by her disciplined support of her husband's life. Going with him back to the land of the Tafts in Cincinnati, she ran the chicken and asparagus farm they economically bought out in the Indian Hill section ("The only thing we ever did that turned out to be fashionable"), kept his store-bought suits mended, bore him four sons, whom she later taught golf, and worked for the various civic enterprises (hospitals, art museum, zoo, symphony association) founded by city-serving Tafts. Only with Martha could Bob, the diligent public figure with a secret sense of humor, talk out the decisions by which he built the city's biggest law firm and worked as a state senator to reform the notoriously corrupt local G.O.P. He tried for the U.S. Senate in the New Deal heyday of 1938 after Martha summarized the situation: "It's now or never, Bob."

Wife's Mission. The Tafts became a team, she sticking to women's groups and sometimes delivering ten talks a day. In her old Dodge one night, she skidded to avoid hitting a dog, rolled over three times, went on to the scheduled meeting. "Anyway, that probably got us the S.P.C.A. vote," she quipped. Upset Democrats credited Bob's Senate victory to Martha, who angrily retorted that they were just trying to belittle him again. But the Cleveland Press got it about right in a 1938 headline: BOB AND MARTHA WIN.

While Bob Taft's logical mind became the main barrier to New and Fair Deal excesses, Martha's dry wit ("To err is

Truman") became a much-quoted weapon against Democrats and the voter's best invitation to understand Taft ("Most people think Bob is austere, but he's just departmentalized").

Spartan Devotion. One night during his tough 1950 campaign for re-election to the Senate, Bob drove' home from a radio station to find Martha crumpled on the floor, felled by a paralytic stroke while listening to his speech. While he campaigned mechanically, tirelessly to victory, he eagerly nursed Martha, forever shopping for something she might enjoy and regularly reading the morning and evening papers to her. In 1952 she persuaded him to make his third try for the Republican presidential nomination, used her unparalyzed hand to cut out useful clippings, followed the opposition's radio and TV moves, dictated her customary dozens of vote-getting letters and painfully signed them. Supremely unaffected by doctor's orders, she flew to the Chicago convention, dauntless as ever in his final defeat by Dwight Eisenhower.

Martha worried in April of 1953 when Bob, unable to prevent a limp, admitted that his hip had been hurting. Bob worried, too, but kept it to himself. Spartan as ever in their game of mutual selflessness, though doctors had decided that his cancer was incurable, Bob said nothing and cheerfully pushed her wherever she wanted to go in her wheelchair. Only 48 hours before his painful death in July did he tell her the truth, and she met the worst unflinching. In silent grief she buried him at the new cemetery beside Cincinnati's Indian Hill Church, organized her life so as not to burden her children. She helped plan the Taft memorial carillon now completed near the Capitol, moved back to Washington for a while "to keep in touch." Last week in Cincinnati, Martha Taft died and was buried beside her husband.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.