U.S. Senator. A member of the Republican Party and a conservative, he served as a representative from the state of Ohio in the United States Senate from 1939 until his death in 1953 and was regarded by historians as one of the most powerful U.S. Senators of the 20th century. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio he was the oldest son of William Howard Taft, the 27th U.S. President and later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He spent four years in the Philippines as a young boy where his father served as governor from 1901 to 1904. In 1910, he graduated from Yale College at New Haven, Connecticut and from Harvard Law School in 1913. After passing the Ohio bar exam, he practiced for four years with the firm of Maxwell and Ramsey (now Graydon Head & Ritchey LLP) in Cincinnati, Ohio. When the US entered World War I in April 1917, he attempted to join the U.S. Army, but he was rejected due to his poor eyesight. In 1918, he worked for the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. and was in Paris, France as legal advisor for the American Relief Administration. In 1920, he returned to Cincinnati to open his own law office and that year he was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives and served as Speaker of the House in 1926. Elected to the Ohio State Senate in 1930, he was defeated for re-election in 1932, the only defeat in a general election of his political career. In 1938, he ran for the U.S. Senate and defeated the Democratic incumbent Robert Bulkley. He led the Conservative Coalition that opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, citing the inefficiency and waste of many of its programs, but he did fully support public housing and the Social Security programs. A staunch non-interventionist, he believed the U.S. should avoid any involvement in European or Asian wars and concentrate instead on solving its domestic problems. Although he fully supported the American war effort after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the declaration of war on Japan by the U.S. Congress, he continued to harbor a deep suspicion of American involvement in postwar military alliances with other nations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He was one of the few voices during World War II (WWII) in opposition to Japanese American internment. In 1944, he came within 18,000 votes of losing his re-election bid to Democrat William G. Pickrel. He condemned the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials as victor's justice under ex post-facto laws and his opposition to the trials was strongly criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike and is sometimes alleged as a main reason for his failure to secure the Republican nomination for president. When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, he focused on labor-management relations as Chair of the Senate Labor Committee and wrote the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which remains the basic labor law. It was vetoed by President Harry S. Truman but Taft convinced both houses of Congress to override the veto. In 1948, he made a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, but was defeated by his arch-rival, New York Governor Thomas Dewey. In 1949, he engineered the passage of the National Housing Act, one of the few Fair Deal proposals of President Truman that he supported. He supported the Truman Doctrine, reluctantly approved the Marshall Plan, and opposed NATO as unnecessary and provocative to the Soviet Union. He took the lead among Republicans in condemning President Truman's handling of the Korean War, questioning the constitutionality of the war itself. In 1950, he won a third term to the U.S. Senate, easily defeating his Democratic opponent Joseph Ferguson. In 1952, he sought the Republican presidential nomination again but when the party's moderates convinced U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run, he lost out in a close and bitter contest. In 1953, following Eisenhower's election, he served as the Senate Majority Leader and in May of that year, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer that had spread throughout his body. He died in New York City, New York two months later from a brain hemorrhage at the age of 63. A memorial statue in his honor is located north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Constitution Avenue. His law firm, Taft Stettinius and Hollister, which he opened in 1924 with his brother Charles, continues to bear his name today.