While he was a junior at Yale, his father entered the White House, but Robert never lived there for any extended periods. Robert Taft's adult personality reflected his upbringing as the first-born son of prosperous, ambitious, talented parents who constantly demanded excellence. Although he was proud of his father's accomplishments, he wanted to have his own identity and was abrupt to those who played up his family ties. Even as a young person he was decidedly cool to all those outside his inner circle and to anyone he believed was wasting his time.
After completing his studies at Yale in 1910, he attended Harvard Law School and, as he had at both Taft School and at Yale, graduated first in his class. He declined a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and moved in 1913 to Cincinnati where his father had arranged a place for him in a prestigious law firm. In October 1914 he married Martha Bowers, sister of a Yale classmate and the daughter of a solicitor general in President Taft's administration. They had four sons. Disqualified by nearsightedness from military service in World War I, Taft leaped at the chance to join Herbert Hoover's Food Administration in Washington as an assistant counsel.
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