His experiences with the Food Administration helped confirm the philosophy he had absorbed from his father. "Whatever price we fixed, everybody howled," he recalled in commenting upon the futility of government regulation of the economy. With the armistice in 1918 he accompanied Hoover to Paris to work on postwar relief problems, and his stay there did much to fix his views on foreign relations. He was horrified at what he saw as the amorality of European
realpolitik and vowed to always work to keep American diplomacy untainted by cynicism and free of corrupting alliances. These years of government service seem to have developed his maturity and intellectual and personal independence from his father.
Upon his return home in 1919 he settled in Cincinnati and established a law practice with his younger brother Charles, specializing in corporate clients. Robert Taft was also a civic leader. He was active in the planning of the Union Station in Cincinnati and helped his uncle develop the Dixie Terminal Building, an interurban streetcar terminus with professional and business offices and shops, still a much-used architectural landmark in the 1980s. He participated in the protracted struggle over reform of the municipal government.
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