When Charles Evans Hughes died in 1948, the nation mourned the passing of one of the greatest public servants of his generation. Over the course of his lengthy career, Hughes went from working as a legislative counsel for New York Senate investigations of corrupt business practices to two terms as the state’s governor, followed by selection as an associate justice to the Supreme Court, nomination as the Republican Party’s candidate in the 1916 presidential election, and four years as Secretary of State in the Harding administration before returning to the Supreme Court as the country’s eleventh chief justice. Few Americans both then and since have served their country in so many capacities, and with such widely-acknowledged distinction.

Detailing such a wide range of achievements within the pages of a single book is no easy feat. Yet it is one that Merlo Pusey pulls off successfully, thanks in part to his familiarity with his subject. A longtime editorial writer for the Washington Post, Pusey was able to interview Hughes several times during the last years of the chief justice’s life, along with several of his illustrious contemporaries. Using these in conjunction with Hughes’s papers and other accounts from the period, he provides a fulsome account of Hughes’s life that chronicles his subject’s life while describing how his manifold gifts made his remarkable accomplishments possible.

Foremost among these gifts was a remarkable intellect, which Hughes evidenced from an early age. As the son of an immigrant preacher from Wales, the young Hughes experienced an itinerant childhood that did little to hinder his academic advancement. Graduating from college at the age of 19, Hughes worked briefly as a teacher before enrolling at Columbia Law School, where he graduated from the top of his class. Hughes entered the New York legal profession that Pusey describes as at the onset of a golden age of advocacy, with legendary attorneys tackling the new legal problems arising from an industrializing economy. Hughes’s strenuous work ethic, command of detail, and logical approach soon earned him a reputation amongst this august group as a “lawyer’s lawyer,” one capable of tackling even the most difficult legal issues.

It was this reputation, along with a parallel one for scrupulous honesty, which led in 1905 to Hughes’s appointment as counsel to a state legislative investigation into the criminal practices of New York’s public utilities. His well-publicized success in that endeavor was quickly followed by a second investigation into insider dealings in the insurance industry, one that exposed illegal campaign contributions to numerous Republican politicians in the state. Fearing defeat in the upcoming gubernatorial election, the party’s leaders decided that the only way they could fend off the candidacy of newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst was to nominate Hughes, which Hughes agreed to with reluctance. As governor, Hughes quickly gave the bosses cause to regret their decision, as he championed bills and other reform measures intended to diminish their control over public life.

By 1908, Hughes was widely regarded as a likely successor to Theodore Roosevelt as president. It was Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, who gave Hughes his next job, though, by appointing the governor to the Supreme Court in 1910. As an associate justice Hughes thrived on the nation’s highest bench, winning the respect of his colleagues for his well-crafted judicial decisions. Yet while Hughes disclaimed any further interest in a political career, the fractious state of the Republican Party, which had split in 1912 over Roosevelt’s bid for a third term, led to Hughes’s nomination as president. While he regretted having to resign from the bench, Hughes campaigned vigorously, and in a campaign in which the ongoing war in Europe was the main issue Hughes came within just a few thousand votes of denying Woodrow Wilson his momentous second term in office.

After his defeat Hughes returned to the law, and was enjoying a thriving practice when Warren Harding asked him in 1921 to join his incoming administration as secretary of state. Accepting the avuncular Ohioan’s offer, Hughes spent the next four years defining America’s foreign relations with the rest of the world in the aftermath of the First World War. Pusey spends a considerable amount of space covering in detail Hughes’s management of foreign affairs, focusing in particular on his negotiations of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 and its subsequent ratification by the Senate. The treaty was the most visible embodiment of Hughes’s efforts to reestablish peace for the United States, and an important part of the success Pusey credits him with in the role before his departure from the office in 1925.

Now approaching his seventieth birthday, Hughes was content to spend his final years engaged in lucrative legal work. With Taft’s death in 1930, however, Hughes was asked by Herbert Hoover to succeed him as chief justice. Pusey argues for regarding Hughes as one of the greatest chief justices in the court’s history, showing how his management style brought about a considerable degree of comity on a court divided ideologically and dominated by formidable personalities. This aided his goal to adapt the law to the demands of a modern industrial society while simultaneously preserving the fundamentals of the constitutional system, which was no small challenge in the midst of the Depression-driven demands for greater governmental intervention in the economy. In this respect Hughes’s fight against Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court “packing” bill proved one of his greatest achievements, and Pusey credits him with a vital role in its defeat.

Pusey himself was extremely critical of the packing bill, and Hughes’s success in defeating it contributes to the considerable regard in which the author holds his subject. This regard results in a book that often veers from objective analysis into a defense and even outright celebration of his subject. In Pusey’s view, Hughes’s virtues are many, while his perceived flaws the result of misunderstandings of the man. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chapter 49, in which the author spends several pages in an unnecessary attempt to exonerate Hughes from any responsibility for the decline in U.S.-Japanese relations ended in war between the two countries. While Pusey may have felt in the immediate aftermath of the conflict that such a justification was necessary, today it stands out as the most blatant example of a defensive posture that calls into question his ability to assess properly his subject.

Such an effort seems particularly unnecessary given the degree to which Hughes’s record stands for itself. But in an ironic sense Pusey did Hughes a disservice by writing a book that provides such an absorbing account of his life. For while other works have been written about various aspects of Hughes’s career, seventy years after its publication Pusey’s book remains the only full-length biography of the man. It’s a formidable work that remains an indispensable source for anyone seeking to learn about Hughes and his many accomplishments, yet its strengths have likely deterred others from following in Pusey’s footsteps. Especially given the works published in the years since about his time as governor, (Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910), his foreign policy (such as Betty Glad'sCharles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence) and his years as chief justice (most notably William Ross's Chief Justiceship of Charles Evans Hughes, 1930-1941 and Mark Tushnet's The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941), an updated and more balanced assessment of Hughes’s life is very much overdue. Until such a book is published, however, readers will have to settle for Pusey’s magnificent, if flawed, biography ( )