The progenitor of the apocryphal tale is Irwin Hoover, known as Ike, a butler and usher who worked in the White House for 42 years, including during Taft’s term, from 1909 to 1913. As Hoover wrote in his 1934 memoir, Taft “would stick” in the tub when bathing and had to be helped out “each time.” Who helped him out? We don’t know, because Hoover only vaguely refers to assistance from somewhere, but doesn’t mention who supplied it, or whether they numbered more than one, let alone six. And how did he or they get Taft out? Hoover doesn’t say it was a particularly arduous event — just that he needed “help” — and there’s certainly no mention of butter.

There are no other eyewitnesses. There’s just one secondhand account to be found in Lillian Rogers Parks’ 1961 memoir, “My 30 Years Backstairs at the White House.” But the maid and seamstress started working in the president’s house 10 years after Taft, for whom her mother worked, had left office.

In the 104 years since Taft left the White House, the tale has only gotten taller, though no historian has ever substantiated it. The University of Virginia’s otherwise excellent Miller Center web site, with specializes in presidential scholarship, echoed the myth in its biographical entry on Taft, saying that “the nation’s press had a field day” with the story. Many historic newspapers are thankfully digitized, and yet no articles exist. I looked. I even contacted Peri E. Arnold, the professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame listed as the author of the Miller Center entry, who confirmed it was “fable,” but he had not in turn alerted the center. I did, and they removed the line.

The best gossip, of course, always contains a grain of truth. Taft was, indeed, very fond of bathtubs. He had an extra large one installed in the White House and on several ships, including the cruiser North Carolina, on which he sailed to Panama to oversee the construction of the canal in 1912. There is a famous photo of that seven-foot-long tub in which four of the men who installed it are comfortably seated inside, grinning at the camera. A mini-Tubgate was reported in this paper on June 19, 1915, when “the portly ex-President,” at the time in Cape May, N.J., as a guest of the Pennsylvania Bankers Association, “had stepped in the tub without realizing the consequences of the sudden rise in the water and had stepped out without noticing the resulting deluge on the floor.” Plus, Taft broke up so-called Bathtub Trust, a porcelain price-fixing ring given, in retrospect, an unfortunate name.

And Taft was certainly our heaviest president. Jeffrey Rosen, the author of a forthcoming Taft biography, said Americans saw him as “a kind of pop culture meme.” Taft entertained audiences with colorful anecdotes about his size, like the time Secretary of War Elihu Root, having heard he’d taken 25-mile ride on horseback, sent a telegram asking “HOW IS THE HORSE?” In 1909, Taft delivered a speech called “He Who Conquers Himself is Greater than He Who Taketh a City,” in which he viewed his weight through a constitutional lens: A healthy democracy and a healthy body are both dependent on self-restraint. And boy, did he know it. Taft had done his share of yo-yo dieting, seeking doctor’s care with inconsistent success. At his inauguration, he weighed 354 pounds, but by his death, he’d gotten down to 280.