Camelot’s Strategist

In Chapter 4 I assess Taylor’s influence in the Kennedy administration and his contribution to the lack of trust by civilian leaders in the JCS after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I also discuss Taylor’s advice on crises ranging from Laos and Vietnam to Berlin and Cuba. Taylor emerged as counterinsurgency coordinator in Washington, drafted a doctrinal framework, and oversaw American efforts in Vietnam and half a dozen other countries. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Taylor had just been installed as JCS chairman. He was a hawk on Cuba, but even though he advised air strikes against missile bases, he backed Kennedy’s naval quarantine against the opposition of the service chiefs. In Vietnam, too, Taylor was a hawk who pushed for the use of air power.

Epilogue

Maxwell Taylor’s experience in the Cold War highlights four interrelated themes that have defined the US national security state and also shed light on the nature of strategy. First, the warfare state will guide decision-makers to seek military solutions to political problems. Sometimes that is appropriate, but at other times, as in Vietnam, it can drown out other approaches. Second, strategy and bureaucracy often work at cross-purposes. Again, decisions leading to the Vietnam War offer an illustration: instead of aligning means, ends, and political objectives, US strategy suffered from the collision of politics and policy with operational art and military planning. The various bureaucracies, though linked in the National Security Council, sought separate solutions. Third, strategy in general has increasingly become the fault line between operational art and politics and policy. It should be the connective tissue. Fourth, powerful and influential individuals served as contingent actors in the historical drama, but their options were limited by Cold War structures, ranging from bureaucracies that channeled possible actions to mind-sets that made it difficult not to view the problem at hand through the lens of the wider conflict and recent experiences. As they say in military and policy circles, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But what if you had several different hammers all trying to strike the nail at once?...

Cold War Frontiers

In this chapter I address Taylor’s command experiences in Germany and Berlin (1949-1951), as army administrator at the Pentagon, and in Korea (February 1953- mid-1955). Taylor deftly handled Cold War crises, helped build alliance relationships, linked politics, economics, diplomacy, and military affairs, and worked at the intersection of operational command and strategic planning. He and the army also coped with strategy shifts as the Truman administration endorsed a buildup of conventional and nuclear forces and President Eisenhower returned to nuclear deterrence and emphasis on the air force. In 1955, Taylor drafted a plan for a strategy of flexible response that combined nuclear and conventional armaments. Eisenhower nevertheless appointed Taylor chief of staff of the army because he trusted in his loyalty.

West Point

In the opening chapter I introduce Maxwell Taylor as superintendent of the US Military Academy (1945-1949), where he placed greater emphasis on the humanities for a more balanced liberal education of army officers. This was to prepare them for leadership of a mass army made up of a mix of volunteers and draftees, which depended on one’s ability to communicate clearly and compellingly. At West Point, Taylor also began to formulate lessons of World War II, pondered the changing nature of strategy, which now had to encompass the full mobilization potential of the nation, and considered the effects of atomic weapons. Curiously, he concluded that limited war remained both possible and likely.

Wise Man?

In the final chapter I widen the chronology to consider Taylor’s advice and commentary into the 1980s. Taylor appeared as a “Wise Man” in deliberations on Vietnam; he was one of the final holdouts who thought the president should stay the course even after the Tet Offensive. He remained a liberal Cold War hawk in his public commentaries throughout the 1970s, when he became a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. In his 1984 testimony before a congressional committee that would ultimately craft the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, Taylor stated that the JCS could not be reformed—the committee needed to be torn down. He remained consistent: he preferred one general to command the armed forces and offer powerful advice aligned with the president’s foreign policy.