Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War

From Berlin to Vietnam

Ingo Trauschweizer

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813177007
• eBook ISBN: 9780813177014
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

General Maxwell Taylor served at the nerve centers of US military policy and Cold War strategy and experienced firsthand the wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as crises in Berlin and Cuba. Along the way he became an adversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nuclear deterrence strategy and a champion of President John F. Kennedy's shift toward Flexible Response. Taylor also remained a public critic of defense policy and civil-military relations into the 1980s and was one of the most influential American soldiers, strategists, and diplomats. However, many historians describe him as a politicized, dishonest manipulator whose actions deeply affected the national security establishment and had lasting effects on civil-military relations in the United States.

In Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam, author Ingo Trauschweizer traces the career of General Taylor, a Kennedy White House insider and architect of American strategy in Vietnam. Working with newly accessible and rarely used primary sources, including the Taylor Papers and government records from the Cold War crisis, Trauschweizer describes and analyzes this polarizing figure in American history. The major themes of Taylor's career, how to prepare the armed forces for global threats and localized conflicts and how to devise sound strategy and policy for a full spectrum of threats, remain timely and the concerns he raised about the nature of the national security apparatus have not been resolved.

1

West Point

At the end of the Second World War, Major General Maxwell Taylor, famed airborne commander and the first American general to land in France on D-day, moved from the Bavarian Alps to West Point. This was a homecoming. Taylor had been a West Point cadet and he had taught Spanish and French at the US Military Academy. It was where he had met his wife, Lydia (“Diddy”) Happer, and where their older son, John Maxwell, was born. His brother, Thomas Happer, followed in 1934, while Taylor was at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. George Marshall had selected him to run the academy, and Taylor would stay in the Hudson highlands until January 1949. Though young for the post at forty-four, he was a logical choice for superintendent, intellectually inclined and gifted with foreign languages, a general who understood the value of a liberal education. He aimed to balance the academy’s emphasis on engineering with the humanities and social sciences. Taylor was never a team builder, and while he relished debate, he liked to make up his mind independently of majority views. He offended some faculty members and saw himself opposed by traditionalists, but the superintendent himself spent a good deal of time on public relations, touring universities from Stanford and UCLA to Virginia and Michigan, receiving a steady stream of visitors from Washington, businessmen, journalists, and foreign leaders, and speaking widely about his lessons of the war and his projections for the future. He also took advantage of the proximity to New York and became an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which afforded him a professional network he could put to use in his later career in policy and diplomacy.

Taylor’s army was caught between demobilization and preparedness. Army leaders, with the support of President Harry S. Truman, proposed to meet manpower requirements with a fundamental shift in the American military tradition: away from mobilization of untrained men and toward universal military training (UMT) to build up a reserve in peacetime. Dwight Eisenhower, for one, thought that the active army’s land and air forces could then be reduced to 325,000 officers and men.¹ Generals like Marshall and Eisenhower also proposed that the armed services’ high command and bureaucracy should be unified. Congress debated UMT throughout the second half of the 1940s, but the United States maintained the selective service conscription model of the world wars. Unification of the armed services was diluted, as the United States built the Defense Department while retaining three independent services (once the air force was split from the army in 1947). Instead of installing one general-in-chief, a preference held by Taylor throughout the Cold War, the wartime measure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, providing advice by consensus, compromise, or disagreement, was made permanent in 1947.²

Maxwell Taylor

In his memoirs, Taylor painted himself as good shepherd of the academy. He faced four major tasks: careful study of what West Point was and what it should become; assessing the effects of World War II on the postwar army and the requirements for leadership in a draftee-heavy force; his role as spokesman for the academy to military and general audiences; and the maintenance of academic rigor, but also of accessibility for graduates from average high schools. Taylor mentioned his accomplishments only in passing: a curriculum shifting away from heavy emphasis on mathematics and engineering toward better balance between the sciences and humanities, and the concurrent ability to educate officers rather than churn out second lieutenants with tactical and technical expertise. The future army needed leaders who were loyal to the service, could think independently, and could communicate effectively with military professionals and citizen soldiers. Some aspects of Taylor’s curricular reform, his expansion of the faculty, and his emphasis on physical as well as intellectual preparedness resembled the reshaping of the academy by Douglas MacArthur after World War I, which Taylor had experienced firsthand as a cadet.³

As he departed for West Point, Taylor solicited advice from senior generals in Europe.⁴ The most candid response came from George Patton, who had tasked his deputy chief of staff, Brigadier General Paul Harkins, to form a study group. Harkins reported, “They all agree that the education at West Point should be liberalized. They thought that more English should be studied along with the languages. They agree with [Patton] that, upon graduation, graduates should take three or four years serving in more than one branch.” Harkins surely caught Taylor’s attention when he noted, “Many of the courses in higher mathematics, although they provide mental gymnastics, could be well provided in a more liberal education—languages, history and English.” Harkins closed on a personal observation: “One of the primary efforts of the Academy is to make a man mentally and physically mobile and that he must retain this mobility whether at some social occasion dealing with foreigners in peace and more so while on the battlefield.”⁵ Taylor soon brought Harkins to West Point, and he succeeded Taylor’s World War II deputy, Gerald Higgins, as commandant in 1948. Patton added his own touch: “Nothing I learned in electricity or hydraulics or in higher mathematics or in drawing in any way contributed to my military career.” Instead, “much more emphasis should be placed on [military] history,” English, and foreign languages, by requiring cadets to study two of four options: Russian, German, Japanese, or Spanish.⁶

Whereas Patton was characteristically blunt, the supreme commander in Europe responded more guardedly. General Eisenhower held that “the value of West Point has been amply demonstrated again in this war.” He did not recommend specific changes to academics beyond insisting the academy should return from the wartime three-year curriculum designed to turn out young officers faster to a four-year program as soon as possible and noting that “efforts toward improvement should be centered more along the human than the technical side. Lessons of cooperation and coordination, in the spirit of friendliness and devotion to a common cause, should be stressed.” Moreover, he approved of the trend toward placing greater demands on First Classmen, “treating them as quasi officers.” Eisenhower concluded that the stress which joint and combined warfare had placed on those holding unified command positions suggested the need for structural change. He hoped to foster better understanding of the sister service by “frequent and intimate contacts between the Annapolis midshipman and the West Point cadet.” Eisenhower thought a full-year student exchange program could facilitate it.⁷

Taylor was not among Eisenhower’s top choices to lead the academy. He had recommended Taylor’s friend Alfred Gruenther, also a West Point instructor during the Great Depression—when he and Taylor perfected a bathtub gin recipe—who had served on Eisenhower’s staff during the war, and he thought Omar Bradley and Thomas Handy would be ideally suited.⁸ Yet in his later assessment to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, when Eisenhower prepared to trade in his job at the Pentagon for the presidency of Columbia University in 1948, Taylor made the chief of staff’s list of extraordinary army officers. He was in fine company: Bradley and Handy, fellow airborne commanders Matthew Ridgway, Anthony McAuliffe, and Gavin, Gruenther, and Lyman Lemnitzer, some thirty generals and rising staff officers in all.⁹

One year prior, in February 1947, Eisenhower, who served on the board of the Boy Scouts of America, had recommended Taylor to be the new leader of the youth group, a well-paying position Taylor declined on the grounds that he did not want to leave the army at a time of international crisis, especially not when he was trying to inculcate in his cadets a sense of commitment to a military career. He also noted that the army had given him “more rewards than I could ever have anticipated.”¹⁰ A visit to West Point from Amory Houghton, the president of the Boy Scouts, could not change Taylor’s mind.¹¹ Perhaps a decade later, when Army Chief of Staff Taylor became a thorn in President Eisenhower’s side, Eisenhower would come to regret Taylor’s choice, but in 1947 he insisted he did not want Taylor to quit. Instead, Eisenhower reassured Taylor that he “would view your departure from the Army with something akin to dismay; your standing in my estimation is unexcelled.”¹²

Eisenhower may have harbored doubts about Taylor at first, but with the exception of closer cooperation between the military and naval academies, the two men came to agree on most issues concerning West Point. Both thought the academy should educate leaders who held dear country and their own personal honor as well as West Point’s honor system, which represented the cornerstone of the academy’s values.¹³ Taylor agreed with Eisenhower that the honor system should remain above being used as “a device for the detection of the violation of regulations.” Instead, he hoped that the return to the four-year curriculum would “bring forth a more mature First Class capable of assuming authority in the management of the Corps beyond that possible during the war-time course,” thus giving soon-to-be lieutenants more experience in leading men.¹⁴

Unlike Eisenhower, Marshall had watched Taylor’s career closely since he had proved his competence on Marshall’s staff at the outset of World War II. More importantly, Marshall knew that very few senior army officers could match the combination of scholarly mind, leadership, and courage that Taylor had displayed during the war. In a letter to Douglas MacArthur, Marshall rated Taylor as “among the half-dozen most conspicuously successful division commanders in the heavy fighting in Europe.” The two men must have spoken about the future when Mar shall, taking a break from the Potsdam Conference, visited Taylor’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden on July 27 and 28. Perhaps Taylor reminded his chief of his experiences in Japan, where he served on the military attaché staff from 1935 to 1939 and, alongside Joseph Stilwell, trekked behind the Japanese army during its 1937 campaign in China. Marshall recommended Taylor for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. But he also wanted combat veterans to lead army schools and training programs, and when MacArthur did not respond, Marshall nominated Taylor as West Point’s superintendent.¹⁵ Taylor started in early September and knew that he owed his position to Marshall.¹⁶

The earliest seeds for his willingness to innovate as superintendent were planted when he experienced intellectual boredom in the inflexible curriculum as a cadet. Taylor, who grew up in the Missouri suburbs of Kansas City and attended technical college after graduating from high school at age fifteen, had entered West Point in the fall of 1918 as part of a class that was supposed to be ready for combat commands in France in time for the anticipated 1919 summer offensive. The end of World War I put a stop to such intentions, and Taylor’s class got to take the full four years at the academy. Taylor had been drawn to all things military from a very young age, under the spell of stories told by his grandfather of daring raids as a Confederate cavalryman. Later in life Taylor came to suspect that at least some of these tales stretched the truth and he learned that his grandfather’s missing arm was the result of a sawmill accident, not a war wound. But military operations and strategy remained Taylor’s passion, though his perspective shifted over time from a romantic tinge to detached professionalism.¹⁷

At West Point, young Taylor, well read and quick to pick up languages and history, discovered he could rely heavily on prior knowledge for his coursework. Since there were no electives, he read philosophy and military history on his own. This extracurricular focus did not negatively affect his performance: Taylor graduated fourth in a class of 102 cadets. His career in the interwar army and his experiences in World War II deepened his sense that future army officers required the ability to think critically, communicate clearly, and learn about history and knowledge of world affairs. He also recalled how the superintendent for three of his cadet years, Douglas MacArthur, had applied his lessons of the First World War to the academy’s methods, which resulted in the modernization of the plebe system, moderate liberalization of the curriculum, and the arrival of intramural sports for cadets who were not part of an intercollegiate athletic team.¹⁸

For Taylor, an avid tennis player, physical fitness, moral courage, and intellectual growth had to stand alongside technical expertise in the making of future army officers. He told the Class of 1946 that all great leaders “have been devoted to the welfare of their troops. Next, they have been richly endowed with human understanding. And finally, they have stood out by their professional competence and ability.”¹⁹ Taylor firmly held that leadership depended on the ability to think through an argument, state it compellingly to one’s men, and communicate clearly in day-to-day interactions. Therefore, he placed equal stock in the humanities and in the sciences. Taylor noted in his later reflections that the army in World War II had faced few problems finding enough engineers and scientists, but it had found it harder to develop strong leaders. West Point was the ideal place for young men to be educated in the foundational skills that would enable them to become such leaders as their experience and technical expertise grew over time.²⁰

West Point’s primary focus had already shifted toward academics and away from military training when Taylor served as a foreign language instructor from 1927 to 1932. The curriculum, albeit less rooted in rote memorization than had been the case in the early twentieth century, still built toward a “general engineering education”—the assessment of the 1939 academic board review—and the department heads rejected new courses in the humanities and social sciences because they would displace subjects “of more practical and cultural value to the Army officers.”²¹ Just before Taylor returned to West Point in 1945, the War Department had asked for a course in Russian to be added to the foreign language options. The next year, 119 First Year students took Russian, though Spanish, French, and German remained more popular. Taylor, himself fluent in French...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. West Point
• 2. Cold War Frontiers
• 3. Reformer and Strategist?
• 4. Camelot’s Strategist
• 5. Architect of the Vietnam War
• 6. Wise Man?
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index