Maxwell D. Taylor
Maxwell Davenport Taylor was a senior United States Army officer and diplomat during the Cold War. He served with distinction in World War II, most notably as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed "The Screaming Eagles."
After the war, he served as the fifth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. Taylor, along with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, played a major role during the early days of the Vietnam War in the decision to deploy US combat troops to Vietnam and to escalate the conflict more generally.
Early life and career
Taylor was born in Keytesville, Missouri, the only child of attorney John Earle Maxwell Taylor and Pearle Taylor. He was raised in Kansas City, graduated from Northeast High School, and attended Kansas City Polytechnic Institute. In 1918, he passed competitive examinations for Congressional appointment by William Patterson Borland to either the United States Military Academy or United States Naval Academy and then passed the Military Academy entrance examination. Taylor attended West Point, graduated fourth in the Class of 1922, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He served in Hawaii with the 3rd Engineers from 1923 to 1926.Taylor transferred to the Field Artillery and, from 1926 to 1927, served with the 10th Field Artillery, receiving promotion to first lieutenant. Having demonstrated a facility for foreign languages, he studied French in Paris and was then assigned to West Point as an instructor in French and Spanish. He graduated from the Field Artillery School in 1933, and he completed the course at the United States Army Command and General Staff College in 1935.
Taylor was promoted to captain in August 1935 and served at the American embassy in Tokyo from 1935 to 1939, including attaché duty in China in 1937. He graduated from the United States Army War College in 1940 and was promoted to major in July 1940.
World War II
Early assignments
Taylor served on the War Plans Division staff in 1940 and took part in a defense cooperation mission to Latin American countries. He commanded the 1st Battalion of the 12th Field Artillery Regiment from 1940 to 1941, and then served in the Office of the Secretary of the General Staff until 1942. He received temporary promotions to lieutenant colonel in December 1941, colonel in February 1942, and brigadier general in December 1942.Combat in Sicily and Italy
In July 1942, Taylor became chief of staff of the 82nd Infantry Division, a position he held from July until October, by which time the division had been converted into the 82nd Airborne Division. This was followed in November when he was placed in command of the 82nd Airborne Division Artillery and received a promotion to the temporary rank of brigadier general in December. In this role he took part in combat in Sicily and Italy. In the late summer of 1943, during the planning for the Allied invasion of Italy, Taylor's diplomatic and language skills resulted in his secret mission to Rome to co-ordinate an 82nd air drop with Italian forces. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, later said that "the risks he ran were greater than I asked any other agent or emissary to take during the war."Hundreds of miles behind the front lines of battle, Taylor was forced by the rules of engagement to wear his American military uniform to prevent himself, if captured, from being shot as a spy. He met with Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had recently become Italy's prime minister, and General Giacomo Carboni, head of Servizio Informazioni Militare, the Italian military's intelligence agency. The air drop near Rome to capture the city was called off at the last minute since Taylor realized that German forces were already moving in to cover the intended drop zones. His efforts behind enemy lines got Taylor noticed at the highest levels of the Allied command.
101st Airborne Division
After the campaigns in the Mediterranean, Taylor was assigned to become the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed "The Screaming Eagles", which was then training in England in preparation for the Allied invasion of Normandy, after the division's first commander, Major General William Lee, suffered a heart attack. Taylor received temporary promotion to major general in May 1944.File:Operation 'market Garden' - 17 - 25 September 1944 B6543.jpg|thumb|left|Taylor, pictured here on the left, receiving the Distinguished Service Order from General Sir Bernard Montgomery for gallantry in action at Carentan, France, 12 June 1944
Taylor took part in the division's parachute jump into Normandy on 6 June 1944, the first Allied general officer to land in France on D-Day. He subsequently commanded the 101st in the Battle of Normandy, including in the capture of Carentan on 13 June, and the division continued to fight in the campaign as regular infantry. The 101st Airborne Division was pulled out of the line in late June, having been in almost continuous action for nearly a month, and in early July, he returned to England to rest and refit and absorb replacements, after having suffered over 4,600 casualties.
Having been brought up to strength, Taylor led the 101st in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands in September 1944. He was not present for the division's action during the Siege of Bastogne as part of the Battle of the Bulge since he was attending a staff conference in the United States. The divisional artillery commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, exercised command in his absence. Taylor called the defense of Bastogne the 101st Airborne Division's "finest hour" of the war and stated that his absence was one of his greatest disappointments of the war. After Bastogne, Taylor's 101st saw little further service in the war and was sent to the United States in late 1945, where it was deactivated in November.
Post-World War II
On 4 September 1945, Taylor became superintendent of the United States Military Academy. In 1947, he drafted the first official Honor Code publication marking the beginning of the written "Cadet Honor Code" at West Point. He was succeeded by Bryant Moore on 28 January 1949. Afterwards he was the commander of allied troops in West Berlin from 1949 to 1951; when he left that post, he felt like a "Berliner," more than a decade before John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in the city. In July 1951 he was promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Administration at the Pentagon.In June 1953, he was sent to Korea, where he commanded the Eighth United States Army during the final combat operations of the Korean War. In 1955, after a brief assignment in Tokyo as military governor of Allied-occupied Japan, Taylor was appointed the Army's Chief of Staff—becoming the first officer since 1917 to serve as Chief of Staff without seeing service during World War I—succeeding his former mentor, Matthew B. Ridgway. During his tenure, Taylor attempted to guide the service into the age of nuclear weapons by restructuring the infantry division into a Pentomic formation. Observers such as Colonel David Hackworth have written that the effort gutted the role of US Army company and field grade officers, rendering it unable to adapt to the dynamics of combat in Vietnam.
During 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Taylor to deploy 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce federal court orders to desegregate Central High School during the Little Rock Crisis.
As Army Chief of Staff, Taylor was an outspoken critic of the Eisenhower administration's "New Look" defense policy, which he viewed as dangerously overreliant on nuclear arms and neglectful of conventional forces; Taylor also criticized the inadequacies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff system. Frustrated with the administration's failure to heed his arguments, Taylor retired from active service in July 1959. He campaigned publicly against the "New Look," culminating in the publication in January 1960 of a highly critical book, The Uncertain Trumpet.
Return to active duty
As the 1960 presidential campaign unfolded, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy criticized Eisenhower's defense policy and championed a muscular "flexible response" policy intentionally aligned with Taylor's views as described in The Uncertain Trumpet. After the April 1961 failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy, who felt the Joint Chiefs of Staff had failed to provide him with satisfactory military advice, appointed Taylor to head a task force to investigate the failure of the invasion.Both President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had immense regard for Taylor, whom they saw as a man of unquestionable integrity, sincerity, intelligence, and diplomacy. The Cuba Study Group met for six weeks from April to May 1961 to perform an "autopsy" on the disastrous events surrounding the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In the course of their work together, Taylor developed a deep regard and a personal affection for Robert F. Kennedy, a friendship that was wholly mutual and which remained firm until RFK's assassination in 1968.
Taylor spoke of Robert Kennedy glowingly: "He is always on the lookout for a 'snow job,' impatient with evasion and imprecision, and relentless in his determination to get at the truth." In January, 1965 Robert Kennedy named his next-to-last son Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
Shortly after the investigation concluded, the Kennedys' warm feelings for Taylor and the President's lack of confidence in the Joint Chiefs of Staff led John Kennedy to recall Taylor to active duty and install him in the newly created post of military representative to the president. His close personal relationship with the President and White House access effectively made Taylor the President's primary military adviser, cutting out the Joint Chiefs. On 1 October 1962, Kennedy ended this uncomfortable arrangement by appointing Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position in which he served until 1964.