Chief of Staff

(See Cover)

Military measures have no merit in themselves. They are only tools of a broader strategy in a cold or hot war.

These are the words of the paratroop general who led "The Battered Bastards of Bastogne," of the military diplomat who commanded U.S. troops in Berlin (1949) and Korea (1953), of the scholarly Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1945), of the restless, rebellious Army Chief of Staff under Dwight Eisenhower. They are the words of General Maxwell Davenport Taylor, U.S.A. (ret.), soldier and statesman who, by a remarkable turn in the wheel of fortune and the special needs of John F. Kennedy, last week had the biggest, toughest job of his career: military and intelligence adviser to the President of the United States.

Since he began his job last month, Maxwell Taylor has been at the President's side during every major discussion of the gathering crises facing the nation: Southeast Asia, the looming difficulty of Red China and the U.N., and especially Berlin, where grateful citizens have named a street Taylorstrasse to honor his service there. As the new man on the White House staff, Taylor has been scrupulously careful not to give advice until asked--but he was being asked more and more, as he won Kennedy's confidence with a manner both incisive and decisive. Says Kennedy: "A definitive, tough mind." Fast emerging as the strong man of the White House staff, Taylor is in fact President Kennedy's chief of staff in the basic task of plotting U.S. cold war strategy.

All of a sudden, he seems to be everywhere in official Washington--an aloof, handsome man with cool china blue eyes, a knack for sketching a problem in broad perspective, and a talent for hammering out explicit courses of action. Last week he attended the meeting of the National Security Council, took part in the intensive, two-hour session with Kennedy in the White House where plans for Berlin began to harden. From time to time, he sat in on the President's talks with official visitors. He made himself available to the White House team on problems far removed from the military. Over and over again, Kennedy staffers were heard to say: "Let's go ask Taylor about this."

Flexible or Inflexible? Maxwell Taylor's presence in the White House is symbolic of an evolving change in the U.S. military posture, a change that is reflected in the planning for Berlin and Southeast Asia, and in the defense budget now before Congress. For Taylor is the leading advocate of the philosophy of "flexible response" to Soviet aggression--a varied U.S. capability for action that might range all the way from rifle fire to a hail of nuclear missiles on Moscow. Taylor argues that the nuclear standoff between Russia and the U.S. makes a "general war" less likely than a "limited war," which would be fought by conventional armies backed up, if need be, by tactical atomic weapons. Many U.S. military men claim that the U.S. is now prepared for limited warfare, but Taylor has argued time and again that the U.S. is ill-equipped to counter aggression with any means but the "inflexible response" of nuclear retaliation.

Faced with a conventional attack, says Taylor, the U.S. now has no alternative but to risk national suicide by starting an all-out war "or retreat in the face of the superiority of Soviet conventional forces. We have accepted as a deliberate decision continued inferiority on the ground in those areas where we may be challenged on the Communist periphery."

"Sense of Urgency." As Army Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1959, Taylor fought unsuccessfully for a bigger and better-equipped Army, finally quit in frustration, and poured his theories into an outspoken book he called The Uncertain Trumpet. As a sort of casual afterthought, Taylor admitted in his book that his program would call for a budget of from $50 billion to $55 billion a year, a sum that invoked scoffing laughter in Congress. But the book caught the eye of Senator Kennedy, who contributed a blurb for the publisher: "This volume is characterized by an unmistakable honesty, clarity of judgment, and a genuine sense of urgency."

Since then, President Kennedy seems to have bought Taylor's views on limited war. The Administration's $47.7 billion defense budget now before the Senate contains over $1 billion more than last year's to buy equipment for fighting a limited war. The nation's limited war forces will get another big boost this week when Kennedy announces that he will ask Congress for over $3 billion more for defense (see Foreign Relations).

The planning for Berlin, endorsed by both Taylor and Adviser Dean Acheson, calls for the U.S. to be prepared to fight a limited war, instead of devastating Russia with H-bombs as soon as a Soviet soldier fires the first rifle shot. The Administration's reasoning: a limited war against Russia would leave the situation flexible enough so that general war might be averted. Many U.S. officials argue that, by definition, it would be impossible for two great powers such as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to fight a limited war. But Taylor has long claimed that a limited war in Europe was indeed possible. To take the other view, Taylor says in The Uncertain Trumpet, "means that any collision of patrols would automatically result in general atomic war."

Steely Glint. In his new job General Taylor wears sober civilian suits, but they do nothing to cloak the commanding air of a professional soldier. Though he is doing his best to fit in with the freewheeling White House staffers--as non-military a group as any college faculty--the first time one of the resident eggheads greeted Taylor with an airy "Good morning, Max," the glint of steel flashed in the general's eye. But Taylor managed to restrain his celebrated talent for chewing out an offender and smiled a casual hello.

For all his bone-hard military manner, Taylor has shown the Kennedys that he can handle himself agilely in any social situation--from humorously barbed, dinner-party small talk to the more energetic competition of the tennis court. Taylor frequently takes on Bobby Kennedy, has confided to a friend: "We're pretty even. But when they give me a good doubles partner, I usually win."

Occasionally cupping a hand to an ear --he was deafened slightly by a demolition charge in the '30s--Taylor has also demonstrated that he can hold his own in high-powered debate with such White House word men as McGeorge Bundy, the former faculty dean of Harvard University, M.I.T.'s Walt Rostow, or Arthur Schlesinger, Harvard's Pulitzer prizewinning historian. A linguist of intimidating intensity, Taylor is fluent in Japanese, German, Spanish and French. "Taylor is an intellectual." says one White House staffer. "You give him a problem in the Middle East, and he wants to know how Xerxes handled it."

April Fiasco. Although he had never met Taylor, President Kennedy was so impressed by The Uncertain Trumpet and the man's general reputation that he began looking for a job for him right after taking office. In all Taylor was suggested for at least eight jobs on the New Frontier. Kennedy even considered him for Secretary of Defense but reluctantly decided against the idea because he did not want a military man in the job.

Then, in April, John Kennedy made the great blunder of his Administration: he sent the ill-prepared. anti-Castro rebels into the Bay of Pigs. What was more, Kennedy made the military mistake of withholding air support from the rebels. Publicly, Kennedy shouldered the responsibility for the Cuban fiasco, but in private he blamed the advice he got from the Central Intelligence Agency and the military guidance he received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mad and upset, Kennedy looked about for a man to find out what went wrong. A quick phone call, and Maxwell Taylor took the job.

For nearly two months. Taylor and Bobby Kennedy holed up in an office in the Pentagon and worked over CIA data with the help of CIA Chief Allen Dulles and Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke. Last month, with the concurrence of his colleagues. Taylor made his main report orally to John Kennedy. Said he: the CIA should have no operational role in future major actions similar to the Cuban venture but should be allowed to continue small-scale, covert activities.

Bigger Problem. But Jack Kennedy was already beginning to realize that a far bigger problem remained at the heart of his Administration--a problem tailor-made for Taylor. Every foreign crisis facing the U.S.--from West Berlin to South Viet Nam--has its military implications. But the White House staffers, in whom the President has confidence, have no military experience, and Kennedy had lost faith in the military advice that he was getting from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Says one ranking Pentagon official of Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: "The President just doesn't find Lemnitzer responsive to his needs. He's just not the forceful, dynamic, persuasive person that this situation requires."

Taylor was exactly the man the President wanted to have around. Agreed Bobby Kennedy, the Administration's recruiting officer: "We need a man like Taylor to give things a cold and fishy eye." The problem was to put Taylor in a position to do just that. For a while, Kennedy toyed with the idea of replacing Lemnitzer with Taylor but gave it up because of the predictable explosion that the move would have touched off in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Finally, Kennedy created a special job for Taylor: Military Representative of the President.

Pentagon Battle. At the President's discretion, Taylor is available to give top-level, searching criticism on plans submitted by either the civilians in the White House or the military men in the Pentagon. So far, Bundy, Rostow & Co. have worked well with Taylor because they admire his brains and background. But the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are bracing for a fight: they see Taylor's appointment as a direct challenge to their authority.

Taylor left himself few allies in the Pentagon when he shucked his uniform and stormed back into civilian life in 1959. The Air Force is still enraged at his criticism of massive retaliation, calls his book "The Unclean Strumpet." Senior Pentagon officers as a whole were shocked by his scheme to scrap the Joint Chiefs of Staff in favor of a single Defense Chief of Staff. And most of the Army generals who supported Taylor's doctrine of flexible response have long since been transferred to other posts.

Says one former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Taylor was consistent, I'll say that for him. He never stopped pressing the case for limited war, and he never demonstrated much understanding of the other side of the picture. Well, he was wrong all the way, and he was consistent in that, too."

Hill Barrage. Military Analyst S.L.A. ("Slam") Marshall of the Detroit News, a retired brigadier general and one of the nation's leading military historians (The River and the Gauntlet), has serious reservations about the man he followed through Normandy, Holland, Belgium and Korea. "I think I know Max Taylor as well as any man in America. He was an extraordinary battle commander--the most tightly self-disciplined officer I ever knew. But Taylor is the wrong man for this job. Taylor is not a conciliator. He's actively interested in the exercise of power for his own sake."

On Capitol Hill, a regiment of Republicans, supported by some dissident Democrats, is already sighting and ready to open fire on Taylor at his first mistake. In part, the opposition to the general stems from his past attacks on General Dwight Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs, but a surprising amount of it is smoldering resentment of Taylor's reserved manner--as if any degree of introspection were a dangerous symptom indeed. "He was always a loner," says one Congressman. "He'd never mix with the fellows when we went on trips, drink a beer or join in chitchat. He'd go over in a corner of the plane and read a book." Says one Hill leader: "I see nothing but trouble ahead."

By the Book. With storm signals like these slapping vigorously in dangerous winds, Kennedy and Taylor are picking their course with caution. Said Kennedy to an associate: "This appointment doesn't inject Taylor between me and the Pentagon until I assign him to a specific problem." Taylor, for his part, has assured the Joint Chiefs that he will help them get the President's ear, has promised to inform them about anything of substance he tells Kennedy.

The man most endangered by Taylor's appointment is Defense Secretary McNamara, the former Ford president who is working 72 hours a week to tighten civilian control over the Pentagon. McNamara has already alienated the Joint Chiefs by slashing across service boundaries and flouting traditions. If Taylor, in his turn, should cut him off from the President, McNamara would be floating in limbo. But since Taylor's appointment, three key policy papers requested by Kennedy have gone to the White House from the Pentagon. Kennedy had Taylor screen only one, and then instructed him to keep McNamara fully informed. "After that," said one White House staffer, "McNamara noticeably relaxed." Says one Pentagon official: "McNamara and Taylor are finding their minds work in much the same way. There's a good personal accommodation there."

In everything he did last week, Maxwell Taylor was following the military textbook rule of working through channels. Few soldiers have ever learned that book as well as Taylor, a man who leads not because he has the personal magnetism of a Patton or a Chennault, but because he earns the respect of his men by simple professional skill and dogged devotion to duty. "You just can't get close to him," says one man who has admired him for years. "Apparently he doesn't need that." Says another admirer: "He's strictly a West Point officer. He even kept his bearing one time when he got sick on some Atabrine pills. With his head in a pot, Maxwell Taylor still looked like a general."

Army v. Navy. An only child, Taylor was born to a struggling lawyer in Keytesville, Mo., and raised in Kansas City. As a toddler, he used to be enthralled by his one-armed grandfather's tales of riding with the Confederate cavalry of General Jo Shelby. Young Max was a solemn five when he announced to his mother: "When I'm big. I'm going to West Point--that's where the big boys go to be officers in the Army."

But when Taylor graduated from high school in 1917 with straight E's (for Excellent) in Latin, Greek and Spanish, he hedged his bet on West Point by also taking exams for Annapolis. He passed the Army's test but flunked the Navy's because of a vagueness about geography. Says Taylor: "If the Strait of Malacca had been in Europe, I might have been an admiral instead of a general."

Brilliant Beginning. At West Point, Taylor played varsity tennis, met a girl named Lydia Happer, whom he married in 1925, and graduated fourth in the class of 1922. Like many top-ranking graduates, Taylor chose the engineers--as had his boyhood idol, Robert E. Lee--and began his brilliant career. For most Army officers, the '20s and '30s were drab years of no activity and few promotions. Taylor was a lieutenant for 13 years, but he led the lively life reserved for the outstanding young officer--language study in both France and Japan, a tour as an instructor at West Point, then assignment to the Command and Staff School and the Army War College.

In 1942 Brigadier General Taylor became artillery commander of the Army's first airborne division, the 82nd, commanded by General Matt Ridgway. He soon found that it was his kind of outfit. "I don't like to jump," Taylor once confessed frankly, "but I like to be with people who like to jump." Taylor went into action with the 82nd in Africa and Sicily, soon earned a reputation as a tough, resourceful officer and was singled out for one of the most dramatic cloak-and-dagger missions of the war.

Mission to Rome. In September 1943, with invasion imminent, Italy wanted desperately to surrender to the Allies. The Italians under Marshal Badoglio maintained that the 82nd could capture Rome by making a surprise landing. General Dwight Eisenhower assigned Taylor and Air Corps Colonel William T. Gardiner to check out the scheme by going to Rome.

Aware that they stood a good chance of being captured, Taylor and Gardiner wore their uniforms lest they be shot as spies. The two men transferred from a British PT boat to an Italian corvette and were put ashore in the port of Gaeta. They made the 75-mile trip to Rome in an Italian truck, stayed back of the enemy lines for two days, discovered that Badoglio could not give the necessary support to a landing, called off the attack by radio and were flown out to Tunis in an Italian plane. Eisenhower later wrote of Taylor: "The risks he ran were greater than I asked any other agent or emissary to undertake during the war."

Click-Click. On the night of June 6, 1944, Major General Taylor became the first American general to invade Europe when he led his joist Airborne Division on the jump into Normandy. Taylor struggled out of his chute harness and found himself surrounded by mildly curious cows. For 20 minutes, Taylor hunted frantically for his division. Finally he heard the click-click of the toy cricket that his paratroopers used to signal in the darkness. Taylor click-clicked back, jumped over a hedge and hugged a 101st G.I.--"the finest, most beautiful American soldier I've ever seen. A fine private with his bayonet fixed."

Taylor then collected Brigadier General Tony McAuliffe, a flock of colonels and staff officers, a correspondent from Reuters and a few score soldiers and led the attack that opened up a causeway from Utah Beach for the 4th Division. Says Taylor: "Never were so few led by so many." To his stunned surprise, Taylor got the Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the action after a staff officer sneaked his name onto the citation list. The embarrassed Taylor gave the officer a memorable chewing out.

Rump Session. In Normandy, and later in Holland, Taylor proved himself to be a master tactician, maneuvered his division with consistent versatility to keep open roads and harass the enemy. He insisted on peak performance from his staff, unceremoniously sacked one senior colonel for failing to act boldly. A stickler for discipline, Taylor once gave a lieutenant a medal for a dangerous patrol and simultaneously fined him $50 for not being clean-shaven. Taylor was harder on himself than anyone, making personal reconnaissances by Jeep, risking injury unnecessarily by sitting stubbornly at a staff table while shells fell in the courtyard outside.

Taylor eventually was wounded in the rump by a mortar fragment while making a tour of a forward area against the angry advice of a sergeant, who warned of the alert enemy. When Taylor was hit, the sergeant stormed up to his rescue with an attitude that was anything but solicitous: "Goddammit. General, now do you believe me?" Taylor spent ten days in the hospital, but made his staff keep his name off the wounded list for fear he would lose his command.

Who's Worried? Ironically, Taylor was back in the U.S. for consultation when his 101st faced its darkest moments of the war. Attacking in the last-ditch Battle of the Bulge, the Germans surrounded the division at Bastogne. When a delegation arrived to negotiate for the surrender of the 101st, Tony McAuliffe, the acting commander, became one of the most famous soldiers of World War II by firing back a one-word answer: "Nuts." Meanwhile, Taylor was frantically trying to get a plane ride back to Europe. "I've got 10,000 sons," he kept telling his wife, "and they're my responsibility." On Christmas Eve, 1944, Taylor gave his two boys, Tom and Jack, their presents, and finally was able to hop a cargo flight across the Atlantic. Just three days later, Taylor jeeped into Bastogne with the first elements of the 4th Armored Division. Taylor found McAuliffe coolly getting ready for dinner. "No damned reason to be worried about us," said McAuliffe. "We're ready to attack."

Battle Fatigue. After the war, Maxwell Taylor got the coveted assignment of Superintendent of West Point.* promptly expanded the liberal arts courses and set the cadets to studying the dissenting opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the poems of T. S. Eliot. Taylor posted a sign in the West Point locker room reading, "No pot belly will ever lead the corps of cadets," and became renowned as a give-no-quarter handball player.

In 1949, Taylor moved on to command U.S. forces in West Berlin. Speaking German well--he installed an instructor at his luncheon table--Taylor impressed West Berliners with his skill as an emissary and his tough treatment of Communist capers. When Communist students in East Berlin made plans to stage a provocative march on the western half of the city, Taylor cooled them off in advance by holding elaborate riot-control drills. Taylor won over the students by offering them books and tickets to shows in West Berlin. After a brief tour in the Pentagon, Taylor went to Korea in 1953 as the commander of the Eighth Army in the waning months of the war, started his own effective program of rebuilding hospitals and schools, and helped train the Korean Army. At one ceremony activating new Korean divisions, Taylor astonished Syngman Rhee by giving a rousing speech in Korean.

Then General Matt Ridgway was forced into retirement as Chief of Staff after campaigning too loudly for a larger Army. In June 1955, Maxwell Taylor was picked by President Eisenhower, his old friend and admirer, to be the Army Chief, and he began to fight the only losing battle of his career. "I think Napoleon himself could have been Chief of Staff in that period and looked like a bum," says one able Army colonel. Taylor quickly found himself bracketed between Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, who undercut him constantly, and squabbling factions of officers, who campaigned publicly for their specialties, whether long-range missiles or one-man helicopters.

But Taylor soon found that his main opponent was Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the confidant of President Eisenhower. Radford was one of the prime exponents of the theory of massive nuclear retaliation, which had been originated by State Secretary John Foster Dulles. In The Uncertain Trumpet, Taylor calls Radford "an able and ruthless partisan," for the way he imposed the policy upon the Joint Chiefs.

Taylor got nowhere in his behind-the-scenes battle for a bigger Army and managed in the process to lose the friendship of Dwight Eisenhower. When he finally retired in 1959, Taylor said wryly: "For four years I have struggled to modernize the Army, and my success was limited. So I decided I would do one thing for the country and withdraw an obsolescent general from inventory."

Odds for Peace. Taylor soon proved that he could be at home outside the Army. He worked as chairman of the board of the Mexican Light and Power Co. until the Mexican government nationalized the company in 1960. He was looking around for a job as a college president last winter when he got an offer to head the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts--a cultural oasis rising on Manhattan's West Side. Working in a totally strange field, Taylor still took firm command. Says Lincoln Center's Reginald Allen: "There's no question about it--he's the most stimulating leader I've ever met." Then in April came the call from President Kennedy and the job in the White House.

Now that Maxwell Taylor is close to the seat of power, many Washington officials are wondering worriedly if he will turn out to have the same relationship with President Kennedy that Admiral Radford had with President Eisenhower. Like Radford, Taylor has the full confidence of his President, and he too has been called an able and ruthless partisan by his critics.

But last week General Taylor was talking about his new job in terms that soared far beyond any interservice squabble in the Pentagon. For the general in the White House is convinced that the U.S. must give "to friend and foe alike a clear expression of our purpose and of our motives. Our military behavior must be visibly consistent with our conduct in the political, economic and intellectual fields. Such are the notes to be sounded by confident leaders who know what they are doing and why. Then we can prepare ourselves calmly to the battle, knowing that if it is properly prepared, the odds are high for peace."

*At 44, Taylor was the second youngest man to be superintendent. The youngest: Douglas MacArthur, who was superintendent at 39. Lee, Taylor's hero, got the job at 45.

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