Maxwell D. Taylor

Biography

Maxwell Taylor was born in Keytesville, Missouri, in 1901 and grew up in Kansas City. He graduated fourth in the West Point class of 1922, served as an engineer and artillery officer, taught French and Spanish at the academy, and spent the late 1930s at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, with a spell in China.

In the Second World War he was chief of staff and then artillery commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Sicily and Italy, and in 1943 slipped into Rome on a secret mission to the Italian government. He then led the 101st Airborne Division, jumping into Normandy on D-Day and commanding it in Operation Market Garden.

After the war he was superintendent of West Point, commanded U.S. forces in Berlin, led the Eighth Army in the last months of the Korean War, and in 1955 became Army chief of staff, in which post he sent troops to Little Rock in 1957. He retired in 1959 in protest at Eisenhower's reliance on nuclear weapons and argued for 'flexible response' in The Uncertain Trumpet.

John F. Kennedy brought him back after the Bay of Pigs, first to investigate the failure and then as his military representative and, from 1962, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor pressed for deeper American involvement in Vietnam, served as ambassador in Saigon in 1964 and 1965, and later chaired the president's intelligence advisory board and headed the Institute for Defense Analyses. He died in Washington in 1987.