The Best and The Brightest

Chapter Twenty-one

Even as the bureaucracy was gearing up its plans for bombing, the upper level of the bureaucracy and many of the principals were meeting in the Pentagon to program war games for Vietnam. It was an elaborate procedure, with the lower-ranking staff people spending two weeks before the arrival of their superiors in planning and setting up the games. The actual scenario reflected the real situation in Vietnam as accurately as possible. The situation in the South was bad, the play was now up to the United States, would it bomb, and if it did, what would be the North Vietnamese response? Though there was nothing unusual about the idea of having war games—they are constantly being programmed in the game room of the Pentagon—these games were different, and all the players knew it; it was as if this was a dry run for the real thing. The players were not the usual semi-anonymous figures from the lower floors of the government, but some of the great names of the government, men like Curtis LeMay, and General Earle Wheeler, and John McNaughton; and to let everyone know that it was not some light exercise, representing the President of the United States was none less than McGeorge Bundy, a sign somehow that although this was a war game, it was as close to reality as it could be.

The only problem with the war games was that they did not go well. The real question was to test out what would happen if we bombed the North. It quickly became apparent that very little would happen. The Red (or Hanoi) Team had some very good players, a smart general like Buzz Wheeler, and Marshall Green of the State Department; the Blue Team had men like Bill Bundy, General LeMay and McNaughton. Hanoi had all the advantages; the bombing of the infiltration routes did not seem to bother it. The more the United States moved, the more men it could send down the trails. For every American move, there seemed to be a ready countermove for Hanoi; the blockade of Haiphong saw the North Vietnamese simply put more pressure on the U.S. military bases in the South and slip more men down the trail. We bombed and they nudged a few battalions into the South. We bombed some more of the greater military targets, and because we were bombing them we had brought in a surface-to-air (SAM) antiaircraft missile site to protect the South’s cities against North Vietnamese or Chinese bombing. So they put the SAM site under siege, and in order to protect the site, which was staffed by Americans, we had to bring in Marines, at which point they nudged a few more men down the trail. The moment the Marines landed we had more difficult logistic problems, and the Vietcong simply applied more pressure to all supply routes, blowing up railroad tracks, ambushing convoys, making the small bases held by Americans increasingly isolated, dependent upon air supply (because there was little patrolling), and moving their machine guns in closer and closer to the bases, and beginning to shoot down the resupply planes. The enemy was turning out to be very savvy, very clever, and to have just as many options at his disposal as we did at ours. Maybe even more. What was particularly disturbing, the civilians on the Blue Team were discovering, was that he could meet the U.S. escalations at surprisingly little cost of his own.

North Vietnam had, noted a civilian player, always seemed like such a small country, until you got involved in a war game; then, programmed from their side, their army seemed very large, about 250,000 men, and it was so easy just to send a few divisions down the trails and those divisions somehow did not disturb the mass of troops left behind in the North. The bombing, they soon found out, seemed to have little effect on their military establishment; Hanoi could disassemble it, move it to rural areas, use camouflage, and run on very little logistic support in the American sense. Indeed, the more the Blue Team players pushed, the less vulnerable the North seemed to the kind of limited bombing envisioned (limited in the sense of using either the military system or the industrial system as bombing targets, and excluding cities and irrigation dikes). There was a growing sense of the elephant struggling with the gnat, and Marshall Green, who had the most experience in Asia, at one point noted that if his (the Red Team’s) airfields were bombed, he would move all his women and children to the airport and make an announcement to the world that they were there, and then dare the Americans to keep bombing.

It was all very frustrating for the Blue Team and particularly for General LeMay, who was the classic Air Force man and who hated the restraints imposed by civilians. He sensed that a new kind of war was coming and that once again the military would be frustrated, that sanctuaries would be given, that air power would be misused. At one of the intermissions he began a running dialogue with Mac Bundy which reflected his own frustration and his belief (and later the military’s belief) that bombing should be used all-out against the North, that if we bombed we should bomb to level them, and Bundy’s view (the civilians’ belief, which would surface in 1964 and again in 1967) that there was a limited amount that bombing could do. We were, LeMay said, swatting at the flies, when we should really be going after the source, the manure piles. Bundy deflected that one, and LeMay continued: they had targets, oil depots, ports, dikes, and if they existed and we were their enemy and we were enemy enough to fight them and to die, we should tear it all down. “We should bomb them into the Stone Age.”

“Maybe,” answered Bundy, “they’re already there.”

But LeMay was still not satisfied, and he seemed restless and irritated. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Here we are at the height of our power. The most powerful nation in the world. And yet we’re afraid to use that power, we lack the will. In the last thirty years we’ve lost Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Czechoslovakia. Hungary. Bulgaria. China . . .”

“Some people,” said Bundy, “don’t think we ever had them.”

LeMay, with a wave of the cigar, a quick flick of the ash: “Some people think we did.”

The second set of war games went a little better. General Wheeler had switched sides, and though there were certain continuing problems of Asian responses (a massive air attack cut all rail links between North Vietnam and China, but a Chinese general simply released 50,000 men to replace 50,000 North Vietnamese troops who would then move into the South), there was a subtle difference now. That was a greater U.S. willingness to commit more and more of its resources to the war, and corollary change among the North Vietnamese, a downplaying of their willingness to meet the larger American commitment. Despite the more favorable outcome of this game, however, few of those who played in both of them left sanguine; the real lesson of the games, and it was not a lesson they wanted to talk about, was not how vulnerable the North was to U.S. bombing, but rather how invulnerable it was, how much of an American input it would require to dent the North Vietnamese will, and how even that dent was not assured, and finally, for some of the more neutral observers, the fact that the basic strategy of limited bombing already split the civilians and much of the military.

The collapse in the South, the one force which the American leaders could not control, continued unabated. The Americans had always had the illusion that something might turn it around; a new leader in South Vietnam who would understand how to get with the program; a realization on the part of the South Vietnamese that their necks were on the line, that the feared enemy (the Americans’ feared enemy, though perhaps not the feared enemy of the Vietnamese), the Communists, were about to walk into Saigon. Or magically, the right battalion commander would turn up to lead ARVN battalions into battle against the Vietcong, or the right program would emerge, blending arms and pig-fatteners together to make the peasants want to choose our side. But nothing changed, the other side continued to get stronger, the ARVN side weaker. One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact, which was so important to the understanding of the political calculations (it explained why their soldiers would fight and die, and ours would not; why their leaders were skillful and brave, and ours were inept and corrupt), entered into the estimates of the American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the United States was even fighting on the right side. In contrast, the question of Communism and anti-Communism as opposed to revolution and antirevolution was far more convenient for American policy makers.

For members of the intelligence community, the war was directly linked to the recent past; they saw deep-rooted reasons for Vietcong successes and Saigon government failures. As far as the intelligence community was concerned, history was alive and gaining its revenge in Indochina; as far as the principals were concerned (and it was a very American attitude that Vietnamese events and history began only after the Americans arrived and took charge), nothing had existed before because it had not been done, tended to, examined by Americans. The Americans were tempting history by ignoring it; after all, in the past they had been able to dominate events by the sheer force of their industrial capacity, which had exempted them from much of the reality of the world. Nowhere was this so openly reflected as in a report by Maxwell Taylor which he brought back to the country at Thanksgiving time in 1964. He was recommending greater escalation, and he talked at great length about the political weakness of the South:

. . . there seems to be a national attribute which makes for factionalism and limits the development of a truly national spirit. Whether this tendency is innate or a development growing out of the conditions of political suppression under which successive generations have lived is hard to determine. But it is an inescapable fact that there is no national tendency toward team play or mutual loyalty to be found among many of the leaders and political groups within South Viet-Nam. Given time, many of these [words illegible] undoubtedly change for the better, but we are unfortunately pressed for time and unhappily perceive no short term solution for the establishment of stable and sound government.

Then, added Taylor, still perplexed about it all:

The ability of the Viet-Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. . . . Not only do Viet-Cong units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidence of bad morale among Viet-Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet-Cong documents. . . .

Thus did the Americans ignore the most basic factor of the war, and when they did stumble across it, it continued to puzzle them. McNamara’s statistics and calculations were of no value at all, because they never contained the fact that if the ratio was ten to one in favor of the government, it still meant nothing, because the one man was willing to fight and die and the ten were not.

So the Americans ignored the real key to Vietnam, only to have successive collapses of the South Vietnamese continue to confront, astound and disturb the American planners. The inability of the South Vietnamese to behave like Americans was particularly puzzling, and chief among those puzzled was the man who had become the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam in July 1964, Maxwell Taylor, a man who was supposed to be a soldier-intellectual and to understand both the war and the enemy, but who in fact understood neither.

In June, Henry Cabot Lodge had gone home, the call of the Eastern establishment too great upon his ears as Goldwater neared the Republican nomination, a challenge and affront far greater to Lodge than it was to Johnson; it was a challenge to the traditional Republican leadership. He had gone back ostensibly to help the belated campaign of William Scranton as the moderate Eastern challenger to Goldwater, but he was not above hoping that lightning might strike for himself, a hope that would turn a little bitter when he found out later in the year that his old friend Dwight Eisenhower had wanted Lodge to run when Lodge had interpreted it as simply the general wanting someone from the East to run against Goldwater.

When Lodge announced his decision to come back, there had been no dearth of candidates to take his place, including Robert Kennedy, who was still trying to find mission and duty and purpose in the postassassination days (Johnson wrote him a compassionate note saying he could not risk the dangers to Kennedy’s life inherent in the Saigon job), and the Good Soldier Rusk, ready to resign and take the job of ambassador. When Taylor, who had been serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past two years and had accomplished all that could be achieved in that career, also volunteered, willing to peel off his four stars, Johnson gladly chose him. It was a time when he wanted to move things in Vietnam without really touching them, affect events while doing nothing; thus one moves names, celebrities, and what better name than Max Taylor, citizen-soldier, a liberal, an intellectual, a quoter of Greek, a man who knew something about war and politics, and above all a friend of the Kennedys’ (thus tying up Robert Kennedy even more; indeed some three years later, when Robert Kennedy began to dissent on the war, the Administration used Taylor to bring him back a step and a half). Better still, if one wanted to keep his options open, if there was going to be a decision to cut and run, then what better name under which to cloak it than Maxwell Taylor. A cool man in a cool era, Max Taylor.

Which was not the way he saw it. As far as American officials in Saigon were concerned, Taylor gave them their marching orders on July 9, almost immediately upon his arrival. He had summoned the mission council together, that group of a dozen Americans who ran the country, or tried to run it, and he briefed them on what he considered to be American objectives. There were, he said, four alternatives. The first was to throw in our hand and withdraw. The second was accommodation through negotiation, which he said was a sign of political weakness. The third was to take military action against the North, which could be done by the South Vietnamese air force, with or without U.S. participation, either in retaliation for specific acts of violence or as part of a general deterrent. These reprisals, he said, would threaten all that Ho Chi Minh had accomplished in his homeland in the last decade and could provide him with a strong incentive to change his mind. The fourth and final option was to improve and expand the in-country pacification program (i.e., within the South Vietnamese borders) with special emphasis on the so-called eight critical provinces. The U.S. government was, he said, following option four while preparing for alternative three. “No consideration is being given to alternatives one and two, because they are tantamount to accepting defeat,” Taylor said. “Failure in Southeast Asia would destroy and severely damage our standing elsewhere in the world.” With that he was finished; he had in effect told the men who would be running the operations in Saigon that we were not going to lose Vietnam, that negotiation was out of the question. We would stand. Among the men listening to him, there to get guidance, was his old protégé, the new commander of the U.S. military mission in Saigon. General William C. Westmoreland, a man who was neither brilliant nor, for that matter, presumptuous, would come away from the meeting with the belief that he had been told to hold Vietnam. Which in fact he had.

So for the third time Max Taylor would become a major player on Vietnam, which had begun in 1961 as a test case for the Administration’s new strategies of war, and Taylor more than anyone else had been the author. He had, at the start, been looking more for a limited war than a guerrilla war, but you took what you could get, and he was never too sharp on the distinction and the political significance of the latter. It was his military recommendations which Kennedy had partially followed in authorizing the advisory and support mission. Taylor had hand-picked Harkins, so that he himself could control the reporting from Saigon, a reporting system which he had not only orchestrated, but what was worse and more dangerous, come to believe. Taylor had been coolly critical about the Bay of Pigs because it was the work of other men and other agencies with other beliefs, but he would not, in turn, be so detached about Vietnam, which was his work, and where his reputation rode. He was almost the last person in the government to accept the failure—there is no other word—of the Kennedy limited commitment because in large part it was his failure and because he stood for the middle way, the limited war. The entire experiment in Vietnam had been based on the idea that a great power could get by with a small war in Asia. It was deep in the public mind and the minds of his military contemporaries that Taylor was, like Ridgway, a member of the Never Again Club: U.S. Army officers who, embittered by the frustrations of Korea, vowed that never again would they fight a land war on the Asian mainland without nuclear weapons. Thus if a small war failed, the failure would be one of doctrine; more, it would play to the advantage of the more militant men in the Pentagon who believed you had to use greater quantities of force, total force if necessary.

Thus in 1964 his pessimism was not so great as might have been expected; if things were perhaps not going well, he did not see them as going that badly. In the first few months after his arrival in Vietnam he was not as pessimistic as Westmoreland, because he was tied to past optimism, which Westmoreland was not, and because he feared the consequences of the failure of the advisory and support mission, which Westmoreland, ready and just a little eager to be a commander, did not. Taylor did not in mid-1964 particularly believe in the bombing, thinking that it would lack military effectiveness—certainly in interdiction—nor was he particularly enthusiastic about the idea of combat troops. So even before he left for Saigon, Taylor wanted to maintain the kind of commitment which already existed. He talked openly with a handful of Pentagon reporters about the bombing, telling them he was against it (some of the other Chiefs were already pushing it). It was likely to be ineffective, and as far as interdiction went, it was more difficult to interdict than the Air Force thought, he said. He was more of an authority on that particular subject than he wanted to be, having served as an Army general in Korea and having been hit by Chinese divisions which the Air Force had failed to interdict. Though he would later become an advocate of the bombing, during much of 1964 he was a critic, particularly of its use in a military sense. He was uneasy about it politically, since it might involve us more deeply, and simultaneously take too much of the burden and psychological responsibility for the war from the South Vietnamese, a factor which always bothered him.

He changed his views on the bombing in the latter half of 1964, and after that to a limited degree on sending combat troops. It was a crucial change in the cast of characters. For as a member of the Never Again Club, the linear descendant of Matt Ridgway, whose proudest boast was that he had helped keep us out of the French Indochina war, Taylor was, when he became ambassador, the most prestigious American then in uniform. Max Taylor before a Senate committee would have been a powerful advocate for the decision not to escalate, but when he turned, the President lost a compelling reason for staying out. At the very end, in the final rounds of decision making, Taylor voiced doubts about the use of combat troops, but by then it would all be beyond him. He would be replaced by other, more powerful players, and at the moment when his word carried weight, he had approved the escalation. His role was vital: Washington is a gossipy town both in and outside the government, and the coming of the Xerox machine has made it more so; so when Taylor’s cables came in during the last part of 1964 calling for bombing, they had a profound effect upon the bureaucracy.

The reasons why he changed were varied; an awareness of the failure in the South, an irresistible pressure to justify what you are doing, to compensate for the latest miscalculation, which carries you on further and further past cutoff points without knowing they have been passed. Too much had already been committed, too many men, too much honor, too much prestige, too many white crosses to turn back. And he changed, too, because he had changed constituencies. He had gone from Washington and become a spokesman for the American community in Saigon, living in that intense, almost irrational atmosphere of men who talked only to themselves and others like them, and who came to believe that whatever else, Vietnam should not be lost, and for whom the domestic problems of the United States were quite secondary. From Saigon the United States seemed distant and small, Vietnam was the important thing, the center of the universe; the careers and the decisions centered there. In Washington, if the particular men making the decisions did not have many ties to the poor and there were few representatives of the underclass at the meetings, there was at least a broader view of the United States and its needs, a certain sanity. Later, however, as the war progressed, the particularly hothouse, isolated quality of the Saigon military headquarters in Saigon and the American embassy would begin to find its counterpart in the White House and other centers of power in Washington (as the President rose and fell with events in Vietnam). So in the last months of 1964 Max Taylor changed; he had not intended to go this far but there was nowhere else to go, no more forks in the road, even for a supremely detached man like Maxwell Taylor.

Maxwell Davenport Taylor, the Kennedy general, impressive even in civilian clothes. The words to describe Max Taylor came easily to all journalists: Distinguished career. Soldier-statesman-intellectual. The New York Times’s “Man in the News” profile of Taylor when he went before the Fulbright committee, a profile so flattering that it was used in his lecture brochure, was titled “Soldier and Statesman,” and naturally, under the photograph, there was, God save the mark, this caption: “Somewhere between Virgil and Clausewitz.” It began, not untypically for him:

It was characteristic of General Maxwell Davenport Taylor, star witness today at the Fulbright committee, that he quoted Polybius, a Greek historian of the pre-Christian era. “It is not the purpose of war to annihilate those who provoke it, but to cause them to mend their ways,” General Taylor quoted. . . . General Taylor’s reference was characteristic because he has long been known as a soldier-scholar, equally familiar with Polybius and Virgil as with Caesar and Clausewitz. When he was superintendent at West Point in the late 1940s he advised cadets to study the dissenting opinions of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes . . .

A striking-looking man. Always in fine shape, tennis racket in hand, always ready to play tennis, to stay lean and trim. Very good at getting junior officers to play tennis with him. Very correct, almost curt. “Major, tennis tomorrow at three?” “Yes, sir.” And then tennis for an hour, the major exercising Taylor, just like a masseur giving a work-out. The hour over, still very correct and curt. No friendship. “Thank you, Major. Tomorrow at three?”

Not a favorite of other generals, who thought him aloof and self-centered and did not entirely like him, never one of the boys; the other generals uneasy during the Kennedy years about whether Taylor represented Kennedy or them, whether their views were getting through. Not a man to relax, not even in those moments when there might have been time, flying across the ocean in old propeller airplanes. While the other officers would gossip and talk shop, who had which command, who was on the way up, there Max Taylor would be, reading a German magazine. Even when he finished reading, would he come over and talk, be with the boys? No sir, he would sit back and take out a pack of small cards, look at a card, and look out the window, and then look back at the card again. Max was memorizing Japanese. Will power. Discipline, always discipline. Different from the other generals. The others were not surprised. They had gone to school with him at the Point and even then, as a young boy from Keytesville, Missouri, he was different. All business, all ambition, cold as ice, determined; he was going to be someone.

He had had a flawless career. He was fourth in his graduating class at West Point, and was voted “most learned” in his senior year. But he was not just one of those bright boys who are at the top of their class but who fade as they get into the other, more demanding world of military command; rather, this was a fine mind in an officer who had the capacity to command and to lead, a man who would come on quickly in the middle stages of his career, taking off when he became a colonel. Taylor graduated in 1922, shortly after one war and nineteen years before the next one. It was a time when George Marshall had changed the Army and was determined to open the doors of learning to his officer corps, doors which might ordinarily have been closed. Marshall, who was dissatisfied with the leadership of World War I, believed in expanding the mind and the man in preparation for command in an ever more complicated modern world and army.

Taylor’s mind was first-rate; not, in the view of some of his contemporaries, a particularly restless or doubting one, or one tuned to the disorder of the world, wondering why that disorder existed, but rather one tuned to the order, to control the disorder, a mind to master facts rather than challenge them, an attitude which was entirely within the traditions of his service. It was as if it were all a matter of will power, learning a remote language and learning it quickly, but perhaps little knowledge or curiosity about the mores of the people who spoke the language, what moved them and why. The result was that despite his travels he was a surprisingly unchanged and rigid man, and when he came to Vietnam in 1961 he saw it more in terms of his World War II and Korean experiences than in terms of the French experience. His recommendations were based largely on how to exploit the new technology, how to make the Vietnamese army more mobile. He was a man without much sense of feel or nuance, but that was not readily apparent; instead, he seemed by comparison with other generals to be a vastly superior man. He was very good at languages, it added enormously to the legend that Max Taylor was an intellectual and a linguist, fluent in several languages, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German and Italian. He had linguistic control without any feeling for the people: people were to be molded.

He had a fine peacetime record between the wars, this serious, disciplined young man, who seemed apart from much of the peacetime Army, and the slots were good and the superiors impressed. When the Japanese invaded China, and Colonel Joseph Stilwell needed a Japanese-speaking aide, Captain Maxwell Taylor was sent out in 1937. They got along well. Taylor found himself, besides other responsibilities, charged with being something of a diplomatic buffer between the irascible Stilwell and the turbulent world around him. Taylor handled the Stilwell assignment well; clearly he was an unusual man of unusual abilities. George Marshall, who was then keeping a little black book where he entered the names of particularly able young officers whom he planned to push ahead to command if war came (so that many of the best of the World War II generals were catapulted to command ahead of nominally more senior men), made a note about Taylor. When World War II came, Taylor was ready, an airborne commander, the best of the best, part of that elite group which would dominate the Army command during the postwar years (Ridgway, Gavin, Taylor, Westmoreland). At the time of the Italian campaign, when an airdrop of the 82nd Airborne into Rome was a possibility, Eisenhower chose Major General Taylor for a special mission behind the German lines because he spoke the language and was a cool officer who would not lose his head. Taylor performed the mission, moved past German positions by PT boat, slipped into Rome, and returned back to Eisenhower’s headquarters, having recommended against the drop. It was a mission which caught the particular fancy of Robert Kennedy many years later. Taylor was later given command of the elite 101st Airborne (Westmoreland would later command it), while Gavin, his chief rival in ability and dash, had the 82nd, both of them dropping in Normandy on D-Day. (Years later, when Taylor was at the White House, the question arose of whether to keep the Davy Crockett—a two-man nuclear weapon, a nuclear bazooka really—in the military inventory. The White House staff, led by Carl Kaysen, wanted to get rid of the Crockett, and Taylor wanted to know why Kaysen was unhappy. “Because it makes a very big bang for such a small outfit,” Kaysen said. “What do you mean?” Taylor asked. “Well, suppose a corporal and a sergeant get cut off from their regular unit and become surrounded—do we really know enough about them, about what’s going on in their heads, to give them a nuclear weapon?” Taylor answered, “I’ve been a troop commander and I’ve never been out of touch with any unit in my command,” which left Kaysen amazed, wondering about all those little units scattered across the French farmland on D-Day. But Taylor was, Kaysen noted, different from other generals even on this; he had asked, Who doesn’t like it and why? not What do you know about it?)

Taylor had been at home when the 101st was cut off during the Battle of the Bulge and was rushed back just as the division was rejoined. He came out of the war with his career on the way up (at the end of the war he had moved to deactivate the 82nd and have the 101st make the victory parade through New York, but Gavin had managed to switch those roles, so it was the 82nd, not the 101st, which marched before cheering millions). Ahead of him were the choice assignments which go only to an up-and-coming officer. Superintendent of West Point, a post which only the truly anointed get, then first U.S. commander in Berlin, another plum assignment, and a highly political one (where he became a close friend of William Draper’s, a former Assistant Secretary of War, who was working with General Clay and who was extremely influential in the redevelopment of Europe. Draper took a special interest in Taylor’s career, helping him to get a job at Mexican Power and Light Company in 1959, and then eventually the job at Lincoln Center, which was in part designed to bring him into the New York area and to meet influential people). During the Korean War he was given command of the Eighth Army at the time hostilities were drawing to a close. He sensed accurately the political balance of the war, took his troops to the 38th parallel and a little beyond, and then waited for the political disposition of the war. He went on from there to Tokyo to command all ground forces in Japan, Korea and Okinawa, and finally, in 1955, with Ridgway in open conflict with the other Chiefs and the Eisenhower Administration, Taylor was brought home to become Chief of Staff of the Army, the most coveted position within his profession.

Taylor is different from most generals. A loner. A man with a broader view of the military role, with a sense of the balance between the military and civilian, and the subordination of the military to American politics; a belief that the military must adjust to the civilian side and must not try and fight the greater organism (though the war which he helped to plan would in many of its ironies do more to isolate the military from the larger organism and make it a separate entity with separate values and requirements than anything in recent history; it would almost single-handedly undo much of the work that men like Marshall and Taylor himself had done in trying to liberalize and broaden the Army as an institution, and encourage a broader range of officers). If he was not particularly well liked by some of his contemporaries, there was nonetheless an almost universal respect for him; more important, he was liked and respected by high-level civilians. He was in fact, and this was one of the keys to his success, a general that civilians liked and felt at ease with, and trusted; he was thus a political general in the classic sense, the way Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower were, able to go to the limits of one constituency and work as a bridge to another, to understand the needs, limits and tastes of civilians and give them what they need. MacArthur had tried to be a political general too, but it had never worked. He had been too brazen; he had believed his own speeches. He had tried to adapt the greater organism to the values, styles and beliefs of the smaller one, believing that this was possible, that the harder, more rigid, more openly patriotic mores of the military would triumph in civilian life, that the civilians were ready and waiting for this kind of leadership and would rally to it given a chance. MacArthur had terrified vast numbers of people; and was a complete political failure. It was never possible to think of MacArthur without his uniform, whereas it was always possible to think of Marshall and Eisenhower and Taylor in civies. A high-level civilian dealing with MacArthur would always know that there was no give, that any accommodation would have to come from the civilian, whereas with men like Taylor there would be accommodation, flexibility. Some of these men had, after all, had plenty of chances to work in Washington as young officers, to study in the politically charged atmosphere there, lobbying, writing speeches, meeting congressmen and senators. Ike, for instance, friendly, easy grin, good mind, good writer, had been a fine lobbyist and a very good speech writer (“Remember those great speeches MacArthur made from the Philippines?” he once told a friend, a rare moment when the greater inner ego flashed outside. “I wrote all those”).

Marshall had dominated one era, and now Taylor seemed on paper to be part of that tradition. Since he was too proud to wear a hearing aid, he was denied a political career of his own. Besides, he had never returned from a triumphal war like Eisenhower; the wars where he played a major role, Korea and Vietnam, were reflections of a modern age, frustrating, messy, unsatisfactory, unheroic except to the men who had fought there. Yet he had managed to reach the summit of a career, to be the leading military officer of an era. Eisenhower made him Chief of Staff of the Army, Kennedy brought him back to Washington and then made him Chairman of the JCS, Johnson sent him to Saigon as ambassador. And in 1968, after that war cost Johnson his Presidency and Richard Nixon had been elected, there he was in Washington, with his own office in the Executive Office Building (his title was Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board), advising Nixon on Vietnam. Pictured going in and out of National Security Council meetings. A great survivor.

He was always a great survivor; he had a capacity to meet a crisis head-on and survive. Nothing had shown this better than the major power struggle within the military which took place in the fifties; it was an unusual test of him and his beliefs. At the time, Eisenhower had been President for more than two years, and despite the fact that a West Point graduate was in the White House, the morale of the Army was very low. It was the golden age of the Air Force; Ike was cutting the budget, promising a bigger bang for a buck, and there was an emphasis on massive retaliation. The military seemed prepared to fight the biggest war of all, either that or no war, a political policy made somewhat simpler by the fact that the Republicans under Eisenhower could foster a policy like this and not be charged with being soft, for spending inadequately on the nation’s defenses. The Republicans were never on the defensive on the issue of patriotism. The coming of the military-industrial complex, the big new contracts awarded the Air Force, had given it far more muscle on the Hill than the other branches of the service, and the Army’s roles and budget were being sharply reduced. There was a feeling among many of the Army’s top officers that it was now dangerously close to not being able to fulfill its functions, that it could not fight intermediate, brush-fire wars. This had caused much unhappiness in Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway, who retired in 1955 after one frustrating tour; his farewell statement, a harsh critique of the inflexibility of the Eisenhower policies, was held back by Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, who made it a classified document, but a young officer smuggled it out to the press. It was a tense time.

With Ridgway retiring in June, Taylor was called back from Tokyo by Wilson for a long talk, which reflected how well Wilson understood the coming political problems for an Army Chief of Staff. (“He then began to cross-examine me on my readiness to carry out civilian orders even when contrary to my own views. After thirty-seven years of service without evidence of insubordination I had no difficulty of conscience in reassuring him, but I must say I was surprised to be put through such a loyalty test,” Taylor would later write in The Uncertain Trumpet.) Shortly thereafter he was made Chief of Staff.

Taylor’s moves were going to be watched by the Army command, but by now none more closely than a group of talented young colonels which had been assembled by the Army as a special secretariat for the Chief of Staff, as if to be his political-intellectual planning staff, to decide what the Army’s needs were, what its budget should be, and to evaluate the proposals of the Air Force and the Navy. This was known as the Coordinating group, a new office prompted by the fact that the military world had become infinitely more complicated, the range and sophistication of missions and problems had gone beyond the range of a few overworked generals; it was in effect the coming of new managerial planning techniques to the once happenstance and more leisurely planning of the U.S. Army.

The young officers, all colonels on the way up, had been carefully selected for this secretariat; they were the pick of the Army, all of them certain to make general; all but one were West Pointers, all in the top 10 percent of their promotion class, with good combat records and staff service, and intellectual capacity. Many were working on their master’s degrees. They saw the Army withering away beneath them; they believed, as Taylor did, that massive retaliation did not fit a complex world, that the world would be unstable and that the future for the Army was its capacity to fight brush-fire wars in places like Algeria and Indochina. The sense of rebellion against the drift of the Army had started informally with two or three of them discussing it, and finding their own doubts and concerns shared by others. They were not prompted by any parochial conviction, by Army chauvinism or search for career advancement; indeed it might and finally did end some promising careers. They were concerned about what they felt was the most serious question an officer could face: whether or not the Army was able to perform its mission.

After a while the colonels began to meet more regularly and more formally, keeping notes, and by the summer of 1955 they were putting together papers on the Army’s problems; they discovered that they had a consensus not only among themselves but among their contemporaries throughout the Army. They found little response among most of the senior officers. Yes, agreement that things didn’t look good at all, but a warning that they were treading on dangerous ground by challenging the policies of the Administration. The generals, the colonels decided, had their stars and wanted more, and were no longer sufficiently restless. Only one general gave them encouragement, James Gavin, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, a man who believed above all in mobility and who was bothered by the same frustrations as the colonels. He listened to them, encouraged them, and served in an unofficial way as their adviser, using them as his own sounding board.

It was at this point that Taylor came home; the colonels were curious as to what this would mean. The Army grapevine word was that Taylor was good, and might, being an old airborne man, be extremely sympathetic. So when Taylor returned in the summer and brought with him the draft of a paper called “A National Military Policy,” the colonels became excited: here was the man they had been looking for; here was a new Chief of Staff saying exactly what they had been saying, bothered by the same things, coming up with the same answers. And here was a man who would fight for his beliefs; he would not be doing all this unless he intended to fight (the program as outlined in his paper was in essence what he would call for in The Uncertain Trumpet). What impressed the colonels the most was that this was not staff work, a vague paper whipped up by an ambitious staff for an indifferent or reluctant general officer; this was by the man himself. They knew this because the paper was so poorly typed that they had asked a staff officer if he knew who was responsible for all the typos, and he told them that Taylor had written and typed it himself on the way back from Japan.

Taylor had turned his paper over to the colonels for critique. They tore it apart, added, cut, sharpened it, and wondered whether it was too anti-Air Force in tone. When they finally finished working on it and handed it back to Taylor, they asked him what he planned to do with it. He said he thought he could issue it to the Army for consideration. The colonels dissented sharply (in retrospect, said one of them years later, “I shudder to think how outspoken we were, a bunch of colonels standing up to the Chief of Staff, telling him what he had to do. But it was a reflection of how serious we thought the matter was”); they told him it was not enough, that Taylor was in this too deeply, that the Army wanted and needed more than a paper stating what it already knew. They suggested that he turn the paper over to the other Chiefs for comment. Taylor agreed, and in early 1956 this was done. They, not surprisingly, did not respond at all. “Noted,” they would scribble on it upon receipt, which disappointed Taylor, who felt he had been fair and objective.

For a time the issue seemed to stall, and then the most intense and driven of the colonels, a young officer named Donovan Yeuell who had just come back from four years in Germany and picked up a master’s degree at Georgetown, started to push the problem again. Yeuell watched for a chance to be alone with Taylor, and found out that the Chief was going to the New Orleans area for three days to be with the Corps of Engineers; Yeuell and another colonel got themselves assigned to the trip. They bided their time, and then one day, which Taylor spent sightseeing on an old paddle wheeler, they cornered him. He was alone and there was no place to hide. They asked him if he believed enough in the paper, which he had written and they had refined, to fight for it. He said he did. At this point they told him they needed a controlled and deliberate campaign to inform the press and the public. It would not have to be traced to Taylor, they claimed. They had outlined about twenty steps of the campaign, including congressional and journalistic connections. The Army, they said, had more friends on the Hill than it realized; people like Senator Henry Jackson were sympathetic and wanted to help, but they needed some help from the Army, two- and three-star generals, and these generals would have to come into the public eye. They told Taylor there would be some heat, that he could not go up against Eisenhower, Radford, Twining and Charlie Wilson without taking heat, but the case to be made was very strong. Though Taylor was noncommittal, they found him very sympathetic during the three-hour session, helping to construct the scenario, saying he knew this particular senator or that columnist, vetoing their idea of ghostwritten anti-Air Force articles (“How the Air Force Failed in Interdiction in Korea”) as too risky.

At the end of the paddle-boat tour, Taylor looked at them and said, “Okay, I understand what you’ve said. Now put it in a memo.” Yeuell did, and shortly afterward there was a paper on the new military program, and on the public campaign for it. After Taylor signed it, he called in Yeuell and said, “Yeuell, you’re really asking me to stick my neck out.” Yeuell answered that if he fought for the program he would have an Army, otherwise he could spend his years simply sitting in the office (“I was a real believer, full of myself and my beliefs—willing to put my career and my life on the line for them,” he would recall fifteen years later). Taylor read the memo, agreed that it was an accurate account of what he had committed himself to do and signed a paper to that effect, thus committing himself to a program of exposure for the Army viewpoint.

Meanwhile the colonels were getting set up to go ahead with their program. The head of the secretariat was a brigadier named Lyal Metheny who worked regularly with the Secretary of the General Staff, another brigadier named William C. Westmoreland (Westy was in effect Taylor’s secretary, determining who did and who did not see the Chief). The colonels themselves were now full of enthusiasm; they were all aboard with the exception of one young officer named William Depuy who was uneasy about the whole thing and who felt that his contemporaries were pushing too hard and were going to get their superiors in hot water (Depuy would go on to a particularly noteworthy career, serving as Westmoreland’s chief of operations in Vietnam, and being in effect Westmoreland’s egghead, helping to design the search-and-destroy strategy).

The colonels began to collect papers backing up their points, and began to write articles hinting at the new strategy and outlining the Army’s role. Similarly, Taylor had begun to send them around the country in groups of two to tell other officers at the posts, and particularly the service schools—which are vital to the Army’s intellectual life, the centers of thought, where the hand-picked meet with the hand-picked—what was happening. There they explained the new military program, and more important, that they were going to fight for it. The question everywhere was a simple one: Is he going to fight? Is the Chief with us? They assured everyone that he was. The question then became how best to go about the public campaign. Since 1956 was an election year, they wanted it to be a campaign issue and decided to gear up as quickly as possible for a national campaign. Yeuell started talking to his brother-in-law Wallace Carroll, then news editor of the New York Times Washington bureau. Carroll said that the Times would not move unless the Army high command was behind it; the Times would not report just for restless colonels. Slowly, the Times people were introduced to the generals, assuring the Times that the Army was behind the program. When the Times was finally confident of the depth of the commitment, Carroll asked for some of the staff papers, which the colonels turned over and which became the basis for articles by Anthony Leviero in May 1956 (“Inter-Service Rivalry Flashed”).

The story hit the Pentagon like an explosion. Wilson was in a rage, and the Army brass quickly folded. The Coordinating group was immediately broken up. The colonels were ordered not to come to their offices. Yeuell’s files were cleaned out and burned. Wilson told reporters, “There’s a bunch of eager beavers down in the Army staff, and if they stick their heads out again I’ll chop them off.” Within the Army command the colonels were told that Westmoreland, who was halfway in and halfway out of the cabal, had assured Taylor that he would take care of the colonels for him and clean it all out. Yeuell, who was investigated three times in one year, went to the War College a year ahead of schedule, but eventually lost faith in the Army and drifted out of it. Metheny, one of the other leaders, was immediately transferred to a meaningless post in Florida; the others were quickly and quietly switched in their assignments.

Later that week in May, Wilson called a press conference and assembled the Chiefs to prove that they were all on the team; Taylor, asked if there had been a revolt, answered that there was none (which was technically true, since it had been an authorized rebellion) and also quite carefully failed to repudiate the colonels; he walked a very tight rope indeed. But he did not fight for the colonels, and the campaign was dropped then and there. Later that year Taylor went to see Eisenhower to ask him to reappraise their defense policies, with Ike reportedly asking what was wrong with them. But Taylor stayed on, served two consecutive two-year tours as Chief of Staff, and then in 1959, after he had left, wrote The Uncertain Trumpet, thus strengthening his reputation. To many younger officers, however, he had turned out a major disappointment, a man who was the ablest person to sit in that office for many years but who had not fought for what he believed and who finally played the game, which he did rather skillfully, becoming closer and closer to the Democrats as Eisenhower’s second term wore on, and as the Democrats picked up the issue of preparedness. This helped link him with the Kennedys, and it would become an article of faith among the Kennedy people (for instance, in the Schlesinger book) that Taylor had resigned when he had in fact retired.

But there was less feeling for him in the Army and even among some of the other Kennedy-style generals, especially Jim Gavin, who had also been a critic of the defense policies in the 1950s. In fact, Gavin testified before the Johnson Senate Preparedness Subcommittee hearings; when Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania asked him about casualties in a nuclear war, Gavin answered that there would be 425 million casualties. The hearings were supposed to be private and censored, but someone had conspired to make the Gavin testimony public, and the Japanese were horrified because of all the fall-out which would blow across their land. When the testimony surfaced, Gavin became the scapegoat for the Army’s position and was in effect forced to leave the Army. He did so with a certain bitterness, feeling that Taylor had sacrificed him (and there was a feeling among some other general officers that Westmoreland, who was half a Taylor protégé and half a Gavin protégé, had rushed the resignation through a little precipitously). The result was a certain division within the airborne clique in the Army, and a lingering distaste in Gavin for Taylor.

Taylor had been very helpful to President Kennedy in the early days, Robert Kennedy would say in 1968 (when he was running against the war and reporters haunted him with questions about Taylor and the origins of the war). Which he had. He had come in as military adviser to the President, a filter to the Joint Chiefs, but he had not remained there long. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had relied on him as his chief investigating officer; Taylor had been very thorough in analyzing the failure of the breakdown in planning, though in retrospect his report seemed to deal too little with the political realities of such a venture, instead being concentrated on the technical failings (not enough ammunition; the fact that like most green troops the brigade had fired too quickly and used up too much ammunition). But he had been of value to the Kennedys and McNamara in trying to reshape the grand design of strategy, away from nuclear dependence, and he had given the change in policies a certain respectability; he was an imposing figure to have on your side. In trying to gain some kind of control over the military, Taylor had been a considerable help, and part of the counterinsurgency fad, which Bobby Kennedy promoted in 1961, was an attempt to work outside the existing bureaucracy to Kennedyize the military programs, as if to take some of the planning and decision making away from the Chiefs, who were not Kennedy people.

It quickly became clear to Kennedy that this was not adequate and that he needed more control of the military. Since Taylor as a civilian assistant lacked real leverage, he soon returned to uniform as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His was not an easy role, caught as he was between the conflicting pressures of two very different constituencies: the Chiefs with their totality of commitment to the early lessons of the Cold War, the Communists were enemies, the only thing that mattered was force, and maximum application of it, and the Kennedy Administration, nervously and gingerly and slowly beginning to move away from some of the rules of the Cold War. Taylor was particularly valuable to the Administration on nuclear control, and among the White House confidants of the President there was a feeling that if Taylor was not exactly the intellectual he was supposed to be (“He is a very handsome man, and a very impressive one,” said Averell Harriman in 1967, “and he is always wrong”), there was genuine warmth toward him based more than anything on the test-ban treaty. He had been very helpful then, and in June 1963, when Kennedy decided to give the American University speech in which he would announce that the United States would not be the first to test in the atmosphere, a White House staff member had the job of clearing it with McNamara, Gilpatric and Taylor. He called the general and explained what they were planning to say and what they were doing and suggested that Taylor might want to check with the Chiefs; Taylor answered no, he did not think he needed to check with them, since it was basically a political matter for the President to decide, not a military issue. It was a very special act, a mark of his deference to the President on something the President cared deeply about; Taylor knew that if he asked the Chiefs they would object strenuously, so he decided not to ask them at all. As far as the White House was concerned it was Taylor at his best, and there was a mutuality of gratitude.

This had been a happy time for him, back in uniform, working with a President he liked, on particularly good terms with the President and even better ones with the Attorney General (Jack Kennedy had once said that he would stick with his old friends once in the White House, that the White House, the center of everyone’s desire for influence, was not a good place to develop new friends, but McNamara and Taylor were the prime exceptions to that. They were the professional associates who had bridged the gap, a gap which held a certain element of good old-fashioned snobbery to it, and became personal friends. In Robert Kennedy’s case his friendship with Taylor was even more remarkable, since Taylor was not known for having close friendships of any kind, particularly not with men more than twenty years his junior. Friendship with younger men was not normally something he encouraged, but then, there are exceptions to every rule). After the assassination, Taylor and McNamara would visit Jackie regularly, working very hard to keep her spirits up, visits that she particularly prized. And later, when Taylor became ambassador to Vietnam, the friendship with Bob Kennedy continued, and a friend of Taylor’s would remember one moment with the general that was in stark contrast to the everyday Taylor, usually so aloof: the scene was the airport when Taylor was returning to Saigon after a visit to Washington. Bobby and Ethel and innumerable children were there to see him off, arriving a few minutes before Taylor, rushing aboard the plane and leaving notes for him pinned everywhere, hidden here, folded under this seat, and on the ceiling, notes of fondness and trivial jokes. When Taylor, normally so cold and distant, found them, he was absolutely transformed, laughing and affectionate. If there were holes in his discipline, it should not be for anyone below the rank of Attorney General.

But it was no wonder that Robert Kennedy liked him, that Jack and Jackie had liked him; that Lyndon Johnson felt comfortable with him, that he was one more reassuring figure in that era. He was so reasonable and so professional. The very best of the breed. The right officer for the American century. He seemed to embody the American officer of the era; he gave off vibrations of control and excellence and competence, and indeed he seemed to represent something that went even beyond him, the belief of the United States military that they were the best in the business. Wars on the plains of Europe and the jungles of the South Pacific were behind them, the struggles against the Chinese hordes in Korea loomed, in retrospect, increasingly as a victory. Now we were at the apex, the new technology added to the old valor, the average officer now the graduate of an endless series of service schools, bearing graduate degrees from America’s great universities. So Taylor had seemed to be speaking almost for the American era in June 1963 when he gave the commencement address at West Point; he had chosen as his topic “The American Soldier,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 had spoken on “The American Scholar.” As Emerson had declared American scholarship free from dependence upon Europe, so now Taylor said he was doing the same for the American soldier:

I have often felt that a West Point graduation should sometime have been the occasion for a similar address dedicated to the American Soldier—and I use that term broadly this morning to mean the American man-at-arms be he soldier, sailor, airman or marine. Like other forms of American scholarship, American military thought was also once in European bondage, but likewise has become emancipated. Our Civil War marked the turning point in this trend. Drawing confidence from the experience acquired in that war, American military leadership became more and more independent of the European tradition which once controlled its thinking and limited the soar of its initiative . . .

Yet as I said at the outset, no orator has thus far seen fit to memorialize the deeds of the American Soldier and of American arms. Even if an Emerson were here today with this purpose—and all too clearly one is not—any oration in praise of the independence of the American soldier would be largely postlude to the present fact of the ascendant role of America in military affairs.

Abroad this ascendancy of American arms and American military concepts is accepted as a matter of course—it is imperfectly or reluctantly recognized at home. Abroad the successes of our armed forces in World War II and Korea and the visible deterrent power of our arms today as shown in the Cuban crisis have enforced this appreciation of American primacy—for in the military field as in other fields of endeavor it is success that brings conviction.

Abroad, the success of the American military effort has led to an inquiry into its causes, into the form of its concepts, and the nature of its tactics and techniques. Hence allied and neutral representatives send their representatives to our military schools in vast numbers—last year approximately 17,000 students came to the United States to learn the American way of waging war and of keeping the peace. These same countries draw heavily on our military literature to guide their own studies. A few decades ago we in the United States learned from foreign military text books. In the Superintendent’s quarters here at West Point some of you have no doubt seen the desk of Sylvanus Thayer, the great superintendent whom we know as the Father of the Military Academy. There you have noted some of the military texts to which he turned for counsel in administering West Point at about the same time that Emerson was delivering his oration in Cambridge. Most of these books are in French, a few in the English of the mother country. Today, the library of any foreign military academy is apt to be filled with books written in the English of the military centers of the United States. Last month I stood on a hilltop in Iran and with the military representatives of the CENTO alliance watched with the Shah a military demonstration presented by the Iranian Army and Air Force. The explanation to the assembled international audience was made in English by Iranian officers in uniforms similar to the U.S. field uniform and the briefing bore the unmistakable mark of Fort Benning or Fort Sill. One sensed the influence of the American Soldier in his role as teacher of the armies of freedom.

Yet, said Taylor, though Americans boast of all accomplishments and are not an immodest people, there were few who boasted of the accomplishments of the American soldier, great though they were,

the lands, seas and air spaces which they have conquered and the prisoners which they have taken dwarf the deeds of the great conquerors which provided the familiar faces in the history books of our childhood. But still no orations are devoted at home to the ascendancy of the American Soldier. Why is this so?

Our incomplete answer would be that we Americans are made uneasy by the responsibilities of military leadership. As a nation we are still the prey of clichés about men on horseback and of the dangers of the military to democracy. We still have trouble distinguishing between what is military and what is militaristic; between what is peaceful and what is pacifistic. We must perhaps progress further toward maturity before there will be wholehearted acceptance at home of the continuing need for a large and respected military profession in the United States in the same way as there is a need for a class of businessmen, professional men, scientists, clergymen, and scholars. Uncle Sam has become a world renowned soldier in spite of himself . . .

If the Kennedy Administration had come to power to be the rationalizers of the great new liberal Democratic empire, then they had found the perfect general; their social and academic hubris was matched by his military self-confidence. His were not the attitudes of a man about to be deterred from his path by a little peasant revolutionary Army. Not in the American century.