The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  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.