General Maxwell Taylor served at the nerve centers of US military policy
and Cold War strategy and experienced firsthand the wars in Korea and
Vietnam, as well as crises in Berlin and Cuba. Along the way he became
an adversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nuclear deterrence
strategy and a champion of President John F. Kennedy's shift toward
Flexible Response. Taylor also remained a public critic of defense
policy and civil-military relations into the 1980s and was one of the
most influential American soldiers, strategists, and diplomats. However,
many historians describe him as a politicized, dishonest manipulator
whose actions deeply affected the national security establishment and
had lasting effects on civil-military relations in the United States.
In Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam, author Ingo
Trauschweizer traces the career of General Taylor, a Kennedy White House
insider and architect of American strategy in Vietnam. Working with
newly accessible and rarely used primary sources, including the Taylor
Papers and government records from the Cold War crisis, Trauschweizer
describes and analyzes this polarizing figure in American history. The
major themes of Taylor's career, how to prepare the armed forces for
global threats and localized conflicts and how to devise sound strategy
and policy for a full spectrum of threats, remain timely and the
concerns he raised about the nature of the national security apparatus
have not been resolved.
