The Cold War: Chief of Staff

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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.