The Cold War: Chief of Staff

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Taylor was exactly the man the President wanted to have around. Agreed Bobby Kennedy, the Administration's recruiting officer: "We need a man like Taylor to give things a cold and fishy eye." The problem was to put Taylor in a position to do just that. For a while, Kennedy toyed with the idea of replacing Lemnitzer with Taylor but gave it up because of the predictable explosion that the move would have touched off in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Finally, Kennedy created a special job for Taylor: Military Representative of the President.

Pentagon Battle. At the President's discretion, Taylor is available to give top-level, searching criticism on plans submitted by either the civilians in the White House or the military men in the Pentagon. So far, Bundy, Rostow & Co. have worked well with Taylor because they admire his brains and background. But the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are bracing for a fight: they see Taylor's appointment as a direct challenge to their authority.

Taylor left himself few allies in the Pentagon when he shucked his uniform and stormed back into civilian life in 1959. The Air Force is still enraged at his criticism of massive retaliation, calls his book "The Unclean Strumpet." Senior Pentagon officers as a whole were shocked by his scheme to scrap the Joint Chiefs of Staff in favor of a single Defense Chief of Staff. And most of the Army generals who supported Taylor's doctrine of flexible response have long since been transferred to other posts.

Says one former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Taylor was consistent, I'll say that for him. He never stopped pressing the case for limited war, and he never demonstrated much understanding of the other side of the picture. Well, he was wrong all the way, and he was consistent in that, too."

Hill Barrage. Military Analyst S.L.A. ("Slam") Marshall of the Detroit News, a retired brigadier general and one of the nation's leading military historians (The River and the Gauntlet), has serious reservations about the man he followed through Normandy, Holland, Belgium and Korea. "I think I know Max Taylor as well as any man in America. He was an extraordinary battle commander—the most tightly self-disciplined officer I ever knew. But Taylor is the wrong man for this job. Taylor is not a conciliator. He's actively interested in the exercise of power for his own sake."

On Capitol Hill, a regiment of Republicans, supported by some dissident Democrats, is already sighting and ready to open fire on Taylor at his first mistake. In part, the opposition to the general stems from his past attacks on General Dwight Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs, but a surprising amount of it is smoldering resentment of Taylor's reserved manner—as if any degree of introspection were a dangerous symptom indeed. "He was always a loner," says one Congressman. "He'd never mix with the fellows when we went on trips, drink a beer or join in chitchat. He'd go over in a corner of the plane and read a book." Says one Hill leader: "I see nothing but trouble ahead."