The Cold War: Chief of Staff

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By the Book. With storm signals like these slapping vigorously in dangerous winds, Kennedy and Taylor are picking their course with caution. Said Kennedy to an associate: "This appointment doesn't inject Taylor between me and the Pentagon until I assign him to a specific problem." Taylor, for his part, has assured the Joint Chiefs that he will help them get the President's ear, has promised to inform them about anything of substance he tells Kennedy.

The man most endangered by Taylor's appointment is Defense Secretary McNamara, the former Ford president who is working 72 hours a week to tighten civilian control over the Pentagon. McNamara has already alienated the Joint Chiefs by slashing across service boundaries and flouting traditions. If Taylor, in his turn, should cut him off from the President, McNamara would be floating in limbo. But since Taylor's appointment, three key policy papers requested by Kennedy have gone to the White House from the Pentagon. Kennedy had Taylor screen only one, and then instructed him to keep McNamara fully informed. "After that," said one White House staffer, "McNamara noticeably relaxed." Says one Pentagon official: "McNamara and Taylor are finding their minds work in much the same way. There's a good personal accommodation there."

In everything he did last week, Maxwell Taylor was following the military textbook rule of working through channels. Few soldiers have ever learned that book as well as Taylor, a man who leads not because he has the personal magnetism of a Patton or a Chennault, but because he earns the respect of his men by simple professional skill and dogged devotion to duty. "You just can't get close to him," says one man who has admired him for years. "Apparently he doesn't need that." Says another admirer: "He's strictly a West Point officer. He even kept his bearing one time when he got sick on some Atabrine pills. With his head in a pot, Maxwell Taylor still looked like a general."

Army v. Navy. An only child, Taylor was born to a struggling lawyer in Keytesville, Mo., and raised in Kansas City. As a toddler, he used to be enthralled by his one-armed grandfather's tales of riding with the Confederate cavalry of General Jo Shelby. Young Max was a solemn five when he announced to his mother: "When I'm big. I'm going to West Point—that's where the big boys go to be officers in the Army."

But when Taylor graduated from high school in 1917 with straight E's (for Excellent) in Latin, Greek and Spanish, he hedged his bet on West Point by also taking exams for Annapolis. He passed the Army's test but flunked the Navy's because of a vagueness about geography. Says Taylor: "If the Strait of Malacca had been in Europe, I might have been an admiral instead of a general."