The Cold War: Chief of Staff

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In 1949, Taylor moved on to command U.S. forces in West Berlin. Speaking German well—he installed an instructor at his luncheon table—Taylor impressed West Berliners with his skill as an emissary and his tough treatment of Communist capers. When Communist students in East Berlin made plans to stage a provocative march on the western half of the city, Taylor cooled them off in advance by holding elaborate riot-control drills. Taylor won over the students by offering them books and tickets to shows in West Berlin. After a brief tour in the Pentagon, Taylor went to Korea in 1953 as the commander of the Eighth Army in the waning months of the war, started his own effective program of rebuilding hospitals and schools, and helped train the Korean Army. At one ceremony activating new Korean divisions, Taylor astonished Syngman Rhee by giving a rousing speech in Korean.

Then General Matt Ridgway was forced into retirement as Chief of Staff after campaigning too loudly for a larger Army. In June 1955, Maxwell Taylor was picked by President Eisenhower, his old friend and admirer, to be the Army Chief, and he began to fight the only losing battle of his career. "I think Napoleon himself could have been Chief of Staff in that period and looked like a bum," says one able Army colonel. Taylor quickly found himself bracketed between Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, who undercut him constantly, and squabbling factions of officers, who campaigned publicly for their specialties, whether long-range missiles or one-man helicopters.

But Taylor soon found that his main opponent was Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the confidant of President Eisenhower. Radford was one of the prime exponents of the theory of massive nuclear retaliation, which had been originated by State Secretary John Foster Dulles. In The Uncertain Trumpet, Taylor calls Radford "an able and ruthless partisan," for the way he imposed the policy upon the Joint Chiefs.

Taylor got nowhere in his behind-the-scenes battle for a bigger Army and managed in the process to lose the friendship of Dwight Eisenhower. When he finally retired in 1959, Taylor said wryly: "For four years I have struggled to modernize the Army, and my success was limited. So I decided I would do one thing for the country and withdraw an obsolescent general from inventory."

Odds for Peace. Taylor soon proved that he could be at home outside the Army. He worked as chairman of the board of the Mexican Light and Power Co. until the Mexican government nationalized the company in 1960. He was looking around for a job as a college president last winter when he got an offer to head the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—a cultural oasis rising on Manhattan's West Side. Working in a totally strange field, Taylor still took firm command. Says Lincoln Center's Reginald Allen: "There's no question about it—he's the most stimulating leader I've ever met." Then in April came the call from President Kennedy and the job in the White House.