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.
"This is the best biography of one of America's most influential military leaders in the Cold War. Maxwell Taylor was supremely talented, but this biography elucidates the deep flaws in his thinking that contributed to American failures in Vietnam and other interventions. Taylor's experiences continue to influence current US debates about military power and foreign policy strategy. This is a book
Jeremi Suri, author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest O
"Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam is the definitive professional biography of General Maxwell Taylor, a World War II hero who as US Army Chief of Staff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and US ambassador in Saigon had an enormous impact on military policy and strategy in the Cold War and Vietnam. It is a vitally needed and timely commentary on the rise of the national securi
Peter Mansoor, General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History, The Ohio State Univ
"The first scholarly study of one of the Cold War's most important military strategists. Trauschweizer's painstaking research reveals Taylor's vital role in the post-World War II development of the US Army, national military policy, and the Vietnam War."
Brian McAllister Linn, author of Elvis's Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield
