A military strategist of the nuclear age
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he presented the military options and then conveyed the president’s blockade decision to the armed forces.
Maxwell Taylor was a U.S. Army officer who moved from airborne command in World War II to a central military and diplomatic role in the Cold War. He criticized the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear-heavy “New Look” and argued for stronger conventional forces and flexible response. Trusted by John F. Kennedy, he served as presidential military representative and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; during the Cuban Missile Crisis he joined EXCOMM, presented military options, and conveyed the president’s blockade decision to the armed forces. He later supported expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam, revealing both the reach and limits of Cold War military strategy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1922Second lieutenant, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- 1942–1945Commander, 82nd Airborne artillery; commanding general, 101st Airborne Division
- 1949–1951Commander of Allied troops in West Berlin
- 1953–1955Commander, Eighth United States Army; Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Administration
- 1955–1959Chief of Staff of the United States Army
- 1961–1962Military representative to the President
- 1962–1964Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; EXCOMM member
- 1964–1965U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam
Related historical events
The Pentomic Division: Army Reform as Chief of Staff
When Maxwell Taylor took office as U.S. Army Chief of Staff in July 1955, the Eisenhower administration's "New Look" allocated most military funding to the Air Force and Navy while leaving the Army relatively neglected. Taylor criticized that policy, yet he also pressed ahead with reorganizing the Army itself for a battlefield on which tactical nuclear weapons might be used. The "Pentomic" structure he designed divided a division into five battle groups, each of which contained five rifle companies. The aim was to shorten the time needed to organize an attack and thereby narrow the window in which an enemy could respond with a nuclear strike.
The first unit tested was the 101st Airborne Division, which Taylor had commanded in World War II. After test tables of organization for the airborne reorganization (ROTAD) appeared in August 1956, the 11th, 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were reorganized during 1957, and the Army's nine infantry divisions completed the new structure within that same year. The reorganization was contested from the outset. The span of control became too wide, the battalion level of command between company and regiment disappeared, and the cohesion of long-established regiments weakened. Field officers called the plan "ill started, ill fated and hopefully short lived," and some suspected it was a scheme by Taylor to increase the number of active divisions while actually cutting combat manpower.
Because the structure was the Chief of Staff's own creation, as Westmoreland later recalled, any officer who valued his career was reluctant to criticize it. After finishing his command of the 101st Airborne Division in 1960, Westmoreland recommended that the Pentomic structure be abolished; that December the Army began studying a new reorganization fitted to the Kennedy administration's "flexible response" doctrine, shifting to the ROAD structure by 1963. Taylor's Army reform, advanced against the New Look, ended a short life without resolving the problems he himself had diagnosed.