The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  With Ridgway retiring in June, Taylor was called back from Tokyo by Wilson for a long talk, which reflected how well Wilson understood the coming political problems for an Army Chief of Staff. (“He then began to cross-examine me on my readiness to carry out civilian orders even when contrary to my own views. After thirty-seven years of service without evidence of insubordination I had no difficulty of conscience in reassuring him, but I must say I was surprised to be put through such a loyalty test,” Taylor would later write in The Uncertain Trumpet.) Shortly thereafter he was made Chief of Staff.

  Taylor’s moves were going to be watched by the Army command, but by now none more closely than a group of talented young colonels which had been assembled by the Army as a special secretariat for the Chief of Staff, as if to be his political-intellectual planning staff, to decide what the Army’s needs were, what its budget should be, and to evaluate the proposals of the Air Force and the Navy. This was known as the Coordinating group, a new office prompted by the fact that the military world had become infinitely more complicated, the range and sophistication of missions and problems had gone beyond the range of a few overworked generals; it was in effect the coming of new managerial planning techniques to the once happenstance and more leisurely planning of the U.S. Army.

  The young officers, all colonels on the way up, had been carefully selected for this secretariat; they were the pick of the Army, all of them certain to make general; all but one were West Pointers, all in the top 10 percent of their promotion class, with good combat records and staff service, and intellectual capacity. Many were working on their master’s degrees. They saw the Army withering away beneath them; they believed, as Taylor did, that massive retaliation did not fit a complex world, that the world would be unstable and that the future for the Army was its capacity to fight brush-fire wars in places like Algeria and Indochina. The sense of rebellion against the drift of the Army had started informally with two or three of them discussing it, and finding their own doubts and concerns shared by others. They were not prompted by any parochial conviction, by Army chauvinism or search for career advancement; indeed it might and finally did end some promising careers. They were concerned about what they felt was the most serious question an officer could face: whether or not the Army was able to perform its mission.

  After a while the colonels began to meet more regularly and more formally, keeping notes, and by the summer of 1955 they were putting together papers on the Army’s problems; they discovered that they had a consensus not only among themselves but among their contemporaries throughout the Army. They found little response among most of the senior officers. Yes, agreement that things didn’t look good at all, but a warning that they were treading on dangerous ground by challenging the policies of the Administration. The generals, the colonels decided, had their stars and wanted more, and were no longer sufficiently restless. Only one general gave them encouragement, James Gavin, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, a man who believed above all in mobility and who was bothered by the same frustrations as the colonels. He listened to them, encouraged them, and served in an unofficial way as their adviser, using them as his own sounding board.

  It was at this point that Taylor came home; the colonels were curious as to what this would mean. The Army grapevine word was that Taylor was good, and might, being an old airborne man, be extremely sympathetic. So when Taylor returned in the summer and brought with him the draft of a paper called “A National Military Policy,” the colonels became excited: here was the man they had been looking for; here was a new Chief of Staff saying exactly what they had been saying, bothered by the same things, coming up with the same answers. And here was a man who would fight for his beliefs; he would not be doing all this unless he intended to fight (the program as outlined in his paper was in essence what he would call for in The Uncertain Trumpet). What impressed the colonels the most was that this was not staff work, a vague paper whipped up by an ambitious staff for an indifferent or reluctant general officer; this was by the man himself. They knew this because the paper was so poorly typed that they had asked a staff officer if he knew who was responsible for all the typos, and he told them that Taylor had written and typed it himself on the way back from Japan.

  Taylor had turned his paper over to the colonels for critique. They tore it apart, added, cut, sharpened it, and wondered whether it was too anti­Air Force in tone. When they finally finished working on it and handed it back to Taylor, they asked him what he planned to do with it. He said he thought he could issue it to the Army for consideration. The colonels dissented sharply (in retrospect, said one of them years later, “I shudder to think how outspoken we were, a bunch of colonels standing up to the Chief of Staff, telling him what he had to do. But it was a reflection of how serious we thought the matter was”); they told him it was not enough, that Taylor was in this too deeply, that the Army wanted and needed more than a paper stating what it already knew. They suggested that he turn the paper over to the other Chiefs for comment. Taylor agreed, and in early 1956 this was done. They, not surprisingly, did not respond at all. “Noted,” they would scribble on it upon receipt, which disappointed Taylor, who felt he had been fair and objective.

  For a time the issue seemed to stall, and then the most intense and driven of the colonels, a young officer named Donovan Yeuell who had just come back from four years in Germany and picked up a master’s degree at Georgetown, started to push the problem again. Yeuell watched for a chance to be alone with Taylor, and found out that the Chief was going to the New Orleans area for three days to be with the Corps of Engineers; Yeuell and another colonel got themselves assigned to the trip. They bided their time, and then one day, which Taylor spent sightseeing on an old paddle wheeler, they cornered him. He was alone and there was no place to hide. They asked him if he believed enough in the paper, which he had written and they had refined, to fight for it. He said he did. At this point they told him they needed a controlled and deliberate campaign to inform the press and the public. It would not have to be traced to Taylor, they claimed. They had outlined about twenty steps of the campaign, including congressional and journalistic connections. The Army, they said, had more friends on the Hill than it realized; people like Senator Henry Jackson were sympathetic and wanted to help, but they needed some help from the Army, two- and three-star generals, and these generals would have to come into the public eye. They told Taylor there would be some heat, that he could not go up against Eisenhower, Radford, Twining and Charlie Wilson without taking heat, but the case to be made was very strong. Though Taylor was noncommittal, they found him very sympathetic during the three-hour session, helping to construct the scenario, saying he knew this particular senator or that columnist, vetoing their idea of ghostwritten anti­Air Force articles (“How the Air Force Failed in Interdiction in Korea”) as too risky.

  At the end of the paddle-boat tour, Taylor looked at them and said, “Okay, I understand what you’ve said. Now put it in a memo.” Yeuell did, and shortly afterward there was a paper on the new military program, and on the public campaign for it. After Taylor signed it, he called in Yeuell and said, “Yeuell, you’re really asking me to stick my neck out.” Yeuell answered that if he fought for the program he would have an Army, otherwise he could spend his years simply sitting in the office (“I was a real believer, full of myself and my beliefs—willing to put my career and my life on the line for them,” he would recall fifteen years later). Taylor read the memo, agreed that it was an accurate account of what he had committed himself to do and signed a paper to that effect, thus committing himself to a program of exposure for the Army viewpoint.

  Meanwhile the colonels were getting set up to go ahead with their program. The head of the secretariat was a brigadier named Lyal Metheny who worked regularly with the Secretary of the General Staff, another brigadier named William C. Westmoreland (Westy was in effect Taylor’s secretary, determining who did and who did not see the Chief). The colonels themselves were now full of
enthusiasm; they were all aboard with the exception of one young officer named William Depuy who was uneasy about the whole thing and who felt that his contemporaries were pushing too hard and were going to get their superiors in hot water (Depuy would go on to a particularly noteworthy career, serving as Westmoreland’s chief of operations in Vietnam, and being in effect Westmoreland’s egghead, helping to design the search-and-destroy strategy).

  The colonels began to collect papers backing up their points, and began to write articles hinting at the new strategy and outlining the Army’s role. Similarly, Taylor had begun to send them around the country in groups of two to tell other officers at the posts, and particularly the service schools—which are vital to the Army’s intellectual life, the centers of thought, where the hand-picked meet with the hand-picked—what was happening. There they explained the new military program, and more important, that they were going to fight for it. The question everywhere was a simple one: Is he going to fight? Is the Chief with us? They assured everyone that he was. The question then became how best to go about the public campaign. Since 1956 was an election year, they wanted it to be a campaign issue and decided to gear up as quickly as possible for a national campaign. Yeuell started talking to his brother-in-law Wallace Carroll, then news editor of the New York Times Washington bureau. Carroll said that the Times would not move unless the Army high command was behind it; the Times would not report just for restless colonels. Slowly, the Times people were introduced to the generals, assuring the Times that the Army was behind the program. When the Times was finally confident of the depth of the commitment, Carroll asked for some of the staff papers, which the colonels turned over and which became the basis for articles by Anthony Leviero in May 1956 (“Inter-Service Rivalry Flashed”).

  The story hit the Pentagon like an explosion. Wilson was in a rage, and the Army brass quickly folded. The Coordinating group was immediately broken up. The colonels were ordered not to come to their offices. Yeuell’s files were cleaned out and burned. Wilson told reporters, “There’s a bunch of eager beavers down in the Army staff, and if they stick their heads out again I’ll chop them off.” Within the Army command the colonels were told that Westmoreland, who was halfway in and halfway out of the cabal, had assured Taylor that he would take care of the colonels for him and clean it all out. Yeuell, who was investigated three times in one year, went to the War College a year ahead of schedule, but eventually lost faith in the Army and drifted out of it. Metheny, one of the other leaders, was immediately transferred to a meaningless post in Florida; the others were quickly and quietly switched in their assignments.

  Later that week in May, Wilson called a press conference and assembled the Chiefs to prove that they were all on the team; Taylor, asked if there had been a revolt, answered that there was none (which was technically true, since it had been an authorized rebellion) and also quite carefully failed to repudiate the colonels; he walked a very tight rope indeed. But he did not fight for the colonels, and the campaign was dropped then and there. Later that year Taylor went to see Eisenhower to ask him to reappraise their defense policies, with Ike reportedly asking what was wrong with them. But Taylor stayed on, served two consecutive two-year tours as Chief of Staff, and then in 1959, after he had left, wrote The Uncertain Trumpet, thus strengthening his reputation. To many younger officers, however, he had turned out a major disappointment, a man who was the ablest person to sit in that office for many years but who had not fought for what he believed and who finally played the game, which he did rather skillfully, becoming closer and closer to the Democrats as Eisenhower’s second term wore on, and as the Democrats picked up the issue of preparedness. This helped link him with the Kennedys, and it would become an article of faith among the Kennedy people (for instance, in the Schlesinger book) that Taylor had resigned when he had in fact retired.

  But there was less feeling for him in the Army and even among some of the other Kennedy-style generals, especially Jim Gavin, who had also been a critic of the defense policies in the 1950s. In fact, Gavin testified before the Johnson Senate Preparedness Subcommittee hearings; when Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania asked him about casualties in a nuclear war, Gavin answered that there would be 425 million casualties. The hearings were supposed to be private and censored, but someone had conspired to make the Gavin testimony public, and the Japanese were horrified because of all the fall-out which would blow across their land. When the testimony surfaced, Gavin became the scapegoat for the Army’s position and was in effect forced to leave the Army. He did so with a certain bitterness, feeling that Taylor had sacrificed him (and there was a feeling among some other general officers that Westmoreland, who was half a Taylor protégé and half a Gavin protégé, had rushed the resignation through a little precipitously). The result was a certain division within the airborne clique in the Army, and a lingering distaste in Gavin for Taylor.

  Taylor had been very helpful to President Kennedy in the early days, Robert Kennedy would say in 1968 (when he was running against the war and reporters haunted him with questions about Taylor and the origins of the war). Which he had. He had come in as military adviser to the President, a filter to the Joint Chiefs, but he had not remained there long. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had relied on him as his chief investigating officer; Taylor had been very thorough in analyzing the failure of the breakdown in planning, though in retrospect his report seemed to deal too little with the political realities of such a venture, instead being concentrated on the technical failings (not enough ammunition; the fact that like most green troops the brigade had fired too quickly and used up too much ammunition). But he had been of value to the Kennedys and McNamara in trying to reshape the grand design of strategy, away from nuclear dependence, and he had given the change in policies a certain respectability; he was an imposing figure to have on your side. In trying to gain some kind of control over the military, Taylor had been a considerable help, and part of the counterinsurgency fad, which Bobby Kennedy promoted in 1961, was an attempt to work outside the existing bureaucracy to Kennedyize the military programs, as if to take some of the planning and decision making away from the Chiefs, who were not Kennedy people.

  It quickly became clear to Kennedy that this was not adequate and that he needed more control of the military. Since Taylor as a civilian assistant lacked real leverage, he soon returned to uniform as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His was not an easy role, caught as he was between the conflicting pressures of two very different constituencies: the Chiefs with their totality of commitment to the early lessons of the Cold War, the Communists were enemies, the only thing that mattered was force, and maximum application of it, and the Kennedy Administration, nervously and gingerly and slowly beginning to move away from some of the rules of the Cold War. Taylor was particularly valuable to the Administration on nuclear control, and among the White House confidants of the President there was a feeling that if Taylor was not exactly the intellectual he was supposed to be (“He is a very handsome man, and a very impressive one,” said Averell Harriman in 1967, “and he is always wrong”), there was genuine warmth toward him based more than anything on the test-ban treaty. He had been very helpful then, and in June 1963, when Kennedy decided to give the American University speech in which he would announce that the United States would not be the first to test in the atmosphere, a White House staff member had the job of clearing it with McNamara, Gilpatric and Taylor. He called the general and explained what they were planning to say and what they were doing and suggested that Taylor might want to check with the Chiefs; Taylor answered no, he did not think he needed to check with them, since it was basically a political matter for the President to decide, not a military issue. It was a very special act, a mark of his deference to the President on something the President cared deeply about; Taylor knew that if he asked the Chiefs they would object strenuously, so he decided not to ask them at all. As far as the White House was concerned it was Taylor at his best, and there was a mutuality of gr
atitude.

  This had been a happy time for him, back in uniform, working with a President he liked, on particularly good terms with the President and even better ones with the Attorney General (Jack Kennedy had once said that he would stick with his old friends once in the White House, that the White House, the center of everyone’s desire for influence, was not a good place to develop new friends, but McNamara and Taylor were the prime exceptions to that. They were the professional associates who had bridged the gap, a gap which held a certain element of good old-fashioned snobbery to it, and became personal friends. In Robert Kennedy’s case his friendship with Taylor was even more remarkable, since Taylor was not known for having close friendships of any kind, particularly not with men more than twenty years his junior. Friendship with younger men was not normally something he encouraged, but then, there are exceptions to every rule). After the assassination, Taylor and McNamara would visit Jackie regularly, working very hard to keep her spirits up, visits that she particularly prized. And later, when Taylor became ambassador to Vietnam, the friendship with Bob Kennedy continued, and a friend of Taylor’s would remember one moment with the general that was in stark contrast to the everyday Taylor, usually so aloof: the scene was the airport when Taylor was returning to Saigon after a visit to Washington. Bobby and Ethel and innumerable children were there to see him off, arriving a few minutes before Taylor, rushing aboard the plane and leaving notes for him pinned everywhere, hidden here, folded under this seat, and on the ceiling, notes of fondness and trivial jokes. When Taylor, normally so cold and distant, found them, he was absolutely transformed, laughing and affectionate. If there were holes in his discipline, it should not be for anyone below the rank of Attorney General.