THE CONTROVERSIAL ‘ARCHITECT OF THE VIETNAM WAR’
Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam
By Ingo Trauschweizer University Press of Kentucky, 2019
“I don’t like jumping out of airplanes,” famed World War II 101st Airborne Division commander Gen. Maxwell Taylor told the West Point Class of 1969. “I just like hanging out with guys that do.” With that, Taylor had every cadet in the audience firmly in the palm of his hand.
The West Point speech encapsulates Maxwell Davenport Taylor’s careerlong appeal—he was extremely intelligent, always sharp, and had an instinctive grasp of what his audience expected him to say. Regardless of the subject under discussion, Max Taylor seemed the most knowledgeable person in the room. At least, that’s the image he projected throughout his military and political service from 1922 to 1970, the last two decades spanning the Cold War’s most critical years.
Arguably, Taylor was, more than any U.S. politico-military leader, the “Architect of the Vietnam War,” as Ingo Trauschweizer claims in his superbly researched biography, Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War.
Trauschweizer surgically dissects “Taylor the Cold Warrior”
