General Maxwell Taylor

...In Vietnam, Taylor was, at first anyway, a "gradualist...

...If in 1961 I'd known how the situation would be in 1965, let's say, I wouldn't have come back recommending that we 'fly the flag' with a little logistical force in South Vietnam...

...According to Marks, Stalin "announced himself the champion of religious liberty...

...Coming Next Month: P. J. O'Rourke on Dave Barry on P. J. O'Rourke ROOSEVELT AND STALIN: THE FAILED COURTSHIP Robert Nisbet/Regnery Gateway/120 pp...

...T hough its subject served in three 1 wars, was the first American general in German-occupied Europe (with the airborne no less), and served as the United States ambassador to Vietnam from the summer of 1964 to the summer of 1965, General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen never gives the reader the sense of being among the wounded and dead 'midst the acrid smoke and screeching artillery of war...

...If gradualism worked against the political purpose of inducing the enemy to seek an accommodation, it also violated the military principles of surprise and mass as a means to gain prompt success...

...In both the private and the plenary meetings Roosevelt made his disagreements with Churchill plain to Stalin...

...But the Kennedy Administration believed that the South Vietnamese— unlike the Laotians—were willing to fight, and that if a stand had to be made, the United States would make it in South Vietnam...

...In its most obvious form the desire showed itself in ice cream factories, snack bars, post exchanges, and other 'plush' excrescences...

...But Roosevelt fulfilled his heart's desire: he had private meetings with Stalin before each of the three official summit meetings...

...And, finally, Roosevelt secured the Balkans for Soviet totalitarianism by promising Stalin that "the Channel invasion of . . . France would be supplemented by an invasion of southern France" by troops from the Italian campaign, "thus wrecking the 'soft underbelly' strategy of Churchill...

...America's defeat in Vietnam, Taylor thought, exposed not only a disturbing lack of will, but also an American inability to think of war in its proper context...

...Privately, however, he had grave doubts as to whether a country preoccupied with material well-being could long bear the burdens that were the lot of any great power...

...Even with the deployment of ground forces, however, President Johnson did not prosecute the air war as Taylor would have liked...

...He pointed out the dangers of landing American troops in what was "an essentially hostile foreign country" where it would be "increasingly difficult to hold the line" on the numbers of troops deployed, and where it would be difficult for American troops to distinguish "between a Viet Cong and a friendly Vietnamese farmer...

...and that citizenship in twentieth-century America carries with it obligations as well as privileges...

...Stalin never deigned to "take notice" of repeated complaints about that treatment...

...and in today's Army, with its extensive use of women, the problem has been further exacerbated...

...He noted that in Southeast Asia, the Mekong River formed a natural defensive barrier, making Thailand the natural defensive break against a Communist advance in the region...

...The USSR, he said, would "chart a postwar course between communism and capitalism...

...Marks's longer and more academic work confirms Nisbet's account and his conclusions...

...Mass can be bought, surprise can be won with discipline and a sense of realpolitik, but all will still depend on the reliability, toughness, and character of the individual soldier, sailor, and airman...

...By then victory was taken for granted...

...General Taylor was regarded as a soldier-scholar, but it is instructive that he admired combat soldiers—not pencil pushers—that he put his trust in the man in the field—not in the officers in the rear echelons—and that the most influential soldier in his own life was probably General George C. Marshall, a man of limited combat experience, but considerable steadfastness...

...Taylor's backtracking on the idea of "gradualism" in Vietnam offers something of a solution as to how Americans can fight limited wars...

...All this was done behind Churchill's back...

...Taylor wrote that "the sword must appear inexorable and inescapable" if the North Vietnamese were to be convinced to drop their aggression against the South...

...But Johnson's continual bombing pauses and diplomatic peace offensives undermined the entire bombing strategy to which Taylor adhered...

...the man who kept his head when everybody else was losing theirs...

...enduring security requirements that it must deal with rationally...

...After Vietnam, the outstanding question became, Would the United States be willing and able to defend its national interests...

...W hat motivated Roosevelt in this blind pursuit of Stalin's friendship...

...He was a hawk when it came to bombing the North, but a dove when it came to bringing in American ground forces...

...While Nisbet's sources have all been accessible before, there is much in this most readable distillation, like Roosevelt's discovery of the Christian gentleman in Stalin, that has been forgotten or never known by the young, many of whom were taught the "revisionist" version of the Cold War by Red professors...

...And all that Roosevelt asked in return "was that Stalin be sensitive to the needs of Roosevelt's re-election campaign...

...With equal liberality Roosevelt said that "he fully realized that Russia had had sovereignty" over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and "added jokingly that when the Soviet armies re-occupied these areas, he did not intend to go to war with the Soviet Union on this point...

...We are certainly having our share of national troubles these days, not the least of which is Bobby's candidacy...

...Nisbet is therefore justified in concluding that, in this respect, Teheran was comparable to Munich in 1938, because it was at Munich that Hitler realized the fragility of the French-English alliance...

...Undoubtedly surprise and mass will be needed in the future...

...There would be private ownership, he [Stalin] assured Roosevelt, along with freedom of worship," and so on...

...Maxwell Taylor, in the words of his son, "deserves to be remembered, and to be remembered for more than being a valiant soldier and GENERAL MAXWELL TAYLOR: THE SWORD AND THE PEN John M. Taylor/Doubleday/457 pp...

...Taylor was the most famous advocate of "flexible response," and a critic of President Eisenhower's reliance upon "massive retaliation...

...The results of Roosevelt's blindness— the Berlin Wall, the division of Germany, the subjugation of Poland and of the Balkan countries, Korea, Vietnam —inflicted tragic suffering in the second half of this century...

...22.50 Franz M. Oppenheimer THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 47...

...And it is here that Taylor's example is especially important...

...He agreed with Stalin that France's overseas possessions must be taken from her and assured him "that not only Germany but France would be reduced to third rate powers after the war...

...When Wayne Morse told Taylor that it would not be long "before the American people as a people will repudiate our war in Southeast Asia," Taylor replied: "That, of course, is good news to Hanoi, Senator...

...Stalin's superb gift of dissembling, well described in Frederick W. Marks's work Wind Over Sand The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt,' helped Roosevelt, a parochial man, to disregard his experts...

...The desire to live at war in accordance with American standards at home, while thoroughly understandable, was costly to indulge [in Korea...

...When, after a year and a half of pleading by Roosevelt, Stalin condescended to a summit meeting, he insisted that he could travel no farther than Teheran...

...Scarcely anything" was discussed at the plenary sessions that had not been "discussed and largely agreed on beforehand by Roosevelt and Stalin in their three private meetings...

...According to Nisbet, the answer to the question of Roosevelt's motives, "in a word, is Wilsonianism...

...Willful blindness has been a recurring constant in the West's relations with the Soviet Union...

...Time after time Roosevelt proposed such a meeting, and time after time he was rebuffed...

...Stalin's nature and goals were well known by those whose warnings Roosevelt systematically ignored: Averell Harriman, his ambassador in Moscow...

...Unless the United States built up its conventional forces, created the capability to deploy them, and had the will to use them, America would be perpetually on the defensive...

...Nor were these the only people Roosevelt betrayed...

...The fact is that, without the limited war option and the forces that go with it, we have little of substance to defend our interests...

...And he never broke ranks on Vietnam, even when his friends, such as Robert Kennedy, did...

...Throughout 1942, Roosevelt insisted over Churchill's violent protests that convoys carrying arms to Russia keep sailing to Archangel and Murmansk even though the losses of ships and lives, caused by German submarines and aircraft operating from close-by Norwegian bases, were unbearable: "On July 14, Churchill wrote FDR: 'Only four ships have reached Archangel . . . out of thirtythree included in Convoy PQ 17.' " Moreover, Roosevelt insisted on this course in the teeth of Stalin's refusal to help those convoys by permitting English and American planes and ships to use Soviet bases, and despite the "often ugly treatment at Archangel and Murmansk of British sailors who had managed to survive the Arctic route...

...I would have said, `Let's get several divisions and get in there fast and clean this thing up and come home again.' " In other words, the war should have been fought more as MacArthur would have fought it...

...a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...

...22.50 H. W. Crocker III 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 a valued presidential counselor...

...So, naturally, Teheran it was...

...At Teheran, where butter would not melt in his mouth, he expressed a preference for Paasikivi as Finnish president even though the latter was a democrat rather than a communist...

...Taylor did not believe that there were any scientific "laws" in international affairs, and so was reluctant to embrace the "domino theory...

...He is being so careless with the facts in support of his arguments that he is creating endless future problems for himself and also for me when I am asked what I think of them...

...When called before William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in February 1966, Taylor said that the United States was determined to preserve the freedom of South Vietnam and, in the process, prove to the Communists that wars of "national liberation" were "costly, dangerous, and doomed to failure...

...Strategic nuclear weapons, Taylor argued, were an empty threat because they would never be used...

...In them Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union should retain the parts of Poland that Hitler had permitted the Soviet Union to annex in the Hitler-Stalin pact...

...Taylor's answer was, probably, no...

...able to guerrilla elements of the North Korean army, and unnecessarily enlarged the scope of the war in a theater where Japan, not Korea, was the most important territory to be protected...

...Taylor's objections to introducing American troops into Vietnam were prophetic...

...Taylor could be regarded as a man of the truly vital center who exemplified the strengths and endured the weaknesses of that position...

...The contrast between their warnings and the observable facts on the one hand and Roosevelt's obsession with pleasing Stalin on the other justifies the subtitle of Nisbet's book, "The Failed Courtship": the tale has more in common with fictional accounts of amorous obsessions, like Swann's Way, than with sober statecraft...

...Nisbet shows convincingly that those betrayals were perpetrated during Roosevelt's first meeting with Stalin at the Teheran Summit in November 1943 rather than at Yalta in February 1945...

...that it has V ery early in this book we read that Franklin Roosevelt, in reporting to his cabinet upon his return from Yalta, referred to Joseph Stalin's early training in a seminary and said: "I think that something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave...

...It manifested itself in a different form in the excessive consumption of munitions in support of insignificant actions on the theory that the soldier should get everything it takes to make him safe as well as comfortable...

...We should be grateful to Professor Nisbet, a distinguished historian of intellectual history, for spending two full years to distill these 120 pages from the immense documentation of World War II and to the editor whose initiative set him on this course...

...Roosevelt replied: "It does not appear appropriate for me to send another message now to Stalin...

...At Teheran, Stalin really began the Cold War, and did so on the basis of perceptions identical with those of Hitler at Munich...

...Taylor first noticed this problem, at the field level, in Korea...

...But if General Maxwell Taylor lacks bite, its author, the general's son, can take solace in knowing that his father comes off as a good and admirable man...

...Like Wilson, Roosevelt wanted to transform an imperialist war into a war to make the world safe for democracy...

...George Kennan, and Charles E. Bohlen, among others...

...Taylor was hawkish after the North Vietnamese spectacular, but failed, Tet Offensive of 1968 that sent the Johnson Administration into despair...

...From such premises, and Roosevelt's ignorance of the history and nature of the Soviet Union, it followed quite naturally that the best hope for a democratic postwar world, free of imperialism, would have to be some form of AmericanSoviet condominium...

...T he destructive influence of materialism has of course long been the focus of histories of national decline, recounted by the likes of Montesquieu, Machiavelli, and others who saw materialism as an enemy of republican virtue...

...For his was the voice that held—when such views were hopelessly out of fashion— that the United States is more than a collection of interest groups...

...On the vast canvas of Roosevelt's indulgences of Stalin, those that exhibit Franz M Oppenheimer...

...Roosevelt's interpreter was Charles Bohlen, to whom we owe the record of those private meetings...

...In Korea, he disapproved of MacArthur's drive to the Yalu, because it expanded the defensive front of the American Army from 125 miles at the DMZ to nearly 500 miles on the Chinese border, left the rear of the American forces vulnerH. W Crocker III is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C...

...General Taylor didn't believe in abandoning Vietnam because he believed in the necessity and efficacy of limited wars...

...He perceived Britain and France as imperialist powers, but, as recorded in the diary of General Brooke, he said: "Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist...

...Only an interpreter from each side was present...

...q a callous indifference to the fate of American and British soldiers and sailors are the most revolting...

...General John Deane, the head of the United States Military Mission in Moscow...

...Taylor recognized that in Vietnam, the "restrained use of our air power suggested to the enemy a lack of decisiveness...

...nce America entered the war, Taylor was stalwart in his defense of America's prosecution of it...

...This desire was feted even further in Vietnam...

...As early as July 1941, "Roosevelt seems to have been seized by a desire to have a meeting of his own with Stalin, one that would be secret, limited to the two of them and very small staffs...

...Since the intentions of the Red East are now once again seen in a golden haze, there can be no more timely reading than Robert Nisbet's book on Roosevelt's stubborn refusal to open his eyes to the nature and goals of Stalin and the Soviet state...

...Equally revolting was Roosevelt's refusal in March 1945 to respond when "Harriman, outraged by Soviet brutality and callousness toward American prisoners-of-war rescued from German prison camps, begged the President to communicate directly with Stalin as a means of bringing the mistreatment to immediate [sic] stop...

...q 'University of Georgia Press, $29.95...

...One barely believes one's eyes to read further that Roosevelt added "that what most concerned Americans was the right of self-determination and that he himself 'was confident that the people would vote to join the Soviet Union.' " Thus, "in less than an hour" slavery was decreed for Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians...

...We had better pray that euphoric blindness will not produce similar results in the next...

...This concern over the ability of a democracy to resort to arms for reasons other than survival may be offensive to readers who will view it as the desire of a militarist to keep war alive," Taylor wrote in his memoirs, Swords and Ploughshares...

...Taylor said of Marshall that he "did not give the impression of great brilliance of mind, as General MacArthur did, but of calm strength and unshakable will...

...He liked to believe that the individualistic, anarchic, and insubordinate aspect of the American character did not mean that Americans could not make good soldiers...

...But inevitably linked with these qualities is American materialism...

...By the time of the Teheran Summit, at the latest, the motivation could not have been to save the Soviet Union from defeat...

...nor, for all General Taylor's attainments as a linguist and as a military intellectual, does it provide any especially profound insights into his ideas or character...

...The decisions subsequently made at Yalta merely ratified the death warrants handed down at Teheran...

...it just meant that they needed a special kind of officer to lead them, one who would take advantage of the dash and initiative these qualities could engender as well...

...That a soldier-scholar should prefer "calm strength and unshakable will" over "great brilliance of mind" is intriguing, particularly when one considers that these were the qualities that would also characterize Taylor, a pragmatic, rational man, who was as meticulous and careful in his preparation of position papers as he was in his preparations for battle...

...John Taylor notes that his father "found the role of prophet of gloom distasteful, [and] he did not dwell on his belief that the United States had entered a period of decline as a world power, a decline that was perhaps irreversible...

...It is depressing to contemplate that those individual sufferings directly resulting from Roosevelt's infatuation with Stalin pale in comparison with the suffering inflicted on all the people of Eastern Europe whom Roosevelt betrayed by means of understandings with Stalin, originally kept secret from Churchill, and very deliberately kept secret from the American people for fear of how American Poles and other ethnics would vote in 1944...

...Taylor found it "curious how hard it had been to get authority for the initiation of air attack against the North and how relatively easy to get the Marines ashore...