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Telford Taylor
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Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908 - May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography
Taylor was born in Schenectady, New York; his parents were John Bellamy Taylor (a descendant of Edward Bellamy) and Marcia Estabrook Jones.
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Encyclopedia
Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908 - May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography
Taylor was born in Schenectady, New York; his parents were John Bellamy Taylor (a descendant of Edward Bellamy) and Marcia Estabrook Jones. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts before enrolling at the Harvard Law School in 1928, where he received his law degree in 1932. He subsequently worked for several government agencies, becoming the general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission in 1940.
World War II and Nuremberg
Following the outbreak of World War II, Taylor joined Army Intelligence as a Major in 1942, leading the group that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from intercepted German communications using ULTRA encryption. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1943 and visited Bletchley Park in London, where he helped negotiate the 1943 BRUSA Agreement. He was promoted to full Colonel in 1944, and was assigned to the team of Robert H. Jackson, which helped work out the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials.
At the Nuremberg Trials, he initially served as an assistant to Chief Counsel Jackson and in this function was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case. The indictment in this case called for the General Staff of the Army and the High Command of the German Armed Forces to be considered criminal organizations; the witnesses were several of the surviving German Field Marshals. Both organizations were acquitted, though.
When Jackson resigned his position as prosecutor after the first (and only) trial before the IMT and returned to the U.S., Taylor was promoted to Brigadier General and succeeded him on October 17, 1946 as Chief Counsel for the remaining twelve trials before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals. In these trials at Nuremberg, 163 of the 200 defendants that were tried were found guilty in at least some of the charges of the indictments.
While Taylor was not wholly satisfied with the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials, he considered them a success because they set a precedent and defined a legal base for crimes against peace and humanity. In 1950, the United Nations codified the most important statements from these trials in the seven Nuremberg Principles.
McCarthyism, Vietnam, and later life
After the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor returned to a civilian life in the United States, opening a private law practice in New York City. He became increasingly concerned with Senator McCarthy's activities, which he criticized strongly. In a speech at West Point in 1953, he called McCarthy "a dangerous adventurer", branding his tactics "a vicious weapon of the extreme right against their political opponents" and criticizing then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower for not stopping McCarthy's "shameful abuse of Congressional investigatory power." He defended several victims of McCarthyism — alleged communists or perjurers — including labor leader Harry Bridges and Junius Scales. Although he lost these two cases (Bridges' sentence of five years in prison was later voided by the Supreme Court), he remained unfazed by McCarthy's attacks on him, and responded by writing the book, Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional Investigations, which was published in 1955.
In 1961 Taylor attended the Eichmann trial in Israel as a semi-official observer, and expressed concerns about the trial being held on a defective statute.
Taylor became a full professor at Columbia University in 1962, where he would be named Nash Professor of Law in 1974. He was one of very few professors there who refused to sign a statement issued by the Columbia Law School that termed the militant student protests at Columbia in 1968 as being beyond the "allowable limits" of civil disobedience. Taylor was very critical of the conduct of U.S. troops in the Vietnam War, and in 1971 urged President Richard Nixon to set up a national commission to investigate the conflict. He strongly criticized the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, the commanding officer of the U.S. troops involved in the My Lai massacre, because it did not include higher-ranking officers. Taylor regarded the 1972 bombing campaign targeting the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, as "senseless and immoral"; in December 1972, he visited Hanoi along with folk singer Joan Baez and others, amongst them also the associate dean of the Yale Law School.
Taylor published his views in a book entitled Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy in 1970. He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II. For this reason, he favored prosecuting U.S. aviators who had participated in bombing missions over North Vietnam.
In 1976, Taylor, who had already been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, accepted a new post at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, becoming a founding member of the faculty while continuing to teach at Columbia. His 1979 book, Munich: The Price of Peace, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the "best work of general nonfiction". In the 1980s, he extended his legal activities into sports and became a "special master" for dispute resolution in the NBA. His 700-page 1992 memoir of the Nuremberg trials (see bibliography) revealed how Nazi leader Hermann Göring had "cheated the hangman" by obtaining poison.
Telford Taylor retired in 1994. He died in 1998 at the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after having suffered a stroke. He was survived by his wife Toby Golick and six children: Joan, Ellen, John, Ursula, Ben, and Sam.
Quotes by Telford Taylor
- "The laws of war do not apply only to the suspected criminals of vanquished nations. There is no moral or legal basis for immunizing victorious nations from scrutiny. The laws of war are not a one-way street." In The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir
- "To punish the foe — especially the vanquished foe — for conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." In Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy
Quotes about Telford Taylor
- "If I was asked to name the person of my generation whom I most admired, I would promptly answer Telford Taylor. .. [W]ise counselor, persuasive advocate, careful scholar, all the qualities that signify distinction... were his in high degree." — Herbert Wechsler, law professor and member of the U.S. prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials.
- "The human rights movement owes much of its legal foundation to the work of Gen. Telford Taylor...." — The Nation magazine, 1995.
- "For almost seven decades, from the days of FDR's New Deal through to the early 1990s, Taylor embodied the best of American legal liberalism. At least two generations of postwar Americans looked to him, as they did to no other lawyer, for tough, outspoken criticism of public affairs, from McCarthyism to the Eichmann trial or even the Vietnam War." — The New York Times
Bibliography
- Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster 1952; reprinted 1980. ISBN 0-8446-0934-X
- Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional Investigations, Simon & Schuster 1955; reprinted 1974. ISBN 0-306-70620-2
- The March of Conquest: The German Victories in Western Europe, 1940 (Great War Stories), Simon & Schuster 1958; reprinted 1991. ISBN 0-933852-94-0
- The Breaking Wave: The Second World War in the Summer of 1940, Simon & Schuster 1967; ISBN 0-671-10366-0
- Guilt, responsibility and the Third Reich, Heffer 1970; 20 pages; ISBN 0-85270-044-X
- Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Times Books 1970; ISBN 0-8129-0210-6
- Perspectives on Justice, Northwestern University Press 1974; ISBN 0-8101-0453-9
- Courts of terror: Soviet criminal justice and Jewish emigration, Knopf 1976; ISBN 0-394-40509-9
- Munich: The Price of Peace, Hodder & Staughton 1979; reprinted 1989. ISBN 0-88184-447-0
- The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, Knopf 1992; ISBN 0-394-58355-8
External links
- on April 1, 1946 at the Nuremberg Trial.
- from Columbia University.
- Telford Taylor , New York Times, March 28, 1982. "...In such an analysis, it should be noted that, as far as wartime actions against enemy nationals are concerned, the Genocide Convention added virtually nothing to what was already covered ... by the internationally accepted laws of land warfare ...".
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