Telford Taylor
 |
Telford Taylor |
Telford Taylor (
February 24,
1908 -
May 22,
1998) was a
U.S. lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the
Nuremberg Trials after
World War II, his opposition against
Senator McCarthy in the
1950s, and his outspoken criticism of the U.S. actions in the
Vietnam War in the
1970s.
Taylor was born in
Schenectady, New York; his parents were John Bellamy Taylor and Marcia Estabrook Jones. One of his ancestors was
Edward Bellamy. Taylor went to
Williams College before enrolling at the
Harvard Law School in
1928, where he received his law degree in
1932. He subsequently worked for several government agencies—in
1940 he became general counsel for the
FCC—until he joined Army Intelligence as a major in
1942, where he led the group that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from German communications using
Ultra encryption. He was promoted to
Lieutenant Colonel in
1943 and to full
Colonel in
1944, when he 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 case. The indictment in this case called for the 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.
After the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor returned to the U.S. to a civilian life, opening a private law practice in
New York City. He increasingly became concerned with
Senator McCarthy's activities, which he criticized strongly. In a speech at
West Point in
1953, he called McCarthy "a dangerous adventurer" and branded his tactics as "a vicious weapon of the extreme right against their political opponents" and criticized then-president
Dwight D. Eisenhower for not stopping this "shameful abuse of Congressional investigatory power." He defended several victims of
McCarthyism, alleged communists or perjurers, including
Harry R. Bridges and
Junius Scales. Although he lost these two cases (Bridges' sentence of five years of imprisonment was later voided by the
Supreme Court), he remained unimpressed 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. In the mid-sixties, he was one of very few professors there who did
not sign a statement by the Columbia Law School that called the student protests there beyond the "allowable limits" of
civil disobedience. He was very critical of the conduct of the U.S. troops in the
Vietnam War and urged president
Richard Nixon to set up a national commission to investigate the conflict in
1971. He considered the bombing of
Hanoi in
1972 "senseless and immoral" and heavily criticized the court-martial of Lt.
William Calley (the commanding officer of the U.S. troops involved in the
My Lai massacre) for not including higher-ranking officials. In
1972, he visited Hanoi together with
Joan Baez and others, amongst them also the associate dean of the Yale Law School.
He published his views in a book entitled
Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, which appeared already in
1970. He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. conduct in
Vietnam and
Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II.
In
1976, Taylor, who had already been a visiting professor at
Harvard and
Yale, also accepted a post as professor at the Cardozo School of Law at the
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 1992 700 page memoir of the Nuremberg trials (see bibliography) revealed how Goering "cheated the hangman" by obtaining poison. Telford Taylor retired in 1994.
Taylor died in 1998 at the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in
Manhattan after having suffered a stroke.
"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 magazine
The Nation, 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, cited here after [
1].
"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." —Telford Taylor in
The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir.
*
The obituary from the
New York Times,
May 24,
1998.
*
Telford Taylor, an article that appeared in the
Columbia Journal of Transnational Law on
November 1, 1998.
*
Telford Taylor from the Cardozo School of Law at the
Yeshiva University.
*
Taylor's presentation of the High Command case on
April 1,
1946 at the
Nuremberg Trial.
*
A short biography from
Columbia University.
Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster 1952; reprinted 1980. ISBN 0-844-60934-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 0-933-85294-0
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 0-852-70044-X
Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Times Books 1970; ISBN 0-812-90210-6
Perspectives on Justice, Northwestern University Press 1974; ISBN 0-810-10453-9
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 0-881-84447-0
The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, Knopf 1992; ISBN 0-394-58355-8
