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Telford Taylor

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.

some or all of the charges of the indictments.


While Taylor was not wholly satised with the outcomes
of the Nuremberg Trials, he considered them a success
because they set a precedent and dened a legal base
for crimes against peace and humanity. In 1950, the
United Nations codied the most important statements
from these trials in the seven Nuremberg Principles.

Biography

1.2 McCarthyism, Vietnam, and later life

Taylor was born in Schenectady, New York; his parents


were John Bellamy Taylor (a relative 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.

1.1

World War II and Nuremberg

Following the outbreak of World War II, Taylor joined


Army Intelligence as a Major on October 5, 1942,[1] 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 England, 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 Robert H. Jackson and in this function was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case.
The indictment in this case called for the General Sta 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.

Taylor in retirement

After the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor returned to civilian


life in the United States, opening a private law practice
in New York City. He became increasingly concerned
with Senator McCarthys 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 president Dwight D.
Eisenhower for not stopping McCarthys shameful abuse
of Congressional investigatory power. He defended sev-

When Jackson resigned his position as prosecutor after


the rst (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 who were tried were found guilty in
1

REFERENCES

eral victims of McCarthyism alleged communists or Ben, and Sam.


perjurers including labor leader Harry Bridges and
Junius Scales. Although he lost these two cases (Bridges
sentence of ve years in prison was later voided by the 2 Decorations
Supreme Court and Scales six-year sentence was commuted after one year), he remained unfazed by McHere is the list of his decorations:[4][5]
Carthys 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-ocial 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 1966, he was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[2] 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 conict. He strongly criticized the court-martial of
Lt. William Calley, the commanding ocer of the U.S.
troops involved in the My Lai massacre, because it did
not include higher-ranking ocers. Taylor regarded the
1972 bombing campaign targeting the North Vietnamese
capital, Hanoi, as senseless and immoral"; in December
1972, he visited Hanoi along with musician and activist
Joan Baez and others, among 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.[3]

3 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 0-93385294-0
The Breaking Wave: The Second World War in the
Summer of 1940, Simon & Schuster 1967; ISBN 0671-10366-0
Guilt, responsibility and the Third Reich, Heer
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


In 1976, Taylor, who had already been a visiting proMemoir, Knopf 1992; ISBN 0-394-58355-8
fessor 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, Mu- 4 References
nich: The Price of Peace, won the National Book Critics
Circle Award for the best work of general nonction. In Main sources:
the 1980s, he extended his legal activities into sports and
became a "special master" for dispute resolution in the
The obituary from the New York Times, May 24,
NBA. His 700-page 1992 memoir of the Nuremberg tri1998.
als (see bibliography) revealed how Nazi leader Hermann
Gring had cheated the hangman by taking smuggled
Ferencz, B.: Telford Taylor: Pioneer of Internapoison.
tional Criminal Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 37(3), 1999. URL last accessed 2006Telford Taylor retired in 1994. He died in 1998 at the
12-12.
St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after having
suered a stroke. He was survived by his second wife
Telford Taylor from the Cardozo School of Law at
Toby Golick and six children: Joan, Ellen, John, Ursula,
the Yeshiva University.

3
Other sources:
[1] Telford Taylor Leaves FCC To Accept Majority in
Army. Broadcasting and Broadcast Advertising (Washington, D.C.: Broadcasting Publications, Inc.) 24 (14):
16. October 5, 1942.
[2] Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter T (PDF).
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 22
April 2011.
[3] Robert Richter, War Hero or War Criminal?, Counterpunch 14 October 2008
[4] Military Times, Hall of Valor. Retrieved 13 November
2014.
[5] Recommendation for Award of OBE. Retrieved 13
November 2014.

Further reading:
Essays on the laws of war and war crimes tribunals
in honor of Telford Taylor: Columbia Journal of
Transnational Law, vol. 37(3)

External links
Taylors presentation of the High Command case on
April 1, 1946 at the Nuremberg Trial.
A short biography from Columbia University.
Telford Taylor When people kill a people, New
York Times, March 28, 1982. "...In such an analysis, 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 ....
Telford Taylor at Find a Grave

6 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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