As a junior officer, Maxwell Taylor served in China with Colonel Joseph 'Vinegar Joe' Stillwell and then went on to lead the 101st Airborne Division at D-Day, operation Market Garden and at the Bulge, before taking a role in the team assigned to the negotiation of the Italian armistice. After the war, General Taylor became Eisenhower's chief of staff, a job that brought him into constant conflict with the administration's defence policy and led to his writing The Uncertain Trumpet, one of the most influential books on military strategy ever written. John F. Kennedy appointed 'his favourite general' as a special military advisor during the Bay of Pigs operation and then elevated him to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after his leading role in the eventual resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. Yet Taylor's most controversial appointment was to come in the 1964 when he succeeded Henry Cabot Lodge as American ambassador in Saigon. He initially claimed that Vietnam was not "an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate", but by 1965 he had become unequivocal in his advocacy of expanding the war and bombing North Vietnam in order to "change a losing game".
- ISBN10 0891417524
- ISBN13 9780891417521
- Publish Date 8 August 2001
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 5 October 2008
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Presidio Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 496
- Language English