ANOTHER WAR CRIMINAL

In addition to JFK, McNamara, LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger, there's a new member of the Vietnam War Criminals list: Maxwell Taylor. In H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, he outlines Taylor's culpability (pp. 103-4):

Taylor had a profound impact on the Kennedy Administration. He had helped the president replace recalcitrant members of the Joint Chiefs with men who would prove more sensitive to domestic political concerns. He had been instrumental in appointing Generals Harkins and Westmoreland and had helped to shape the American effort in Vietnam. He had developed and overseen the implementation of the advisory effort and, until November 1963, had joined McNamara in praising the "headway" that U.S. advisers and their South Vietnamese allies had made.

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When he found it expedient to do so, he misled the JCS, the press, and the NSC. He deliberately relegated his fellow military officers to a position of little influence and assisted McNamara in suppressing JCS objections to the concept of graduated pressure, reinforcing the secretary's confidence in his ability to develop strategic options foer Vietnam independent of JCS advice. ... To keep the Chiefs from expressing dissenting views, he helped to craft a relationship based on distrust and deceit in which the president obscured the finality of decisions and made false promises that the JCS conception of the war might one day be realized.