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Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer and professor. Taylor was known for his role as lead counsel in the prosecution of war criminals after World War II, his opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, and his outspoken criticism of American actions during the Vietnam War.
With the US Army, Taylor served with the Military Intelligence Corps during WWII. He reached the rank of brigadier general in 1946, following the war. During the prosecution of Axis powers war criminals, he served as lead counsel for the prosecution in the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials before US military courts, after serving as assistant to Robert H. Jackson in the initial trial before the International Military Tribunal.
Following the Nuremberg trials, Taylor opened a private law practice, but remained politically active.
At the Nuremberg trials, Taylor initially served as an assistant to chief counsel Robert H. Jackson and, in that function, was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case. The indictment in that case called for the OKH and the High Command of the German Armed Forces to be considered criminal organizations; the witnesses were several of the surviving German . Both organizations were acquitted.
When Jackson resigned his position as prosecutor after the first (and only) trial before the IMT and returned to the US, Taylor was promoted to brigadier general and succeeded him on October 17, 1946, as chief counsel for the remaining twelve trials before the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals. In these trials at Nuremberg, 163 of the 200 defendants who were tried were found guilty in some or all 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.International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) References Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950: Introduction
Telford Taylor advised William L. Shirer in the late 1950s when Shirer was writing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, loaning documents and books from his personal collection. Shirer's monumental history of Nazi Germany became a surprise best-seller when it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1960, and has remained in print ever since.
In 1959, he served as a technical advisor and narrator on the television production Judgment at Nuremberg.
In 1961 Taylor attended the Eichmann trial in Israel as a semiofficial observer and expressed concerns about the trial being held on a defective statute, citing international justice and ethical issues.
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. 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 US 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 Lieutenant William Calley, the commanding officer of the US 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." He offered to describe and explain his views to CBS, but the network declined to air them because they considered them "too hot to handle.". In December 1972, he visited Hanoi along with musician and activist Joan Baez and others, among them was Michael Allen, the associate dean of the Yale Divinity School.
Taylor published his views in a book, , in 1970. He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg trials, U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia, while different in some ways, was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II. For that reason, he favored prosecuting US aviators who had participated in bombing missions over North Vietnam. Shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, Taylor said over the past few decades since World War II, some of his historical views had changed. His views on Germany hadn't changed, but they had on the United States.
"Most of these things are not done by monsters. They're done by very ordinary people, people very much like you and me. These things are results of pressures and circumstances to which human frailty succumbs. And a large part of it isn't really due to any intrinsic sadism or a desire to inflict pain - it's the degeneration of standards under pressures, boredom, fear, other influences of this kind. Well, I guess that I did think before that Americans, in their history, had been somewhat more immune to these pressures and that the historical record was a better one. The moral standards we tried to attain in peace and war were higher. I guess I still think we try to attain the higher values; but, yes, and succeed sometimes - succeed less often, I guess, than I thought before.""Since I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I guess it was born in upon me that these things had happened before. The feeling that I'd had for a long time that these things didn't go on in the American armed forces, alas, it isn't so. They sometimes do."
Taylor retired in 1994.
While serving at Bletchley Park, he had an affair with Christine Brooke-Rose, who later became a writer and critic but was then a British officer at Bletchley. The affair led to the end of Brooke-Rose's marriage, although Taylor's to Walker endured for some years thereafter.Recollections of Brooke-Rose quoted in Smith, Michael. The Secrets of Station X. Biteback Publishing. 2011.
In 1974 he married Toby Golick, having two children who both survived him, Benjamin and Samuel.
Taylor also had one child, Ursula Rechnagel, with Julie Rechnagel, both of whom also survived him.
He died at age 90 on May 23, 1998, at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, after suffering a stroke.
| Army Distinguished Service Medal | |
| American Campaign Medal | |
| European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal | |
| World War II Victory Medal | |
| Army of Occupation Medal | |
| Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire |
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