American Rifle - Alexander Rose [184]
Within months, however, Dulles had begun fretting at the lack of flexibility inherent in the Massive Retaliation doctrine and its adverse effects on the United States’ European allies, who understandably feared being vaporized alongside their Russian neighbors if a minor border incident somewhere in Asia spiraled into global thermonuclear war. All this hearty “talk of atomic attack,” he advised, “tended to create ‘peace at any price people’ and might lead to an increase of appeasement sentiment in various countries.”63 That was precisely the opposite of what Washington desired of its allies.
Should nuclear war be the sole option available to punish the Soviets? he continued, grasping the inherent flaw of Massive Retaliation: though presented as a policy of strength, so long as the Soviets were willing to pull the American tail around the world on a limited basis, the doctrine actually weakened the United States. Without being able to draw on a variety of conventional, diplomatic, and nuclear options, the United States would be continually confronted by all-or-nothing decisions, and as the Soviets knew the Americans wouldn’t dare push the button to punish a small infraction, Massive Retaliation diminished the credibility of the nuclear deterrent. Worse, the doctrine grew steadily less effective as the Soviet nuclear force expanded, thereby making the American home-land—and all those huge SAC bomber bases—vulnerable to a first-strike surprise attack. These facts, dutifully laid out, persuaded Eisenhower in late 1954 that Massive Retaliation had to be revised and a new, improved “New Look” developed that would rebalance the army– navy– air force relationship.
Matthew Ridgway’s successor as chief of staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor, was “an aloof, handsome man with cool china blue eyes,” wrote Time in a mash note masquerading as a cover story, “a knack for sketching a problem in broad perspective, and a talent for hammering out explicit courses of action.” The son of a struggling lawyer in Keytesville, Missouri, Taylor was enthralled by the tales his grandfather had told of riding with Shelby’s Confederate cavalry during the Civil War. He was determined to go to West Point, but when the time came, he kept his options open by applying to Annapolis as well. He failed the navy’s en-trance examination partly because he did not know where the Straits of Malacca were (he thought they were in Europe); but for that small geographical slip, Taylor might well have ended his days as an admiral. As it was, he graduated fourth in the West Point class of 1922 and joined the engineers, as many top-ranked West Pointers still did. There followed a brilliant military career (he was the first American general to invade Europe when he parachuted into Normandy on the night of June 6, 1944) and rapid promotion.64 A former commander of the 101st Airborne and superintendent of West Point, he now took the battle directly to the enemy—defined as the other two fighting services but also including the president. His objective, he would write, was “to improve the combat readiness of the Army . . . and to improve its morale de-pressed as it was by the precedence given to the needs of the Navy and Air Force by the ex-Army man in the White House.”65
Shrewdly predicting that the army would be called on to enforce America’s interests abroad when nuclear annihilation seemed a measure somewhat too extreme, Taylor’s first tactic was to turn himself into a supporter of what was being called the Flexible Response doctrine. In so doing (and by judicious leaking to the press), he managed to head off a dangerous proposal by Admiral Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Eisenhower loyalist, to erase another 450,000 men from the army, leaving it with a rump of about 575,000.66
Taylor was greatly aided by Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker, who gave speeches, galvanized the Association of the United States Army into becoming a lobbying organization, and wrote articles ex-tolling the virtues of the general