American Rifle - Alexander Rose [185]
The renewed sense of urgency to adopt the T44 was also spurred by the very public unveiling of the Russian AK-47 during the Hungarian revolt in the fall of 1956 against the Communist government. When the Politburo decided to crush the rebels and send in the Red Army, the soldiers who arrived were seen to be carrying these strangely shaped rifles. American Ordnance officials took note but weren’t quite sure what to make of them.68 Probably through clandestine intelligence sources, they obtained a few samples for testing, but by then the momentum behind the T44 was too powerful to change direction or to start all over again with fresh designs.69 On May 1, 1957, Brucker announced to the world that the twenty-round, newly dubbed “U.S. Rifle, 7.62mm, M14” had been selected as the new service weapon.70
Taylor retired in 1959, having emerged triumphant from his epic clash, of which the M14 rifle was its reigning symbol, but not without reigniting an unfortunate tradition of military politicking that had found its hero in General Nelson Miles (Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root’s implacable enemy) and its praetorian apogee in Douglas MacArthur’s impertinent questioning of the president’s authority in Korea. Whereas Taylor’s foe Admiral Radford had a rule not to send what he called “splits” upstairs to the secretary of defense, so as to preserve the chiefs’ spirit of “consensus,” Taylor’s book The Uncertain Trumpet, published in 1960, publicly revealed his fights with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House and turned the concept of rapid limited wars into a political issue to bludgeon Eisenhower.71 Republicans and air force colonels, livid at Taylor’s criticisms of Massive Retaliation, called it The Unclean Strumpet.72 The witticism did them no good. In the 1960 presidential election, nearly every candidate condemned the New Look and pledged to reduce the role of the SAC.
The eventual victor, John F. Kennedy, in league with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, went furthest in calling for Flexible Response and an enhanced mission for the army. By first appointing Taylor “Military Representative to the President,” and then recalling him to active duty and appointing him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy explicitly supported not only an army buildup but an army capable of intervening in potential trouble spots. Khrushchev’s declaration of January 6, 1961, that the USSR would back guerrilla-style “wars of national liberation” in those exact same trouble spots; then the Berlin Crisis of 1961–62, when the Soviets built their infamous wall; followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, demonstrated to Kennedy that Taylor had been right about Flexible Response and Eisenhower wrong to oppose it. As part of the Kennedy-era troop increases (during the Berlin Crisis the president requested an increase in army strength to one million men) and improvement in their combat readiness, Taylor augmented the government’s counterinsurgency programs and expanded the army’s Special Forces units. When Kennedy’s assassination brought Lyndon Johnson to power in 1963, he thus found ready-made units prepared to “advise” in Vietnam. By 1964–65 Johnson had made the fateful decision to augment the U.S. presence there, all without escalating to a nuclear ex-change.73The M14 rifle cast long shadows, it seems.
It also appeared to be accursed. Back in 1957, when the M14 was adopted, the Europeans had ended up with a cartridge they did not want but a rifle they did (the FN-FAL), whereas the Americans had a cartridge they did want but a rifle that few did. Because it was competing against the FN-FAL and the AK-47, the M14