Tag: JCS

How did Gen. Maxwell Taylor, JCS chairman, react to the death of JFK?

Gen. Maxwell Taylor
Gen. Maxwell Taylor with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, left, and JFK. (Credit: Robert Knudsen/JFK  Library)

 

I ask because I don’t know the answer. In a crisis like a presidential assassination, the role of the nation’s top soldier is worth understanding. But I don’t know how Taylor responded Can any help me out here?

I known Taylor testified to the Church Committee but only about the plots to kill Castro.

Taylor was known in CIA traffic as GPPHOTO, perhaps in recognition of his manly photogenic style. Robert Kennedy named one of his sons after him, a measure of the personal affection the Kennedys had for the general.

 

JFK: hawk or a dove?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable:”

In this well-edited YouTube piece, Eytmon reminds us that President Kennedy was a “dove,” a leader more inclined to restrain U.S. military power than to unleash it. While JFK was often aggressive in rhetoric, he also emphasized peace was “necessary and rational.” It was his experience as a Navy lieutenant in World War II who repeatedly faced death in battle that made the cause of peace personally urgent to him. It also distinguished him from the hawks of his day

Annals of secrecy: At height of missile crisis, Pentagon proposed assassination of Cuban officials

A newly declassified Pentagon study, published today by the non-profit National Security Archive, sheds new light on the thinking of U.S. military leaders at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.

As President Kennedy searched for a solution that did not involve a war that might have gone nuclear, the Pentagon was itching to escalate.

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