The new superintendent also de-emphasized football at West Point, a national powerhouse at the time. The game against Notre Dame, once an annual event, was dropped after the 1947 contest and not resumed until 1957. Chief of Berlin Government
In January 1949, General Taylor became Chief of Staff of American Forces in Europe. That September, he was appointed the first commander of the American Military Government in Berlin, which the Allies had divided into American, British, French, and Soviet sectors.
His conduct as leader of the 3,000-man Berlin garrison in a constantly ticklish situation - there was much friction between the Soviet commander and the Allied commanders - won General Taylor a high-level post in the Pentagon, where he served from 1951 to 1953 as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Administration.
General Taylor, who succeeded Gen. James A. Van Fleet as commander of the Eighth Army and United Nations forces in Seoul early in 1953, planned strategy for some bitter fighting in the closing months of the Korean War. He did so while hewing to instructions from President Eisenhower, who was trying to arrange an armistice, not to rout the enemy but to contain him. After an armistice was signed July 17, 1953, the general remained in Seoul to arrange prisoner exchanges, reinforce South Korea's army, and direct the Eighth Army's efforts to help rebuild the war-torn country.
When General Taylor became Army Chief of Staff in June 1955, he succeeded General Ridgway, who had alienated President Eisenhower by pushing for a large army. It was a time of change and the President, despite his own Army background, had sided with the Air Force view favoring, as the country's first line of defense, development of a massive nuclear strike-and- retaliation potential. Conflict on Military Policy
General Taylor came into almost immediate conflict with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Arthur W. Radford, who had President Eisenhower's staunch backing and favored the massive nuclear strike-and-retaliation line. It was General Taylor's view, which he expressed with increasing frustration, that the nation's military policy should be based on ''flexible response.''
''Air power is our initial line of defense,'' he conceded, ''but no one has proved to my satisfaction that we will have only world wars to be settled only by big bangs. Specific cases have a way of differing from expected patterns, in many ways, but infantrymen at one time or another become indispensable. Nothing we have discovered or expect to discover will reduce the need for brave men to fight our battles. The atom bomb is no weapon to counter a coup d'etat. Airborne troops appear to be an ideal force to police the free world.''
But at meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Taylor's ideas usually fell on deaf ears. He later recalled he had been outvoted on 20 of 23 major issues by Admiral Radford and the Air Force Chief of Staff. And so, in 1959, he resigned as Army Chief of Staff and requested retirement.
''For four years I have struggled to modernize the Army, and my success was limited,'' he said, adding with heavy sarcasm: ''So I decided I would do one thing for the country and withdraw an obsolescent general from inventory.'' Book Presents Position
General Taylor's service to his country was far from over, however.
He wrote ''The Uncertain Trumpet,'' its title taken from I Corinthians 14:8: ''For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle?'' The book severely criticized the Pentagon's organization, reviewed General Taylor's controversies with the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Eisenhower and advocated scrapping the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Taylor recommended substituting a single Chief of Staff with control of an integrated military budget.
General Taylor served briefly as board chairman of an electric company serving Mexican communities and as president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.
Following the Bay of Pigs catastrophe in 1961, President Kennedy, who had publicly assumed full responsibility for the debacle, yet felt he had been ill-served by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on General Taylor to conduct an investigation of the affair. The general concluded that, in the future, the C.I.A. might be allowed to continue small-scale undercover activities but should not be permitted to take an operational role in major undertakings of the magnitude of the Cuban invasion. Drafted by Kennedy
President Kennedy, who had become disenchanted with the advice he was getting from the Joint Chiefs, created the new White House post of Military Representative of the President and persuaded General Taylor to return to active duty and accept it in July 1961. The President also made General Taylor his personal watchdog over the nation's intelligence apparatus.
Mr. Kennedy depended on the general for advice on the crisis over Berlin, which led to construction of the wall that separated East Berlin from West Berlin, and other military-political problems, notably the gathering storm in Vietnam.