Telford Taylor

The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor helped establish the guidelines for trying German war criminals after World War II, which became a model in future years for similar tribunals around the globe. As the Nation wrote in 1995, "the human rights movement owes much of its legal foundation to the work of Gen. Telford Taylor. . . . Nuremberg gave legitimacy to the concept that the world had something to say about how governments treat their own citizens." Educated at Williams College and Harvard Law School, Taylor worked in various federal offices for almost ten years before joining the Army in October 1942; at the war's end he was transferred to the International War Crimes Tribunal, where he worked closely with chief counsel and former U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson. Even as revelations of Nazi atrocities mounted, Jackson and Taylor remained committed to conducting fair proceedings within a defined legal framework. In October 1946, Taylor succeeded Jackson as chief prosecutor and, over a two-year period, would obtain more than a hundred convictions-of government officials, SS officers, scientists, and others. (The trials were dramatized in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, with the actor Richard Widmark portraying Taylor in all but name.) Upon returning to civilian life in 1949, Taylor worked in private practice before publishing his first book, Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich (1952). He would go on to write eight more, among them the prizewinning Munich: The Price of Peace (1979). For the rest of his life, Taylor cautioned against the use of war as a policy instrument, opposing U.S. actions in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Bosnia. He also stressed the need for integrity in government and was among the first critics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. A lifelong lover of music, he played both piano and clarinet. In his later years, he developed a practice in sports law and occasionally served as a special master to resolve disputes for the National Basketball Association.