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Telford Taylor ( February 24 , 1908 - May 23 , 1998 ) was a U.S. Lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II , his opposition against Senator McCarthy in the 1950s , and his outspoken criticism of the U.S. actions in the Vietnam War in the 1970s . BIOGRAPHY Taylor was born in Schenectady, New York ; his parents were John Bellamy Taylor and Marcia Estabrook Jones. One of his ancestors was Edward Bellamy . Taylor went to Williams College before enrolling at the Harvard Law School in 1928 , where he received his law degree in 1932 . He subsequently worked for several government agencies—in 1940 he became general counsel for the FCC —until he joined Army Intelligence as a major in 1942 , where he led the group that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from German communications using Ultra encryption. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1943 and to full Colonel in 1944 , when he was assigned to the team of Robert H. Jackson , which helped work out the London Charter Of The International Military Tribunal (IMT), the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. At the Nuremberg Trials , he initially served as an assistant to Chief Counsel Jackson and in this function was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case. The indictment in this case called for the General Staff Of The Army and the High Command of the German Armed Forces to be considered criminal organizations; the witnesses were several of the surviving German Field Marshal s. Both organizations were acquitted, though. .]] When Jackson resigned his position as prosecutor after the first (and only) trial before the IMT and returned to the U.S., Taylor was promoted to Brigadier General and succeeded him on October 17 , 1946 as Chief Counsel for the remaining twelve trials before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals . In these trials at Nuremberg, 163 of the 200 defendants that were tried were found guilty in at least some of the charges of the indictments. While Taylor was not wholly satisfied with the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials, he considered them a success because they set a precedent and defined a legal base for Crimes Against Peace and Humanity . In 1950, the United Nations codified the most important statements from these trials in the seven Nuremberg Principles . After the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor returned to the U.S. to a civilian life, opening a private law practice in . In 1961 Taylor attended the Eichmann Trial in Israel as a semi-official observer and expressed concerns about the trial being held on a defective statute. Taylor became a full Professor at Columbia University in 1962 , where he would be named Nash Professor of Law in 1974 . In the mid-sixties, he was one of very few professors there who did ''not'' sign a statement by the Columbia Law School that called the student protests there beyond the "allowable limits" of Civil Disobedience . He was very critical of the conduct of the U.S. troops in the Vietnam War and urged president Richard Nixon to set up a national commission to investigate the conflict in 1971 . He considered the bombing of Hanoi in 1972 "senseless and immoral" and heavily criticized the court-martial of Lt. William Calley (the commanding officer of the U.S. troops involved in the My Lai Massacre ) for not including higher-ranking officials. In 1972 , he visited Hanoi together with Joan Baez and others, amongst them also the associate dean of the Yale Law School. He published his views in a book entitled '''' (1970). He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II. In for the "best work of general nonfiction". In the 1980s , he extended his legal activities into sports and became a "special master" for dispute resolution in the NBA . His 1992 700 page memoir of the Nuremberg trials (see bibliography) revealed how Goering "cheated the hangman" by obtaining poison. Telford Taylor retired in 1994. He died in 1998 at the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after having suffered a stroke. He was survived by his wife Toby and six children: Joan, Ellen, John, Ursula, Ben, and Sam. TRIVIA On '', March 19 , 1948 ; p. 13. URL last accessed 2006-12-12 . QUOTES ABOUT TELFORD TAYLOR
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