Telford Taylor Telford Taylor ( February 24 , 1908 – May 23 , 1998 ) was an American lawyer best known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II , his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s , and his outspoken criticism of U . S . actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s . Biography . Taylor was born in Schenectady , New York ; his parents were John Bellamy Taylor ( a relative of Edward Bellamy ) and Marcia Estabrook Jones . He attended Williams College in Massachusetts before enrolling at the Harvard Law School in 1928 , where he received his law degree in 1932 . He subsequently worked for several government agencies , becoming the general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission in 1940 . World War II and Nuremberg . Following the outbreak of World War II , Taylor joined Army Intelligence as a Major on October 5 , 1942 , leading the group that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from intercepted German communications using ULTRA encryption . He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1943 and visited Bletchley Park in England , where he helped negotiate the 1943 BRUSA Agreement . He was promoted to full Colonel in 1944 , and 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 Robert H . 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 who were tried were found guilty in some or all 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 . McCarthyism , Vietnam , and later life . After the Nuremberg Trials , Taylor returned to civilian life in the United States , opening a private law practice in New York City . He became increasingly concerned with Senator McCarthy ' s activities , which he criticized strongly . In a speech at West Point in 1953 , he called McCarthy " a dangerous adventurer " , branding his tactics " a vicious weapon of the extreme right against their political opponents " and criticizing president Dwight D . Eisenhower for not stopping McCarthy ' s " shameful abuse of Congressional investigatory power . " He defended several victims of McCarthyism — alleged communists or perjurers — including labor leader Harry Bridges and Junius Scales . Although he lost these two cases ( Bridges ' sentence of five years in prison was later voided by the Supreme Court and Scales ' six - year sentence was commuted after one year ) , he remained unfazed by McCarthy ' s attacks on him , and responded by writing the book , " Grand Inquest : The Story of Congressional Investigations " , which was published in 1955 . 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 1966 , he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was one of very few professors there who refused to sign a statement issued by the Columbia Law School that termed the militant student protests at Columbia in 1968 as being beyond the " allowable limits " of civil disobedience . Taylor was very critical of the conduct of U . S . troops in the Vietnam War , and in 1971 urged President Richard Nixon to set up a national commission to investigate the conflict . He strongly criticized the court - martial of Lt . William Calley , the commanding officer of the U . S . troops involved in the My Lai massacre , because it did not include higher - ranking officers . Taylor regarded the 1972 bombing campaign targeting the North Vietnam ese capital , Hanoi , as " senseless and immoral " ; in December 1972 , he visited Hanoi along with musician and activist Joan Baez and others , among them also the associate dean of the Yale Law School . Taylor published his views in a book entitled " " in 1970 . He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials , U . S . conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II . For this reason , he favored prosecuting U . S . aviators who had participated in bombing missions over North Vietnam . In 1976 , Taylor , who had already been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale , accepted a new post at the Benjamin N . Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University , becoming a founding member of the faculty while continuing to teach at Columbia . His 1979 book , " Munich : The Price of Peace , " won the National Book Critics Circle Award 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 700 - page 1992 memoir of the Nuremberg trials ( see bibliography ) revealed how Nazi leader Hermann Göring had " cheated the hangman " by taking smuggled 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 Golick and six children : Joan , Ellen , John , Ursula , Ben , and Sam . References . Main sources : Other sources : Further reading :