By 1935, he provided legal counsel (assisted by Max Lowenthal among others) to a subcommittee of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee chaired by Burton K. Wheeler and whose members included the newly elected Harry S.

[citation needed] Following the outbreak of World War II, Taylor joined Army Intelligence as a major on October 5, 1942,[2] leading the American group at Bletchley Park that was responsible for analyzing information obtained from intercepted German communications using Ultra encryption.

In 1944, he was promoted to full colonel and was assigned to the team of Robert H. Jackson, which helped work out the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials.

[citation needed] At the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor initially served as an assistant to chief counsel Robert H. Jackson and, in that function, was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case.

[citation needed] 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.

[4] Shirer's monumental history of Nazi Germany became a surprise best-seller when it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1960, and has remained in print ever since.

After the Nuremberg Trials, Taylor returned to civilian life in the United States, opening a private law practice in New York City.

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.

Taylor was very critical of the conduct of US troops in the Vietnam War, and in 1971 urged President Richard Nixon to set up a national commission to investigate the conflict.

In December 1972, he visited Hanoi along with musician and activist Joan Baez and others, among them was Michael Allen, the associate dean of the Yale Divinity School.

He argued that by the standards employed at the Nuremberg Trials, U.S. conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia, while different in some ways, was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II.

And a large part of it isn't really due to any intrinsic sadism or a desire to inflict pain - it's the degeneration of standards under pressures, boredom, fear, other influences of this kind.