Grand Inquest; The Story of Congressional Investigations

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. First Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good. xviii, 358, [6] pages. Occasional footnotes. Appendices. Historical Note on Outlawry. Notes to the Text and Appendices. Sources and Acknowledgments. Index. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Some fep discoloration. Review slip laid in. Some wear and dings to cover. Telford Taylor (February 24, 1908 - May 23, 1998) was an American lawyer known for his role in the Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, his opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his outspoken criticism of U.S. actions during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. 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, 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. At the Nuremberg Trials, he served as an assistant to Chief Counsel Robert H. Jackson when he was the U.S. prosecutor in the High Command case. Derived from a Kirkus review: "This" says the able and thoroughly informed author "is a study of the powers and purposes of legislative investigation, not of the merits or demerits of particular inquiries". He has explored a range of Congressional investigation, dating back to Major General St. Clair's disastrous defeat in our early years as a nation. He has approached the subject from multiple angles, the variety of types of investigation, the relation to the constitution, the use of investigation to reduce the presidential control of the executive branch, impacts on the judicial branch, and the infringement of constitutional rights. He has analyzed the permissible scope of processes within investigation- and the refuge taken by witnesses in the Fifth Amendment. He considers the points at which states rights have been involved. He presents his own suggestions, leveled at the starting and stopping points of investigation. There is no evasion of the central issue today,- an issue involving others than just Senator McCarthy and others of his stripe. Blame attaches, he feels, to weakness of decision in the White House, to panic action by an almost unanimous Congress in outlawing the Communist Party- and so thrusting it underground, in various failures to restore restraint, commonsense and courage, in lack of leadership never so much needed as today. This should be read and used as a spur to solution of the problems that confront us. This book is an expansion of an address on the powers of legislative investigating committees presented in December, 1953, as a symposium at Notre Dame University and printed as an article in the following issue of the Notre Dame Lawyer, and of other addresses and lectures on the same subject delivered in 1953 under various auspices.