
William Brockenbrough Taylor Jr. (14 September 1947-) was the United States Ambassador to Ukraine from 21 June 2006 to 23 May 2009, succeeding John E. Herbst and preceding John F. Tefft.
Biography[]
William Brockenbrough Taylor Jr. was born in New Mexico in 1947, and he attended high school in Mount Vernon, Virginia before graduating from West Point in 1969 and serving in the US 101st Airborne Division in the Vietnam War. He earned the CIB, Bronze Star, and Air Medal for heroism in Quang Tri and Thua Tien, and he left the military in 1975. Taylor worked for the Department of Energy before serving as a legislative assistant to Democratic US Senator Bill Bradley, as a defense advisor to US Ambassador to NATO William Howard Taft IV, as Afghanistan coordinator at the State Department, as Director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, and as George W. Bush's Ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. He helped draw Ukraine closer to NATO, and, after President Barack Obama became President, Taylor returned to the Middle East to coordinate US support for the Arab Spring. In 2019, he briefly served as charge d'affaires in Ukraine after Trump fired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch for undermining Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his rival Joe Biden, and he later testified that Trump had threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine investigated Joe Biden.