Who Killed James
Forrestal?
World
War II had ended less than three years before. It was becoming increasingly
apparent that, for all its losses, the big winner of that war had been the
Soviet Union and world communism. On March 10, 1948, the body of one of the
leading holdouts against the communist advance was found in the courtyard
beneath the window of his office. National authorities called the death a
suicide, but reports in opposition countries concluded that it had been a
murder, a political assassination by the secret police. I am speaking of
Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the last
non-communist government minister of Czechoslovakia, which was the last Eastern
European country not yet taken over completely by the communists.
On
May 22, 1949, the body of the man generally regarded as the leading government
official warning of the communist menace abroad and within the United States
government, the nation’s first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, was
found on a third floor roof 13 floors below a 16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval
Hospital.
He had been admitted to the hospital, apparently against his will, diagnosed as
suffering from “operational fatigue” and kept in confinement in a room with
security-screened windows on the 16th floor since April 2, some seven weeks
before. The body had been discovered at 1:50 a.m., and the last edition of the
May 22 New York Times reported the death as a suicide, although the
belt, or sash, of his dressing gown was tied tightly around his neck, a more
suspicious happenstance than anything associated with Masaryk’s death.
Books
on Forrestal
A
suicide it has remained in the newspapers and magazines of the United States to
the present day. Three books have also been written about Forrestal, each of
which discusses his death in considerable length. The first was James
Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy by California
political science professor, Arnold A. Rogow, published in 1963 by The
Macmillan Company. If the Book Review Digest is any indicator, it was
the most heavily publicized, if not the best received, of the books in
question. Nineteen reviews are listed, and a few are summarized. Most take the
author to task for the general shallowness of his effort and his attempt at
post-mortem psychoanalysis, what some have called a psychological autopsy. None
of them, however, challenge Rogow’s conclusion–which is really almost his
starting place–that Forrestal’s death was an obvious suicide caused by his
“mental illness,” something that Rogow dwells upon almost ad nauseam.
The
second book was The Death of James Forrestal by Cornell Simpson,
published by Western Islands Publishers in 1966. It is not mentioned by Book
Review Digest, and presumably it was not reviewed by anyone in the American
media.* Your local municipal or university library probably does not have a
copy. Through checking with contemporary newspaper sources, I have found it to
be far more accurate and better documented in matters concerning the details of
Forrestal’s last weeks, days, and hours, than even the celebrated third, and most
recent, of the books written. That book, in its two chapters on Forrestal’s
decline and death, references Simpson’s book only once, versus 23 references to
Rogow. We shall have a good deal more to say about Simpson’s efforts later in
this essay.
Driven
Patriot
But
first, let us turn to that last word on the subject, the 587-page biography, Driven
Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and
Douglas Brinkley. This biography by a former Under Secretary of the Air Force
and the current head of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans,
respectively, was named a Notable Book of the Year (1992) by the New York
Times, although the Book Review Digest records only seven reviews in
periodicals. Here is their concluding paragraph of chapter 32 entitled
“Breakdown,” the paragraph that occasions their lone reference to the Simpson
book:
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Forrestal’s
death fostered several enduring suppositions that the end was not suicide,
but murder. Henry Forrestal, for one, believed “they” murdered his brother, a
position based in large part on his conviction that no man of Forrestal’s
courage and stamina could kill himself. The murderous ‘they’ were variously
identified as “the Communists” or “the Jews,” and their nefarious work had
the necessary connivance of the highest authorities in the United States
government. But the facts of the case, beginning well before Forrestal
entered the hospital and including the Menninger and Raines diagnoses of his
illness, effectively refute the murder theory. (p. 468)
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It
is interesting, indeed, to learn that in this case a man as close to Forrestal
as his older brother Henry did not believe that the death was a suicide, so
let’s have a close look at the “facts of the case” on the night of the death,
as recounted by Hoopes and Brinkley:
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Apparently,
Forrestal was now finding it possible to take the onset of Drew Pearson’s
Sunday-night broadcasts in stride, for on Friday, May 20, two days after
Raines’s departure, there was no visible sign of the anxiety that had shaken
him on the approach of previous weekends. On the contrary, he seemed in high
spirits. On Saturday, Rear Admiral Morton Willcutts, the commanding officer
at Bethesda, watched him consume a large steak lunch and found him ebullient,
meticulously shaven, and eager to greet a few scheduled visitors, among them
[son] Peter. Nothing untoward occurred during the afternoon and early
evening. Then, late in the evening, he informed the corpsman on duty that he
did not want a sedative or a sleeping pill because he was planning to stay up
quite late and read. The corpsman was Edward Prise, the most sensitive (and the
one Forrestal liked best) of the three who rotated round-the-clock eight-hour
shifts outside his door. One of the other corpsmen had chosen Friday to go
absent without leave and get drunk, which meant that Prise was to be relieved
at midnight by a substitute for the fellow who had gone AWOL; the new man was
a stranger to Forrestal and to the subtleties and dangers of the situation.
Prise had observed that Forrestal, though more energetic than usual, was also
more restless, and this worried him. He tried to alert the young doctor who
had night duty and slept in a room next to Forrestal’s. But the doctor was
accustomed to restless patients and not readily open to advice on the subject
from an enlisted corpsman. Midnight arrived and with it the substitute corpsman,
but Prise nevertheless lingered on for perhaps half an hour, held by some
nameless, instinctive anxiety. But he could not stay forever. Regulations,
custom, and his own ingrained discipline forbade it.
At
one-forty-five on Sunday morning, May 22, the new corpsman looked in on
Forrestal, who was busy copying onto several sheets of paper the brooding
classical poem “The Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles, in which Ajax, forlorn
and far from home, contemplates suicide. (As translated by William Mackworth Praed
in Mark Van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry.) The book was bound in red
leather and decorated with gold.
Fair
Salamis, the billows’ roar
Wander around thee yet, And sailors gaze upon thy shore Firm in the Ocean set. Thy son is in a foreign clime Where Ida feeds her countless flocks, Far from thy dear, remembered rocks, Worn by the waste of time– Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....
Woe
to the mother in her close of day,
Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray, When she shall hear Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear! “Woe, woe!’ will be the cry– No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–
When
Forrestal had written the syllable “night’ of the word “nightingale” he
stopped his copying. It remains a speculation whether the word “nightingale”
triggered what Dr. Raines later called “Forrestal’s sudden fit of
despondence,” but a coincidence should not go unremarked. As discussed in
Chapter 23, “Nightingale” was the name of an anti-Communist guerilla army
made of Ukrainian refugees, recruited and trained by the CIA to carry on a
secret war against the Soviet Union from behind the Iron Curtain. Many of the
recruits were Nazi collaborators who had carried out mass executions of their
fellow countrymen, including thousands of Jews, behind the German lines
during the war. As a member of NSC, Forrestal had authorized the operation.
In
most accounts of what happened next, it is said that the inexperienced
corpsman “went on a brief errand.” However, Dr. Robert Nenno, the young
psychiatrist who later worked for Dr. Raines, quotes Raines as telling him
that Forrestal “pulled rank” and ordered the nervous young corpsman to go on
some errand that was designed to remove him from the premises.
After
writing the syllable “night” of the word “nightingale,” Forrestal inserted
his sheets of paper in the book between the last page and the back cover and
placed the book on the bed table, open to the poem. Then he quickly walked
across the corridor into the diet kitchen. Tying one end of his dressing-gown
sash to the radiator just below the window, and the other around his neck, he
removed the simple screen and climbed out the window. No one knows whether he
then jumped or hung until the silk sash gave way, but scratches found on the
cement work just below the window suggest that he may have hung for at least
one terrible moment, then changed his mind–too late–before the sash gave way
and he plunged thirteen stories to his death. Only seconds after he entered
the diet kitchen, a nurse on the seventh floor heard a loud crash. His broken
body had landed on the roof of a third-floor passageway, the dressing-gown
sash still tied around his neck and his watch still running. The Montgomery
County coroner concluded that death was instantaneous.
The
corpsman Prise had returned to his barracks room, but could not sleep. After
tossing restlessly for an hour, he got dressed and was walking across the
hospital yard for a cup of coffee at the canteen when he was suddenly aware
of a great commotion all around him. Instantly, instinctively, he knew what
had happened. Racing to the hospital lobby, he arrived just as the young
doctor whom he had tried unsuccessfully to warn emerged from an elevator. The
doctor’s face was a mask of anguish and agony. As Prise watched, he grasped
the left sleeve of his white jacket with his right hand and, in a moment of
blind madness, tore it from his arm. Prise was doubly crushed by Forrestal’s
death; in frequent friendly exchanges over several weeks, he had come to
regard Forrestal as “the most interesting man I ever met.” But more than
that, Forrestal had asked Prise to work for him after he left the hospital–as
chauffeur, valet, man Friday. The details had not been filled in, but Prise
felt there was a genuine bond between them, and a job with a great and famous
man meant a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. ‘It was my one big chance,” he
said later. (pp. 463-466)
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This
might sound persuasive to the uncritical reader. But notice what’s missing. We
hear nothing from the people in the position to know, the naval corpsman and
the doctor who were on duty there on the 16th floor at the time of the death.
Interestingly, Hoopes and Brinkley even withhold their names, as though they
are afraid that someone might track them down and find out what they saw and
heard that fateful night. We also hear nothing from the nurse who was supposed
to be in charge of that floor that night. Instead, we get a psychiatrist, who
later worked for the supervising psychiatrist who was in Montreal at the time
of the fall and an “intuitive” naval corpsman who, by his own words here, had
left for the night well before the fall occurred.
We
might note, as well, that the name of this Edward Prise appears in none of the
contemporaneous accounts of the death in the major newspapers I consulted, and
his story appears to contradict some of the basic facts in those stories. For
instance, news accounts place the time of the declining of the sleeping pill at
1:45 am, not much earlier in the evening as Prise tells us. The news accounts
also note nothing irregular or unusual about the corpsman who was on guard at
the time of the death. He is named as Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr.,
and he is nowhere described as a substitute for the regular person on duty. By
those early accounts, it was not a case of an inexperienced corpsman not
recognizing danger signals who allowed himself to be wheedled into leaving his
post. Rather, the guard, according to the hospital, had simply been relaxed
from 100% of the time to checks on Forrestal every five minutes. So great had
been Forrestal’s improvement, so little did anyone fear that he would commit
suicide, that not only was he routinely being permitted unobserved, ready
access to an easily-opened 16th-floor window, but he was also “being allowed to
shave himself and...belts were permissible on his dressing gown and pajamas.”
And Harrison’s guard shift did not begin at midnight as told in the Prise
account, but at 9:00 p.m. as related by The Washington Post on May 23,
1949.
So,
this Edward Prise story is not just irrelevant. It appears to be fiction. So
where did Hoopes and Brinkley get it and why do they tell it to us? Their three
references are as follows:
[John]
Osborne, “Forrestal,” unpublished manuscript outline; Rogow, James Forrestal,
pp. 16-17; and Lyle Stuart, Why: the Magazine of Popular Psychiatry I,
no. 1 (November 1950), pp. 3-9, 20-27.
About
the first reference, one can only wonder how it came to their attention. One
hardly knows where to start looking for it. The second reference, for its part,
flatly contradicts the Prise account:
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Late on the
evening of May 21 Forrestal informed the Naval Corpsman on duty that he did
not want a sedative or sleeping pill and that he was planning to stay up
rather late and read. When the Corpsman looked in at approximately 1:45 on
the morning of Sunday, May 22, Forrestal was copying onto several sheets of
paper Sophocles’s brooding ‘Chorus from Ajax,’ as translated by William
Mackworth Praed in Mark Van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry. The
Corpsman went on a brief errand while Forrestal transcribed: [poetry lines
repeated] (p. 17)
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Notice
that the person told earlier by Forrestal that no sedative will be needed and
the person on duty later at the time of the tragic events are one and the same
in this account. There is no Edward Prise being replaced at midnight by a pinch
hitter on the job. Notice, as well, that Rogow who, as we have noted, sells the
suicide thesis even harder than do Hoopes and Brinkley, is also careful not to
give us Harrison’s name.. (Former Naval Corpsman Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr., if
you are still alive out there, now is the time to come forward.)
We
might also note that the Rogow account is also in conflict with contemporaneous
news accounts with respect to the rejection of the sedative. They say that it
took place when Harrison looked in on Forrestal at 1:45 and found him awake,
after he had appeared to be sleeping at 1:30. Forrestal’s declining of the
pill, by news accounts, even prompted Harrison to go wake up the staff
psychiatrist on duty on the 16th floor, Dr. Robert R. Deen, and ask him what they
should do about it. On page 16 Rogow also reveals that Hoopes and Brinkley are
wrong about the steak dinner that Admiral Willcutts watched Forrestal eat. That
was at noon on Friday, not Saturday, which is in agreement with the Simpson
account.
Who
knows what’s in that third reference for the Prise story? Why? The Magazine
of Popular Psychiatry is truly obscure. According to a search at the
Library of Congress, only two libraries in the country have back issues of this
long-defunct periodical, and when I tried to get a copy I found that their
collections did not go back to the cited premier issue.
Secret
Investigation Report
So
why did Hoopes and Brinkley have to reach so far for sources, especially when
those sources relate, apparently, only to a very poor witness who wasn’t even
around when Forrestal took his tragic plunge? What about the findings of the
review board that was appointed by the same Admiral Willcutts who observed
Forrestal dining on steak on Friday? Here’s how The New York Times
described the board’s upcoming work on May 24:
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The board will
consider all the circumstances of Mr. Forrestal’s illness and of what
happened in the few minutes when he was left unattended, walked out of his
room into a diet kitchen and jumped. Today the board outlined the procedures
it would follow and visited the scene of the death. Tomorrow it will hear
witnesses, including Capt. Raines, the psychiatrist attending Mr. Forrestal.
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Why,
you might ask, didn’t Hoopes and Brinkley simply go to the transcript of those
hearings and tell us what the most immediate witnesses had to say? At this
point, the best expression that comes to mind is one frequently used by the Miami
Herald’s humorous columnist, Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.” The
hearings were secret and the transcript has remained secret to this day.**
It
is true that Admiral Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Medical Center,
Admiral Leslie Stone, the Bethesda Hospital commandant, Dr. George N. Raines,
the Navy psychiatrist in charge of the case, and Dr. Frank J. Brochart,
Montgomery County (Maryland) coroner, all publicly called the death a suicide
virtually immediately after it happened (in violation of the basic
investigative rule of police that all violent deaths should be treated as
murder until sufficient evidence is gathered to prove otherwise). But, on what
basis, one might ask, did the duly appointed investigative body, Admiral
Willcutts’ review board, conclude that it was, indeed, a suicide?
Dave
Barry’s favorite expression is appropriate once again. I’m not making this up.
The answer is that it didn’t. Here is what the investigation concluded, as
reported on page 15 of the October 12, 1949, New York Times. The full
article, including the headlines, is given here:
Washington,
Oct. 11. Francis P. Matthews, Secretary of the Navy, made public today the
report of an investigating board absolving all individuals of blame in the
death of James Forrestal last May 22. The former Secretary of Defense leaped
to his death from an upper story of the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda,
Maryland.
The
text of the report declared:
The
board, appointed by Rear Admiral Morton D. Willcutts, then head of the Naval
Medical Center, submitted its report on May 30. The Navy announcement today
gave no explanation of the delay in making the findings public.
Shortly
after Mr. Forrestal’s death, Navy psychiatrists explained that their patient
had reached a stage in his recovery where a necessary “calculated risk” had
to be assumed in permitting him more liberty of movement and less
supervision. He climbed through the window of a kitchen during the temporary
absence from his floor of an orderly, who otherwise would have seen him and
who could have prevented the jump.
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At
least The New York Times is consistent. Its very first report in the
last edition of its May 22 newspaper begins, “James Forrestal, former Secretary
of Defense jumped thirteen stories to his death early this morning from the
sixteenth floor of the Naval Medical Center.”
But
look at the Navy’s conclusions. They tell us only that he died from the
injuries caused by the fall and that no one associated with the hospital or the
Navy was responsible in any way for the fall. What they don’t say is what
caused the fall. They don’t even venture to remind us that the sash of a
hospital gown, presumably Forrestal’s, was tied tightly around the neck of the
corpse, which they thoroughly establish was that of Forrestal. By not
mentioning it, they are relieved of any requirement to explain, or even to
speculate upon, its purpose and who might have done the tying of the sash.
Recall
that Hoopes and Brinkley had said quite confidently that Forrestal had tied one
end of the sash to a radiator below the window and that it “gave way,” whatever
that means. All The New York Times had to say about the sash in its
front-page May 23 article was as follows:
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There were
indications that Mr. Forrestal might also have tried to hang himself. The
sash of his dressing-gown was still knotted and wrapped tightly around his
neck when he was found, but hospital officials would not speculate as to its
possible purpose.
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And
to this day no one in authority has told us what that sash was doing there.
Might that be because the attempted hanging scenario is not just nonsensical,
but it is impossible? If Forrestal was bent on killing himself, wouldn’t he
have simply dived out the window, particularly when the attendant was likely to
return at any minute? After the sash had been wrapped and tied tightly around
his neck, was there enough of it left over for it to also have been tied at one
time around the radiator beneath the window? Were there any indications from
the creases in the sash that an attempt had been made to tie it around
something at one end? How likely is it, anyway, that Navy veteran Forrestal
would have been so incompetent at tying a knot that it would have come undone?
Most importantly, how do we know that skilled assassins, working for people
with ample motives to silence this astute and outspoken patriot (more about
those people later) did not use the sash to throttle and subdue Forrestal
before pitching him out the window?
The
willingness of the authorities to withstand the thoroughly justified charge of
cover-up by not releasing the results of their investigation, including the
transcripts of witness testimony, speaks volumes, as does the extraordinarily
deceptive description of the case by the likes of such establishment figures as
Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. The Hoopes-Brinkley account is replete
with deceptions, but there is none greater than this withholding of the
information that all the key witness testimony has been kept secret, along with
the results of the investigation itself, and that the investigation did not
conclude that Forrestal committed suicide. Even Arnold Rogow states in a very
matter-of-fact manner in a footnote on page 19, “Both the Surgeon General of
the United States and the Navy conducted official inquiries. The results of
these investigations have never been made public.” (This is the only mention
that I have seen of the Surgeon General’s inquiry. I submitted a Freedom of
Information request for the Willcutts investigation report to the National
Naval Medical Center some weeks ago, but have received no reply as of this writing.)
“Evidence”
without Sources, and Sins of Omission
By
leaving out the vital information that the official record of the case has been
suppressed, Hoopes and Brinkley, cobbling together an account based on a
hodgepodge of dubious sources, leave the reader with the impression that we
know more about what happened than we really do. Take, for instance, the matter
of Forrestal’s copying of a poem, interpreted as an advocacy of suicide, in the
wee hours of the night. How do we know that the copying was done by Forrestal,
himself, and not by someone who saw it as a clever substitute for a more
difficult to compose fake suicide note? Well, Hoopes-Brinkley say that the
substitute corpsman saw him copying away when he looked in on him at 1:45. And
how do they know that? Their sole reference for that observation is Arnold
Rogow, and, sure enough, as we see in the Rogow quote above, that’s what Rogow
says, although Rogow’s observer is apparently the regular guard and not a
substitute.
So
how does Rogow know? We have no way of knowing, because he has no reference. In
all likelihood, the Rogow account upon which Hoopes-Brinkley rely is not true.
All The New York Times and The Washington Post have to say about
the 1:45 encounter is that the corpsman found Forrestal awake, and he declined
a sedative or sleeping pill. If the corpsman had actually witnessed him
writing, with the poetry book open in front of him, the newspapers would have
surely taken that opportunity to tell us, because they certainly do want us to
believe that he was the transcriber. Here’s The New York Times account
of May 23:
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Mr. Forrestal
had copied most of the Sophocles poem from the book on hospital memo paper,
but he had apparently been interrupted in his efforts. His copying stopped
after he had written “night” of the word “nightingale” in the twenty-sixth
line of the poem.
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Clearly,
this is conjecture, and not based on what the corpsman had to say. This
presumably copied poem by Forrestal was played up big by all the newspapers
from the very beginning, because it was from that, as much or more than
anything else, that the suicide conclusion that all of them immediately reached
was made to seem plausible. It is highly unlikely that the newspapers would
have passed up actual eyewitness evidence that Forrestal was transcribing the
tragic lines just minutes before he took his fatal plunge.
So,
was Forrestal the person who transcribed those lines from Sophocles, and, if he
was, did he do it just before his fall from the window? The honest answer is
that we do not know.***
By
now it should be clear to the reader that authors of well-publicized and
distributed books in the United States on James Forrestal have taken no oath to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Take, as well, the
treatment of Forrestal’s older brother, Henry, a solid and successful
businessman who lived in the family home in Beacon, New York, where they and an
older brother had grown up. We have seen that Hoopes and Brinkley note Henry’s
doubts about the official verdict on Forrestal’s death, but they brush him
aside and make him appear a tad outrageous with his suggestion that “the
Communists” or “the Jews” might have been behind it, with the connivance of the
highest officials in the U.S. government. As with the missing testimony of the
witnesses, how much better would it have been to hear what Henry had to say
himself about this matter! The authors had access to Cornell Simpson’s 1966
book, The Death of James Forrestal, and they could have given us at
least something of the flavor of the following passage:
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At his home in
Beacon, New York, Henry Forrestal stated to this author that James Forrestal
positively did not kill himself. He said his brother was the last person in
the world who would have committed suicide and that he had no reason for
taking his life. When Forrestal talked to his brother at the hospital, James
was having a good time planning the things he would do following his
discharge. Henry Forrestal recalled that Truman and [new Defense Secretary
Louis] Johnson agreed that his brother was in fine shape and that the
hospital officials admitted that he would have been released soon. To Henry
Forrestal, the whole affair smelled to high heaven. He remarked about his
brother's treatment at the hospital, his virtual imprisonment and the
censorship of his visitors. Henry Forrestal had never heard of such treatment
and questioned why it should have been allowed. He further questioned why the
hospital officials lied about his brother being permitted all the visitors he
wanted.
He
was bitter when recounting that from the first minute the officials had
insisted the death was a result of suicide; that they did not even consider
the possibility of murder even though there was no suicide note, though his
brother acted perfectly normal when the corpsman saw him only a few minutes
before his death, though the bathrobe cord was knotted tightly around his
neck.
He
considered it odd that his brother had died just a few hours before he,
Henry, was to arrive and take James out of the hospital.
Then
he repeated his belief that James Forrestal did not kill himself; that he was
murdered; that someone strangled him and threw him out the window. Henry
Forrestal went on to ask why the authorities did not have the decency to
admit these things and then try to apprehend the murderer. He lamented the
fact that the case was hurriedly hushed up in an apparent attempt to avoid a
scandal.
He
went on to say that he was a Democrat but nevertheless he blamed the Truman
administration for covering up his brother's murder, for letting it happen,
and for the way James Forrestal was treated in the hospital. He concluded
that he was "damned bitter" about it all but did not know what he
could do.
There
is at least one other person who did not believe the suicide story. Monsignor
[Maurice] Sheehy said that when he hurried to the hospital several hours
after Forrestal hurtled to his death to try to learn what he could of the
circumstances of the tragedy, a stranger approached him in the crowded
hospital corridor. The man was a hospital corpsman, not young Harrison, but a
warrant officer wearing stripes attesting to twenty years of service in the
navy. He said to Monsignor Sheehy in a low, tense voice: "Father...you
know Mr. Forrestal didn't kill himself, don't you."
But
before Monsignor Sheehy could reply or ask the man's name, he said, others in
the crowded corridor pressed about him closely, and the veteran warrant
officer, as if fearful of being overheard, quickly disappeared.
What
did this man know about Forrestal's death? What was it he did not dare tell
even a priest?
What
really happened in the hospital that fatal night? (pp. 29-30)
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Hoopes
and Brinkley also say matter-of-factly that Henry had visited his brother at
the hospital four times. Again, they don’t tell us what we learn in the obscure
1966 Simpson book:
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Henry
Forrestal tried several times to see his brother in the hospital but was
refused visiting rights by both Dr. Raines and [acting hospital commandant]
Captain [B. W.] Hogan. He finally managed to see his brother briefly after he
had informed Hogan that he intended to go to the newspapers and after he had
threatened legal action against the hospital.
Henry
Forrestal told this writer that when he was finally allowed to see his
brother, he found James “acting and talking as sanely and intelligently as
any man I’ve ever known.” (p. 9)
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There
is no hint from Hoopes-Brinkley that Henry was ever kept away from his brother
by the hospital.
Hoopes
and Brinkley do tell us of Henry’s futile efforts to persuade Dr. Raines to
allow Forrestal’s friend and Catholic priest, Father Maurice Sheehy, to visit,
although they don’t tell us that, in fact, Raines turned Sheehy away on six
separate occasions. The different accounts of the prevention of visits by
Sheehy in the two books make interesting reading. First we have
Hoopes-Brinkley:
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Raines did not
release his patient, but he did tell Henry that his brother was
“fundamentally okay.” Henry also pressed Raines to allow Father Maurice S.
Sheehy, a Catholic priest, to visit Forrestal, but Raines was opposed.
According to Michael Forrestal, his father had met Sheehy, “a short, dark man
of the shadows,” sometime during his last months in office when “he was groping
for a way back to his boyhood faith.” Forrestal had asked to see Sheehy “to
help him return to the Catholic Church, almost from the first day he entered
the hospital,” and concurrently he was reading Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen’s Peace
of Soul. For reasons never adequately explained, Raines turned down these
requests while providing assurances that everything would be possible at the
proper time. Henry Forrestal, who was Father Sheehy’s ally in this
undertaking, asked, “How long do you want to wait, Doctor? Delays in such
cases can be dangerous. Have you ever heard of a case where being visited by
a clergyman has hurt a man?” But Raines, for his own reasons, perhaps because
he thought the reopening of the Catholic issue would be disquieting to the
patient, or possibly because a Catholic confessional might risk disclosing
sensitive national security information, continued to put him off. On May 18,
Henry Forrestal and Sheehy took their exasperation to the Navy Secretary,
John L. Sullivan. He telephoned Raines, who seemed to promise an early visit
by Sheehy, but three days later he was dead. (pp. 462-463)
|
Now
here’s the Simpson account:
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Henry
Forrestal could see no reason why his younger brother should be held almost a
prisoner in the hospital. He talked again with Captain Hogan and Dr. Raines
and expressed the thought that his brother should be out in the country where
he could walk around in the sun and talk to his friends. He received no
response to his suggestions and finally asked the doctor point-blank if his
brother was fundamentally all right. Dr. Raines replied yes.
Nevertheless,
when Henry Forrestal told Raines and Hogan that his brother particularly
wanted to talk with his close friend Monsignor Maurice S. Sheehy, who was
instructor in religion at Catholic University of America, in Washington,
D.C., and who had been a World War II navy chaplain, Captain Hogan admitted
that the patient already had requested this a number of times but said he
still would not be allowed to see the priest. Henry Forrestal told this
writer that the more he thought about his brother being shut up in an
isolated tower room and refused permission to see Father Sheehy, the more it
bothered him. Finally, he decided to take his brother into the country to
complete his convalescence. Henry Forrestal made train reservations to return
to Washington on Sunday, May 22, and reserved a room at the Mayflower Hotel
for that day. He then phoned the hospital and told them he was arriving to
take his brother.
But
only hours before Henry Forrestal was due to board his train, he received the
news that his brother was dead. James Forrestal, oddly, died the very day his
brother had planned to take him from the hospital. (pp. 8-9)
|
Notice
that Simpson makes no attempt to make excuses for the inexcusable policy of Dr.
Raines with respect to Father Sheehy. Rather, he says, “The priest later
commented that he received the distinct impression that Dr. Raines was acting
under orders. One might ask, Under whose orders?” (p. 10)
When
Father Sheehy contacted Secretary of the Navy Sullivan, the Secretary seemed
surprised to learn of the ban on his visiting. Simpson reaches the conclusion
that the orders that Dr. Raines was following came from the White House, the
same as the orders that had caused him to be committed to the hospital in the
first place and kept there in near isolation on the top floor for seven long
weeks.
Simpson
goes on to reveal that Father Paul McNally, S.J. of Georgetown University had
also tried and had been prevented from seeing Forrestal by Dr. Raines, as had
at least one other important friend, unnamed, who “urgently wanted to talk with
him.” (p. 11)
Yet,
The Washington Post reported on May 23 that “During the past few weeks,
Forrestal was allowed to have any visitors he wanted to see, a medical officer
on duty said, adding that no log was kept of such visitors.” Obviously, the
Bethesda medical authorities, like the prominent Forrestal biographers, had
taken no oath to adhere to the truth, either.
Odd
Choice of Permitted Visitors
At
the same time that Forrestal was being prevented visits by those he most wanted
and needed to see, unwanted guests were being allowed in. These included his
successor as Secretary of Defense, a man whom, according to Hoopes and
Brinkley, he held in very low regard:
|
[Louis]
Johnson was not an attractive figure physically, intellectually, or socially.
As Assistant Secretary of War in the late 1930s, he quarreled with his
superior, Harry Woodring, and was soon marked as a nakedly ambitious
troublemaker. FDR fired him without tears. [Forrestal aide] John Kenney
thought him “a miserable creature, driven to live in an atmosphere of strife
and discord of his own making.” Forrestal regarded him with contempt and
found degrading the idea that he might be displaced by such a man. “He is
incompetent,” he told Kenney. (p. 431)
|
Interestingly,
The New York Times of May 23, 1949, alongside its articles about
Forrestal’s death is the headline, “Johnson Took Post on Forrestal Plea.” That
article reported that on May 17 Louis Johnson had addressed a group called the
Post Mortem Club and had told them at that time that he was reluctant to accept
the post, but Forrestal had pleaded with him to take over the job from him. One
might wonder if Johnson knew at that time that Forrestal would never be able to
contradict him, although what is more likely is that Johnson knew that
Forrestal was too big a man to do such a petty thing as to contradict him
publicly over such an ultimately small matter.
Another
guest who was probably unwanted, two weeks before Forrestal’s death, was the
man who had actually made the decision to replace Forrestal with his own head
campaign fund-raiser, none other than President Truman, himself. Townsend
Hoopes also learned in a January 1989 interview of top Forrestal aide, Marx
Leva, that even young Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson “managed to gain
entrance to the suite ‘against Forrestal’s wishes’.”(p. 462)
This
is a very strange revelation. Johnson, at that time, was a man of far lesser
stature than Forrestal. It would have been extraordinarily presumptuous of him
to bull his way into Forrestal’s hospital room when his visit was frankly not
wanted. A likely reason why Forrestal would have considered Johnson a member of
the enemy camp, albeit a low-level one, was Johnson’s great partisanship toward
the fledgling state of Israel. As a Congressman, Johnson was considerably ahead
of his time in that respect, at least for a Congressman outside the state of
New York. We might imagine something of Forrestal’s attitude toward LBJ by
noting a May 23, 1949, Washington Post article headlined, “Delusions of
Persecution, Acute Anxiety, Depression Marked Forrestal’s Illness.” That
article concludes as follows:
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His fear of
reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by some columnists
on what they said was his opposition to partition of Palestine under a UN
mandate. In his last year as Defense Secretary, he received great numbers of
abusive and threatening letters. (p. 7)
|
One
must truly wonder why Lyndon Johnson would have wanted to go visit Forrestal in
his hospital room and what on earth the two adversaries might have had to say
to one another. We must wonder as well why none of Forrestal’s closest
professional associates are known to have visited or attempted to visit him.
One would think that men like Ferdinand Eberstadt, Robert Lovett, and Marx
Leva, who, as we shall see, were at his side during his days of decline would
have exhibited continuing personal concern for his well-being by periodic
visits to the hospital.
Something
we need not wonder about is whether Dr. Raines and the Naval Medical Center
made decisions based upon what was best for the patient in this case. Clearly
they did not. Their visitor policy would appear to be more closely akin to
torture than to therapy, or closer to the state-serving psychiatric profession
of the old Soviet Union. Here’s what the aide, Leva, had to say about it in an
interview for the Truman
Library:
|
By the way,
psychiatry. He was never permitted to see the people he should have seen. I'm
not sure he should have seen me, I would have reminded him of too much, but
friends of his, people who loved him; Senator Leverett Saltonstall, just to
mention one name, not really a political ally but just someone who really
loved him; Kate Foley his secretary.
The
great vice of military medicine is that you see who they want you to see.
Louis Johnson came out to see him and he saw him and that was the last person
that he should have seen you know. Captain Raines couldn't say no to Louis
Johnson, but that's the last thing that should have been done.
-----
And only a Navy doctor could put a VIP patient on the seventeenth floor (sic)
you know. I mean nobody else would put anybody above the second floor with
that particular illness. Who is to know whether that had gone so far? I mean
he apparently was beyond being neurotic, I mean it was apparently paranoid
(sic) but I didn't see it at all. It's a long way to tell you that I did not
see it at all until the day after he left office.
|
Forrestal’s Condition
However
much he might have improved, whether because of or in spite of his treatment at
the Naval Hospital, one must wonder if Forrestal wasn’t a bit off in the head
and therefore possibly prone to suicide, as even Leva grudgingly seems to have
accepted. A number of statements made in the wake of the death could leave one
with hardly any other impression. This is from the May 24 New York Times:
|
Captain George
M. Raines, the Navy psychiatrist who had been treating Mr. Forrestal, said
that the former Secretary ended his life in a sudden fit of despondency. He
said this was “extremely common” to the patient’s severe type of mental
illness.
|
And
in the May 24 Washington Post, although Dr. Raines “categorically denied
that Forrestal attempted suicide previously during his stay at the hospital”
(which had been charged by columnist, Drew Pearson, who also said he had tried
to hang himself, slashed his wrists, and had taken an overdose of sleeping
pills while at Hobe Sound, Florida, where he had gone for relaxation), Raines
did say:
|
There was a
history of an alleged suicide attempt obtained by Dr. Menninger which is said
to have occurred on the night before the patient was seen by him (at Hobe
Sound). At no time during his residence with the Naval Hospital had Mr.
Forrestal made a suicidal gesture or a suicidal attempt. His feelings of
hopelessness and possible suicide had been a matter of frank discussion
between the two of us throughout the course of the therapy.
|
Please
notice the firmness of the denials of actual suicide attempts versus the
extreme vagueness of the apparent affirmation of suicidal tendencies and of the
“alleged suicide attempt.” Arnold Rogow also gets in on the act. Speaking of
Forrestal’s stay at Hobe Sound, he says:
|
During the
next several days Forrestal made at least one suicide attempt. As a result,
all implements that can be, and have been, used in suicide efforts–such as
knives, razor blades, belts, and so on–were hidden or kept under
surveillance. Forrestal was at no time left alone; when he was taking a
shower or shaving himself, swimming in the surf or strolling on the beach,
one or more friends was always in his company. Since proximity to the ocean
presented special risks, Forrestal was always accompanied in the water by a
friend who was an especially strong swimmer. (p. 6)
|
Notice,
again, that while there are many details about preventive measures taken
against suicide, Rogow provides us no details at all about what he calls “at
least one suicide attempt.”
Hoopes
and Brinkley muddy the water still further with respect to that supposed
suicide attempt with this passage.
|
Although
Forrestal talked of suicide in Florida, Raines said, he made no
attempt to kill himself. According to Eliot Janeway, however, Eberstadt told
him privately that Forrestal had made one suicide attempt at Hobe Sound. (p.
456)
|
Here
Dr. Raines apparently clarifies his earlier “alleged suicide attempt” claim,
ruling it out entirely, but a somewhat less authoritative and frankly biased
source is cited to bring it back into the realm of possibility, though details
are still quite noticeably lacking.
Hoopes
and Brinkley also say that before the decision was made that Forrestal should
go to Florida to rest, he told his friend and fellow Wall Street magnate turned
high government official, Ferdinand Eberstadt, that “his life was a wreck, his
career a total failure, and he was considering suicide.” (p. 450) And what is
their reference for that? Like their account of the witness to the
transcription of the poem, it is only Arnold Rogow. Rogow says that Forrestal
told Eberstadt that he was a complete failure and considering suicide, but,
once again, Rogow has no reference such as an interview with Eberstadt or any
writing by Eberstadt.. He has no reference again when he describes Forrestal’s
transfer from the relaxing beach resort in Florida to the Bethesda Naval
Hospital:
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Forrestal,
although he had been given sedation, was in a state of extreme agitation
during the flight from Florida. Again he talked of those “trying to get me”
and of suicide. At one point he raised the question whether he was being
“punished” for having been a “bad Catholic’–“bad”–referring to the fact that
he had not practiced his faith for more than thirty years, and had married a
divorced woman. Although he was repeatedly reassured that he was not being
“punished” and that no one wished him ill, much less wanted to destroy him,
Forrestal’s agitation increased during the trip in a private car from the
airfield to the hospital. He made several attempts to leave the car while it
was in motion, and had to be forcibly restrained. Arriving at Bethesda, he
declared that he did not expect to leave the hospital alive. It was not clear
whether he was referring to suicide or to a conviction that he would be
murdered. (pp. 8-9)
|
On
page 454 Hoopes and Brinkley repeat this passage virtually verbatim, leaving
out the part about his talking of suicide again and supplying the information
that he was accompanied on this trip by Eberstadt, the psychiatrist Dr.
Menninger, and by aide John Gingrich. Only the sourceless Rogow, however, is cited
as a source. Maybe the more recent authors omitted the suicide talk, knowing
that it would hardly ring true in such close juxtaposition to Forrestal’s
manifestation of his serious Roman Catholicism. Catholics regard suicide as one
of the cardinal sins.
Of
particular interest are the supposed words of reassurance given by Forrestal’s
traveling associates. “Efforts by his companions to assure him that no one
wished him ill or wanted to destroy him were unavailing,” is how Hoopes and
Brinkley put it. At this point one must ask who it is that’s off his rocker
here. The unprecedented campaign of defamation to which he had been subjected,
led by columnists and radio commentators Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, ever
since his position against recognition of the state of Israel had become
public, and the “great numbers of abusive and threatening letters” about the
matter that the Washington Post said he had received demonstrated beyond a
doubt that large numbers of people wished James Forrestal ill. It is also
abundantly obvious that there were a number of people who wanted to destroy him
as a man of influence. The only question was how much power they might have had
and how far they thought it necessary to go.
The
Hoopes-Brinkley account of what transpired upon Forrestal’s arrival at the
Bethesda Naval Hospital, which directly follows the account of his troubled
trip, is most intriguing:
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Dr. Menninger
talked to Forrestal on April 3 and again on April 6, but did not see him
thereafter. Responsibility had passed to Dr. Raines and the navy, but recent
evidence suggests that the White House was beginning to exert its influence
on physical arrangements and public relations. In 1984, Dr. Robert P. Nenno,
a young assistant to Dr. Raines from 1952 to 1959, disclosed that Raines had
been instructed by “the people downtown” to put Forrestal in the VIP suite on
the sixteenth floor of the hospital. Dr. Nenno emphasized that Raines’s
disclosure to him was entirely ethical, but that “he did speak to me because
we were close friends.” The decision to put Forrestal in the tower suite was
regarded by the psychiatric staff as “extraordinary” for a patient who was
“seriously depressed and potentially suicidal,” especially when the hospital
possessed two one-story buildings directly adjacent to the main structure
that were specifically organized and staffed to handle mentally disturbed
patients. Nenno added, “I have always guessed that the order came from the
White House.”
|
If
the White House was calling the shots on where Forrestal should be locked up,
there is a good chance that Monsignor Sheehy’s suspicions as related by Simpson
that they were also specifying the visitors he should receive were also
correct.
Who Was Calling the Shots?
Concerning
the extent of White House involvement in Forrestal’s treatment, the following
1968 excerpt of an
interview
by the Truman Library’s Jerry Hess of Harry Truman’s appointments secretary for
his full time as President, Matthew J. Connelly, is of considerable interest.
Connelly had previously been Truman’s executive assistant when Truman was Vice
President and when he was Senator, and before that he was the chief
investigator on the Senate committee through which Truman rose to prominence as
chairman, the Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The first
and last parts of the excerpt are included to support other suggestions in this
paper that there was a big drop-off in leadership quality in the fledgling
Department of Defense when James Forrestal was replaced by Louis Johnson.
|
HESS: The next
man who served for just a short period of time until the unification was
Kenneth C. Royall. He appears again as Secretary of the Army so we'll discuss
him as Secretary of the Army, if that's all right.
The
next category is Secretary of Defense. Of course, the first Secretary of
Defense under the unification act was James Forrestal. Why was he chosen as
the first Secretary of Defense?
CONNELLY:
Forrestal was Secretary of the Navy prior to the merger of the branches of
the Army, Navy and Air Force. Mr. Forrestal had been in Washington under the
Roosevelt administration, was a highly intellectual fellow, and was a good
administrative officer. When the merger was completed to create the Defense
Department, Mr. Truman looked on him as the superior of the other members of
the military establishment and appointed him as Secretary of Defense, which
office he held very successfully until an illness overtook him.
HESS:
Do you recall any instances, any evidences on the job of the mental
deterioration that overtook Mr. Forrestal, unfortunately?
CONNELLY:
Yes, I recall Mr. Forrestal called me and told me that his telephones were
being bugged, his house was being watched, and he would like me to do
something about it. So I had the chief of the Secret Service detail at the
White House make an investigation of Mr. Forrestal's home; I had him observe
it, I had him check his phones, and found out that he was just misinformed,
that it wasn't being watched, and there was no indication that there was any
wiretapping in Mr. Forrestal's home. That really upset me, because I realized
that the Secret Service would do a thorough job, and I told the President that
I was worried that Mr. Forrestal might be a little bit wrong.
HESS:
What did the President say at that time? Do you recall?
CONNELLY:
He asked me what I thought and I said, "I think Mr. Forrestal is
cracking up."
So
he said, "Why don't we arrange to have him go down to Key West and take
a little vacation?"
So,
Mr. Forrestal did go to Key West. There was a repetition down there. Mr.
Forrestal had hallucinations about things that were going wrong at Key West
and he called me from Key West and told me that something was wrong down
there. So I checked very carefully with the Navy, who supervises Key West,
and Mr. Forrestal later was transferred from Key West to the naval hospital
in Bethesda.
HESS:
Do you recall what he thought was going wrong at Key West at this time?
CONNELLY:
He thought that the same things were happening, that people were annoying
him, and he felt he was under surveillance down there, he felt that he was
being watched, and in other words, he was being personally persecuted. So as
a result of that, we had him very quietly removed to Bethesda hospital in
Washington. And history will disclose that is where he jumped out a window.
HESS:
The next man to hold the position was Louis Johnson. Why was he chosen for
that position?
CONNELLY:
Louis Johnson was chosen for two reasons. Number one, Louis Johnson had been
Commander of the American Legion. He was a perennial candidate for President.
He was a very effective political organizer, and during the campaign of 1948
when things were not very good for Mr. Truman, Louis Johnson accepted the
position as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. He gave up his
law practice. He devoted all of his time to raising money for the campaign in
'48. He was a highly successful lawyer in Washington, and Mr. Truman turned
to him after the death of Mr. Forrestal to take over the Pentagon operation.
HESS:
During this time, two important events took place, the cutting back of the
Armed Forces and the invasion of Korea. Some people had blamed Louis Johnson
for the reduction in the Armed Forces. Is that valid?
CONNELLY:
That is valid. He had promised that he would cut to the bone the expenditures
of the Defense Department and set out to do so, with the result that when the
Korean war developed we found ourselves very unable to meet our commitments
for our appearance in Korea.
HESS:
Was this done strictly for reasons of economy? Wasn't it seen that this was a
dangerous thing to do in the world situation at that time, or not?
CONNELLY:
Well, World War II was over and Mr. Johnson thought that the appropriation
for the Defense Department could be cut to reduce the overhead we had in
maintaining the equipment over here and overseas, and he put on an economy
program and without the Korean war at that time being imminent, he succeeded
in his objectives. However, when the Korean thing developed we were too thin
on supplies and materiel.
HESS:
In the Korean war the North Koreans invaded South Korea, we'll get to that a
little bit later, on June the 24th, on a Saturday, of 1950. Just when was the
decision made to replace Louis Johnson . What can you tell me about the
resignation of Louis Johnson?
CONNELLY:
I don't recall.
HESS:
Was that offered willingly, do you recall?
CONNELLY:
I don't believe so. I think that the President by this time became
dissatisfied with Johnson because of his inability to get along with other
members of the Armed Forces.
HESS:
How did he got along with the other members of the Cabinet?
CONNELLY:
Louis Johnson was somewhat of an individualist, and Louis Johnson was not
what you would call a cooperative member of the Cabinet. He was running his
own show, and he didn't want any interference from anybody else, and I don't
think he asked very often for opinions from anybody else.
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The
first thing to notice here is that Connelly’s statement apparently contradicts
both the Hoopes-Brinkley and the Rogow accounts as to who was behind the
decision to send Forrestal down to Florida, and later to have him placed in the
Bethesda Naval Hospital. Both books have Forrestal’s friend and colleague,
Ferdinand Eberstadt, as the prime mover in the decision to go down to the
estate of State Department official and friend, Robert Lovett, where
Forrestal’s wife, Jo, was already vacationing. As we shall see, their version
is supported by the most immediate witness to Forrestal’s apparent nervous
breakdown, Forrestal aide, Marx Leva. One curiosity is that, although Eberstadt
did not die until 1969, six years after Rogow’s book was published and 20 years
after Forrestal’s death, no one seems to have any sort of formal statement from
Eberstadt directly about these matters, including Forrestal’s supposed suicide
attempt at Hobe Sound or his talk of suicide. As for the decision to move Forrestal
to Bethesda, Hoopes-Brinkley have it as a “tacit agreement” among several
people at Hobe Sound, including Dr. Menninger, whom Eberstadt had apparently
called in, Dr. Raines, who they say had been sent down at the behest of the
White House (though not as the “agent” of the White House) and Forrestal’s
wife. The wife, they say, had been influenced toward the Bethesda decision by a
telephone conversation with Truman. Rogow says simply that Bethesda “was
deemed” preferable to Menninger’s psychiatric clinic, but doesn’t say by whom.
Considering
the fact that Forrestal, having been officially replaced as Defense Secretary
by Johnson on March 28, was a private citizen at this point, it is certainly
reasonable to assume that Forrestal’s extra-legal transportation to Florida on
a military airplane and confinement and treatment in the Naval Hospital at
Bethesda was not done without approval at the highest level. Therefore, the
Connelly account is probably essentially correct, although some area of dispute
may remain as to who was the prime mover behind the decisions that were made.
What appears not to be factually correct in the Connelly account is his placing
of the Florida vacation site as Key West instead of Hobe Sound. Hobe Sound is
on the southeast coast of Florida, north of Jupiter and West Palm Beach and
more than 100 miles from Key West. One would like to think that he just slipped
up on the name, but he is so definite about the Navy’s role in everything, and
the U.S. Navy does have facilities at Key West. Perhaps it was the active role
of Navy doctor, Captain Raines, that caused his confusion.
As
we have seen, although they don’t go quite so far as Connelly, Hoopes and
Brinkley do hint at a heavy behind-the-scenes presence by the White House in
Forrestal’s treatment. Not only do they suggest that the White House was
responsible for Forrestal being confined to the 16th floor, but one can easily
see political pressure as opposed to sound medical considerations behind the
curious choice of visitors that they tell us Forrestal was permitted. Arnold
Rogow doesn’t take that chance. He did, as we have seen, mention in passing,
though without comment in a footnote, that the report of the official
investigation was kept secret, but generally he is far guiltier than
Hoopes-Brinkley of withholding vital information from the reader.
Rogow’s
Psychological Autopsy
The
hand of the White House remains completely hidden in the Rogow account. Rather,
the voice we hear over and over is that of Dr. Raines and of the psychiatric
community. One is greatly reminded of Kenneth Starr’s heavy reliance upon
“suicidologist” Dr. Allan Berman and his “100% degree of medical certainty”
that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide:
Although
some psychiatrists regard involutional melancholia as one of the mixed states
of manic-depression, and others feel that it is a form of schizophrenia,
there is broad agreement that the symptoms include anxiety, self-doubt,
depression, and nihilistic tendencies.
The
underlying personality characteristics of a typical involutional melancholic,
according to one authoritative source, include a devotion to hard work and
pride in work. Many of those who develop the illness are “sensitive,
meticulous, over-conscientious, over-scrupulous, busy, active people....”
(same textbook reference) They have also been described as showing “a narrow
range of interests, poor facility for readjustments, asocial trends,
inability to maintain friendships, intolerance and poor sexual adjustment, also
a pronounced and rigid ethical code and a proclivity to reticence....”
(ibid.) In the treatment of involutional melancholics, suicide is always a
great risk, and therefore the average patient “is best treated in a mental
hospital.” (ibid.)
A
percentage of involutional melancholics experience paranoid ideation; in
Forrestal’s case such ideation was particularly apparent. The belief that he
was a victim of “plots” and “conspiracies” antedated his visit to Hobe Sound,
and despite the treatment prescribed by Raines in Bethesda, this delusion was
never fully displaced in his mind. (pp. 9-10)
|
Rogow
does mention, again almost in passing, that Forrestal’s brother, Henry, was not
happy with the treatment at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and he quotes from the
December 1950 article by William Bradford Huie in the December 1950 New
American Mercury to that effect. He also tells us that Father Sheehy had
tried six times “during the week before [Forrestal’s] death” to see him at the
hospital but “he told reporters, he was turned away by Raines because Raines
did not believe that such a visit ‘would be in the patient’s best interest.’”
(p. 45)
No
reference is given for the Sheehy talk to reporters, but the Huie article is
clear that the six attempts by Sheehy to visit took place before Henry’s last
visit with Raines on May 12, ten days before Forrestal’s death, and probably
over a period of time much longer than one week. Huie tells us that on April
12, “Henry Forrestal also told the doctors (Raines and Hogan) that his brother
wished to talk with Father Sheehy. Captain Hogan replied, according to Mr.
Forrestal:: ‘Yes, he has asked to see the Father several times. And, of course,
he will.’” (p. 651)
The
prevention of any meeting between Sheehy and James Forrestal was obviously not
the last minute sort of thing that Rogow would apparently want us to believe it
was. In a further attempt to explain things away, but in apparent contradiction
to the statement that the six visit attempts were all in the week before
Forrestal’s death, Rogow has this long footnote:
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Huie quotes
Henry Forrestal as saying to Raines in May (It was May 12. ed).: “How long do
you want to wait, doctor [before Forrestal was permitted to talk with Father
Sheehy]? We have waited five weeks. Delays in such cases can be dangerous.
Have you ever heard of a case where being visited by a clergyman has hurt a
man?” Huie also reports Father Sheehy’s statement that “Had I been allowed to
see my friend, Jim Forrestal, receive him back in the Church, and put his
mind at ease with the oldest and most reliable medicine known to mankind, he
would be alive today. His blood is on the heads of those who kept me from
seeing him.” On November 18, 1949, however, Father Sheehy issued a more
temperate statement to a United Press reporter who interviewed him in
Washington. In its story headed “New Argument Stirred Over Forrestal Death,”
the UP reported that while Raines had declined to comment on Father Sheehy’s
statement that he had been “turned away” on six occasions when he tried to
see Forrestal, a “Navy spokesman” had said that the hospital had never
“refused permission” for a priest to talk to Forrestal. Father Sheehy, the UP
story continued, “agreed that the Navy attitude was not one of outright
refusal but of believing that Mr. Forrestal’s condition did not warrant
calling in a priest.” (pp. 46-47)
|
Say
what? But what if Forrestal requested to see the priest, and did his condition
warrant calling in a number of non-medical people that he was very loath to
see? Sheehy, in a very short article in the January 1951 Catholic Digest
entitled “The Death of James Forrestal”responding to Huie’s American Mercury
article offers the opinion that “the psychiatrist in charge was acting
according to his principles.” Father Sheehy, who also reveals in the article
that his efforts to see Forrestal took place virtually over the whole period of
the confinement, writes here in such a politically circumspect manner that one
wonders what anyone could possibly have had to fear in letting him talk to
Forrestal.
Rogow,
for his part, even manages to come half clean with respect to doubts that
Forrestal’s death was actually a suicide. Here is his one paragraph on that
subject:
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In addition to
those who believed, with Huie, that Forrestal had been “destroyed” by persons
inside and outside the government, there were those who were convinced–and
who remain convinced–that Forrestal did not, in fact, commit suicide.
Forrestal’s widow, in early June, 1949, in a preliminary application for
payment of a $10,000 accident insurance policy held by Forrestal, claimed
that her husband had met “accidental death.” A letter to the Commercial
Travelers Mutual Accident Association of America, sent in her behalf by the
firm of Wyllys Terry and James Terry, Inc. of New York, stated that since
Forrestal’s death did not involve suicide, the policy, which was payable in
the case of accidental death, should be paid in full.
|
A
footnote then tells us that we don’t know whether or not the insurance company
paid up. What’s missing here, of course, is the heartfelt cry of outrage from
Henry Forrestal that we quoted earlier from the Simpson book.
To
be sure, Rogow did not have the Simpson book to quote from since his book
predated Simpson’s by three years, but he had something even better. He had
Henry Forrestal himself. In his acknowledgments on page 375 he says, “To begin
with, I owe a debt to his brother, Henry L. A. Forrestal. Without his
cooperation the book would have been a much more difficult undertaking.” Also,
on page 58 we have this passage: “Although his brother reports that the family
supplied him with an estimated $6,000 during the three years at Princeton,
Forrestal, for reasons not clear, was almost continually in financial
distress.”
Clearly,
Henry made himself available to Rogow and told the man everything he wanted to
know. No doubt, in desperate hope of finally getting his own considered opinion
that his brother was murdered out to the public, he also told Rogow everything
that he wanted Rogow to know. One can only imagine the sense of betrayal he
must have felt upon reading what Arnold Rogow ended up writing. The experience
probably left him more "damned bitter" than ever, and ever more at a
loss as to what he could do.
The
Gospel According to Rogow
In
the absence of an official “Warren Report” or “Fiske Report” or “Starr Report”
on Forrestal’s death, Rogow’s flawed account has become the surrogate
“official” version of what happened. We have seen how Hoopes-Brinkley lean on
it for important evidence that is not elsewhere supported, like the naval
corpsman witnessing Forrestal transcribing the Sophocles poem and Forrestal’s
supposed talk of contemplated suicide to Ferdinand Eberstadt. It has also
become the standard reference for accounts of Forrestal’s death in popular
books like The Puzzle Palace, by James Bamford, The Agency, by
John Ranelagh, and The Secret War against the Jews, by John Loftus and
Mark Aarons. Otto Freidrich, in his book, Going Crazy, uses Rogow as his
source and refers to Forrestal as “mad as King Lear.” (For a severe criticism
of Rogow and his psychological slant see the brief but incisive “Madness and
Politics: The Case of James Forrestal” by Mary Akashah and Donald Tennant,
Proceedings of the Oklahoma Academy of Science, Vol. 60, 1980).
We
have noted that Rogow, like Hoopes-Brinkley, leaves out the name of vital
witnesses like the naval corpsman and the doctor on duty on the 16th floor on
the night of May 21-22, 1949. He even goes Hoopes-Brinkley one better and omits
the name of Special Assistant and General Counsel to the Secretary of Defense,
Marx Leva, the man who first witnessed Forrestal’s breakdown on March 29, the
day after his replacement as Defense Secretary by Louis Johnson and shortly
after he was honored at a ceremony of the Committee on Armed Services of the
House of Representatives. In the course of two paragraphs Rogow refers to an
anonymous “aide” or “assistant” no less than five times. In each case he is
talking of Leva.
Forrestal
Protégé, Marx Leva
Since
it is evident that Rogow didn’t want readers to seek out Leva and hear or read
for themselves what he had to say, I shall provide his account here from the
previously-cited Truman Library interview by Jerry Hess:
|
HESS: What do
you recall about the unfortunate mental breakdown that overtook Mr.
Forrestal?
LEVA:
Well, I may have been in the position of not being able to see the forest for
the trees because I was seeing him six, eight, ten, twelve times a day and
both in and out of the office. A lot of his friends have said since his
death, "Oh, we saw it coming," and, "We knew this and we knew
that." The only thing that I knew was that he was terribly tired,
terribly overworked, spending frequently literally sixteen hours and eighteen
hours a day trying to administer an impossible mechanism, worrying about the
fact that a lot of it was of his own creation. I knew that he was tired, I
begged him to take time off. I'm sure that others begged him to take time
off.
I
tried to arrange, and on one occasion did arrange, a fishing trip for him
with his friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, which he canceled, he didn't take it. I
tried to tell him he ought to go south, go somewhere, and rest. I did realize
that. But I did not--I had no background with mental illness, I had no
knowledge of how it manifested itself and I did not equate exhaustion and
mental illness. I just thought he was terribly tired and he ought to take time
off.
I
even came up with what I thought was a very ingenious device because he told
me he didn't have any under secretary; he didn't have any assistant
secretaries, he couldn't leave. And I even gave him a legal opinion (I hope
not written because it was not very valid), in which I said that, I think I
told him this: That because the 1947 unification act didn't create an under
secretary or any assistant secretaries, but did have a number of presidential
appointees in the Pentagon, it would be quite all right for him to designate
any one of the three secretaries as the acting Secretary of Defense in his
absence because they were the next level of presidential appointees. And I
said, "If you feel that Secretary Symington cannot be objective on a Navy
matter and Secretary Sullivan cannot be objective on an Air Force matter,
then you have Royall as a possible man, since the Army is less partisan, or
if you feel that it would be an insult to one of the secretaries to have one
of the others and what you want is a caretaker for a couple of weeks, you can
appoint a fellow like Gordon Gray, who was my specific recommendation, who is
the Assistant Secretary of the Army, or perhaps then Under Secretary"
And I said, "Nobody could be insulted, everybody respects him and he is
a presidential appointee. I'm sure Mr. Truman would approve, and you could
just let him run the department administratively, and we can always get you
on the phone when we need to," which I thought was a rather ingenious
solution, but nothing came of it.
That
is a long answer to your question, or a long non-answer, I did not know what
was happening. Now my observation of what did happen is as follows: Louis
Johnson, who I had not met before he was sworn in, was to have been sworn in
on March the 31st of 1949. Forrestal apparently just thought he couldn't hold
on any longer, I didn't realize that until later, and asked that this
ceremony be moved up to March the 28th. It was moved up to March 28th and
while Forrestal was terribly tired, it was--he spoke briefly but well. The
ceremony went off fine.
I
believe that either Forrestal went to an office that had been set aside for
him afterwards, or he went home. In any event, we had an appointment on the
Hill the next day, March 29th before the House Armed Services Committee
because Chairman Vinson had said to me, "Be sure to have Mr. Forrestal
there." They wanted to take note of his outstanding service, etc. So I
arranged that Mr. Forrestal would be there. He came to the Pentagon.
I
rode up to the Hill with him. That was the day after Johnson was sworn in,
and we appeared before the House Armed Services Committee and Forrestal was
sort of overwhelmed by the compliments of Carl Vinson and the ranking
Republican member, Dewey Short, from the great state of Missouri. And he was
a little teary eyed, I think, but he responded very beautifully and said that
anything that he had been able to accomplish was because the Secretaries of
Army and Navy and Air Force had been working so closely with him, etc. He
made a, you know, good routine response. My further recollection at that time
is that Stuart Symington said to me, "Marx, old fellow, would you mind
if I rode back to the Pentagon with Jim; there's something I want to talk to
him about." I don't know what it was.
I
said, "Sure."
So,
I rode back with Royall because Forrestal and I had driven over together.
When I got back to the Pentagon I went back to my office. Forrestal had been
given an office down from the Secretary of Defense a little, next door to
mine. So I stuck my head in--it was next door to my office--and he was
sitting there just like this with his hat on his head, just gazing. And I
went in and I said, "Mr. Secretary, is there anything I can do for
you?"
He
was almost in a coma really. That was when I first knew and that was when I
first got scared. So I said, "Do you feel faint?" I don't remember
what I said.
He
said, "No, no, I want to go home."
So,
he got up and headed for the door and I said, "Where are you
going?"
He
said, "I'm going for my car." Well, he didn't have a car.
So,
I ran like hell. I remember whose car I got; I got Dr. Vannevar Bush's
driver, who was then head of the Research and Development Board, and I said,
"Take Mr. Forrestal home and phone me when you get him there." I
knew Mrs. Forrestal wasn't in town, and I told the driver to make sure that
the butler knows that he's there, etc. And then I phoned, as it happened, Mr.
Eberstadt who was testifying on the 1949 amendments to the unification act
before the Senate Armed Services Committee. And I said, "I don't like
what I see. Can I meet you?"
He
said, "Yes, I'll meet you at the house."
So,
I met him at the house and the butler said he had gone upstairs. I don't
know, anyway--I’m sort of short-circuiting this. That wasn't exactly what
happened. We first phoned the house, Eber and I got together, the butler
said, "He won't speak to anybody."
Eber
said to the butler, "You tell James (Eber and others of the Princeton
group called him James), you tell James he can get away with that with a lot
of people but not with me." And so he came to the phone and apparently
babbled a lot of stuff about the Russians--apparently it was just like that.
I don't know. The only further thing I knew is that I did drive to the house,
I waited while Eber had the butler pack his clothes. Eber came out once and
said,"Can you get a plane to take him to Florida?"
And
I said, "Certainly."
And
I phoned and we got a Marine plane, I think, I don't know. And so Forrestal
came down and Eber sat in the back seat of my old, old Chevrolet and
Forrestal sat in front with me and then the butler came running back, came
running after us. He brought the Secretary's golf clubs. So I opened the
trunk, we put in the golf clubs and I drove out to the private plane end (we
didn't go to the military planes), private plane end of National Airport. And
on the way out Forrestal said three times, the only thing he said, Eber tried
to speak to him and he would say, "You're a loyal fellow, Marx."
"You're a loyal fellow, Marx," three times. I remember that, I
think I remember that. And we put him in the plane and I had also phoned to
be sure to have a military aide there to look after him and then I said to
Eber, "I hate for him to be going down there by himself but I know Bob
Lovett is down there," who was a close friend.
And
I said, "I'm going to phone Bob to be sure to meet the plane." So I
phoned Bob and Bob did meet the plane. I never saw him after that.
By
the way, psychiatry... (omit two paragraphs previously quoted)
Actually,
as I understood later from Mr. Eberstadt--Mr. Eberstadt sent a plane down,
chartered a plane, and sent Dr. Menninger from Topeka and wanted the
Secretary to fly up to the Menninger Clinic, but Mrs. Forrestal and Mr.
Truman agreed that it would be--neither of whom knew anything about
psychiatry either--that there would be less stigma at being at the naval
hospital.
And
only a Navy doctor could put a VIP patient... (omit previously-cited
paragraph)
HESS:
What would be your evaluation of his general effectiveness and his
administrative ability and Mr. Forrestal's overall value to the United
States?
LEVA:
Oh, I think he was one of the ablest public servants I have ever known. I
think that he was simply tremendous in everything that he went into. I think
that most people's memories have been clouded by the end of the story without
any attention to the early chapters or the middle chapters.
I
think in particular of a column that Arthur Krock wrote that impressed me
very deeply. The day after Forrestal was sworn in, which now has us to
September '47, in which Arthur wrote, in substance, "He entered on his
new duties as Secretary of Defense with a measure of public respect and
esteem unequaled in the memory of this correspondent." It's easy to lose
sight of that. He apparently did a simply fantastic job at the Navy during
World War II both as Under Secretary and as Secretary. I only got there when
it was over but those who were there say that that multi-multi billion
procurement program that he put together, hiring for the purpose the best and
the most outstanding lawyers anywhere in the country to make sure that the
country got its money's worth, and what he did on a crash basis, and I'm sure
what Patterson did in a similar context in the Army, was simply a fabulous
administrative achievement. I think within the limit of what one could do in
the very difficult framework of starting unification, he did magnificently.
|
The
first thing to note is that Leva’s candid, non-medical view that prior to the
breakdown on March 29 the only thing noticeable about Forrestal’s condition was
that he was badly exhausted and overworked. Leva was not alone in not seeing
any evidence that Forrestal was actually “cracking up.” Here’s what Hoopes and
Brinkley have to say on page 426:
|
Given the
extent and pace of his decline, it is astonishing that colleagues at the
Pentagon, including members of his inner staff, failed to recognize it. In
retrospect they attribute their failure to Forrestal’s formidable
self-control, his brusque, impersonal method of dealing with staff, and the
simple fact that they saw him too frequently to note much change in his
condition or demeanor.
|
These
observations are in curious contrast to what Monsignor Sheehy wrote in his Catholic
Digest article:
|
The day he was
admitted to the hospital, Forrestal told Dr. Raines he wished to see me. The
word reached me through the executive officer of the hospital. I dismissed a
class, because I had seen his collapse coming on for some weeks, and knew his
condition was serious. The psychiatrist told me that he wished my help, but
that Jim was so confused I should wait some days before seeing him. (Pp.
40-41)
|
Sheehy
does not elaborate. Perhaps he is talking about the growing exhaustion. Setting
aside what some have seen as “paranoid” previous claims by Forrestal that some
people were out to get him, because there is every reason to believe that they
were, his truly strange behavior began very abruptly after that automobile ride
with Secretary of the Air Force (and later Senator and Presidential aspirant)
Stuart Symington. It should be noted that in their index under “Symington,
Stuart, double-dealing tactics of,” they list pages 368-70, 380-83, 446, and
447. It is a relatively safe assumption that whatever it was Symington had to
say to Forrestal affected the latter very, very greatly and in a very negative
way. It would not have been out of character for Symington, if one accepts the
Hoopes-Brinkley portrait of the man, for that to have been his intention. That
impression of Symington’s motives is reinforced by the fact that, “Symington
later denied the trip had occurred or that he was alone with Forrestal, but
Leva and [Forrestal aide John] Ohly are insistent on that point.” (p. 447)
The
Symington Revelations?
The
reader may excuse me if I engage in a bit of speculation at this point as to
what the subject matter of that conversation might have been. One must agree, I
believe, that this speculation is at least as valid as the suggestion that the
word “nightingale” in that poem by Sophocles, because that was the name of an
American intelligence program to infiltrate anti-communist former Nazi
sympathizers into the Ukraine, touched off such feelings of guilt in an
apparently fully-recovered Forrestal that he rushed quickly across the hall,
tied one end of his gown’s sash tightly around his neck, attempted
unsuccessfully to secure the other end to a radiator, and then flung himself
out the window, dying from the fall instead of from the intended hanging.
The
key to the subject matter of the Symington conversation is to be found in the
five words that Forrestal kept repeating to Leva, “You are a loyal fellow. You
are a loyal fellow.” And why wouldn’t he be, one might ask, and in contrast to
whom? Now I think we can see why Arnold Rogow didn’t want us to know Marx
Leva’s name. Marx Leva, if you had not guessed by this time, was quite
thoroughly Jewish. The best guess as to the subject matter of Symington’s
conversation, I believe, is that it related to some enormity, some devastating
power play by Jewish Americans that advanced the cause of Israel at the expense
of what Forrestal perceived to be the interests of the United States. Forrestal
was absolutely overwhelmed by the contrast between the personal and the
patriotic loyalty of Leva, a man he had elevated to his current position
because of his dedicated service to the American government, and the large
number of prominent and less-prominent Jews who had made Forrestal’s life a
hell over the past couple of years.
On
the Beach
At
this point let us pick up the Hoopes-Brinkley account of Forrestal’s actions at
Hobe Sound:
|
At times he
seemed more relaxed and was able to joke about the fact that his friends
would not allow him to be alone even on the toilet. But his depression and
despondency did not depart, nor did his conviction that “they” were lurking
everywhere and determined to get him. Walking on the beach with Lovett, he
pointed to a row of metal sockets fixed in the sand to hold beach umbrellas.
“We had better not discuss anything here. Those things are wired, and
everything we say is being recorded.” He expressed anxiety about the presence
of Communists or Communist influence in the White House, which he said had
driven him from office. He thought he had been marked for liquidation for his
efforts to alert America to the menace, indeed, that the Kremlin planned to assassinate
the whole leadership in Washington. He was convinced the Communists were
planning an invasion of the United States, and at certain moments he talked
as if it had already begun. (p. 451)
|
This
passage is so close to a verbatim rendering of Rogow, whom they reference, that
one could almost call it plagiarism, except that Hoopes-Brinkley have made it
sound even more outlandish by adding the bit about the Kremlin’s plan to
assassinate the whole leadership in Washington. Once again, when we turn to Rogow
for his reference we find that he has none at all.
The
story about the supposedly bugged beach umbrella sockets is quoted in its
entirety in The Secret War against the Jews and it is also recounted in The
Agency. It certainly does make it sound like Forrestal was pretty far
around the bend while at Hobe Sound, but no evidence has been provided that it
is true.
Robert
Lovett is long dead, but fortunately he gave an interview to Alfred Goldberg
and Harry B. Yoshpe of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Oral History
Project on May 13, 1974 (Lovett was Secretary of Defense under Truman from
September 1951 to the end of Truman’s term in January of 1953.).
We
quote the relevant portions:
|
YOSHPE: It has
often been said that the problems of trying to run the Defense establishment
in the face of these difficulties undermined Forrestal’s health. Is there any
truth in that?
LOVETT:
I wouldn’t say that those problems were the ones. Jim Forrestal was a very
intense man anyway, but he had himself under strict control. He was never one
to show emotion–containing that all the time was what I think put such extra
tension on him. I remember that he was flown down to Hobe Sound after his
breakdown. They phoned me and asked me if I would meet him, which I did–as I
say, he was a very dear, close friend of mine. And when he got out of the
plane over at the air base, we stood under the shadow of the tail plane
because it was hot as the hinges at that time of day. When he came down and
he offloaded his golf clubs, bag, and that sort of thing, I said to Jim, “I’m
glad you brought your golf clubs because I’m going to take every dollar
you’ve got here.” Not a crack of a smile, and he finally turned to me and
said, “You know, they’re really after me.”
I’d
been warned, of course, by Eberstadt over the phone that Forrestal was in bad
shape. But to shorten the story, he was at that time a completely different
person from the one I knew. We finally got him back to Washington. Ed Shea,
his roommate at Princeton, came up from Texas and stayed there with him, and
slept in the room with him the whole time. But he obviously was in very bad
shape.
Now
part of that tension was not the result of the problems of running the
Department but the fact that he had been dabbling a little bit in politics.
In other words, he had been dealing with the Republican side while a
Democratic appointee. Not in any sly way but simply maintaining his
position–I think he wanted to continue in the job in case of the change. I
believe that had something to do with it. But that, I would say, would not be
for publication.
YOSHPE;
Some of the material, including the Forrestal diaries, seemed to indicate
that he had expected to stay on at least until May.
LOVETT:
He had hoped, I think, to stay on. He was obsessed with the idea that his
phone calls were being bugged and that “they” (it was hard to identify they)
were some anti-Forrestal group in the Administration. They, the enemy, who
was it? He was not of sound mind, in my view.
|
That’s
it. No examples are given to illustrate Forrestal’s unsoundness of mind but the
ones you see here. There is no talk of suicide and no mention of any suicide
attempt. There is also no mention of suspicion of bugged beach umbrella sockets
(although if one were to try to record conversations on a beach, putting bugs
in pre-installed umbrella sockets would seem to be the best way to do it), nor
is there any talk of Forrestal running out of his room in the middle of night
claiming the Russians were attacking when a police siren awakened him. This
latter tale is a story reported by Drew Pearson in his nationally-syndicated
column, but dismissed as untrue by Hoopes-Brinkley. But listen to what Pulitzer
Prize winner, Thomas Powers, has to say in The Man Who Kept the Secrets,
Richard Helms and the CIA:
|
Less than a
week after his replacement as Secretary of Defense in March 1949, Forrestal
broke down completely, told a friend, “They’re after me,” and was even
reported to have run through the streets yelling, “The Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers.”
(Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace [Houghton Mifflin, 1977], p. 208.) In
May, in the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, Forrestal tried to
hang himself with his dressing gown from his hospital room window, but
slipped and fell sixteen stories to his death. (p. 361)
|
Yergin’s
reference for this story, and for Forrestal’s “at least one suicide attempt” at
Hobe Sound, turns out to be none other than Arnold Rogow. The idea that
Forrestal slipped and fell while trying to hang himself is apparently original
with Powers. In the Ranelagh and Loftus-Aarons accounts, the reason Forrestal
ends up falling instead of hanging is that the sash broke, another fanciful account
that these authors seem to have invented independently, that is, unless there
is some propaganda-central supplying these authors. (Here we are reminded of
the supposedly independent reports of authors Ronald Kessler [Inside the
White House] and Judith Warner [Hillary Clinton, The Inside Story]
that Vincent Foster’s pocket was where a hand-written list of psychiatrists
turned up in that mysterious death case. That bit of evidence is inconsistent
with the official story, which is that a search of Foster’s clothing turned up
nothing—except two sets of keys after a second search of the body at the
morgue.)
But
we have not yet covered everything in the Lovett interview that bears upon the
demise of James Forrestal:
|
GOLDBERG:
Another issue from this same period was raised with us by a number of people.
It falls right into your State Department period. That was the Palestine
problem. The Defense Department had very strong views on this, and the State
Department did also.
LOVETT:
I was the agent in State who had to take the rap in this thing and do most of
the ground work so I’ve a lively recollection. Pick some particular question
–
GOLDBERG;
I really wanted to ask how State looked at the National Security aspects of
the issue at that time. I know how the Defense Department was looking at it,
and I’ve seen a lot of the State documents for the period, too, but we’re
interested in hearing about it from your level and General Marshall’s.
LOVETT:
Well, you remember the American position set forth by Senator Austin at the
United Nations meeting. It was, in effect, that this small country of a
million and one half people, surrounded by 40 million Arabs, was non-viable
unless it could be assured of an umbrella of some sort. It was on that basis
that the theory of the trusteeship was developed which would give them an
independent country, but place them in the hands of a group of trustees until
such time as they either matured into a viable nation or until some method of
living could be worked out with the Arabs.
We
were ultimately defeated on that. I say we, this country’s point of view did
not prevail, and it didn’t prevail because it was fought vigorously by the
Israelis. Now the atmosphere was embittered, and that was the thing which
caused most of the attacks on Forrestal. In my view, it was one of the
principal causes for his mental condition. The constant unrelenting attacks
on Forrestal. I was less visible as a government official. They were bad
enough, God knows, on me. I received telephone calls at 11 o’clock at night,
with threats: “we’ll get you, you so and so.” And I got telegrams from every
conceivable agency–Haganah, Hadassah, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver–everybody
pressuring me to do this, that, and the other thing. Give these people
independence. You give them independence and they get overrun–what do you do
then? So it was a sense of conscience in this country, being willing to help
them and not leading them down the garden path to utter destruction. It was a
very serious problem.
|
Compared
to Forrestal, Lovett, by his own account, was relatively out of the line of
fire over the Israel issue, but that did not prevent him from receiving late
night threatening telephone calls and tons of pressure from all quarters.
Lovett was subjected to none of the public vilification that Forrestal faced,
so one can only imagine what Forrestal had to put up with privately.
Forrestal
Was Bugged
Actually,
we don’t have to depend completely upon imagination. This is from pages 212-213
of The Secret War against the Jews by Loftus and Aarons:
|
Soon after
arriving in Florida, [Forrestal] tried to commit suicide. Some of the “old
spies” we asked about Forrestal suspect that part of the blame for his demise
rested with [Zionist leader David] Ben-Gurion, who also believed that [New
York Governor Thomas E.] Dewey would be elected instead of Truman. The
Zionists had tried unsuccessfully to blackmail Forrestal with tape recordings
of his own deals with the Nazis, but they had much less evidence than they
had against [Nelson] Rockefeller. Still, it was enough to tip Forrestal over
the edge. His paranoia convinced him that his every word was bugged.
To
his many critics, it seemed that James Forrestal’s anti-Jewish obsession had
finally conquered him. He was admitted to the mental ward of Bethesda Naval
Hospital in April 1949. At the end, Forrestal allegedly could be heard
“screaming that the Jews and the communists were crawling on the floor of his
room seeking to destroy him.” His suicide came in the early hours of May 22,
1949.
|
Whether
or not Forrestal’s “every word” was bugged would appear from this revelation to
be little more than a quibble over the degree to which his dealings were
clandestinely monitored by his avowed enemies. After all, how would Ben-Gurion
have come into possession of tapes of Forrestal’s most private business
dealings except through the use of bugs and/or wiretaps? And if this account is
to be believed, the fact of the monitoring had already been revealed to
Forrestal by this dastardly attempted blackmail, an attempt to get Forrestal to
go against what he thought was best for the nation by playing upon a hoped-for
fear of revelations possibly detrimental to his own personal interests. The
following passages from Hoopes-Brinkley shed more light on the underhandedness
of such a proposition:
|
In the
Palestine affair, Forrestal was, along with the entire leadership of the
State Department and the military services, concerned with the protection of
U.S. interests in the Middle East, which they felt would be seriously
jeopardized by American sponsorship of a Jewish state. His innate patriotism
led him to believe American Jews would, or should, be U.S. citizens first and
thus ready to recognize and support evident national interests. He had always
despised his immigrant father's pro-Irish stance and had severed his own
residual ties of sentiment to the Old World. This seemed to him the clear
civic duty of every American, but he paid dearly for his lack of
sophistication on that point. Beyond the substantive issue, he was troubled
and alarmed by the messy, sordid, fantastically disordered way in which
American policy on Palestine was determined, for he was passionately devoted
to orderly process. (p. 477)
Forrestal,
[Secretary of State George C.] Marshall, Lovett, the State Department, and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff were all agreed that a war in the Middle East into
which American troops might be drawn, loss of Arab friendship, and long-range
turbulence in the whole region were too high a price to pay for a Jewish state.
They underestimated, however, the elemental force of the Zionist movement and
the need of a politically weak administration for the support of Jewish
votes. Ironically, although he was not, in fact, a central figure in
developing and carrying out U.S. policy on Palestine, Forrestal took a
disproportionate share of the heat and suffered heavier damage to his
reputation from hostile press attacks than any of the others. In part, this
seemed the consequence of his outspoken insistence on reasoned argument and
orderly process, an inability to conceal his dismay at the sorry,
fantastically disordered performance of government officials and special
interest lobbyists and their feckless indifference to the consequences of
their actions. It was a spectacle entailing everything Forrestal considered
inimical to good government.
Events
proved him wrong on two short-term calculations: (1) the U.S. recognition of
Israel did not cause the Arabs to cut off the oil supply to the West, and (2)
the Jews were not driven into the sea by the combined Arab armies. As to the
first, it was astonishing to Forrestal–and especially the oil company
executives on whose judgment he heavily relied–did not see that a cutoff was
unlikely, as it would deprive the Arabs of their markets and thus of their
principal revenues; their only means of selling their product was through a
marketing apparatus controlled by American and European oil companies. As to
the second, Forrestal’s miscalculation was shared by everyone in
Washington–the White House, the State department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and the Congress. The fighting qualities of the fledgling Israeli army
astonished the world. In a real sense, this was the factor that made
recognition an acceptable, indeed nearly a painless risk for the Truman
administration. If the Jews in Palestine had been in severe danger of being
overrun and destroyed, U.S. recognition would have carried with it far
heavier consequences, including a moral obligation to send American troops to
fight alongside the Israeli army. Such an extreme situation might well have
led to a cutoff of Arab oil in the context of a “holy war” against the
Western Infidel, and the Arabs might well have turned to the Soviet Union for
arms and political support. Either consequence would have produced corrosive
divisions in the American body politic.
In
the longer perspective, it is hard to fault those who in 1948 argued that
sponsoring a state of Israel was not in the U.S. national interest. The
United States has paid, and continues to pay, an extremely high political and
economic price for its indulgent support of that nation. Instability in the
Middle East over the past forty years would have existed had there been no
Israel, but the unending Arab-Israeli antagonism has inexorably bifurcated
the U.S. approach to the Middle East, making it impossible for Washington to
define and pursue U.S. interests there without ambivalence and contradiction,
or to promote the economic development of the region as a whole. A series of
bloody Arab-Israeli wars has not perceptibly mitigated the hostility or the
vicious complications, and these conditions continue to fuel a relentless
arms buildup on both sides (including nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons) that makes the Middle East the most overarmed and explosive region
in the world. "The melancholy outcome," Robert Lovett said in 1985,
"is in the day's headline." His statement applies with equal force
in 1991, even after the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War against Iraq. The Palestinians
remain a permanently dispossessed people.
Forrestal,
Lovett added, “warned that unless the American support of the Zionist demands
guaranteed the rights of the Palestinians would be justly upheld and the
boundaries of the new state explicitly drawn, the United States would
alienate not alone the Arabs and the Middle East, but of the whole Moslem
world...and the eventual harvest would not be a peaceful homeland for a race
exhausted by persecution and massacre, but a reaping of a whirlwind of hate
for all of us.”
The
immediate consequence for Forrestal, however, was to become the target of “an
outpouring of slander and calumny that must surely be judged one of the most
shameful intervals in American journalism.” ( pp. 402-404)
|
Back
to the passage from The Secret War against the Jews: the Rockefeller
reference relates to the book’s prior revelation that Nelson Rockefeller had
been coerced by Ben-Gurion into using his influence with various Latin American
dictators to vote in the United Nations for Palestine’s partition, again
through threatened revelation of Rockefeller’s business dealings with the Nazis
throughout World War II.
“It
seems likely from its sheer quantity that the information the Zionists
collected on Nelson Rockefeller had to have come from a variety of sources,
including wiretaps.” (p. 168)
So,
it would seem that in the secret war “the Jews,” who to Loftus and Aarons are
synonymous with the Zionists, are not without weapons of their own, and very
sinister weapons they are, indeed.
More
Zionist Weapons
We
learn some more about the extent of their clandestine weaponry from Neal
Gabler, the biographer of one of Forrestal’s main press tormentors, Walter
Winchell. The period under discussion is 1940-1941, when, in spite of its best
efforts, the Roosevelt administration, because of the overwhelming opposition
of the American people, had not yet been able to involve the United States in
the European war:
|
To Walter
isolationism had now become unconscionable, a form of treason. He was
determined to prove that the isolationists were not, as they claimed,
patriotic Americans who happened to hold a different point of view from his
own; they were Nazi collaborators, anti-Semites, and racists who cared far
less about saving American lives than about ensuring Hitler’s victory. In
1940 Walter inaugurated a new feature in his column, “The Winchell Column vs.
The Fifth Column,” thrashing Nazi sympathizers, and early in 1941 he replaced
the “oddities” portion of his broadcast with a report of Nazi activities in
this country called “The Walter Winchell Quiz to End All Quizzes...And All
Quislings!,” an allusion to the Norwegian leader who collaborated in the Nazi
occupation of his country. A few months later he changed the feature’s name
to “Some Americans Most Americans Can Do Without.”
Every
week brought new charges from Walter linking the radical right to Nazi
Germany, but Walter’s prime source was not, as most assumed, the FBI; in
fact, he was one of its prime sources, channeling hundreds of
documents about Nazi groups to the bureau both before and during the war.
Rather Walter’s most important source was Arnold Forster, the young
basso-voiced attorney who, at the time he met Walter early in 1941, was New
York counsel for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the B’nai B’rith.
-----
When
it came to the radical right, Forster had one of the best
intelligence-gathering operations in the country, with spies everywhere. He
had even infiltrated the inner circle of Mississippi Senator William (sic)
Bilbo, a vicious white supremacist and isolationist. “I was soon receiving a
continuous flow of reports about the conduct of the senator against Jews,
blacks, the Administration, the ‘internationalists’ and other ‘dangerous
elements,’” wrote Forster, “reports that I would rewrite into column items
for Winchell’s broadcasts.” It drove Bilbo crazy to see in the column or hear
on the broadcast everything he said privately. (Winchell: Gossip, Power
and the Culture of Celebrity, pp. 294-295)
|
The
Winchell biographer, Gabler, by the way, is another one of those authors who
draws very heavily upon Arnold Rogow in his account of Forrestal’s death.
Publishing his Winchell biography in 1994, two years after the Hoopes-Brinkley
biography of Forrestal, he makes explicit use of their account as well.
The
ADL has continued its clandestine activity in the United States.
|
By
Barbara Ferguson
WASHINGTON:
The San Francisco Superior Court has awarded former Congressman Pete
McCloskey, R-California, a $150,000 court judgment against the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
McCloskey,
the attorney in the case, represented one of three civil lawsuits filed in
San Francisco against the ADL in 1993. The lawsuit came after raids were made
by the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI on offices of the ADL in
both San Francisco and Los Angeles, which found that the ADL was engaged in
extensive domestic spying operations on a vast number of individuals and
institutions around the country.
During
the course of the inquiry in San Francisco, the SFPD and FBI determined the
ADL had computerized files on nearly 10,000 people across the country, and
that more than 75 percent of the information had been illegally obtained from
police, FBI files and state drivers license data banks.
Much
of the stolen information had been provided by Tom Gerard of the San
Francisco Police Department, who sold, or gave, the information to Ray
Bullock, ADL’s top undercover operative.
The
investigation also determined that the ADL conduit, Gerard, was also working
with the CIA.
Two
other similar suits against ADL were settled some years ago, and the ADL was
found guilty in both cases, but the McCloskey suit continued to drag through
the courts until last month.
In
the McCloskey case, the ADL agreed to pay (from its annual multi-million
budget) $50,000 to each of the three plaintiffs Jeffrey Blankfort, Steve
Zeltzer and Anne Poirier who continued to press charges against the ADL, despite
a continuing series of judicial roadblocks that forced 14 of the original
defendants to withdraw. Another two died during the proceedings.
The
ADL, which calls itself a civil rights group, continued to claim it did
nothing wrong in monitoring their activities. Although the ADL presents
itself as a group that defends the interests of Jews, two of three ADL
victims are Jewish.
Blankfort
and Zeltzer were targeted by the ADL because they were critical of Israel's
policies toward the Palestinians.
The
third ADL victim in the McCloskey case, Poirier, was not involved in any
activities related to Israel or the Middle East. Poirier ran a scholarship
program for South African exiles who were fighting the apartheid system in
South Africa.
At
the time, the ADL worked closely with the then anti-apartheid government of
South Africa, and ADL's operative Bullock provided ADL with illegally
obtained data on Poirier and her associates to the South African government.
But
the conclusion of McCloskey's case does not mean the end to the ADL's legal
problems.
On
March 31, 2001, US District Judge Edward Nottingham of Denver, Colorado,
upheld most of a $10.5 million defamation judgment that a federal jury in
Denver had levied against the ADL in April of 2000.
The
jury hit the ADL with the massive judgment after finding it had falsely
labeled Evergreen, Colorado residents 'William and Dorothy Quigley; as
"anti-Semites." The ADL is appealing the judgment.
|
Post-Mortem Smear Artists
There
are a couple of more things in the earlier Loftus-Aaron quote that need comment
upon. Let us look again at the next to last sentence: “At the end, Forrestal
allegedly could be heard ‘screaming that the Jews and the communists were
crawling on the floor of his room seeking to destroy him.’” That is obviously a
false statement, ranking right up there with this one from Jack Anderson,
written in his 1979 book, Confessions of a Muckraker, The Inside Story of
Life in Washington during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Years,
with James Boyd:
|
While at Hobe
Sound, Forrestal made three suicide attempts, by drug overdose, by hanging,
and by slashing his wrists. On the night of April 1, the sound of a fire
engine siren prompted him to rush out of the house in his pajamas screaming,
“The Russians are attacking!” (p. 158. And yes, Anderson quotes Rogow
extensively as well.)
|
Actually,
the Loftus-Aarons observation is even worse, because it gives the impression
that Forrestal’s mental state had continued to deteriorate while he was in the
hospital, but we have seen from the observations of Henry Forrestal, Harry
Truman, and Louis Johnson, and the statement to Dr. Raines to brother Henry
that Forrestal was “essentially okay” and the general relaxation of his
observation, that that was certainly not the case. Loftus-Aarons give as their
reference, Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the
Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, pp. 210-211. Here is what we find
there:
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James V.
Forrestal also ended his life by suicide. In 1949 he hanged himself from the
window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was
suffering from advanced paranoid schizophrenia. Newspapers reported him
screaming that the Jews and the communists were crawling on the floor of his
room seeking to destroy him.
|
So
the end of the trail turns out to be anonymous “newspapers,” who if they ever
reported such a thing were likely making it up themselves or had had it fed to
them by someone who was. We might note, as well, how greatly this report of
Forrestal’s condition in his final days contrasts with the observations of the
man in charge of the hospital. This is from Simpson, p. 16:
|
Immediately
after Forrestal’s death Rear Admiral Willcutts told reporters: “We all
thought he was getting along splendidly. I was shocked.” The admiral went on
to say he had visited with Forrestal on Friday (before his death on Saturday
night) and that Forrestal had eaten a large steak lunch. He described the
former defense secretary as being up in the morning with a sparkle in his eye
and “meticulously shaven.”
|
Finally,
we turn our attention to this Secret War against the Jews sentence: “To
his many critics, it seemed that James Forrestal’s anti-Jewish obsession had
finally conquered him.”
Did
he have such an obsession? Loftus and Aarons certainly want us to think so. In
their index we find under “Forrestal, James” the sub-category, “anti-Semitism
of, 156-59, 177-80, 199, 208, 213-14, 327, 365.” The primary evidence they give
for the assertion are the business dealings of Forrestal’s investment banking
firm, Dillon, Read, and Co., with companies in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and
Forrestal’s opposition to the creation of the state of Israel, that is, his
anti-Zionism. Nowhere do Loftus and Aarons tell us that founding partner of
Dillon, Read, Clarence Dillon, who was Forrestal’s boss, was Jewish. He was
born Clarence Lapowski in San Antonio, Texas, in 1882, the son of an affluent
clothing merchant. Maybe this is the rock upon which David Ben-Gurion’s
blackmail attempt foundered.
They
also have passages like this: “Forrestal himself admitted that he thought that
Jews were ‘different,’ and he ‘could never really understand how a non-Jew and
a Jew could be friends.’” (p. 157)
The
passage finds an echo in Gabler’s Winchell biography:
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Forrestal had
never particularly liked Jews and, according to a friend, had never
understood how Jews and non-Jews could be intimates. Now he took his
anti-Semitism into public policy, arguing that a Jewish state in Palestine
would needlessly antagonize Arabs and jeopardize oil supplies, that the
Soviets would eventually be pulled into any Mideast crisis and that American
troops would eventually have to defend the Jews there. (p. 385)
|
If
the two books sound quite similar on this point it is because they have the
same source, page 191 of Arnold Rogow’s book. Turning to Rogow, we see that his
source is not only typically anonymous, but Loftus-Aarons, and Gabler have used
the passage very much out of context:
|
Or
maybe not. Forrestal was also very reserved with people who were not Jews. What
Rogow has given us here is clearly the very subjective impression of one man,
on a very tricky subject. Others have expressed a very different view of
Forrestal. Here are the words of the fervent Zionist James G. McDonald,
America's first Ambassador to Israel.
|
He was in no
sense anti-Semitic or anti-Israel nor influenced by oil interests. He was
convinced that partition was not in the best interests of the U.S., and he
certainly did not deserve the persistent and venomous attacks on him which
helped break his mind and body. On the contrary, these attacks stand out as
the ugliest examples of the willingness of politician and publicist to use
the vilest means -- in the name of patriotism -- to destroy self-sacrificing
and devoted public citizens. (quoted by Alfred M. Lilienthal in The Zionist
Connection II: What Price Peace?.
|
And
here is what Hoopes and Brinkley have to say about Forrestal's presumed
"anti-Jewish obsession":
|
Forrestal was
not in any sense motivated by anti-Semitism. He had worked in harmony with
many Jewish bankers and friends, both on Wall Street and in the government.
In 1951, two years after Forrestal’s death, Herbert Elliston, the editor of
the Washington Post, wrote that the Zionist charge of anti-Semitism
was “absurd...no man had less race or class consciousness.” Robert Lovett
wrote, ‘He was accused of being anti-Semitic. The charge is false. Here I can
speak with sureness.” Forrestal’s Jewish assistant, Marx Leva, thought him
“patriotic, sensitive, intelligent, and just,” entirely sympathetic to the
plight of the European Jews and their desire for a homeland, but unable to
agree that that desire should be allowed to override every other national
consideration. “He was not anti-Semitic,” Leva said flatly. Anyone, however,
who expressed doubts about the primacy of a Jewish homeland became a Zionist
target. Middle East experts in the State Department, who were mainly
pro-Arab, were denounced as “anti-Semites.” The New York Times and its
publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, were openly attacked when the newspaper in
1943 criticized Zionism as a ‘dangerously chauvinist movement” not
representative of mainstream Jewish opinion. The trouble was, as Dean Acheson
later observed, that the Zionist position was propelled by a passionate
emotionalism which virtually precluded rational discussion. Acheson had come
“to understand, but not to share, the mystical emotion of the Jews to return
to Palestine and end the Diaspora,” for he saw that a realization of the
Zionist goal would “imperil not only American but all Western interests in
the Near East.” By pressing the U.S. government to support a state of Israel,
American Zionists were, in his view, ignoring “the totality of American
interests.” (pp. 390-391)
|
Ironically,
for their rather bizarre theory that the word “nightingale” awakened feelings
of guilt in Forrestal and may have prompted a sudden decision to end it all, we
have this reference: “John Loftus to Edythe Holbrook, January 25, 1983 (in
authors’ possession); John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York, 1982);
and Henry Rositzke, CIA’s Secret Operations (New York, 1977). One
wonders why they should think that Loftus, any more than Rogow, was an author
that they could rely upon.
The
Book on the Death
Now
let us look at Cornell Simpson’s virtually unknown book, the one that only
Hoopes-Brinkley make reference to, in this manner:
|
For Henry
Forrestal’s concerns and the “murder-conspiracy” theory, see Cornell Simpson,
The Death of James Forrestal (Belmont, Mass., 1966), and Huie, ”Untold
Facts in the Forrestal Case,” pp. 643-652. (end note 70, chap. 32, p. 544)
|
Simpson
tells us in his foreword that he completed the manuscript in its entirety in
the mid-1950s but then put it aside after a previous would-be publisher decided
that it was too controversial, too “dangerous” to publish. He also says that he
purposely chose not to update it to maintain the “close perspective” of the
era. That is a great shame, for in following this course he gave Arnold Rogow,
who published his book three years before, a free pass. Simpson could have
easily made it clear what a poorly-documented and poorly-argued case for the
suicide theory of Forrestal’s death Rogow had written.
Quite
early in Simpson we get some clarification of the oft-repeated, but vague
assertion that Forrestal had made “at least one suicide attempt” at Hobe Sound.
The renowned psychiatrist, Dr. William Menninger, who at the time was president
of both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic
Association, was summoned by Forrestal’s friend Eberstadt, with Forrestal’s
agreement, according to Simpson.
|
Dr. Menninger
questioned Forrestal about a reported suicide attempt supposedly made by
Forrestal after Dr. Raines’s arrival at Hobe Sound, and Menninger
subsequently told the Washington Post he had satisfied himself that there was
nothing whatsoever to this tale:
In
spite of Dr. Menninger’s statement, the suicide story was later exploited by
unscrupulous newspaper columnists and by a man who was present and knew its
falsity. (P. 6)
|
One
does wish that Simpson had given the date of The Post edition in which
the Menninger quote appeared. The man who was present at Hobe Sound, yet later
exploited the attempted suicide story, from later observations by Simpson,
appears to be Dr. Raines. The Menninger statement is almost too bizarre not to
be true. It also explains the vagueness of the various authors about the nature
of Forrestal’s attempt (except for the specific, but false, claims of the
outrageously irresponsible and vicious Drew Pearson). Were they to get specific
about the means of suicide they would have to come to grips with the Menninger
interpretation of the matter. Still, they can satisfy themselves that they are
not lying because, against Menninger’s interpretation of what Forrestal told
him and the lack of physical evidence, they have Forrestal’s own words.
One
would appreciate more candor from all the authors who have written on the
subject of Forrestal’s mental state. Even noted historian, David McCullough, in
his widely-praised 1992 biography, Truman, repeated the mantra that
Forrestal “made at least one attempt at suicide” while at Hobe Sound. (p. 739) There
is no doubt that at least for a few days the man was in a very bad way. If he
could mistake a nightmare for an actual event he was clearly in need of help.
There is no need for embellishment. What there is ample reason to question is
whether Forrestal was ever truly suicidal, and there is even stronger reason to
question whether he was anywhere near his Hobe Sound emotional state some seven
weeks later. When authors so regularly go beyond known and verifiable facts to
create a desired impression, readers have a very good reason to be suspicious.
By
contrast, Cornell Simpson portrays Forrestal, after his rest and recovery, as
not only quite normal in manner in the judgment of everyone who saw him, but
also as a man with a good deal more to live for than the average person:
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There are
marked peculiarities in connection with Forrestal’s alleged suicide. Contrary
to the impression given the public at the time, Forrestal had none of the
usual reasons for killing himself. He had no financial worries. He had no
personal worries. He was basically in good health.
The
only possible motive he could have had for taking his life, everyone agreed,
was depression over losing his job as secretary of defense and/or over the
smears of newspaper columnists and radio commentators.
However,
Forrestal could hardly have killed himself for those reasons either. All his
life he had been a fighter. And the chorus of abuse directed at him merely
“got his Irish up.” He was actively planning, as soon as he left the
hospital, to start a career as a newspaperman and write a book. These projects,
he had told friends, would allow him to take the offensive against his
attackers and expose their real motives.
A
man depressed and at loose ends may kill himself, but Forrestal was far from
being at loose ends. His eager plans were two good reasons for staying alive.
He had a whole new life before him, including the very career, newspaper
work, that had been his first choice.
As
for “depression over losing his job” as a possible suicide motive, he had
intended leaving his government post soon in any event. Though it was
exasperating and humiliating to be rudely dismissed by Truman, it was far
from a killing blow. It did not even mean a change in his plans. (P. 15)
|
Corroboration
that Forrestal was seriously interested in taking a big plunge into the news,
that is, the opinion-molding business, is provided by Hoopes-Brinkley:
|
What would
Forrestal do after he left? He was, he told friends, seriously interested in
publishing a newspaper or founding an American magazine of political
commentary based on the model of The Economist of London, which he
greatly admired. Various friends in New York, including Clarence Dillon,
Ferdinand Eberstadt, and Paul Shields, appeared willing, even eager, to raise
the necessary money and install Forrestal as the directing head. (p. 238)
|
They
are writing about a time period a couple of years before the press campaign
against Forrestal, but he was still very well off financially and
well-connected on Wall Street. A James Forrestal in the publishing business
would have been a serious force to be reckoned with in American public life,
perhaps a greater force than he had been as a cabinet member.
Forrestal’s
writing and publishing plans provide the answer to the question, “Why would
anyone bother to murder him when he had already been driven from office and
disgraced by the taint of mental illness?” Had Forrestal lived and gone on with
his writing plans, Drew Pearson’s lurid and irresponsible charges would have
probably been all that anyone would have heard about Forrestal being “mentally
ill.” There would have been no Arnold Rogow book psychoanalyzing the man.
James
V. Forrestal was a formidable man who knew a great deal about the inner
workings of the government under Roosevelt and Truman, and he didn’t like the
direction that the country was going.
The
compelling reasons for Forrestal to want to continue living were also
compelling reasons for his powerful enemies to see to it that he did not.
Forrestal had left his top job at Dillon, Read, and Co. in June of 1940 to become
an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of
World War II he served as Under Secretary of the Navy. He became the Secretary
of the Navy in April of 1944, and he was appointed the first Secretary of
Defense after reorganization of the armed services in September of 1947.
All
during his period of high government service, Forrestal had kept a detailed
diary. It would have been a gold mine for the book he planned to write. Who
knows what he might have revealed, but Forrestal was thought of as a very
forceful and independent-minded person, as nobody’s yes-man? Some areas where
his diaries might have been revealing were the disastrous war strategy that
needlessly prolonged the conflict and invited massive communist expansion in
both Europe and Asia, the wholesale infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman
administrations by Soviet agents, communists, and communist sympathizers, and
the tactics employed by the Zionists to gain recognition of the state of
Israel. Perhaps the underhanded means that, according to Loftus and Aarons, had
worked on Nelson Rockefeller but failed on Forrestal, had also worked on some
other high-level government officials.
Simpson
Versus McCullough
The
treatment of the question of the handling of Forrestal’s diary by the prominent
historian McCullough and the little-known writer, Simpson, makes a very
interesting contrast. First we have McCullough:
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Questions
about the tragedy persisted. Why had Forrestal, in his condition, with
suicidal tendencies, been placed in a sixteenth floor room? Had his priest
been denied the chance to see him? As time went on, and fear of Communist
conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal's
diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal,
the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the administration, had in fact been
driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by
"secret Communists on Truman's staff." (pp. 740-741)
|
If
this passage reminds you of number 3 in my “Seventeen Techniques for Truth
Suppression,”
it is with good reason.
|
3.
Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild
rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to
learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors."
(If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are
simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")
|
Contrast
the McCullough brush-off of suspicions with regard to Forrestal’s diary with
Simpson’s long, serious treatment of the diary question:
|
During
Forrestal's brief stay at Hobe Sound, his personal diaries, consisting
of fifteen loose-leaf binders totaling three thousand pages, were hastily
removed from his former office in the Pentagon and locked up in the White
House where they remained for a year. The White House later claimed that the
former defense secretary had sent word during his four days at Hobe Sound
that he wanted President Truman to take custody of these diaries.
It
is unlikely that Forrestal made such a request. The diaries are a key factor
in the Forrestal story and will be discussed in detail later in this book. At
this point, however, it is important to note only that all during the seven
weeks prior to Forrestal's death, his diaries were out of his hands and in
the White House, where someone could have had ample time to study them. The
diaries referred to here are the original ones, not the censored and
emasculated version that was eventually published. (p. 7).
---------
When
Forrestal resigned after nine years in the government he finally was free to
expose administration personalities and policies that he had long known were
aiding world Communism and sabotaging the United States. The book he could
have written in 1949 would have blasted official Washington like a bomb and
aroused his countrymen from the Pacific Palisades to the Maine coastline.
Since
Forrestal's book was to be based to a great extent on the material he had
recorded in his original three-thousand-page diaries, it is important to
consider what was in those original diaries and what happened to them. The
evidence indicates that the key to the whole story of Forrestal and his
tragic death may lie in his diaries and the scorching material they
originally contained.
A
greatly censored version of the diaries eventually was serialized in the New
York Herald Tribune and other newspapers and was published in book form by
the Viking Press. What appeared in print, however, was only a pale shadow of
the original diaries.
Between
the time the White House got its hands on the diaries, seven weeks before
Forrestal died, and their posthumous publication, they were subjected to
censorship and evisceration from three different sources: They were examined
by representatives of the White House; they were censored by representatives
of the Pentagon; and, finally, they were condensed and gutted by Walter
Millis under the guise of editing. (pp. 81-82)
---------
In
his editing job, Millis tossed out more than eighty percent of Forrestal's
writing. There were over half a million words in the original diaries; Millis
used a scant 100,000 of them. This drastic slashing was not done because of a
lack of space, for Millis injected into what was supposedly Forrestal's
diaries approximately 100,000 of his own words. Under the guise of
"explaining, interpreting and supplementing," he frequently
attempted to disparage statements of Forrestal which ran counter to the
leftist line. Since the typographical distinction between Forrestal's and
Millis' words is inadequate, the reader emerges from the book in a cloud of
confusion as to what was written by whom.
Judging
from the few deleted items, we can safely say that Millis left out of the
published diaries some very revealing information. In his foreword, Millis
admitted he had arbitrarily deleted large chunks of the diaries, including
everything on the Pearl Harbor investigations except for a single entry,
itself mutilated by deletions.
On
April 18, 1945, Forrestal set down in his diary (p. 46) a list of
recommendations he had just made to President Truman. Item five revealed
Forrestal had ordered a further investigation of Pearl Harbor. The dots
indicate material deleted by Millis.
Note
that one of the things Millis deleted here was whatever it was Forrestal
recommended regarding Pearl Harbor.
Forrestal
obviously suspected that Roosevelt and his brain trust had covered up
something in the Pearl Harbor debacle. It is likely that as early as April
1945 he was on the trail of the policy makers at top levels in Washington,
not Tokyo, who were, in effect responsible for the Pearl Harbor massacre of
2,993 American servicemen, and who, in effect, saved Soviet Russia from a
planned attack by Japan by steering the Japanese war machine against the U.S.
Millis
conceded that the diaries had contained "numerous entries" on the
Pearl Harbor investigations. But, he added, "all have been
excluded."
Furthermore,
Forrestal's private diaries have contained memos and running notes or (sic)
his war against Communism abroad. But there was not a single mention of
Forrestal's solitary efforts in the published version.
What
else did Millis delete from the diaries? Forrestal's most trusted friend,
Monsignor Sheehy, has revealed that he received more than forty letters and
notes from Forrestal during the years that Forrestal was secretary of the
navy and secretary of defense.
"Many,
many times in his letters to me," Monsignor Sheehy said, "Jim
Forrestal wrote anxiously and fearfully and bitterly of the enormous harm
that had been done, and was unceasingly being done, by men in high office in
the United States government, who he was convinced were Communists or under
the influence of Communists, and who he said were shaping the policies of the
United States government to aid Soviet Russia and harm the United
States!"
Yet
the published twenty percent of the diaries did not contain one reference to
Forrestal's conviction that there existed wholesale Communist subversion of
the United States government. Instead, Forrestal was made to appear concerned
only about Communism outside the United States.
In
his foreword, Millis also frankly admitted he had arbitrarily deleted
unfavorable "references to persons, by name...[and] comment reflecting
on the honesty or loyalty of an individual..."
Who
was Millis protecting by such deletions? Though Forrestal for years was
preoccupied with the Communist menace, his published diaries did not once
refer to any open American Communist, such as the then U.S. Communist party
head, Earl Browder. Nor was there a single mention of Communist spies such as
Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss--all of whom Forrestal had
frequent opportunity to observe in action. Nor did the diaries contain
anything derogatory about most of the other traitors with whom Forrestal had
clashed again and again in his desperate battle to protect his country's
interests. (pp. 83-84)
--------
Perhaps
the most important single omission from the published diaries concerned
Forrestal's perpetual antagonist General George Catlett Marshall. It should
be remembered that Marshall opposed virtually every anti-Communist measure
preposed (sic) by Forrestal or anyone else, and that Marshall's own record
was that of a long series of acts consistently beneficial to Soviet Russia
and harmful to the United States. Yet Forrestal's published diaries contained
no criticism of Marshall. In fact, Millis claimed in the part of the book he
himself wrote that though Forrestal had "occasional" differences
with the general, "he greatly admired and respected" Marshall.
There
is considerable evidence that Forrestal's original diaries contained a great
deal of caustic criticism and highly derogatory information on
Marshall--information which would have dealt a real setback to both Marshall
and his pro-Communist friends if it had reached the American people.
Monsignor
Sheehy said he was astounded that the published diaries included nothing but
favorable mention of Marshall inasmuch as he knew positively from
conversations with Forrestal that Forrestal had distrusted Marshall.
Monsignor Sheehy further said that he strongly doubted that Forrestal had
ever written anything in his diaries to the effect that he "greatly
admired and respected" Marshall. (p. 85)
|
Unfortunately,
the version of the truth with respect to the Forrestal diaries that even the
most serious history students are ever likely to see is that of McCullough, or
maybe that of Hoopes-Brinkley, and not that of Simpson. Hoopes and Brinkley say
nothing in their text about the confiscation of diaries by the White House. At
the beginning of their notes on sources on p. 483 we have this:
|
The 1951
edition of The Forrestal Diaries (Viking Press, New York), edited by
Walter Millis, was a valuable source in the preparation of this book. Prior
to its publication, a number of diary entries were deleted by government
censors on the grounds of national security. In recent years, however, all of
these unpublished entries have been available to scholars at the Seeley G.
Mudd Library at Princeton University, at the Office of the Defense Historian
at the Pentagon, and at the Naval historical Center, Washington, D.C.
Citations from the complete unedited materials are identified in these notes
as Unpublished Forrestal Diaries.
|
One
wonders how these authors can be so confident, in the absence of the diaries’
author, that everything that Forrestal put into the original version is now
available in complete, unedited form. The contrast between Simpson’s claim that
Millis left out 80 percent of the original to “a number of diary entries” were
deleted for national security purposes is also striking.
To
be sure, not everything that Cornell Simpson has written should be taken at
face value, either. Nowhere does he tell us how he knows with such precision
that there were originally exactly 3,000 pages in 15 notebooks in the Forrestal
diaries. Simpson, himself, is something of a mystery man. This book on
Forrestal’s death seems to be the only one he has written, and a search of the
Internet for his name turns up only references to The Death of James
Forrestal. He is a very polished and skillful writer, and his knowledge of
the degree of infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations seems
almost like that of an insider. Many of the charges in his book, which echo
those of Forrestal in his waning days in government, have been borne out by
more recent discoveries. This is from The New Dealers War, Franklin D.
Roosevelt and the War within World War II by Thomas Fleming, 2001:
|
There was
scarcely a branch of the American government, including the War, Navy, and
Justice Departments, that did not have Soviet moles in high places, feeding
Moscow information. Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the
forerunner of the CIA, had so many informers in its ranks, it was almost an
arm of the NKVD. Donovan’s personal assistant, Duncan Chaplin Lee, was a spy.
(P. 319)
By
count from the Venona decrypts (secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s
that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted, which became
available to historians in 1995), there were 329 Soviet agents inside the
U.S. government during World War II. The number of rolls of microfilm shipped
to Moscow from the NKVD’s New York headquarters leaped from 59 in 1942 to 211
in 1943, the same year during which the American press and publishing
industry were gushing praise of the Soviet Union. In the single year 1942,
the documents leaked by one member of England’s Cambridge Five filled
forty-five volumes in the NKVD archives. The Russian agent in charge of
Whittaker Chambers’s spy ring boasted to Moscow: “We have agents at the very
center of the government, influencing policy.” The OSS and the British SIS
did not have a single agent in Moscow.
|
David Niles, the Communist
One
man in particular with some dubious connections was in a very strategic
position to do harm to Forrestal. That is one of the few staff aides that
Truman had inherited from Roosevelt, David Niles (Others were speechwriter,
Samuel Rosenman, press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, press aide, Eben Ayers, and
correspondence secretary, Bill Hassett.). In the foregoing, when we have said
that “the White House” may have taken some action or other with respect to
Forrestal, those actions might well have been the work of Niles, Harry Truman’s
famous aphorism about where the buck stops notwithstanding. The following
passage from Hoopes-Brinkley, set in the period just after Truman’s surprising
victory over Dewey in 1948, gives us a good introduction to Niles:
|
Given the
timing and the circumstances, it seems likely that Truman had not yet
seriously addressed the question of his Cabinet for the new term (a month
before, even his staunchest supporters would have considered this a frivolous
exercise, a waste of precious time and energy in a desperately uphill
campaign). Nevertheless, he had developed questions and doubts about
Forrestal and was beginning to consider whether it was time for a fresh man
at the Pentagon. In his consideration he was strongly pushed by members of
the White House staff–especially [Harry] Vaughn, [Matthew] Connelly (remember
him? ed.), and David Niles–who disliked Forrestal intensely. The main points
against him were resistance (as Navy Secretary) to Truman’s proposals for
military unification, resistance to the Truman budget ceiling on military
spending, resistance to the partition of Palestine, and his attempt to assert
personal control of the National Security Council and its staff. There were
more minor irritations, such as Forrestal’s proposals to create a Cabinet
secretariat and an elite corps of government managers and executives. Those
and other initiatives seemed to small-minded White House loyalists like
efforts to enhance Forrestal’s own power and prestige, especially to give the
impression that he was a kind of philosopher-king whose broad and varied
talents outshone those of Harry S. Truman. (pp. 428-429)
|
Tracking
down Cornell Simpson’s numerous references to Niles leads the reader to suspect
that Niles was not just another “small-minded White House loyalist.” (The
sentence fragments are in the original.):
|
Soviet spy
Alger Hiss, fair-haired boy of the State Department, who went to Yalta as
Roosevelt's advisor and who was a chief planner of the present United
Nations.
Harry
Hopkins, Lauchlin Currie, David Niles, Michael Greenberg, Owen
Lattimore, Philleo Nash and others identified in sworn testimony as
pro-Communists or outright Russian spies operating through the White House,
who for years secretly influenced United States presidents and shaped policy
decisions to benefit the USSR.
With
characters such as the above and countless more like them dictating U.S.
government policy, it is little wonder that Forrestal often felt he was the
only pro-American in a nest of Communists. In December 1945 he made a
brilliantly simple indictment of the wholesale treason in Washington when he
told the newly elected U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R., Wis.):
"Consistency never has been a mark of stupidity. If the diplomats who
have mishandled our relations with Russia were merely stupid, they would
occasionally make a mistake in our favor." (p. 53)
----------
Another
was David Niles, alias Neihuss, a powerful advisor to Roosevelt and
Truman. The mysterious Niles, who had an office in the White House,
operated very secretively; however when various Fifth Amendment Communists
were asked by congressional committees if they knew Niles, they
refused to answer on the grounds that if they did so they might incriminate
themselves. (p. 90)
---------
Congressman
Martin Dies of Texas, first chairman of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, told this writer that a short time before [former U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Frank] Murphy died, Mrs. Dies and he met Murphy at the home of
the late celebrated Washington hostess, Mrs. Evelyn Walsh McLean.
"Justice
Murphy was highly excited," Congressman Dies explained. "In fact,
he was the most emotionally disturbed man I've ever seen. He paced back and
forth, unable to sit down. He said he had recently 'gotten religion' and had
returned to the Catholic church.
"And
then he told us, very excitedly, 'We're doomed! The United States is doomed!
The Communists have control completely. They've got complete control of
Roosevelt and his wife as well. It's impossible for anyone to see him now
unless the appointment is cleared by David Niles and his gang. (p.
134)
----------
The
campaign against Forrestal had a threefold purpose: to discredit Forrestal in
the eyes of the American people, thereby permanently eliminating him as a
public official; to harass and persecute him personally and drive him to a
nervous breakdown if possible, thus wrecking his capacity to fight the
Communist conspiracy even as a private citizen; to intimidate all other
anti-Communists by instilling in them a fear of the terrible reprisals
awaiting those who dare oppose Communism at home and abroad.
Monsignor
Sheehy and others have said they suspected that the long smear campaign
against Forrestal may have been secretly directed by Communists and
pro-Communists in the White House itself—perhaps by the powerful David
Niles. (p. 161)
|
Other
insights into the connections and the character of David Niles are provided by
the following four paragraphs of the 2000 book by Herbert Romerstein and Eric
Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s
Traitors.
|
Meanwhile,
Josephine Adams remained active on the political scene. In October 1944 she
wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, “Last evening it was requested through [presidential
assistant] D. [David K.] Niles that E. B. [Earl Browder] withdraw from the
radio debate with [George] Sokolsky on the election.” Filed with the letter
in the Roosevelt Library was an unidentified newspaper clipping reporting
that Browder had canceled the debate with Sokolsky. The letter was marked to
be shown to the President. The election was a month away. The Communists
actively supported Roosevelt’s reelection, but public support from Earl
Browder was not an asset in most of the country.
Niles,
a mysterious political operative for President Roosevelt, had other
associations with the Communists. An NKVD Venona message from New York to
Moscow reported on a plan to send a husband and wife team of NKVD “illegals”
to Mexico. The message said, “Through Roosevelt’s advisor David Niles–will
take three-four days will cost $500.... [A]round Niles there is a group of
his friends who arrange anything for a bribe. Through them Michael W. Burd
[“Tenor”] obtains priority and has already paid them as much as $6,000.
Whether Niles takes a bribe himself is not known for certain.” Burd was a
Soviet agent and an officer of the Midland Export Corporation in New York
City.
On
August 2, 1944, the New York Rezindentura reported to Moscow that “Niles
refused to intervene in the case explaining that he had only recently
interceded for one refugee and recommended approaching Congressman [Arthur]
Klein.” When this did not work, Niles intervened. And although the project
was held up because Niles was busy with the Democratic convention, the matter
was finally taken care of–Burd handled the paperwork.
Whittaker
Chambers reported to the FBI an odd story about Niles that he had heard from
a fellow Soviet agent named John Hermann in 1934 or 1935. A Soviet agent
named Silverman (not George Silverman) was living in the next building from
Alger Hiss. This Silverman apparently had an obviously homosexual affair with
David Niles. Silverman had told Niles of the work of the underground
apparatus in Washington, and Niles later threatened to expose the activities
of the Communist group unless Silverman left his wife. To solve the problem,
J. Peters, the head of the American Communist underground, ordered Hermann
and Harold Ware to get Silverman to leave Washington, D. C. immediately. (pp.
180-181)
|
That
James Forrestal was “disliked intensely” by the likes of a David Niles would
seem to be something of which Forrestal could be justly proud.
There
is something missing, however, in the portrait painted by Cornell Simpson of
Forrestal as public enemy number one of the Communists. He neglects to mention
that the fiercely anti-Communist columnist and radio commentator, Walter
Winchell, enthusiastically joined his leftist counterpart, Drew Pearson, in the
Forrestal smear campaign. The big thing they had in common was that they were
both strong Israel advocates. Neither Israel nor Zionism appears in Simpson's
index. He vilifies Pearson as a virtual Communist spokesman, but mentions
Winchell only once, and that is favorably for his exposure of Harry Truman’s supposed
lies about Truman’s former membership in the Ku Klux Klan. His only allusion to
possible Zionist enmity toward Forrestal he handles defensively as follows:
|
Others chose
to tar Forrestal with anti-Semitism when they spotted a chance to distort his
stand on the Palestine partition issue. Forrestal was not anti-Semitic; he
had simply urged that Truman not play domestic politics with the Palestine
question and had explained his position as follows:
"If
we are to safeguard western civilization in this crisis, the British and
American fleets must have free access to Near Eastern oil. That is a fact,
however unpleasant it may be.... I am interested in justice in Palestine, but
this interest must remain secondary to my primary interest, which is the protection
of America and the West from the gravest threat we have ever faced [Soviet
Russia]. No minority has the right to jeopardize this nation for its own
selfish interest." (p. 162)
|
David Niles, the Zionist
We’d
never get it from Simpson, but there is very good evidence that David Niles
used his power as a gatekeeper for Roosevelt and Truman at least as much for
the Zionists as he did for the Communists. For evidence of that, we turn to
another source, Edwin Wright. Wright was Army general staff G-2 (intelligence)
Middle East specialist in Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South
Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist
1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, and advisor on intelligence, 1950-55.
The first passage is from his 1975 work, "The Great
Zionist Cover-up,"
originally prepared for and by request of The Harry Truman Library,
Independence, Missouri.
Before
these memoranda could get to the Oval Office in the White House, they had to
pass through the screening of Sam Rosenman, Political Advisor of the
President, and David (Nyhus) Niles, Appointments Secretary, both crypto-Zionists.
One of these memoranda was returned unopened with a notation, "President
Truman already knows your views and doesn't need this." That President
Truman's attitude toward the NEA had been poisoned is evident from his
remarks in his Memoirs that he could not trust his advisors in the State
Department because they were, "anti-Semitic." Being low on the
totem pole in this group, I can testify that I have never worked with a more
honest or conscientious group of men, who when they were asked their opinion
gave it honestly - and were insulted for their loyalty. (pp. iv-v)
|
There
are other telling references to Niles in the July 26, 1974, Truman Library interview of Wright by Richard D.
McKinzie.
|
These many
Israeli Government propaganda organizations did all they could to discredit
those men in the State Department, whom they identified as
"pro-Arab." For further details: Alan R. Taylor Prelude to
Israel (Philosophical Library, 1959), especially the Chapter VIII,
"The Zionist Search for American Support," pp. 77-113.] They kept
whispering in his ear, "Don’t trust the State Department." The
result was he did not trust the State Department, the people who knew what
was going on.
David
Niles was another one. He was the protocol officer in the White House, and
saw to it that the State Department influence was negated while the Zionist
view was presented. You get this from Mr. Truman's book, but also there are
many stories that are not known.
---------
Foreign
policy cannot be operated intelligently if it's to be the football of
domestic lobbies, and this was Mr. Truman's great mistake. In this issue he
gave way to a domestic lobby. What did (New York Congressman) Emmanuel Cellar
know about the Middle East? The answer is nothing. What did these other men,
David Niles or (former Truman business partner) Eddie Jacobson know about the
Middle East? Zero. The result was he listened to a group of propagandists who
gave him the wrong ideas and he came across with this fatal decision that we
would support a Jewish state in the area.
--------
One
day I was sitting next to Mr. Henderson , he had his notes out and was
dictating to me some letters when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Niles of the
White House, and Mr. Niles told him (I got the story later on) that the night
before some member of the State Department had been at a dinner party and had
criticized President Truman's statement on a Jewish state. Mr. Niles said,
"We are not going to tolerate any criticism of the President on this
issue, and you let your staff know that if this happens again they must be
disciplined."
Mr.
Henderson called a meeting of the staff and told them of the message of Mr.
Niles. He said, "None of you people are to speak in public about this
issue, because if you do we'll have to send you off to some Siberia if any of
you publicly express your private opinions, even to private groups, and it
gets to the White House, you will be purged."
-------
What
happened was that Clark Clifford went to Mr. Truman, evidently upon the
request of [Zionist leader and first president of Israel, Chaim] Weizmann,
who was also hanging around Washington. Washington was loaded with Zionists
at that time, they were all hanging around there talking to their
Congressmen, getting Eddie Jacobson on the job and others. They were pulling
all the strings. It's very difficult for the person outside to know just what
did go on, because this has not yet been published. We'll have to find, if
David Niles ever publishes any documents, as to what part he played in it. I
don't know that his book has come out yet.
Anyhow,
through David Niles, they had a meeting of Clark Clifford, political adviser
to the President; [Eliahu] Elath, at that time still called himself Epstein;
and the President. On the morning of the 13th of May, Epstein argued,
"Please recognize Israel immediately, because we need that recognition
for legitimacy." They had quite a discussion, but Mr. [Secretary of State
George C.] Marshall was never called in or asked about this at all. [F.R.U.S.
1948, Vol. V, pp. 974-77, Secretary of State’s memo of May 12, 1948 describes
the acrimonious debate between Clark Clifford and Secretary Marshall.]
--------
We
were committed to certain things and we didn't know what we were committed
to. As these situations unfolded, and the Secretary of State made no
decisions, I can assure you of this: They were all made in the White House.
Mr. David Niles knew what was going on, Emmanuel Cellar knew what was going
on, but the State Department often just had these announcements coming out
and they'd find out afterwards what'd been decided.
-------
MCKINZIE:
At what point was it apparent to you that you weren't supposed to say
anything?
WRIGHT:
The day that Mr. Henderson told us what Mr. Niles' instructions were:
"Discipline these fellows if they disagree with the President."
From then on we knew that we played no part in what was going on.
|
A
final excerpt from the Wright interview reveals completely the ascendancy of
the Zionist power over America’s foreign policy apparatus:
|
There were
influences to get rid of anyone who was called "pro-Arab." They
were not pro-Arab, I must insist upon this, they were acting in accordance
with America's larger interests in the Middle East. The Zionists gave them
the title "pro-Arab" and that was enough to destroy them. You had
to be pro-Zionist or keep quiet in order to stay in the State Department, and
the net result was a whole generation of officers who are simply "Uncle
Toms." They don't dare to speak or publish things. They are afraid that
they will be sent off to Africa, or who knows to some other part of the
world, and will stay there the rest of their lives.
One
of these men was Henry Byroade. Henry Byroade made a talk in Philadelphia in
April 1954. Before he made this talk he had two men work with him on it. One
was Parker T. "Pete" Hart, who was the head of the NE, the Near
Eastern Section, and the other was myself. We went over to his house and
worked out his talk. In it he made this statement: "I have some advice
for both Arabs and for Jews. Israel should think of itself as a state living
in the Middle East and that it must live with its Arab neighbors. The Arabs
must cease to think of themselves as wanting to destroy Israel and should
come to terms with Israel itself." [Fred J. Khouri The Arab-Israeli
Dilemma, Syracuse Press, 1968, p. 300 adds that even the Israeli
Government protested this statement]
The
next morning Henry Byroade got a call from Nathan Goldman, who was in
California. [Nathan Goldman was president of the World Jewish Congress and
many years president of the World Zionist Organization. He acted as though he
were president of a World Jewish State and had a bitter fight with Ben Gurion
after 1948.] He used his first name and said, "Hank, did you make that
speech in Philadelphia that was reported in the papers today?"
Byroade
said, "Yes, I made that speech."
He
said, "We will see to it that you'll never hold another good
position."
That
was the control, from California, that Nathan Goldman held over the State
Department. All they had to do was go to the President or to Congress, and
the demand would come for this fellow to be sent off and put in some obscure
area, where he no longer would influence the situation. This has been going
on for 26 years in the Department of State as the result of Mr. Truman's
first decision to purge Loy Henderson.
It
destroyed the efficacy of the Department of State in that particular area.
The Zionists consider that they have control of the Department of State, can
dictate who is going to be in it and who is going to say what policy should
be. It's sort of silent terrorism that they have applied and kept up ever
since.
|
Zionist Enemy Number One
One
must wonder if James Forrestal realized the power of the forces he was up
against in opposing the push of the Zionists for a state of their own in
Palestine. From the treatment he received in the press, it was apparent whom
they regarded as their principal enemy in the United States. If there is any
doubt left, it is erased by these excerpts from Chapter 7 of The Secret War
against the Jews, entitled “A Jewish-Communist Conspiracy”:
|
In this
chapter we discuss the following allegations by our sources in detail:
·
The
United States’ first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, was the leader
of a cabal of senior State Department and intelligence officials within the
Truman administration that worked behind the president’s back to block the
creation of the State of Israel.
·
Forrestal
was, in fact, a corporate spy for Allen Dulles within the Truman
administration, while Dulles was working to elect the president’s opponent,
Governor Thomas E. Dewey.
·
When
the Zionists realized right before the UN vote on partition of Palestine that
they might not have enough votes, they blackmailed Nelson Rockefeller, who
delivered the largely hostile votes of the Latin American bloc.
The
secret history of the birth of Israel has never been told before. Let us
begin with the principal villain, the man who nearly succeeded in preventing
Israel’s birth.
-----
Despite
deep dissatisfaction with the president [Roosevelt] and his successor,
Forrestal rose through the ranks to become undersecretary and then secretary
of the navy, and finally the first secretary of defense in September 1947.
Truman did not realize for another year that Forrestal was quietly going mad.
Virtually the entire American defense policy, indeed much of its strategy
toward the Zionists, was in the hands of an extremely bigoted lunatic. (pp.
155-156)
|
It could hardly be clearer that the
extreme animosity toward Forrestal that motivated the slander campaign in the
press in 1948, and was behind the threatening letters and telephone calls in
the last months of his life, is alive today in the writings of people like John
Loftus, Mark Aarons, and Walter Winchell biographer, Neal Gabler.
Curiously,
though, the only suspects Cornell Simpson even considers in Forrestal’s likely
murder are the Communists. His book is divided into two sections. The first is
named, “Suicide or Murder?”, and he leaves little doubt in the reader’s mind
that it was the latter. Section Two is titled, “Who Could Have Murdered
Forrestal–and Why? The section consists of four chapters. The titles of the
first three are questions: “Who Gained Most by the Death?”, “Who Gained Most by
the Death (continued)”, and “Who Murders in a Matching Pattern?” The answer in
each case is “The Communists and the international Communist conspiracy.” Yes,
Simpson also shows that the Truman administration itself also benefitted from
the death, but only because it helped conceal the degree of its penetration by
Communists and the extent to which its policies, particularly those of Truman’s
predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, aided the Communists.
The
final chapter, in case you still don’t get the picture, is titled, “What the
Communists Did to Forrestal.” These passages give one the flavor of Simpson’s
summing up:
|
...it was the
Communist Daily Worker that openly launched the vicious barrage
against our first secretary of defense. And the defamation was quickly
snatched up and embellished by all those newspaper columnists and radio and
TV commentators who march in closed ranks behind the Communist party line.(p.
162)
After
Forrestal was killed, the New York Sun reported that [Drew] Pearson’s stories
depicting the former defense secretary as a mental case were picked up and
published prominently in the Russian press. Here again Pearson’s smears were
valuable to the Kremlin, for it is standard Communist technique to question
the sanity of all anti-Communists. (p. 163)
Two
days after the former defense secretary was killed, Tris Coffin, another
Washington columnist, came out with a story that used a classic smear
technique–the anonymous source. Coffin claimed that an unnamed informant had
visited Forrestal at the hospital and had found Forrestal disheveled,
deranged and obviously suicidal. Other visitors and hospital officials agreed
that Forrestal had been in excellent spirits and was immaculately groomed.
Coffin also claimed that Forrestal’s “wrists were bandaged,” implying that
Forrestal had tried to slash them. This lie was printed the day after Dr.
Raines had stated in a press release that Forrestal had not made any suicidal
gestures in the hospital.
Two
and a half years after the death, Time magazine reissued some of the original
“suicide attempt” lies. It also implied that Forrestal’s mind had slipped, as
evidenced in a habit he had developed of scratching his head while thinking.
Note
that Forrestal’s enemies, even long after his death, continued to print lies
designed to establish not only that he had frequently tried to kill himself
but had been hopelessly out of his mind, all of which served to discredit his
entire anti-Communist stand. (p. 166)
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Indeed
it did, but as we have seen, the Forrestal smears and misrepresentations keep
coming, right up to the present day, and they are not coming from the
Communists. They were neatly packaged by Arnold Rogow in a book that was
published three years before Simpson’s, which Simpson chose to ignore, perhaps
because he was unable to paint Rogow as a Communist or Communist sympathizer.
One
must wonder why Cornell Simpson is so intent on steering his readers away from
the obvious prime suspects in Forrestal’s death. It was not the Communists who
were known to have threatened Forrestal, Robert Lovett, and other government
officials in the last months of Forrestal’s life. And though they might have
had some small influence with the American press that slandered him, distorted
the facts about his last few weeks of life, and failed to raise a hue and cry
about the ongoing secrecy of the investigation of his death, it was minor
compared to that of the Zionists, and it is now non-existent.
Simpson
actually gives himself away in the fourth paragraph of his book’s foreword:
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...on November
22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, president Kennedy was shot
and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a mysterious young American Communist recently
returned from a lengthy stay in Soviet Russia. While in Russia, Oswald,
according to his own writings, had been paid large sums of money by the
Soviet secret police, which is the terrorist “enforcement” arm of the Soviet
government and which is notorious for political assassinations both inside
and outside Russia. Why the Soviet secret police would have had the future
assassin of a U.S. president on its payroll never has been disclosed. (P.
vii)
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To
be sure we have learned a great deal more about the Kennedy assassination than
we knew in 1966, but it is very hard to believe that a man as perspicacious and
as skeptical of the government and the press as Cornell Simpson has shown
himself to be in the Forrestal death, could accept as face value the official
line that Oswald killed Kennedy. Here he reminds us of no one so much as the
reporter and now Newsmax.com editor, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy, with his reports
in the New York Post and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and his book, The
Strange Death of Vincent Foster, has been the only American journalist to
challenge the official verdict of suicide in the death of Deputy White House
Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., but he scoffs at skeptics of the Warren Report
and other apparent cover-ups, calling them “conspiracy theorists.” One can only
conclude that Ruddy is an operative for someone, and the fiercely pro-Israel
orientation of the Newsmax site strongly suggests who that someone might be.
May not the same suspicion be raised of Simpson, who gives voice to the
skepticism over the Forrestal death felt by many of his contemporaries, but
then directs that doubt and skepticism down a rabbit trail leading away from
the most likely suspects?
Seasoned Assassins
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At critical
moments in U.S. relations with the Arab world and Israel there has invariably
been some one person who has seen the problem in full perspective, bestirred
himself, and attempted to tell the story to the American public. Equally
invariably, like the wolf at the head of the pack, he has been forthrightly
shot down, his pen or voice stilled, and the gaping vacuum once more becomes
apparent.
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Lilienthal
was referring to techniques like character assassination and other heavy-handed
methods such as those used on conscientious State Department officials, but the
Communists are not the only ones "notorious for political
assassination." Just eight months before Forrestal's death, members of
future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's "Stern Gang" gunned down the
United Nation's chief mediator in Palestine, the Swedish Count Folke
Bernadotte. In November of 1944 that same organization was responsible for the
murder of Lord Moyne, a high British official supervising that country's
Mandate over Palestine. In July of 1946, agents of another Zionist terrorist
organization, Irgun, led by another future Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, blew
up the building where the British had their headquarters in Jerusalem, the King
David Hotel, killing 35 people, including 17 Jews.
The
most extreme of the Zionists in Israel have always had an inordinate amount of
power and influence in the United States, right up to the present day.
Criticism of their actions is much more prominently voiced in Israel, itself,
than it is in this country.
Only
a few months before James Forrestal’s confinement to the Bethesda Naval
Hospital (also famous, or infamous, we might remind readers, for the autopsy of
John F. Kennedy) a group of the most illustrious Jewish intellectuals in the
United States were moved to warn the country with the following
message:
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Letters to The
Times
New York Times December 4, 1948
New
Palestine Party Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement
Discussed
Among
the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the
newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat
Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods,
political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It
was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai
Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The
current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States
is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his
party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with
conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of
national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is
inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if
correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could
add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Before
irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public
manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the
impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in
Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives
of Mr. Begin and his movement.
The
public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual
character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism,
whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist
state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real
character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do
in the future.
Attack
on Arab Village
A
shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This
village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part
in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village
as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this
peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed
most of its inhabitants-240 men, women, and children-and kept a few of them
alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the
Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a
telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far
from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it
widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to
view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.
The
Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom
Party.
Within
the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism,
religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they
have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the
destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate
unions on the Italian Fascist model.
During
the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated
a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up
for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children
join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread
robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy
tribute.
The
people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements
in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only
detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration
endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.
Discrepancies
Seen
The
discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party,
and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no
ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party
for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and
misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.
In
the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth
about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the
more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to
campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents
the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.
The
undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient
facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to
support this latest manifestation of fascism.
ISIDORE
ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT
EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS,
ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L.LINDHEIM, NACHMAN
MAISEL, SEYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M.OSLINSKY, SAMUEL
PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGIS, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J.
SHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. SINGER, IRMA WOLFE, STEFAN WOLFE.
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Would
men like Menachem Begin and his followers have hesitated at assassinating the
most popular, outspoken, and powerful critic of the nascent state of Israel in
the United States if given the opportunity? It certainly did not stop them when
the perceived obstacles to Israeli ambitions were members of the British or the
Swedish leadership and nobility. Would someone like David Niles have used his
power and influence to assist the assassins, and did he have sufficient power
and influence to see that the deed was accomplished? From the evidence we have
presented, I believe the answer would have to be in the affirmative.
Would
President Truman have countenanced such a thing? One likes to think that he
would not, had it been in his power. But from his earliest days in politics as
a member of the political machine, that is, the organized criminal conspiracy,
of “Boss” Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, Truman had learned how to make the
kinds of compromises that would leave him eventually, though President,
powerless to prevent such an atrocity. (Do an Internet search of various
combinations of “Truman” “corruption” “Pendergast” and “John Lazia” for
evidence of the sort that you will not find heavily emphasized by Truman
hagiographers like David McCullough.). We have seen the assertion, after all, by
Zionist apologists John Loftus and Mark Aarons that David Ben Gurion would
freely use blackmail to advance Israel’s interests.
Would
America’s press have participated in the cover-up of such a heinous crime?
Considering what we have learned of the role they have played in the aftermath
of the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King and Vincent
Foster, the temptation to engage in sarcasm at this point is almost
irresistible. Let us simply say that, considering who the most likely suspects
would have to have been, one would sooner expect Pravda of the old days to
question the official verdict in the Jan Masaryk “suicide.”
David
Martin
November 10, 2002
November 10, 2002
*On
April 25, 2011, we learned that the Simpson book was, indeed, reviewed in the
April 1967 issue of American Opinion. That magazine was, as was the
publisher of the book itself, an organ of the John Birch Society. See “News from the Mail Bag.”
**That
secrecy was finally broken in 2004 when the author, through use of the Freedom
of Information Act, was able to obtain a copy. See our initial analysis at “Who Killed James Forrestal, Part 2.”
***In
November of 2004 we determined that it was not Forrestal who did the
transcription. As revealed in “Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 3,” the
handwriting is clearly not his.
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email: dcdave2u@verizon.net
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