Who
Killed James Forrestal?
Go to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part
5, Part 6, Short Version, Synopsis
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:
|
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) |
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:
|
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 Woe to the mother in her close of day, 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) |
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:
|
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) |
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:
|
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. |
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. |
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:
|
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. |
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:
|
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. |
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:
|
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) |
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:
|
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) |
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:
|
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:
|
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:
|
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:
|
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:
|
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. |
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 he 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:
|
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:
|
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.
|
ADL
Found Guilty of Spying by California Court 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:
|
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:
|
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 and 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 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:
|
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:
|
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.
The
First Christopher
Ruddy?
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) |
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:
|
...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) |
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
|
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. (Alfred M. Lilienthal, op.
cit. |
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:
|
Letters to The Times 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. |
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
*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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