Who Killed James Forrestal?
By DCDave
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Synopsis.
Part I
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 barred 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. And although, 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, the third, and last, of the books written, in its two chapters on Forrestal’s decline and death, references Simpson’s book only once, versus 23 references to Rogow’s. 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 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.
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.)
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.
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:
| 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.
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. |
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.
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. (see http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/connly.htm) |
The first thing to notice here is that Connelly’s statement apparently contradicts both the Hoopes-Brinkley and the Rogow accounts as to who was behind the decision to send Forrestal down to Florida, and later to have him placed in the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Both books have Forrestal’s friend and colleague, Ferdinand Eberstadt, as the prime mover in the decision to go down to the estate of State Department official and friend, Robert Lovett, where Forrestal’s wife, Jo, was already vacationing. As we shall see, their version is supported by the most immediate witness to Forrestal’s apparent nervous breakdown, Forrestal aide, Marx Leva. One curiosity is that, although Eberstadt did not die until 1969, six years after Rogow’s book was published and 20 years after Forrestal’s death, no one seems to have any sort of formal statement from Eberstadt directly about these matters, including Forrestal’s supposed suicide attempt at Hobe Sound or his talk of suicide. As for the decision to move Forrestal to Bethesda, Hoopes-Brinkley have it as a “tacit agreement” among several people at Hobe Sound, including Dr. Menninger, whom Eberstadt had apparently called in, Dr. Raines, who they say had been sent down at the behest of the White House (though not as the “agent” of the White House) and Forrestal’s wife. The wife, they say, had been influenced toward the Bethesda decision by a telephone conversation with Truman. Rogow says simply that Bethesda “was deemed” preferable to Menninger’s psychiatric clinic, but doesn’t say by whom.
Considering the fact that Forrestal, having been officially replaced as Defense Secretary by Johnson on March 28, was a private citizen at this point, it is certainly reasonable to assume that Forrestal’s extra-legal transportation to Florida on a military airplane and confinement and treatment in the Naval Hospital at Bethesda was not done without approval at the highest level. Therefore, the Connelly account is probably essentially correct, although some area of dispute may remain as to who was the prime mover behind the decisions that were made. What appears not to be factually correct in the Connelly account is his placing of the Florida vacation site as Key West instead of Hobe Sound. Hobe Sound is on the southeast coast of Florida, north of Jupiter and West Palm Beach and more than 100 miles from Key West. One would like to think that he just slipped up on the name, but he is so definite about the Navy’s role in everything, and the U.S. Navy does have facilities at Key West. Perhaps it was the active role of Navy doctor, Captain Raines, that caused his confusion.
As we have seen, although they don’t go quite so far as Connelly, Hoopes and Brinkley do hint at a heavy behind-the-scenes presence by the White House in Forrestal’s treatment. Not only do they suggest that the White House was responsible for Forrestal being confined to the 16th floor, but one can easily see political pressure as opposed to sound medical considerations behind the curious choice of visitors that they tell us Forrestal was permitted. Arnold Rogow doesn’t take that chance. He did, as we have seen, mention in passing, though without comment in a footnote, that the report of the official investigation was kept secret, but generally he is far guiltier than Hoopes-Brinkley of withholding vital information from the reader.
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:
| Raines diagnosed Forrestal’s illness as involutional
melancholia, a depressive condition sometimes seen in persons who have
reached middle age. In most cases of involutional melancholia,
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.
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, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/OAS/oas_pdf/v60/p89_92.pdf).
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.
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) |
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.
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.
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 |