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Who Killed James Forrestal?
By David Martin
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Now here’s the Simpson account:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
These observations are in curious contrast to what Monsignor Sheehy wrote in his Catholic Digest article:
Sheehy does not elaborate. Perhaps he is talking about the growing exhaustion. Setting aside what some have seen as “paranoid” previous claims by Forrestal that some people were out to get him, because there is every reason to believe that they were, his truly strange behavior began very abruptly after that automobile ride with Secretary of the Air Force (and later Senator and Presidential aspirant) Stuart Symington. It should be noted that in their index under “Symington, Stuart, double-dealing tactics of,” they list pages 368-70, 380-83, 446, and 447. It is a relatively safe assumption that whatever it was Symington had to say to Forrestal affected the latter very, very greatly and in a very negative way. It would not have been out of character for Symington, if one accepts the Hoopes-Brinkley portrait of the man, for that to have been his intention. That impression of Symington’s motives is reinforced by the fact that, “Symington later denied the trip had occurred or that he was alone with Forrestal, but Leva and [Forrestal aide John] Ohly are insistent on that point.” (p. 447)
The 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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Back to the passage from The Secret War against the Jews: the Rockefeller reference relates to the book’s prior revelation that Nelson Rockefeller had been coerced by Ben-Gurion into using his influence with various Latin American dictators to vote in the United Nations for Palestine’s partition, again through threatened revelation of Rockefeller’s business dealings with the Nazis throughout World War II. “It seems likely from its sheer quantity that the information the Zionists collected on Nelson Rockefeller had to have come from a variety of sources, including wiretaps.” (p. 168) So, it would seem that in the secret war “the Jews,” who to Loftus and Aarons are synonymous with the Zionists, are not without weapons of their own, and very sinister weapons they are, indeed.
We learn some more about the extent of their clandestine weaponry from Neal Gabler, the biographer of one of Forrestal’s main press tormentors, Walter Winchell. The period under discussion is 1940-1941, when, in spite of its best efforts, the Roosevelt administration, because of the overwhelming opposition of the American people, had not yet been able to involve the United States in the European war:
The Winchell biographer, Gabler, by the way, is another one of those authors who draws very heavily upon Arnold Rogow in his account of Forrestal’s death. Publishing his Winchell biography in 1994, two years after the Hoopes-Brinkley biography of Forrestal, he makes explicit use of their account as well. The ADL has continued its clandestine activity in the United States. This is from the New York Transfer News Collective, May 8, 2002:
There are a couple of more things in the earlier Loftus-Aaron quote that need comment upon. Let us look again at the next to last sentence: “At the end, Forrestal allegedly could be heard ‘screaming that the Jews and the communists were crawling on the floor of his room seeking to destroy him.’” That is obviously a false statement, ranking right up there with this one from Jack Anderson, written in his 1979 book, Confessions of a Muckraker, The Inside Story of Life in Washington during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Years, with James Boyd:
Actually, the Loftus-Aarons observation is even worse, because it gives the impression that Forrestal’s mental state had continued to deteriorate while he was in the hospital, but we have seen from the observations of Henry Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Louis Johnson, and the statement to Dr. Raines to brother Henry that Forrestal was “essentially okay” and the general relaxation of his observation, that that was certainly not the case. Loftus-Aarons give as their reference, Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, pp. 210-211. Here is what we find there:
So the end of the trail turns out to be anonymous “newspapers,” who if they ever reported such a thing were likely making it up themselves or had had it fed to them by someone who was. We might note, as well, how greatly this report of Forrestal’s condition in his final days contrasts with the observations of the man in charge of the hospital. This is from Simpson, p. 16:
Finally, we turn our attention to this Secret War against the Jews sentence: “To his many critics, it seemed that James Forrestal’s anti-Jewish obsession had finally conquered him.” Did he have such an obsession? Loftus and Aarons certainly want us to think so. In their index we find under “Forrestal, James” the sub-category, “anti-Semitism of, 156-59, 177-80, 199, 208, 213-14, 327, 365.” The primary evidence they give for the assertion are the business dealings of Forrestal’s investment banking firm, Dillon, Read, with companies in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and Forrestal’s opposition to the creation of the state of Israel, that is, his anti-Zionism. Nowhere do Loftus and Aarons tell us that founding partner of Dillon, Read, Clarence Dillon, who was Forrestal’s boss, was Jewish. He was born Clarence Lapowski in San Antonio, Texas, in 1882, the son of an affluent clothing merchant. Maybe this is the rock upon which David Ben-Gurion’s blackmail attempt foundered. They also have passages like this: “Forrestal himself admitted that he thought that Jews were ‘different,’ and he ‘could never really understand how a non-Jew and a Jew could be friends.’” (p. 157) The passage finds an echo in Gabler’s Winchell biography:
If the two books sound quite similar on this point it is because they have the same source, page 191 of Arnold Rogow’s book. Turning to Rogow, we see that his source is not only typically anonymous, but Loftus-Aarons, and Gabler have used the passage very much out of context:
Or maybe not. Forrestal was also very reserved with people who were not Jews. What Rogow has given us here is clearly the very subjective impression of one man, on a very tricky subject. Others have expressed a very different view of Forrestal. Here are the words of the fervent Zionist James G. McDonald, America's first Ambassador to Israel.
And here is what Hoopes and Brinkley have to say about Forrestal's presumed "anti-Jewish obsession":
Ironically, for their rather bizarre theory that the word “nightingale” awakened feelings of guilt in Forrestal and may have prompted a sudden decision to end it all, we have this reference: “John Loftus to Edythe Holbrook, January 25, 1983 (in authors’ possession); John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York, 1982); and Henry Rositzke, CIA’s Secret Operations (New York, 1977). One wonders why they should think that Loftus, any more than Rogow, was an author that they could rely upon.
Now let us look at Cornell Simpson’s virtually unknown book, the one that only Hoopes-Brinkley make reference to, in this manner::
Simpson tells us in his foreword that he completed the manuscript in its entirety in the mid-1950s but then put it aside after a previous would-be publisher decided that it was too controversial, too “dangerous” to publish. He also says that he purposely chose not to update it to maintain the “close perspective” of the era. That is a great shame, for in following this course he gave Arnold Rogow, who published his book three years before, a free pass. Simpson could have easily made it clear what a poorly-documented and poorly-argued case for the suicide theory of Forrestal’s death Rogow had written. Quite early in Simpson we get some clarification of the oft-repeated, but vague assertion that Forrestal had made “at least one suicide attempt” at Hobe Sound. The renowned psychiatrist, Dr. William Menninger, who at the time was president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association, was summoned by Forrestal’s friend Eberstadt, with Forrestal’s agreement, according to Simpson.
One does wish that Simpson had given the date of the Post edition in which the Menninger quote appeared. The man who was present at Hobe Sound, yet later exploited the attempted suicide story, from later observations by Simpson, appears to be Dr. Raines. The Menninger statement is almost too bizarre not to be true. It also explains the vagueness of the various authors about the nature of Forrestal’s attempt (except for the specific, but false, claims of the outrageously irresponsible and vicious Drew Pearson). Were they to get specific about the means of suicide they would have to come to grips with the Menninger interpretation of the matter. Still, they can satisfy themselves that they are not lying because, against Menninger’s interpretation of what Forrestal told him and the lack of physical evidence, they have Forrestal’s own words. One would appreciate more candor from all the authors who have written on the subject of Forrestal’s mental state. Even noted historian, David McCullough, in his widely-praised 1992 biography, Truman, repeated the mantra that Forrestal “made at least one attempt at suicide” while at Hobe Sound. (p. 739) There is no doubt that at least for a few days the man was in a very bad way. If he could mistake a nightmare for an actual event he was clearly in need of help. There is no need for embellishment. What there is ample reason to question is whether Forrestal was ever truly suicidal, and there is even stronger reason to question whether he was anywhere near his Hobe Sound emotional state some seven weeks later. When authors so regularly go beyond known and verifiable facts to create a desired impression, readers have a very good reason to be suspicious. By contrast, Cornell Simpson portrays Forrestal, after his rest and recovery, as not only quite normal in manner in the judgment of everyone who saw him, but also as a man with a good deal more to live for than the average person:
Corroboration that Forrestal was seriously interested in taking a big plunge into the news, that is, the opinion-molding business, is provided by Hoopes-Brinkley:
They are writing about a time period a couple of years before the press campaign against Forrestal, but he was still very well off financially and well-connected on Wall Street. A James Forrestal in the publishing business would have been a serious force to be reckoned with in American public life, perhaps a greater force than he had been as a cabinet member. Forrestal’s writing and publishing plans provide the answer to the question, “Why would anyone bother to murder him when he had already been driven from office and disgraced by the taint of mental illness?” Had Forrestal lived and gone on with his writing plans, Drew Pearson’s lurid and irresponsible charges would have probably been all that anyone would have heard about Forrestal being “mentally ill.” There would have been no Arnold Rogow book psychoanalyzing the man. James V. Forrestal was a formidable man who knew a great deal about the inner workings of the government under Roosevelt and Truman, and he didn’t like the direction that the country was going. The compelling reasons for Forrestal to want to continue living were also compelling reasons for his powerful enemies to see to it that he did not. Forrestal had left his top job at Dillon, Read in June of 1940 to become an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of World War II he served as Under Secretary of the Navy. He became the Secretary of the Navy in April of 1944, and he was appointed the first Secretary of Defense after reorganization of the armed services in September of 1947. All during his period of high government service, Forrestal had kept a detailed diary. It would have been a gold mine for the book he planned to write. Who knows what he might have revealed, but Forrestal was thought of as a very forceful and independent-minded person, as nobody’s yes-man? Some areas where his diaries might have been revealing were the disastrous war strategy that needlessly prolonged the conflict and invited massive communist expansion in both Europe and Asia, the wholesale infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by Soviet agents, communists, and communist sympathizers, and the tactics employed by the Zionists to gain recognition of the state of Israel. Perhaps the underhanded means that, according to Loftus and Aarons, had worked on Nelson Rockefeller but failed on Forrestal, had also worked on some other high-level government officials.
The treatment of the question of the handling of Forrestal’s diary by the prominent historian McCullough and the little-known writer, Simpson, makes a very interesting contrast. First we have McCullough:
If this passage reminds you of number 3 in my “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression,” it is with good reason.
Contrast the McCullough brush-off of suspicions with regard to Forrestal’s diary with Simpson’s long, serious treatment of the diary question:
Unfortunately, the version of the truth with respect to the Forrestal diaries that even the most serious history students are ever likely to see is that of McCullough, or maybe that of Hoopes-Brinkley, and not that of Simpson. Hoopes and Brinkley say nothing in their text about the confiscation of diaries by the White House. At the beginning of their notes on sources on p. 483 we have this:
One wonders how these authors can be so confident, in the absence of the diaries’ author, that everything that Forrestal put into the original version is now available in complete, unedited form. The contrast between Simpson’s claim that Millis left out 80 percent of the original to “a number of diary entries” were deleted for national security purposes is also striking. To be sure, not everything that Cornell Simpson has written should be taken at face value, either. Nowhere does he tell us how he knows with such precision that there were originally exactly 3,000 pages in 15 notebooks in the Forrestal diaries. Simpson, himself, is something of a mystery man. This book on Forrestal’s death seems to be the only one he has written, and a search of the Internet for his name turns up only references to The Death of James Forrestal. He is a very polished and skillful writer, and his knowledge of the degree of infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations seems almost like that of an insider. Many of the charges in his book, which echo those of Forrestal in his waning days in government, have been borne out by more recent discoveries. This is from The New Dealers War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War within World War II by Thomas Fleming, 2001:
One man in particular with some dubious connections was in a very strategic position to do harm to Forrestal. That is one of many key staff aides that Truman had inherited from Roosevelt, David Niles. In the foregoing, when we have said that “the White House” may have taken some action or other with respect to Forrestal, those actions might well have been the work of Niles, Harry Truman’s famous aphorism about where the buck stops notwithstanding. The following passage from Hoopes-Brinkley, set in the period just after Truman’s surprising victory over Dewey in 1948, gives us a good introduction to Niles:
Tracking down Cornell Simpson’s numerous references to Niles leads the reader to suspect that Niles was not just another “small-minded White House loyalist.” (The sentence fragments are in the original.):
Other insights into the connections and the character of David Niles are provided by the following four paragraphs of the 2000 book by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors.
That James Forrestal was “disliked intensely” by the likes of a David Niles would seem to be something of which Forrestal could be justly proud. There is something missing, however, in the portrait painted by Cornell Simpson of Forrestal as public enemy number one of the Communists. He neglects to mention that the fiercely anti-Communist columnist and radio commentator, Walter Winchell, enthusiastically joined his leftist counterpart, Drew Pearson, in the Forrestal smear campaign. The big thing they had in common was that they were both strong Israel advocates. Neither Israel nor Zionism appear in Simpson's index. He vilifies Pearson as a virtual Communist spokesman, but mention Winchell only once, and that is favorably for his exposure of Harry Truman’s supposed lies about Truman’s former membership in the Ku Klux Klan. His only allusion to possible Zionist enmity toward Forrestal he handles defensively as follows:
We’d never get it from Simpson, but there is very good evidence that David Niles used his power as a gatekeeper for Roosevelt and Truman at least as much for the Zionists as he did for the Communists. For evidence of that, we turn to another source, Edwin Wright. Wright was Army general staff G-2 (intelligence) Middle East specialist in Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, and advisor on intelligence, 1950-55. The first passage is from his 1975 work, "The Great Zionist Cover-up," originally prepared for and by request of The Harry Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
A pdf file of “The Great Zionist Cover-up” can by found on the web site of Pitman Buck at http://pitmanbuck.net/ . There are other telling references to Niles in the July 26, 1974, Truman Library interview of Wright by Richard D. McKinzie at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm :
A final excerpt from the Wright interview reveals completely the ascendancy of the Zionist power over America’s foreign policy apparatus:
One must wonder if James Forrestal realized the power of the forces he was up against in opposing the push of the Zionists for a state of their own in Palestine. From the treatment he received in the press, it was apparent whom they regarded as their principal enemy in the United States. If there is any doubt left, it is erased by these excerpts from Chapter 7 of The Secret War against the Jews, entitled “A Jewish-Communist Conspiracy” (with quotation marks around the original):
It could hardly be clearer that the extreme animosity toward Forrestal that motivated the slander campaign in the press in 1948, and was behind the threatening letters and telephone calls in the last months of his life, is alive today in the writings of people like John Loftus, Mark Aarons, and Walter Winchell biographer, Neal Gabler.
Curiously, though, the only suspects Cornell Simpson even considers in Forrestal’s likely murder are the Communists. His book is divided into two sections. The first is named, “Suicide or Murder?”, and he leaves little doubt in the reader’s mind that it was the latter. Section Two is titled, “Who Could Have Murdered Forrestal–and Why? The section consists of four chapters. The titles of the first three are questions: “Who Gained Most by the Death?”, “Who Gained Most by the Death (continued)”, and “Who Murders in a Matching Pattern?” The answer in each case is “The Communists and the international Communist conspiracy.” Yes, Simpson also shows that the Truman administration itself also benefited from the death, but only because it helped conceal the degree of its penetration by Communists and the extent to which its policies, particularly those of Truman’s predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, aided the Communists. The final chapter, in case you still don’t get the picture, is titled, “What the Communists Did to Forrestal.” These passages give one the flavor of Simpson’s summing up:
Indeed it did, but as we have seen, the Forrestal smears and misrepresentations keep coming, right up to the present day, and they are not coming from the Communists. They were neatly packaged by Arnold Rogow in a book that was published three years before Simpson’s, which Simpson chose to ignore, perhaps because he was unable to paint Rogow as a Communist or Communist sympathizer. One must wonder why Cornell Simpson is so intent on steering his readers away from the obvious prime suspects in Forrestal’s death. It was not the Communists who were known to have threatened Forrestal, Robert Lovett, and other government officials in the last months of Forrestal’s life. And though they might have had some small influence with the American press that slandered him, distorted the facts about his last few weeks of life, and failed to raise a hue and cry about the ongoing secrecy of the investigation of his death, it was minor compared to that of the Zionists, and it is now non-existent. Simpson actually gives himself away in the fourth paragraph of his book’s foreword:
To be sure we have learned a great deal more about the Kennedy assassination than we knew in 1966, but it is very hard to believe that a man as perspicacious and as skeptical of the government and the press as Cornell Simpson has shown himself to be in the Forrestal death, could accept as face value the official line that Oswald killed Kennedy. Here he reminds us of no one so much as the reporter and now Newsmax.com editor, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy, with his reports in the New York Post and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and his book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, has been the only American journalist to challenge the official verdict of suicide in the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., but he scoffs at skeptics of the Warren Report and other apparent cover-ups, calling them “conspiracy theorists.” One can only conclude that Ruddy is an operative for someone, and the fiercely pro-Israel orientation of the Newsmax site strongly suggests who that someone might be. May not the same suspicion be raised of Simpson, who gives voice to the skepticism over the Forrestal death felt by many of his contemporaries, but then directs that doubt and skepticism down a rabbit trail leading away from the most likely suspects?
Lilienthal was referring to techniques like character assassination and other heavy-handed methods such as those used on conscientious State Department officials, but the Communists are not the only ones "notorious for political assassination." Just eight months before Forrestal's death, members of future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's "Stern Gang" gunned down the United Nation's chief mediator in Palestine, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte. In November of 1944 that same organization was responsible for the murder of Lord Moyne, a high British official supervising that country's Mandate over Palestine. In July of 1946, agents of another Zionist terrorist organization, Irgun, led by another future Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, blew up the building where the British had their headquarters in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, killing 35 people, including 17 Jews. The most extreme of the Zionists in Israel have always had an inordinate amount of power and influence in the United States, right up to the present day. Criticism of their actions is much more prominently voiced in Israel, itself, than it is in this country. Only a few months before James Forrestal’s confinement to the Bethesda Naval Hospital (also famous, or infamous, we might remind readers, for the autopsy of John F. Kennedy) a group of the most illustrious Jewish intellectuals in the United States were moved to warn the country with the following message:
Would men like Menachem Begin and his followers have hesitated at assassinating the most popular, outspoken, and powerful critic of the nascent state of Israel in the United States if given the opportunity? It certainly did not stop them when the perceived obstacles to Israeli ambitions were members of the British or the Swedish leadership and nobility. Would someone like David Niles have used his power and influence to assist the assassins, and did he have sufficient power and influence to see that the deed was accomplished? From the evidence we have presented, I believe the answer would have to be in the affirmative. Would President Truman have countenanced such a thing? One likes to think that he would not, had it been in his power. But from his earliest days in politics as a member of the political machine, that is, the organized criminal conspiracy, of “Boss” Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, Truman had learned how to make the kinds of compromises that would leave him eventually, though President, powerless to prevent such an atrocity. (Do an Internet search of various combinations of “Truman” “corruption” “Pendergast” and “John Lazia” for evidence of the sort that you will not find heavily emphasized by Truman hagiographers like David McCullough.). We have seen the assertion, after all, by Zionist apologists John Loftus and Mark Aarons that David Ben Gurion would freely use blackmail to advance Israel’s interests. Would America’s press have participated in the cover-up of such a heinous crime? Considering what we have learned of the role they have played in the aftermath of the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King and Vincent Foster, the temptation to engage in sarcasm at this point is almost irresistible. Let us simply say that, considering who the most likely suspects would have to have been, one would sooner expect Pravda of the old days to question the official verdict in the Jan Masaryk “suicide.” David Martin
Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 2
Go to Synopsis.
Signs of a Struggle?
The first person to
enter former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal's fully-lighted room at the
Bethesda Naval Hospital after his fatal, late-night plunge from a 16th floor
window saw broken glass on his bed. The Navy photographer who took pictures
of the room at some unknown time later took a picture of broken pieces of what
looks like either a petri dish or an ash tray on the ornate carpet in the
room, but in the photograph, the bed had nothing but a bare mattress and a
couple of bare pillows on it, not even the turned-back bed covering that the
nurse who saw the glass on the bed described. The two photographs of the
room, taken from different angles, also failed to show either the slippers
under the bed or the razor blade beside it that the nurse saw. In fact, the
barren room with nothing on the bed or any of the furniture, no reading or
writing material, no clothing, no spectacles, no pipe, tobacco, or lighter, in
short, no sign that James Forrestal or anyone else had, shortly before, been a
patient there, is clearly not the room as described by the nurse, Lieutenant
junior grade Dorothy Turner. (See
photographs.) The scene that Navy corpsman chief John Edward McClain captured was not what a proper police crime-scene photographer would have captured. The room had been stripped down and scrubbed up, except that the cleaners seem to have overlooked the clear pieces of glass two feet, or so, from the foot of the bed. A suspicious police investigator, encountering this broken glass on the bed and the floor and noting the bathrobe cord tightly tied around Forrestal's neck, might well have concluded that these were signs of a struggle, quite inconsistent with the quick conclusion of suicide by the county medical examiner and the inferences drawn by the news accounts.
Secret Report Finally Made Public This new information
on James Forrestal's untimely death, never reported before anywhere, is taken
directly from the investigation of the
review board convened
by the commander of the National Naval Medical Center, Rear Admiral Morton D.
Willcutts, on the day after Forrestal's May 22, 1949, death. The board, made
up of five Navy Medical Corps officers junior to Admiral Willcutts and one
retired Medical Corps captain had finished hearing and recording the testimony
of all witnesses–all of whom were also members of the Navy Medical Corps on
duty at the Bethesda Naval Hospital–on May 31, 1949. The "proceedings and
findings" of the board were officially signed off on by the Commandant of the
Potomac River Naval Command on July 13, 1949, but not until October 11 was a
less than one page, uninformative 5-point "Finding of Facts" released to the
public. Interestingly, that release did not conclude that Forrestal had
committed suicide, but the press left us with the impression that it had. The
Review Board investigation itself remained secret until April 6 of 2004 when
the author, on his third Freedom of Information Act try, the first two of
which were to the National Naval Medical Center, received the report from the
Navy's Judge Advocate General's office. Forrestal’s body had been
found on the roof of the second deck of the Bethesda Naval Hospital at around
1:50 AM on Sunday. The board met at 11:45 AM on Monday, May 23, and spent
only 45 minutes total, visiting the morgue to identify the body, the site 13
stories below where Forrestal had landed, room 1618 where Forrestal had been
hospitalized for some seven weeks, and room 1620, the diet kitchen across the
hall out of whose window Forrestal had apparently fallen. A lunch break was
taken from 12:30 to 1:30 and the board members then conferred among themselves
until 2:18, when they adjourned for the day.
Photographers First The first two witnesses
called when the board convened the next morning were the photographer who took
pictures of the body and the photographer who took pictures around the 16th
floor area. It is of some interest that two photographers were required for
this task. Of even greater interest is that, quite properly, the time when
the pictures of the body were taken is firmly established by questioning, but
the board exhibits a very curious lack of curiosity as to when the second set
of pictures, the ones inside the hospital, were taken. After establishing that “Harley F. Cope, junior, Aviation photographer’s mate first,” had “been called upon recently to take some pictures” and having elicited from Mate Cope what the nature of the pictures were, this question is addressed to him:
Q. Can you tell us at what time you arrived on
the scene and at what time you took the pictures? A. Yes, the pictures - that series of pictures were taken between three and three fifteen. The last picture was taken at three fifteen as a matter of fact. The second witness, “John
Edward McClain, hospital corpsman chief, U.S. Navy,” was also asked if he was
“called upon recently to take some pictures” and asked to identify them, but
the follow-up question establishing the important fact of when he was called
upon and when he took the pictures never comes. It is apparent that enough
time had been permitted to elapse for Forrestal’s room to be transformed from
the one that Nurse Turner described to the one that Corpsman McClain
photographed. That the review board failed to establish just how much time
that was looks to be more than inadvertent. When we look carefully at the
windows in the photographs of the room we see that bright sunlight is
streaming in. The sun is about as high in the sky as it gets in May at the
latitude of the Washington, DC, area. One can surmise that at least eight
hours had passed between Forrestal’s fall and Corpsman McClain’s photographic
work. Why was it necessary to let so much time pass? Though they must have
taken a look at the photographs and noticed the barren room and the bright
sunlight in the pictures, the members of the review board failed to note the
contradiction in the later testimony of Lieutenant junior grade Francis
Whitney Westneat when he said that, “... the Navy photographers (plural)
arrived at three fifteen and finished their work at about three
twenty-five....” Not only do the
questioners fail to establish when the second photographer actually did his
work, but in using the passive voice in their initial questions to each of the
photographers, they also fail to inform us as to exactly who called upon these
photographers to take these pictures. Who was in charge of things, of the
investigation, if you will, from the time Forrestal was found dead until
the board began its work at 11:45 of the next morning, some 34 hours later?
If we could know that we might also be able to learn who was responsible for
laundering the crime scene of Forrestal’s room. That Corpsman McClain was, to some degree, treating what he was shooting as a crime scene comes out in his volunteered remarks about one of the pictures he is asked to describe: “This is out of focus. We were shooting for finger prints which we were requested to get and that is what we have, sir.” The board never asks who
requested the pictures of fingerprints or what those pictures turned up.
Since the board never asks who that person was, that key investigator is never
examined by the board. In that same long response
identifying his photographs, McClain reveals the existence of the broken
glass: “The fifth picture is a picture of a rug with some broken glass on it,
taken approximately two feet from the end of the bed. We were unable to get
any identifying marks except the rug; couldn’t pick up the bed because the
glass wouldn’t show. It was room sixteen eighteen.” Perhaps the mystery
investigator who ordered up the fingerprints also made some effort to
determine how the glass came to be broken, but the board members, none of
whom, as medical men, seem to have any background in the investigation of
crimes, have nothing to say about it. Their curiosity about the broken glass was no greater when they questioned Nurse Turner next to last on the third day of the hearing.
Q. What were your particular duties on the
night of May twenty-first?
A. Usually before quarter of two I go down to
tower eight before I write the captain’s log and I had left tower twelve and
went down to tower eight and I asked the corpsman how everything was and he
said he just gave a man a pill. I happened to look up at the clock. It was
just about one fourty-four (sic). I sat there in a chair for a minute and
then I heard this noise. It was a double thud and I said what was that. I
said “It sounded like somebody fell out of bed you better check the wing in
front” and he went to check the beds and said it was alright and so I said
“I’ll check the head” and sent him to tower seven to see if it was something
down there. That’s when I walked in the bathroom on tower eight. I looked
out the window. I just remember thinking in my mind, “Oh my God, I hope he
isn’t mine” and I ran up to tower twelve and told the corpsman to check on
Colonel Fuller’s room so he walked into his room and I walked into room twelve
thirty opposite his room and looked out the window from there and could see a
body distinctly. It was then I really realized it was a body and I thought
of Mister Forrestal. So I went up to tower sixteen and told Miss Harty there
was a man’s body outside the galley window and he wasn’t mine. We both went
into his room and he wasn’t there and we noticed the broken glass on the bed
and looked down and noticed the razor blade and told him he was missing (sic)
and she said it was one forty-eight. Then I walked over towards the galley
and noticed the screen was unlocked. That’s about all.
Examined by the board:
Q. When you found out the body was not that of
one of your patients what made you think of Mister Forrestal?
A. I knew he wasn’t mine and I knew that
Mister Forrestal was up there and was being watched.
Q. You said you saw his slippers and a razor
blade beside them; where did you see them?
A. The bed clothes were turned back and
towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and they were right there as
you get out of bed.
Q. And the razor blade was lying beside the
slippers?
A. Yes it was.
Q. Did you notice any blood on the bed?
A. No, I didn’t see any and the razor blade
was dry; there wasn’t anything on that. I remember looking and there wasn’t
anything on the glass either.
Q. Where was the bathrobe?
A. I didn’t see his bathrobe.
Neither the recorder nor the members of the
board desired further to examine the witness.
The board informed the witness that she was
privileged to make any further statement covering anything relating to the
subject matter of the investigation which she thought should be a matter of
record in connection therewith, which had not been fully brought out by the
previous questioning.
The witness said she had nothing further to
state.
The witness was duly warned and withdrew. A few comments are in
order. Notice that when she first
mentions them, Nurse Turner speaks of the broken glass and the
razor blade as though she has told these people, or at least someone in
authority, about these things before. Once again we are made to wonder who
was in charge in the immediate aftermath of the death and what he learned from
the witnesses. The corpsman who was supposed to be monitoring Forrestal and
first noticed him missing from the darkened room, Robert Wayne Harrison, was
also not called to testify until the third day of the hearing (Wednesday).
Surely someone had interviewed him earlier, but it was not part of the
official record. The questioner said, “you
said you saw his slippers and a razor blade...” The astute reader will
notice that she has said nothing about slippers. Maybe the transcriber just
messed up, but at least as likely, some prior questioning had gone on that was
not officially recorded. And why are they interested in the slippers and the
razor blade when it is the glass, more than anything else, which should
intrigue them? They don’t even ask if she saw broken glass anywhere else,
like on the floor, where they have already seen photographs of it. They had
previously asked Corpsman Harrison if he had seen any glass on the floor, and
he had responded in the negative (but he apparently never turned on the
lights). Nurse Regina M. L. Harty,
who accompanied Nurse Turner to the room, had been interviewed earlier, but
she was never asked to describe what she saw in the room. The final question about the bathrobe might have some real significance. We wonder which of the board members asked it, and if he might have been on to something. Unfortunately, we will never learn who played what role in the questioning because the individual questioners on the board are never identified. He is just a “Q.” Although the “cord” found
tied tightly around Forrestal’s neck is commonly referred to as his bathrobe
cord, no official connection is ever made between that cord and his bathrobe.
He was wearing only his pajamas when he fell from the window. The cord
appears in the list of exhibits, but the bathrobe does not. This question of
Nurse Turner represents the only attempt by the board to locate the bathrobe,
perhaps to see if it was missing a belt.
The Key Missing Exhibits
Some much more important
things than Forrestal’s bathrobe were missing from the exhibits, though. Have
a look at the complete list, dear reader, and see if you notice what they are:
Introduced on Page No. Pictures of
body of deceased,
Exhibits 1A through 1J
.............................................................…......……… 2 Photographs of
Rooms sixteen eighteen and sixteen twenty and outside of
building (illegible), National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda,
Maryland,
Exhibits 2A through
2K...................................................................………….4 Clinical
record of the deceased, Exhibit
3......................................................................8 Bathrobe
cord, Exhibit
4...........................................................................….............37 Photographs of
external injuries taken immediately preceding autopsy, Exhibit
5........................................................................................….…..…...........55 Letter of
Doctor William C. Menninger, Exhibit
6................................…....................57 Letter of
Doctor Raymond W. Waggoner, Exhibit
7....................................................57
That’s right, there’s no
autopsy report, a pretty serious omission. Defenders of the investigation
might respond that the autopsy doctor, as we shall see, was questioned at
length and asked many key questions, revealing that in his opinion Forrestal
was not choked to death before being thrown out of the window, but these are
no substitute for the autopsy report itself. One can only wonder why it was
left out. Possibly germane to this omission is the fact that the author’s
FOIA request for all materials connected with the Willcutts Report was not
completely honored by the Navy JAG office. The first set of exhibits, the 10
photographs of the body as it lay on the third floor roof were held back, as
were an unknown number of photographs taken of Forrestal’s external injuries
taken just prior to the autopsy. The reason given was that “...the
unauthorized release of this information would result in a clearly unwarranted
invasion of personal privacy with respect to Mr. Forrestal’s surviving family
members (5 U.S.C.552 (b)(6), as amended).” The JAG office informed me
that I could challenge the ruling with a formal letter sent within 60 days,
and I did so, on the basis that no family member who knew him and could be
counted as a loved one or a “surviving family member” was still alive (He has
one grandchild who was born many years after his death and is now only of
college age.). On September 14, 2004, I finally received a response. Here is
the key paragraph: "Please be advised that
these exhibits [1, 4, and 5] are missing from the original investigative
report. Due to an administrative error you were informed on April 6, 2004,
that these exhibits were withheld out of respect to Mr. Forrestal’s surviving
family members." It would appear to this
humble observer that the Navy legal team’s initial error was tactical rather
than administrative. Readers of the first
installment of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” should also notice the missing
props that played such a key role in convincing the public that Forrestal had
killed himself. For the others, here are the key passages from the front-page
article in The New York Times of Monday, May 23, 1949:
Forrestal
Killed in 13 Story Leap
Nation is Shocked He Was a War Casualty as If He Died at Front, President Declares
Copied a Poem on
Death Had Seemed to Be Improving in the Naval Hospital–Admiral Orders Inquiry
Washington May 22 - James Forrestal, former
Secretary of Defense, jumped thirteen stories to his death early this morning
from the sixteenth floor of the Naval Medical Center.
Suicide had apparently been planned from early
evening. He declined his usual sleeping pill about 1:45 this morning. A book
of poetry beside his bed was opened to a passage from the Greek tragedian,
Sophocles, telling of the comfort of death.
........
The plunge that caused Mr. Forrestal’s death
occurred at 2 A.M. and hospital authorities announced it with a brief
statement two hours later.
Pushed Open a Screen
The hospital said that Mr. Forrestal had left
his room, No. 1618 in the white granite tower of the hospital, and had gone to
a diet kitchen nearby. There, clad in a dressing gown, he pushed open a
screen held only by thumb latches and plummeted to the third floor projection
after hitting a narrower projection at the fourth floor.
The sound of the fall was heard by Lieut.
Dorothy Turner, the nurse on duty on the seventh floor almost immediately
after a Medical Corpsman’s check of Mr. Forrestal’s room disclosed he was
missing. An investigation led to the discovery of the body on the roof of the
passageway leading from the third floor of the main building.
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.
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.
The book was Anthology of World Poetry, bound
in red leather and decorated in gold. A red ribbon bookmark was between Pages
278 and 279 where “Chorus from Ajax” appears.
.........
He was widely denounced by persons who felt
that he favored the Arabs over the Jews, and Mr. Forrestal was said to be
particularly distressed by a statement that “he cared more for oil than he did
for the Jews.”
........
Rear Admiral Leslie Stone
Adm. Stone gave this account of the circumstances that enabled Mr. Forrestal to elude the attendant early this morning.
Commander R.R. Deen, a staff psychiatrist, was
asleep in the room next to that of Mr. Forrestal. The attendant, Hospital
Apprentice R.W. Harrison made his visit to Mr. Forrestal at about 1:30 and
found him apparently asleep. On his 1:45 check he found Mr. Forrestal awake.
Asked if he wanted a sleeping pill, Mr. Forrestal said he did not.
Apprentice Harrison then went to Commander
Deen’s room to report that Mr. Forrestal had declined to take a sedative.
Back at 1:50, he found that his patient was not in his room.
Commander Deen was immediately roused and a
check of the room begun. A few minutes later the seventh floor nurse, Lt.
Turner, reported the sound of Mr. Forrestal’s body striking the third floor
roof.
Admiral Stone said that Mr. Forrestal had improved to the point where he was being allowed to shave himself and that belts were permissible on his dressing gown and pajamas. It had been accepted that continued treatment would have brought Mr. Forrestal to complete recovery in a matter of months. So where were the poetry
anthology and the memo page with the transcribed lines from “Chorus from Ajax”
in the list of exhibits? Actually, the handwritten page was included among
the materials that the author received from the Navy, but none of the
witnesses mentions having discovered it or the book in Forrestal’s room, and
no one on the review board asks anything about the circumstances of their
discovery. Nurse Turner, the most likely candidate to have seen them first,
if, in fact, they were ever in the room, mentions only the broken glass, the
turned-down bed clothes, the razor blade, and, with prompting from the board,
Forrestal’s slippers. The book and the transcription were absolutely vital in
the selling of the story that Forrestal took his own life, but they seem to
have materialized out of the ether (Speaking of ether, another thing we learn
from the Willcutts Report, for what it is worth, is that Forrestal complained
on a number of occasions of a strong ether smell in his room.). On the other
hand, broken glass was most assuredly discovered in the room by two separate
individuals, one of whom captured it photographically, and it has taken 55
years for that fact to reach the American public (Actually it remains to be
seen whether the salient facts surrounding Forrestal’s death will ever reach
any significant portion of the American public. Those who were content for
the Report to remain secret all these years will hardly be inclined to
publicize its findings and its shortcomings.). Something else that is
notable about the account in The Times is the degree of detail about the
goings on in the hospital in the minutes before and after Forrestal’s fatal
plunge. This is information that could only have come from Apprentice
Harrison, Commander Deen, and Lt. Turner. Someone had clearly taken charge of
the investigation right off the bat to elicit this information from them. For
lack of any other name, that of the commanding medical officer of Bethesda
Naval Hospital, Rear Admiral Leslie Stone, the man who gave the information to
the press will have to do. Yet, as we shall see, when the board questions him
they ask him nothing about his actions in the wake of the Forrestal death.
Forrestal’s
Guard Queried Apprentice Harrison plays such an important role in Forrestal’s last few minutes among the living that his testimony is produced here in its entirety: Examined by the recorder
(Lieutenant Robert F. Hooper, Medical Service Corps, U.S. Navy):
Q. State your name, rate and present station.
A. Robert Wayne Harrison, junior, hospital
apprentice, U. S. Navy, Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland.
Q. Harrison, what were your specific duties on
the night of May twenty-first?
A. My specific duties were to take care of
Mister Forrestal.
Q. What time did you go on duty?
A. I went on duty at eleven forty-five p.m.
Q. Whom did you relieve?
A. Price, hospital corpsman?
Q. Would you tell the board what happened from
the time you took over the watch at eleven forty-five until the time that you
discovered Mister Forrestal was missing?
A. When I took over the watch at eleven
forty-five Price whom I relieved told me that Mister Forrestal was still up in
his room and that he had been walking around; that he had been reading. Since
I didn’t know Mister Forrestal personally, (I had been on the night before,
and when he woke up the next morning I didn’t get to talk to him very much, I
didn’t know him personally), he introduced me to him and he was very friendly
and said “Hello” to me.
Q. How many times did you speak to Mister
Forrestal between the time you took over the watch and the time he was
missing?
A. Approximately three or four times.
Q. Did you notice anything unusual about
Mister Forrestal’s behavior during that time?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.
Q. Did he say anything to you that would lead
you to believe that he was in any way disturbed?
A. No, sir, he didn’t.
Q. At what time did you last see Mister
Forrestal?
A. It was one forty-five, sir.
Q. Where was he then?
A. He was in his bed, apparently sleeping.
Q. Where were you at that time?
A. I was in the room when I saw him.
Q. Did you leave the room at that time?
A. Yes, sir, I did.
Q. Where did you go?
A. I went out to the nurse’s desk to write in
the chart, Mister Forrestal’s chart.
Q. At what time did you become aware of the
fact that Mister Forrestal was missing?
A. At approximately one-fifty a.m.
Q. Had you previously spoken to the doctor
regarding Mister Forrestal?
A. Yes, sir, I had.
Q. At what time was that?
A. That was just before one forty-five before
I went back into his room to check to see what he was doing, to see if he was
asleep or resting.
Q. And then you left the room and went out to
the nurse’s desk?
A. To write in the chart, yes, sir.
Q. What did you do when you discovered Mister
Forrestal was missing?
A. When I went back into the room after I had
finished writing in the chart, I went over to my chair where he had been
sitting while I was in the room before and since it is dark in the room, very
dark, my eyes had to become accustomed to the light before I could see
anything. There is a chair sitting directly in front of the night light and
it is very hard to see anything at all when you first walk into the room so I
went over and started to sit down in the chair; by that time I could see
enough to see that he wasn’t in his bed. The first thought that came to my
mind was maybe he had gotten up and gone into the head and at the same moment
the corpsman on duty, Utz, came to the door and told me I had a phone call out
at the desk. I told him Mister Forrestal was gone. I went out to the desk
and answered the phone call. It was Bramley, the night Master-at-arms of the
Neuropsychiatric service. Bramley asked me if Mister Forrestal was alright.
I said that I didn’t know, that he wasn’t in his bed and he told me to make a
thorough check and to find out for sure where he was. So I went back into the
head, looked in the closet, any possible place in the room, and on my way back
out in the hall back to the phone I looked into the galley and I didn’t see
him in there, either. So I went back to the phone and told Bramley that he
was not there.
Examined by the board:
Q. Just prior to discovering that Mister
Forrestal was missing did you hear any unusual noises coming from the vicinity
of the diet kitchen?
A. No, sir, I heard nothing.
Q. Were you close enough to the diet kitchen
to hear if there had been any unusual noises?
A. Yes, sir, I definitely would have.
Q. What is your regular assignment in the
hospital?
A. I was on night duty on ward 6-D, a
neuropsychiatric ward.
Q. How long have you been there?
A. Approximately two months, a little over two
months, sir.
Q. How long have you been assigned to the
neuropsychiatric service?
A. A little over two months, sir.
Q. How many times did you say you stood watch
on Mister Forrestal?
A. Part of Friday night and I took the regular
watch on Saturday night.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal do very much wandering
about his room or corridor Saturday night?
A. He was walking around his room and he did
follow me out to the diet kitchen when he asked me for some orange juice and
then once after that he was out of his room to drink a cup of coffee.
Q. Did he go to the diet kitchen for the
coffee?
A. Yes, sir, he did.
Q. Were you with him then?
A. No, sir, I was not.
Q. He served the coffee himself?
A. No, sir, the corpsman on duty, Utz, was
bringing coffee up in a coffee pot at that time. I was out writing my chart
and he went past the desk where I was sitting and entering in the chart. He
went out towards the galley with his pot of coffee and I heard him mention
Mister Forrestal’s name and say something to him and ask him if he would like
a cup of coffee. Mister Forrestal said “Yes” and then I heard a noise which
would signify he was giving him a cup of coffee and right after that I got up
and went out to the diet kitchen. He was coming out with his coffee in his
hand. He handed me the cup of coffee and said he was all finished with it.
He said I could put it in the galley.
Q. About what time was that?
A. That is one time I don’t remember.
Q. How was he dressed?
A. He was in his pajamas, sir.
Q. Did he have a bathrobe on or not?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did you give Mister Forrestal any
medication at all that night?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.
Q. Did he talk to you very much that night?
A. No, he didn’t.
Q. Didn’t he ask you about yourself and where you came from and so on?
A. No, sir, he didn’t say much except when I
first came in and was introduced to him. That was when he said “Hello” to
me. When I asked him if he wanted his sleeping tablets he told me no, he
thought he could sleep without them.
Q. Was your station inside Mister Forrestal’s
room or was it outside the door?
A. I don’t exactly understand what you mean by
that, sir.
Q. Were you directed to sit in his room while
you had the watch most of the time or could you sit at the nurse’s desk?
A. I was supposed to be in the room except
when I went out to make entries in his chart or get something for Mister
Forrestal.
Q. Were the lights on in Mister Forrestal’s
room when you took over the watch - the overhead lights?
A. No, sir, not the overhead lights; just the
night light.
Q. Did you notice a broken ashtray any time
during your tour of duty in Mister Forrestal’s room?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.
Q. When you were at the nurse’s desk is it
possible for a person to go into the diet kitchen without your observing him?
A. I couldn’t have seen him.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal appear cheerful or
depressed in the time that you observed him?
A. He appeared neither, sir.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal do any reading?
A. Not while I was on watch, sir.
Q. After you discovered Mister Forrestal was
gone did you go into the galley?
A. About fifteen or twenty minutes afterwards,
yes, sir.
Q. Would you describe the condition of the
window in the area at the time that you were in there, in particular whether
the screen was locked or unlocked?
A. The screen was unlocked at that time, sir.
Q. Were there any attachments to the radiator?
A. I saw none if there were.
Q. Did you notice any marks on the window
sill?
A. Sir, at that time I was in such a state
that I didn’t notice any marks on the window sill.
Q. You did state earlier that you had looked
into the galley but no one was there?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. You had no reason to examine the galley further?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.
Q. Did you see Mr. Forrestal’s body at any
time later?
A. Yes, sir, I did, in the morgue.
Q. Did you recognize the body as that of
Mister Forrestal?
A. Yes, sir.
Neither the recorder nor the members of the
board desired further to examine this witness.
The board informed the witness that he was
privileged to make any further statement covering anything relating to the
subject matter of the investigation which he thought should be a matter of
record in connection therewith, which had not been fully brought out by the
previous questioning.
The witness said he had nothing further to
state.
The witness was duly warned and withdrew. Notice, first, that there
is a difference in the explanation Admiral Stone gave to The Times from that
of Apprentice Harrison for the latter’s absence from the room at the time of
Forrestal’s disappearance. According to Stone, Harrison had left the room to
inform Dr. Deen that Forrestal had declined his usual sleeping pill.
Harrison’s explanation here, though, is that he had simply gone down the hall
to make routine entries in the log book at the nurse’s desk. Actually, Dr.
Deen in his testimony did say that Harrison had awakened him a few minutes
before to report that Forrestal was not sleeping and that he had told Harrison
that he should remind Forrestal that he should take a pill if he was having
trouble sleeping. Harrison had then returned to Forrestal’s room before his
last trip down the hall to make his log entries. Second, the account given by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley in Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) is seen to have some serious flaws:
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 “Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles,
in which Ajax, forlorn and far from home contemplates suicide. The book was
bound in red leather and decorated with gold.
....... 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. (pp. 464-465) According to Apprentice Harrison, only the dim nightlight was on in Forrestal’s room from the time that he went on duty at 11:45 p.m. until the patient turned up missing at 1:50 a.m., and Forrestal did no reading. Assuming Dr. Nenno was
telling the truth, this account also seriously calls into question the probity
of the psychiatrist in overall charge of Forrestal’s care. The head
psychiatrist in charge of Forrestal’s care, Captain George Raines, depicts
Forrestal as scheming to get Harrison out of the way so he can commit suicide,
but the doctor’s story is flatly contradicted by the Harrison testimony,
testimony with which Dr. Raines had to have been thoroughly familiar when he
gave his account to Dr. Nenno. Hoopes and Brinkley do
prove to be correct with their revelation–not found in any previously
published account of which the author is aware–that the guard on duty was new
to the job. Here we find that he was spending his first full night on the
Forrestal detail, having spent part of Friday night on duty. The significance
they read into that fact, however, that it made him easily manipulated by a
suicide-bound Forrestal, proved to be off the mark. If, on the other hand,
Forrestal was murdered on orders of the powers that be, Harrison’s newness to
the job might indicate that he was part of the plot, brought in from outside
to help carry out the deed during the hours when Forrestal was most
vulnerable. To allow the accomplice time to get to know Forrestal as a person
would have jeopardized the mission, and it would have looked really bad if the
deed had been pulled off within a few days of Forrestal’s admission into the
hospital when he was ostensibly under heavy guard, expressly to prevent
suicide. The timing of the board’s
question, giving Harrison the opportunity to establish that he had worked
previously in neuropsychology elsewhere in the hospital, seems almost to have
as its purpose the forestalling of such speculation. We don’t know if
Harrison was, in fact, telling the truth on this point. Furthermore, he could
have been an operative all along, working for one of the more clandestine
branches of the government. It would have been helpful if the board had
established why the regular night-shift attendant was not there. Hoopes and
Brinkley say that he had gone AWOL on a drunken bender, but this is neither
corroborated by the official inquiry nor is it contradicted. A couple more revelations
in the Harrison testimony are of interest. We find out that the regular
station of Forrestal’s attendant was not just outside the door of his room, as
one might assume, but in the room itself. Dr. Raines and the other
psychiatrists in their testimony make a big deal out of relaxed restrictions
on Forrestal being an important part of his “recovery” process. At the same
time they have a person violating his privacy on an almost permanent basis.
The picture that comes across is more of Forrestal as a prisoner than as a
patient. We discover further that those detailed periodic log entries that
make up most of the bulk of the exhibits to the Willcutts Report were made at
the nurse’s desk down the hall and that from that location one could not see
anyone going from Forrestal’s room to the kitchen across the hall with its
unprotected window. It almost makes a farce of the story that when Forrestal
was first admitted and his mental state was bad, precautions against suicide
were tight, but were loosened only as his condition improved. Furthermore, we
learn from other testimony that immediately upon admission to the hospital,
Forrestal was sent immediately to the 16th floor room even though
“security screens” would not be installed on the room’s windows for several
more days. Recall, as well, the one clear picture that we have of one of
these “security screens” and we must really wonder how much of a hindrance
they would have been to anyone bent on suicide. The screen is already half
out of the window. The room pictures also reveal Venetian blinds on the
windows with long cords hanging down from them and radiators beneath the
windows. The cords as a noose and the radiator as a perch from which to jump
look to be almost tailor-made for suicide by hanging. One must really wonder
whether the good doctors at Bethesda ever really considered Forrestal much of
a suicide threat or if they did, whether they were expected to make much of an
effort to prevent it.
The Misnamed Witness The testimony of the witness who followed Harrison on the stand, but was relieved by him on the night of Forrestal’s death, is perhaps even more intriguing than Harrison’s, and it is also reproduced here in full: Examined by the recorder:
Q. State your name, rate and present station.
A. Edward William Price, hospital apprentice,
339 78 55, U.S. Naval Hospital, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda,
Maryland.
Q. What are your regular duties at the Naval
Hospital?
A. Taking care of neuropsychiatric patients.
Q. How long have you been taking care of
neuropsychiatric patients?
A. Fifteen months, sir.
Q. What were your specific duties on the night
of May twenty-first?
A. I had the watch on Mister Forrestal from
four until twelve o’clock midnight.
Q. During the time that you had the watch on
Mister Forrestal did you notice anything unusual about his behavior.
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Will you tell the board what this unusual
behavior was during the watch?
A. Well, sir, at twenty-one ten he started
walking the room and it didn’t seem odd at twenty-one ten but when he was
still walking the floor at twenty-two hundred that was the first time he had
ever walked the floor that long and he was walking the floor for a period of
two hours and fifty minutes before I went off watch at twenty-four hundred.
And another thing was he went into the doctors’ room adjoining his room and he
raised the blinds, I would say that was–I don’t know exact time–around twenty
hundred and he raised the blinds and raised the window and at the time I was
at the desk. We had orders we could stay at the desk until twenty-one hundred
so long as we checked on him; so I went back to the doctors’ room and the
patient was standing at the window. He had raised the bottom part of it as
far as it would go. When I walked in the room he jumped aside. He said
“Price, I raised that window. If it gets you in any trouble close it” so he
went back through the head and closed the door so I let the blind down and
walked out of the room. Just as I got to the door I heard the door to the
head open again. He stuck his head out so I went back and closed the head
door and locked it and I went back to the desk. I didn’t make any note of it
because he has opened windows several times in his own room and the doctors’
room. Only difference was I am usually there with him when he does it. Other
than that there was nothing odd that he done that I can think of.
Q. How long had you stood watch on Mister
Forrestal previous to this particular night?
A. Well, sir, I took over the watch the third
day he was up there.
Q. Do you know the date that was. A. I’d say it was the fifth of April.
Q. And you had stood watches continuously on
him since that date?
A. Yes, sir, I had eight in the morning to
four in the afternoon, then I went from there to twelve to eight, stood that
for two weeks, then went on four to twelve. I have been on four to twelve for
a little over three weeks.
Examined by the board:
Q. These occurrences that you have just
related in regard to Mister Forrestal’s behavior on that night, did you
consider them sufficiently unusual to report them to the doctor?
A. No, sir, I reported his walking the room to
Doctor Deen and I put it in the chart and then Doctor Deen asked me how come
the door was locked back there and I told him I thought I better lock it being
as he raised the blind.
Q. Did you attach any particular significance
to this type of behavior?
A. No, sir, I didn’t at the time.
Q. Had you seen him in the past do things
similar?
A. Well, sir, he several times did walk the
room. He hated light and walked over to the window shades and if they were
open a little too far he would pull it closed.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal seem friendly on that
night?
A. Yes, sir, he seemed very friendly. I
introduced Harrison to him as I left the watch and he shook hands with
Harrison and said he was glad to meet him.
Q. Did he meet him the night before?
A. No, sir, he was sleeping when Harrison came
on watch and hadn’t awakened by the time Harrison went off.
Q. Other than the conversation you have given
with Mister Forrestal did he say anything else to you on that night?
A. No, sir, he asked me if I thought it was
stuffy in the room and he asked that several times since I have been on watch;
he liked fresh air. When I was on night watch, twelve to eight in the morning
he always got a blanket out for us to wrap around us because he had the
windows wide open.
Neither the recorder nor the members of the
board desired further to examine the witness.
The board informed the witness that he was
privileged to make any further statement covering anything relating to the
subject matter of the investigation which he thought should be a matter of
record in connection therewith, which had not been fully brought out by the
previous questioning.
The witness made the following statement:
He started reading a book at about twenty
hundred and whenever the corpsman would come in the room he would turn the bed
lamp off and sit down in the chair and so far as the writing I don’t know. It
appeared that he was but I couldn’t say for sure.
Neither the recorder nor the members of the
board desired further to examine this witness.
The witness said he had nothing further to
state.
The witness was duly warned and withdrew. This rather
matter-of-fact testimony may be contrasted with the account derived from an
undated outline of an unpublished manuscript, as reported in the celebrated
Forrestal biography by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley (See “Who
Killed James Forrestal.”): 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 (as they spell it, ed.), 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. The corpsman, by his own testimony, did not consider Forrestal’s behavior, even the window raising, sufficiently unusual that he should alert the doctor, though he did routinely inform him of the patient’s restless pacing. He also says nothing about Forrestal declining a sleeping pill because he wanted to stay up to read nor does he volunteer anything about hanging around for an additional half hour out of anxiety. Tellingly, in neither account, nor in the testimony of corpsman Harrisonm, do we hear of his passing any sort of warning on to his successor for the evening. In short, neither in word nor in deed did he give the impression that there was anything really amiss. Still, from our vantage
point, it does appear that Forrestal that evening was behaving somewhat
peculiarly, or, at least, showing some signs of anxiety. Recall that it was
reported in the dissenting book, “The Death of James Forrestal” by Cornell
Simpson (Belmont, MA, 1966), that Forrestal’s brother, Henry, was coming the
very next day to take him away from the hospital (This allegation is
corroborated in no way by testimony before the Willcutts Review Board. Dr.
Raines says at one point that he thought Forrestal would be ready for release
in another month or so.). Recall, further, that Hoopes and Brinkley reported
(p. 454) that Forrestal had said that he did not expect to leave the hospital
alive. If, in fact, Forrestal did expect that his brother was going to make
an attempt the next day to get him out of the hospital and he thought that his
life was, indeed, in danger as long as he was there, he had every reason to be
extremely anxious that night, especially with a new attendant whom he did not
know handling the graveyard shift. That might explain why he would have
“jumped aside” from the open window of the doctors’ room when the corpsman
entered the room. As for the opening wide of the window and the raising of
the blinds, the corpsman clearly didn’t take it as an indication that
Forrestal was on the verge of jumping out, so there’s no real reason why we
should, either. The freedom with which
Forrestal could open 16th floor windows, hither and yon, even those
in his own room that had “security screens” between the glass and the inside
of the room, further gives the lie to the notion that anyone at the hospital
was ever really serious about the need for suicide prevention. We learn from
Dr. Deen’s testimony that Forrestal was permitted to sleep in the spare bed in
the doctors’ room when it got too stuffy for him in his own. Nothing would
have prevented him from getting up in the night and taking a swan dive out of
an unprotected window in that room. Finally, there’s the
curious matter of the misspelling of the corpsman’s name. No, this is not
just another example of poor scholarship by Hoopes and Brinkley. In this
case, their source, the undated, unpublished outline of a manuscript by John
Osborne is verifiably correct and the Navy’s official investigation of
Forrestal’s death is wrong. Every time he made an entry onto the medical
chart, Exhibit 3 accompanying the Willcutts Report, he signed his name, and it
is unmistakably the rare name of “Prise,” not the common name of “Price.” Maybe this is not the
trivial matter that it might seem to be. There are only two possibilities,
either the name was repeatedly typed wrong by the Review Board by mistake, or
it was intentionally written wrong. If it was just a mistake, the overall
competence of the work is called into question. How could they get something
as simple as this wrong, and if this is wrong, how much else is wrong? And how could the mistake
happen? Corpsman Prise had been on the case from the beginning. He was well
known to the higher-ups involved with Forrestal’s care, and they all must have
read the draft of the report. Surely they would have known that his name was
not “Price,” and would have corrected the manuscript when they read it. It
was hardly rushed into print, so there was plenty of time to set it right.
Furthermore, the likelihood that the name would have been taken down wrong at
the beginning of Prise’s testimony is very small. When he was asked to state
his name, he did it either pronouncing it “Prize” or “Price.” In the first
instance, hearing the strange name, the recorder would likely have asked him
how it is spelled, if he did not volunteer it. In the second instance, the
volunteering of the correct spelling would certainly have been virtual second
nature to Mr. Prise. He would already have done it thousands of times in his
life, knowing that the common assumption would be that the name is spelled
like it is pronounced. For some reason, the very
existence of Prise was also left out of the account that the hospital gave to
the newspapers in the wake of Forrestal’s death. The newspapers reported at
the time that Harrison’s watch began at nine p.m. and lasted until six a.m.,
which the author, Simpson, repeated in his version of Forrestal’s last hours.
Harrison’s name shows up a number of times in those early stories, but Prise’s
does not. That leaves us with the greater likelihood that the name was misspelled intentionally, and the implications of that are quite sinister, indeed. It is a technique that is used by corrupt investigative authorities when they want to make it difficult for others to track down witnesses, witnesses whose testimony has been misrepresented. There was a classic example of it, among others, in the case of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster in the Bill Clinton administration. Investigators reported that a Patrick Nolton from Washington, DC, saw Foster’s car in the parking lot of Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, when Nolton stopped off for an impromptu urination. It took a foreign reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph of London to get past the obfuscation:
I grabbed the Fiske Report and flicked to page
28.... The key passage had been expurgated....
Finding this witness was no easy matter. His name was redacted in the FBI documents. There was a brief mention of him in a Park Police “incident report”: a Patrick Nolton, with a Washington telephone number 296-2339. But nobody at the number had ever heard of him–it appeared to be a doctor’s clinic–and it soon became clear that there was no such person as Patrick Nolton in the District of Columbia, and never had been. The Park Police had done a first-rate job of “laundering” the identity of the witness.... (The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, Regnery Publishing, 1997, p. 159.) But Evans-Pritchard, using
a bit of detective work, managed to find Patrick Knowlton and interview
him. It turned out that he had seen a reddish-brown, older model Honda than
the light gray Honda that belonged to Foster, and he was quite sure of the
matter, and other parts of what he had told the FBI were also misreported. “Patrick Knowlton is
convinced that the FBI did not misunderstand him when they wrote up his 302
statement the next day. He believes they knowingly falsified it.” (p. 162) If any part of Prise’s
testimony is knowingly falsified, what part might it be? My candidate is that
last volunteered part about Forrestal reading a book and perhaps writing. The
passage doesn’t make much sense, but it did manage to get the suggestion on
the record that Forrestal might have been doing some transcribing from a book
at some time on that fateful evening–although the book seemed to have
disappeared. Whether or not this speculation is correct, the failure of the poetry book to turn up anywhere in the testimony of the review board witnesses suggests strongly that the author Simpson is correct:
The whole overplayed Sophocles-poem angle was nothing but a red herring that effectively threw the public off the scent of the significant fact that the prolific Forrestal had written no suicide note before he met his abrupt and violent death. (p. 18)
The Officer in Charge When Forrestal’s death
occurred, Captain Raines, and the number two psychiatrist at the hospital and
the number two man on the Forrestal case, Captain Stephen Smith, were both off
to a psychiatric conference in Montreal, Canada, so neither was in a position
to have taken charge of matters in the wake of the death. Commander John
Nardini was the doctor in charge of the care of Forrestal in their absence.
The board interviewed him at length, but they asked him no questions about his
actions in the wake of the death. As a purely medical man, he would have
hardly been the person to take charge of the “crime scene,” at any rate. That would leave either
Rear Admiral Morton C. Willcutts, the Medical Officer in Command of the
National Naval Medical Center and the man who convened the review board,
itself, or Rear Admiral Leslie O. Stone, the Medical Officer in Command of the
Bethesda Naval Hospital and the man who gave the detailed statement to the
press on the day of the death, to provide an explanation for the initial
conduct of the investigation. If anyone was in a position to explain why
Forrestal’s room was “laundered” before it was photographed, why many hours
were allowed to elapse before the room was photographed, why the regular
graveyard shift attendant had been replaced, and who discovered the book and
the transcription that played such a large role in supporting the suicide
conclusion, it would be either Willcutts or Stone. According to the
aforementioned testimony of Lieutenant junior grade Westneat both of them
arrived on the scene in the wee hours of Sunday morning and began giving
orders. Even though Willcutts had had dinner with Forrestal on Friday night and was one of the last people to see Forrestal alive, he was not called to testify. Stone was called. As you read his entire testimony below, including all the questions directed to him by the board, you will gain an appreciation for the fact that all of the members of the board (and the recorder) were his subordinates:
Examined by the recorder:
Q. State your name, rank and present station.
A. Leslie O. Stone, Rear Admiral, Medical
Corps, U.S. Navy; Medical Officer in Command, U.S. Naval Hospital, Bethesda,
Maryland.
Q. Admiral Stone, as Commanding Officer of the
U.S. Naval Hospital what was your connection with the handling of Mister
Forrestal’s case?
A. I was aware that he was going to be
admitted on April second of this year, the afternoon of the second of April.
Q. At that time, Admiral, did you leave?
A. No, sir, I was detached Sunday, April
third, and left here at three p.m., checked out with the Officer-of-the-Day
the morning of April third.
Q. What time did you return?
A. I returned Friday, April fifteenth.
Q. From that time on would you tell the board
your connection with Mister Forrestal’s case, if any.
A. Well, I was in constant contact. Captain
Raines, the Medical Officer in charge, kept me daily informed about his
progress and his condition and on numerous occasions, on two occasions, I was
up with the Defense Secretary, Mister Johnson, for a visit and also with
President Truman when he was out to visit with him and I daily was on the
floor but not in the room with Mister Forrestal.
Examined by the board:
Q. What are your feelings in regard to the
type of handling and treatment Mister Forrestal received during the period
after your return and resuming command of the hospital?
A. I feel that Mister Forrestal had nothing
but the best of care; that I have all the confidence in the world in the
psychiatric staff of this hospital and I feel that the statement that Captain
Raines has made publicly is what he believes and I believe that Mister
Forrestal had as good care as he would have received in any institution.
Neither the recorder nor the members of the
board desired further to examine this witness.
The board informed the witness that he was
privileged to make any further statement covering anything relating to the
subject matter of the investigation which he thought should be a matter of
record in connection therewith, which had not been fully brought out by the
previous questioning.
The witness said he had nothing further to
state.
The witness was duly warned and withdrew. So much for that. RHIP.
Rank has its privileges, as they say.
The Suspicious Cord The general approach of
the review board from the beginning seems to be to take it as a given that
Forrestal took his own life and that it is their job to come up with some
explanation as to how he was able to get away with it. The exception to that
rule is in their treatment of the bathrobe cord that was tied around
Forrestal’s neck. They certainly knew that this had to look very, very
suspicious, that someone might have used it to throttle Forrestal in his bed
and then throw him out of the window. If Forrestal was bound to kill himself,
was he so addled that he did not realize that throwing himself out a 16th
floor window, by itself, would do the job? The first person to
testify about it was Hospitalman William Eliades:
When the doctor shone the light you could see
one end was tied around his neck and other end extended over toward the left
part of his head. It was not broken in any way and didn’t seem to be tied on
to anything. I looked to see whether he had tried to hang himself and see
whether a piece of cord had broken off. It was all in one piece except it was
tied around his neck. Eliades and several succeeding witnesses are asked how tight the cord was, and the consensus seems to be that it was tight, but not all that tight. One of the doctors who saw the body when the cord was still on is asked if he saw any signs of asphyxia, and he responded in the negative. Finally, Captain William M. Silliphant, the autopsy doctor, is called upon to lay to rest all speculation that Forrestal was first choked to death and then thrown out of the window:
Q. Was there any evidence of strangulation or
asphyxia by strangulation? A. There was absolutely no evidence external or internal of any strangulation or asphyxia. That still leaves open the possibility that Forrestal was subdued and quieted by use of the cord and then thrown out of the window. If both carotid arteries taking blood to the brain are blocked, unconsciousness can occur within ten seconds. Maybe this is what happened in Forrestal’s case, with insufficient bodily evidence remaining for the autopsy doctor to notice. There is also the possibility that Captain Silliphant was not telling the truth. Those of us familiar with the performance of the autopsy doctor in the aforementioned Foster case, and in the John F. Kennedy case by Navy doctors in that same Bethesda Naval Hospital, are not inclined to believe autopsy doctors implicitly. It would have helped if
someone had gone to the trouble to determine if there was enough cord left
over after “one end” was tied around Forrestal’s neck for the other end to
have been tied to the radiator below the window for the man to hang himself
out the window. And if an attempt had been made to so attach it, the cord
might have left telltale creases where the failed knot had been. This avenue
of inquiry, needless to say, was not explored.
The Doctors’ Perspective A substantial part of the
testimony before the Willcutts Review Board, which altogether filled 61
legal-sized pages and required four days to accomplish, dealt with Forrestal’s
psychological condition. It was, for the most part, a defense case against
any possible charge of negligence against the Navy and hospital officials.
The theme followed–and never challenged by the board–was that the patient was
in pretty bad shape when he was admitted, and during that early period
security precautions were stringent. The patient improved, though fitfully,
and eventually he had improved to the point that hardly any security
precautions were necessary. Indeed, medical necessity required that security
be relaxed to the point of virtually inviting the patient to take a fatal leap
from a high level, although it was never stated in just these terms, of
course. The idea, according to the doctors, was that the patient had to
re–acclimated to real-world dangers in order to get used to returning to
normal life. Five doctors were
responsible for Forrestal’s care, but the name of only one, Captain George
Raines, appears in the two popular biographies of Forrestal, the one by Hoopes
and Brinkley and Arnold A. Rogow’s James Forrestal, A Study of Personality,
Politics and Power (New York, 1963). There was a definite hierarchy among
the doctors, corresponding, to a degree, to their military rank. Captain
Raines was the Chief of Neuropsychiatry at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He
was primarily responsible for Forrestal’s therapy, prescribing medication and
engaging in one to three hour therapy sessions on an almost daily basis until
he ceased them early in May. Captain Stephen Smith was his second in command
who talked less formally on a daily basis with Forrestal and provided
“supportive” and “consultive” services to Dr. Raines. Commander David
Hightower was a resident in neuropsychiatry and Commander Robert Deen was a
resident in second year training in psychiatry. They had the babysitting
duties, alternating sleeping over in the room next to Forrestal and making
themselves available at all times for anything that might arise needing a
doctor’s attention. Finally, there was Commander John Nardini, who was called
in to be in charge of the patient when Raines and Smith left on May 18 for the
psychiatric conference. He developed only a nodding acquaintance with the
patient in the short period of his duties. Some striking differences among the doctors and between the doctors and between the doctors and the press reports come to light with respect to Forrestal’s condition. The popular notion of what was wrong with Forrestal was captured and perpetuated by Rogow in his widely-quoted and referenced biography:
Raines diagnosed Forrestal’s illness as
involutional melancholia, a depressive condition sometimes seen in persons who
have reached middle age....
Although some psychiatrists regard involutional
melancholia psychosis 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. .....
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 treatments prescribed by Raines in Bethesda, this delusion was never fully displaced in his mind. (pp. 9-10) This assessment is
contradicted by the testimony of the Bethesda doctors in almost every
respect. Not once do any of the doctors speak of paranoia as one of
Forrestal’s symptoms, from the time he arrived until his untimely departure.
The term, “involutional melancholia” is never used, nor is there any mention
of manic-depression, schizophrenia, or nihilistic tendencies. They all use
the term “depressed” or “depression,” with respect to the patient, but how
that depression manifested itself and how it was diagnosed and measured is not
at all easy to pin down. Moreover, the consensus of psychiatric community
these days is that there really is no special medical condition known as
involutional melancholia, or a type of depression to which those in middle age
are particularly susceptible. Rather, there is just garden variety depression
which, when it strikes people in middle age, used to be given the special name
of “involutional melancholia.” In his testimony, the only
special sort of depression that Forrestal might have had, according to Dr.
Raines, was “reactive depression,” or, conveniently for the official story,
one that might lie dormant until touched off by some external factor like,
say, reading a depressing poem. Reading over the
various doctors’ use of the term “depressed” to describe Forrestal, one is
struck by how fast and loose the term is used. Virtually nowhere is it
explained how the “depression” manifested itself or how it could be detected
or measured, though it is often spoken of as something as discrete and
measurable as heart rate or blood pressure. The only manifestation that might
possibly be separated out from simply the effects of heavy sedation are
verbally expressed suicidal tendencies. These are attested to only by Dr.
Raines, and the testimony of the other doctors and the peculiarity of some of
Dr. Raines’ assertions seem to call his reliability on this matter into
question.
Dr. Raines Weighs In Dr. Raines was the third person to testify, after the two photographers, and he was the only person to testify twice. He was the only witness to appear before the board on the last two days of witness testimony. Here are some key early passages:
Q. Would you tell the board the results of your observations and treatment of Mister Forrestal, especially in reference to his mental status?
A. Mister Forrestal was obviously quite
severely depressed. I called the hospital from Hobe Sound on the morning of
the second and asked that they have two rooms available, one on the officers’
psychiatric section and the other in the tower. At that time I had not
examined Mister Forrestal, was not at all sure of how much security he
needed. On the flight up I had opportunity to talk to Doctor Menninger at
great length and to see the patient briefly. As a result, I felt he could be
handled in the tower satisfactorily, provided certain security measures were
taken. Consequently, he was admitted to the tower with a continuous watch
when he arrived here. The history indicated that Mister Forrestal had had a
brief period of depression last summer but that this had cleared very rapidly
when he went on vacation. His present difficulties seemed to have started
about the first day of the year, perhaps a little earlier, with very mild
depressive symptoms beginning at that time and a good many physical symptoms,
noticably (sic) weight loss and constipation. The depression had been rather
marked from about the fifteenth of February nineteen forty-nine but had not
become actually overwhelming until the week-end preceding admission which
would have been approximately March twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. At that
time he became very depressed and I believe as a result of that relinquished
his office some three days earlier than had been previously planned. He was
seen by Mister Eberstadt on the Monday before admission and on his advice
immediately relinquished his office and went to Florida for rest. The
physical examination was done by Doctor Lang immediately after admission which
showed nothing remarkable except some elevation in blood pressure. The
neurological examination was negative except for small, fixed pupils which, so
far as I know, had no significance. Mister Forrestal was obviously exhausted
physically and we postponed any complete studies until such time as his
physical condition could be alleviated. He was started immediately on a week
of prolonged narcosis with sodium amytal. His physical condition was so bad
we had difficulty adjusting the dose of amytal because of his over-response to
it. About the third night his blood pressure dropped to fifty-five systolic
under six grains of amytal. To prevent any confusion in the orders on the
case I selected two of the residents, Doctor Hightower and Doctor Deen, and
put them on port and starboard watch to begin at five o’clock each evening.
The doctor on watch slept in the room next to Mister Forrestal. On Monday
after admission on Saturday security screens were provided for the room that
Mister Forrestal occupied and for the head connected with it by moving them
from tower five. At the same time a lock was placed on the outer door of the
bathroom and strict suicidal precautions were observed. I saw Mister
Forrestal for interviews daily during the morning of that first week when he
was allowed to come out of the narcosis for short periods of time. These
interviews were devoted primarily to history-taking. His response to that
early treatment was good and he gained about two pounds during the course of
the weeks’ narcosis. The following week, beginning the eleventh of April we
started Mister Forrestal on a regime of sub-shock insulin therapy combined
with psycho-therapeutic interviews. This was continued about four weeks but
his response to it was not as good as I had hoped it to be. He was so
depleted physically he over-reacted to the insulin much as he had to the
amytal and this occasionally would throw him into a confused state with a
great deal of agitation and confusion so that at the end of the second week I
had to give him a three day rest period instead of the usual one day rest
period. I am not sure that that was the end of the second or third week. At
the end of the fourth week again he was over-reacting to the insulin and I
decided to discontinue it except in stimulating doses. From that time on he
was carried with ten units of insulin before breakfast and another ten units
before lunch with extra feedings in the afternoon and evening. In spite of
this he gained only a total of five pounds in the entire time he was in the
hospital. His course was rather an odd one, although in general it followed
the usual pattern of such things. The odd part came in the weekly variation
of the depression. I can demonstrate it and explain. Instead of the
depression lightening, instead of straight up in a line he would come up until
about Thursday and then dip, hitting a low point on Saturday and Sunday and up
again until the middle of the week and down again Saturday and Sunday. Each
week they were a little higher. He was moving upward steadily but it was in a
wave-like form. In addition, he had the usual diurnal variation, the low
point of his depression occurred between three and five a.m. so that the
course towards recovery was a double wave-like motion, the daily variation
being ingrafted on his weekly variation. The daily variation is very common,
the weekly variation is not so common and that was the portion of the course
that I referred to as “odd”.
Q. Captain Raines, I show you a clinical record, can you identify it? A. This is the nursing record of Mister Forrestal. The only portion I don’t recognize is this poem copied on brown paper. Is that the one he copied? It looks like his handwriting. This is the record of Mister Forrestal, the clinical record. In the following excerpts from the testimony of Dr. Raines, the “Q” and “A” format will not be strictly adhered to. Rather, the portions relating to Forrestal’s supposed suicidal tendencies are selected from Raines’ answers to various questions:
As late as the twenty-ninth of April the
patient was still quite suicidal and personnel were reminded of this by an
order in the chart. A week later the insulin therapy was discontinued and
beginning on the eighth of May the patient was placed on the stimulating doses
of insulin which I previously mentioned. He continued to improve in the
irregular fashion which I have described and by the ninth of May I felt it
safe for Mrs. Forrestal to make her plans to go abroad but didn’t think he
should go with her. My reason for objecting to his going was, ironically
enough, that I knew in the recovery period which seemed at hand the danger of
suicide was rather great. The son returned to his work in Paris on May
thirteenth. The family was at all times kept fully advised as to the
patient’s progress but I didn’t warn them continuously of the suicidal threat
nor did I mention it to any one except my immediate colleague, Doctor Smith.
........
I first eased the regulations as a test on the
twenty-sixth of April but found that the patient was not ready for it and that
resulted in an order on the twenty-ninth of April that the watch was to remain
in the room at all times, that the patient was still quite suicidal. The
relaxation of the afternoon watch was only a few days later, on May first,
which indicates how abruptly his condition would change at times in these
undulating moments in the illness.
.......
He was very close to well actually. When I saw
him on the eighteenth I felt we could, didn’t tell him, but felt
hospitalization for another thirty days would probably do the trick. He was
that close to the end of it. That, of course, is the most dangerous time in
any depression.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal make any attempts at suicide while he was under your care?
A. None whatsoever. The matter of suicide in
Hobe Sound, he told Doctor Menninger that he had attempted to hang himself
with a belt. Menninger and I were very skeptical of that and both he and I
were of the opinion that it was sort of a nightmare. The man had no marks on
him and there was no broken belt. Very frequently a depressed person has a
fantasy of dying and reports it as real. So far as I know he never made a
single real attempt at suicide except that one that was successful. He was
the type of individual, fast as lightening (sic), of extremely high
intelligence and one reason I doubt previous attempts I knew if he decided to
do it he would do it and nobody would stop him. He was a boxer in college and
his movements, even when depressed, were so quick you could hardly follow them
with your eye. In the course of psychotherapy he talked a great deal about
his suicide; he would tell me when he was feeling hopeless and had to do away
with himself. At those times we would tighten restrictions. He would tell me
in symbolic language. One morning he sent me a razor blade which he had
concealed. When I interviewed him I said “What does this mean?” He said “It
means I am not going to kill myself with a razor blade.” Of course, he had
the blade and could have done it. A man of that intelligence can kill himself
at any time he desired and you can’t very well stop him. He is my first
personal suicide since nineteen thirty-six, thirteen years ago. The last one
was on a locked ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital under immediate supervision
of an attendant. He discussed, whenever he felt badly enough, he would talk
about the possibilities of killing himself and I am sure that when I left here
on the eighteenth he had no intention of harming himself.
Q. Had he, in the course of your interviews,
either symbolically or otherwise, suggested his method if he committed
suicide?
A. Yes, I am sure he didn’t jump out of the
window. My interviews with him were for one to three hours a day over a
period of eight weeks (sic); can’t go into all the material that makes me
think that but by the time he had been here four weeks I was certain there
were only two methods he would use because he had told me, one was sleeping
pills. He said that was the one way he could do it and the other was by
hanging which made us feel somewhat more comfortable about the period of risk,
knowing that he wasn’t going out one of the windows. I haven’t gone into all
the details of what happened, but personally feel he tried to hang himself. I
don’t think he jumped; he may have; don’t think it was out the window; think
he meant to hang. For some time he had had complete access to the open
windows in the residents’ room and for a short period of time he even slept in
there for two or three nights. There were two beds in the residents room and
he would sleep in one of those until about three o’clock and then go back to
his own bed. That was the one thing that puzzled me, when he called me (sic),
as to what had happened; I couldn’t believe it because of the window, until I
got back and found out about the bathrobe cord.
........
Actually, he dealt quite well with almost
everything. It is my own feeling from what I know that the period of
despondency which caused him to end his life was very sudden of onset and
probably the whole matter was on an impulsive basis. That was the one thing I
had feared, knowing of his impulsivity. Again, I say, he moved like
lightening (sic), some of those on pure impulse. That is supported by several
things. I talked to Doctor Hightower last night and was glad to hear him say
spontaneously and not just in agreement with me that he felt that this was an
impulsive thing of sudden origin, but one of the main evidences is the
complete absence of any suicidal note or expression of suicidal intent in any
way. He left no message at all except this poem which I am sure was meant for
me and was not a portion of the suicide. That is to say, I think he was
simply writing that out to demonstrate how badly he felt.
Q. Before he came to Bethesda while he was
down south, did he make any attempt to slash his wrist? A. No, he had a small scratch on his wrist which he told me was not a suicidal attempt but he was considering it and he was wondering what he could do to himself and he took a knife or blade and scratched his wrist, so superficial it was not even dressed, and wouldn’t come under the heading of “attempt” so far as I am concerned. Now let’s examine Dr.
Raines’s remarks. He says that he ordered two rooms to be prepared, one in
the officers’ psychiatric suite and the other in “the tower.” After some
deliberation he concluded that Forrestal “could be handled in the tower
satisfactorily, provided certain security measures were taken.” It’s really
not a matter of whether he could be housed on the 16th floor
but, rather, should he be put up there. No one on the panel asks Dr.
Raines or anyone else why they should ever consider putting Forrestal on the
16th floor when they claimed to have believed that he was a danger
to himself. Why take the chance? We also learn that initially there were not
even any security screens, such as they were, on the windows, though there was
a full-time guard to keep an eye on this “fast as lightning,” “impulsive”
patient. The revelation in
Part 1, again from Dr.
Nenno, the future associate of Dr. Raines, that the orders came from
“downtown,” that is, the White House, to put Forrestal up on the 16th
floor, to the general consternation of the psychiatric staff, looks better in
light of these revelations. The board might have known better than to ask why
Forrestal was placed in “the tower,” because they knew there was no good
medically defensible reason that could have been given. Dr. Raines is wrong about
the reason for the advancement of the date of Forrestal’s departure from
office. It was not Forrestal’s decision, brought on by his “depression,” but
President Truman’s decision. Forrestal’s alarming, almost zombie-like
behavior, was first noticed by his assistant, Marx Leva, and called to the
attention of Ferdinand Eberstadt, some hours after Forrestal had been replaced
by Louis Johnson. We also learn from
Raines’s testimony that constipation was among Forrestal’s physical symptoms
upon entry into the hospital as well as constricted pupils of the eyes, but he
makes nothing of it. According to the web site on narcotics at we find that
these are both symptoms of someone on heroin. That is not to argue that
Forrestal was necessarily on heroin, but it does raise the question of whether
some of Forrestal’s sudden lethargic and apathetic behavior–a radical
personality change for him–in the wake of his stepping down from the Defense
Secretary’s job might have resulted from his having been secretly drugged.
Drowsiness and apathy are also heroin symptoms. At least one of the doctors
on the panel should have picked up on the constricted pupils and inquired as
to whether Forrestal had been tested for drugs, but the possibility is never
considered by anyone. If Forrestal already
had an opiate like heroin in his system, sedating him with a strong
barbiturate like sodium amytal could have been dangerous, and might explain
Forrestal’s poor reaction to it. One might question the wisdom of putting
Forrestal on sodium amytal in any case, and it is doubtful that it would have
been done given the current level of medical knowledge. Like opiates, barbiturates are addictive, only more so. Taken to help you sleep, after a few days, it becomes impossible to sleep without them. Like the opiates, barbiturates produce tolerance so that you need to keep upping the dose to get the same effect, but the real hum-dinger is the withdrawal syndrome. If withdrawal from opiates is cold turkey, then withdrawal from barbiturates could be cold raven. Besides the craving, discomfort and inability to sleep, barbiturate withdrawal also causes major epileptic seizures. Nobody dies from opiate withdrawal, but it is a strong possibility with barbiturates and you should only think about it under the supervision of a doctor, preferably as a hospital in-patient. The possibility of overdose is amplified greatly if barbs are injected into a vein rather than taken orally. By and large, it is usually only those people who have had their switches set to automatic self-destruct mode who use barbiturates because the drug isn't at all pleasant or enjoyable. Barbs lack the euphoric content of opiates and the social lubricant properties associated with alcohol. They simply produce a dark, blank oblivion and as such will always remain popular with those people who hate themselves or their lives so much that their behaviour is governed by a compulsion to obliterate all possibility of thought and self-examination. Do yourself a favour. Just say no.
As we noted, it is sometimes difficult to sort
out what in Forrestal’s behavior was a result of his presumed condition and
what was caused by his medication. For example, if the description of
Corpsman Prise of Forrestal walking the floor restlessly on the night he died
is accurate, he might well have been simply exhibiting a case of barbiturate
withdrawal. In his resistance to taking sodium amytal as a sleep aid, the
patient seemed to exhibit a keener sense of what was good for him than did his
doctors.
Suicidal
Tendencies?
Now let us look at Forrestal’s “suicidal
tendencies,” as related by Dr. Raines. “In the course of psychotherapy he
talked a great deal about his suicide; he would tell me when he was feeling
hopeless and had to do away with himself.”
That statement, along with his two written
orders in the medical chart, first on April 7, “Still suicidal -
keep close watch” (underlining in original) and again on April 29, “Watch
in room @ all times. Suicidal. Don’t get careless,” represent the strongest
evidence that Forrestal was, indeed, inclined toward ending his own life and
eventually succeeded.
Still, there are anomalies and curiosities in
Raines’s testimony and treatment. He says the only person he shared
Forrestal’s suicide talk with was Dr. Smith. One would think that those with
the most need to know about the specifics of Forrestal’s putative “suicidal
tendencies” would be the people right on the front lines guarding against it,
Drs. Deen and Hightower. And much of what Dr. Raines says, especially his
assertion that he took the patient at his word as to what method of suicide he
might use, comes across as self-serving, and just plain strange. If he really
believed Forrestal was considering hanging himself because it is on his short
list of preferred methods, do those Venetian blind cords in the room make any
sense, or the relaxation of rules against cords and belts?
As an example of the self-serving quality of
Raines’s testimony, notice how he volunteers that the poetry transcription
looked like it was in Forrestal’s handwriting. Was there any particular
reason why he would know what Forrestal’s handwriting looked like, or that
this sample resembled it? When had he seen Forrestal’s handwriting? Does he
take special note of what people’s handwriting looks like? Did he place the
paper with the transcription on it beside a known sample of Forrestal’s
writing? Is the good doctor qualified at recognizing forgeries? As much as he talked about suicide, Dr. Raines does seem to lay to rest the widely circulated reports that Forrestal had made previous attempts at it. Even today, at an Arlington Cemetery web site, one can find the following passage, based upon no known reliable evidence whatsoever, the following passage: On May 22, after several prior attempts at suicide, and after copying a passage from Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax,” he jumped from the 16th floor hall window.
We know, of course, that it wasn’t a hall
window that he went out of, either. Now let us look at the observations of the other four doctors with respect to Forrestal’s suicidal tendencies. Doctor Nardini, who only became actively involved in the case when he took over during the absence of Drs. Raines and Smith on May 18, can be dispensed with rather quickly: Q. Were you aware of the possibility of suicide?
A. Yes, sir.
.....
Q. Did Mister Forrestal make any attempt at
suicide while you had charge of the patient?
A. No, sir, none that I was ever informed of,
became aware of, or suspected.
Q. Did Mister Forrestal indicate in any way
that he might do harm to himself? A. None whatever. Notice that Dr. Nardini volunteers nothing about Forrestal’s lurid musings on the subject. Dr. Raines has told us that he told no one but Dr. Smith about them, and among those excluded would appear to be the doctor in absolute charge of the patient in their absence. Now we turn to the next person to testify, Dr. Hightower.
Q. Were you fully aware of the various phases
of Mister Forrestal’s condition from shortly after he was admitted as a
patient to the hospital?
A. Yes, sir, Doctor Raines, Doctor Smith,
Doctor Deen and I had discussed at intervals various procedures and
therapeutic efforts that were being made during the course of the entire case.
Q. During the period of his stay in the
hospital did you feel that he was making some gradual improvement? A. Yes, sir, my feeling from the first was that he was pretty overly depressed, as evidenced by his lack of interest in his surroundings, interest in personal contact with me on the brief occasions that I saw him, whereas as the case progressed, particularly during the insulin period he seemed to become more alert, more interested in his surroundings, and particularly interested in what was going on about the floor itself and the hospital.
Q. What was your feeling in regard to the
possibility of suicide during the first few days of his stay in the hospital?
A. My feeling with regard to suicide during
the first few days of his stay in the hospital was that it was potentially
present, that being based on psychiatric experience with depressed patients.
I had no actual factual evidence of any sort which would lead me to be able to
say specifically that suicidal thoughts or ideas were present. However, I did
feel and consider it a possibility on the basis of general psychiatric
knowledge. Q. What was your feeling in regard to the possibility of suicide at approximately the time that Doctor Raines left Washington?
A. At that time I felt that Mister Forrestal
had made a definite improvement in the overall picture from the time of his
admission and that the possibility of suicide was much more remote than
earlier in the case. There were several observations made during the course
of the case which led me to feel this. About two weeks before Doctor Raines
left I went up to stand the watch one night and stopped by the room to speak
to Mister Forrestal, asked him how he was feeling. He said “About as usual.”
We chatted briefly about my medical education and where I lived and what not;
then later, when I came up to go to bed about twenty-two forty-five, he was
awake and I asked him how he was feeling. He said “About as usual” but he
felt his room was a little stuffy and in view of the fact that two of the
windows were stuck and couldn’t be opened I agreed that the room was a little
stuffy. He said that he thought possibly he would be able to sleep better if
he slept in the room with me, there being two beds in my bedroom and I said I
thought that would be a good idea, it might be more comfortable over there.
My feelings at this time were that the patient was making an effort to broaden
his horizons. I felt that he was lonely and felt the need of friendly contact
with other people and also felt at the time that the suicidal possibilities
had lessened sufficiently to make it safe for him to remain out of his room.
The danger of suicide had been discussed with Doctors Raines and Smith on
several occasions prior to this and we had been encouraging the patient to
broaden his activities even prior to this particular incident.
.......
Q. Did Mister Forrestal, in the times you
would be with him, express anything about international affairs?
A. No, sir.
Q. Do you think he was trying to get away from
such things? A. I didn’t have much feeling about whether he was or not. He never made any effort to talk along those lines when I was with him, no, sir. In fact, the basis of most of our conversations were relatively superficial, having to do with things of the moment; should he take his sleeping pills or not; was I going to sleep in the room next to him or not; how was the rose thorn in his finger getting along; or whether his constipation was being taken care of or not. Another one of my duties in the case was to write orders for his bowels and I had done that earlier in the course of the case.
So, although “The danger of suicide had been
discussed with Doctor Raines and Doctor Smith” by Doctor Hightower on several
occasions, he was still able to say that “[he] had no actual factual evidence
of any sort which would lead [him] to be able to say specifically that
suicidal thoughts or ideas were present,” but that, [he] did feel and consider
it a possibility on the basis of general psychiatric knowledge,” at least
during the early stages of the hospitalization. Once again, it is evident
that the specific intimations of suicide that Dr. Raines said Forrestal
communicated to him were not passed along to a doctor on the front line of
Forrestal’s care. Not only that, but it would appear that Dr. Raines’s
specific orders in the medical chart were not getting through, either. The
episode in which Forrestal was permitted to sleep in a room with completely
unprotected windows, at about two weeks before Dr. Raines left, would have
taken place about five days after, “Watch in room @ all times. Suicidal.
Don’t get careless,” with the Raines signature beside it can be found in the
chart. Next we have Dr. Deen, the other doctor on periodic watch on the 16th floor.
Q. Did the matter of suicide ever occur to
you?
A. It certainly occurred to me ever since the
man has been there. Q. How did you regard him from that standpoint for the first few days of his stay in the hospital?
A. Well, of course, on the first few days, it
was much longer than the first few days, on admission to the hospital he was
under almost continuous sedation and constant watch. After a few days they
were able to get screened windows on the room and corpsmen were instructed to
stay with Mister Forrestal at all times and if they needed anything from the
nurse or corpsman on the outside or from Doctor Hightower or me they went
through another corpsman, didn’t leave the room at any time. Following that
he was on sub-shock insulin therapy for a period of something like three
weeks, I believe, and the man was obviously depressed and any time a man is
depressed there is always a consideration of suicide to be kept in mind.
Q. How did you regard the progress of his
condition from the time of admission to the hospital until the time that
Doctor Raines left town? A. Well, I think it is best to put it this way. From discussions with Doctor Raines, Doctor Smith and Doctor Hightower and from the changes in the orders which permitted Mister Forrestal to have more freedom of movement in that he could go into our bedroom and he could be in the room alone without the corpsman I presumed, I felt that improvement was going along or those measures would not have been put into effect. So far as my personal dealing with Mister Forrestal on his original entry and at the time he was on insulin therapy it was always quite difficult to talk with Mister Forrestal, quite difficult because we had been instructed to try to stay away from things that were on therapy and for a man like Forrestal you couldn’t very well talk to him about the flowers and bees because he was not interested in them. I felt he was showing continually more interest in outside activities but, as I said, in the beginning the way I looked at it I felt sure things were going on in discussion with Doctor Raines probably I didn’t know about but which were indications that the man was improving considerably.
Dr. Deen’s impressions, as we see, are almost
the same as Dr. Hightower’s. Each perceived, without being very specific
about it, that Forrestal was depressed, but that he was getting better. They
knew from experience and training that depressed people sometimes commit
suicide, but it is clear that Dr. Raines, as he said, did not share with
either of them anything of substance about any actual suicidal tendencies in
this patient. Both say that they conferred with Dr. Raines, but virtually
nothing of what he told the board seems to have made it to these two
primary-care physicians. One must wonder why not.
One thing in all the doctors’ testimony to this
point suggests that Forrestal might, indeed, have some psychological problem,
drug-induced or not. There could not have been a man alive more interested in
the world around him and, specifically of the welfare of his country than
James V. Forrestal. His correspondence from 1948 alone requires five boxes
for storage at the Seeley G. Mudd library at Princeton University, and the 932
names of the list of his correspondents read like a who’s who of power, money,
and influence on public opinion. Winston Churchill, Bernard Baruch, Omar
Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Thomas E. Dewey, W. Averell Harriman, Henry J.
Heinz, Vincent Astor, Lammot DuPont, William J. Donovan, Edward R. Murrow,
Estes Kefauver, Eugene Meyer, Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
Drew Pearson, Henry R. Luce, Walter P. Reuther, Francis Cardinal Spellman,
Robert A. Taft, William S. Paley, and Frank Wisner, are just a few of the
names that appear. No one had a more imposing Rolodex. Yet he comes across
from the testimony of these doctors as someone who was difficult to talk to
and had little interest in his surroundings. We know that he was deeply
troubled about many things that were going on in the government of which he
was a part. His candor and forthrightness about his concerns were what got
him on the bad side of so many powerful and unscrupulous people in the first
place. Forrestal would have sounded more like himself if one of these
politically unsophisticated medical men had said that he sounded paranoid,
rather than that he was a difficult person to carry on a conversation with.
The Man, Not Just the Patient That brings us to Captain Stephen M. Smith, the last of Forrestal’s psychiatrists to testify and the one person with whom Dr. Raines said he shared Forrestal’s suicidal ruminations. It is noticeable from examining the nurse’s log that, although Dr. Raines might have spent more total hours with Forrestal, Dr. Smith seemed to have visited him more frequently. From the excerpts of his testimony that we will give here, the reader can judge who got to know the patient better and who gave a more candid assessment of his condition. (The patience of the reader is begged at this point. Dr. Smith is articulate, but he is also verbose, given to big words and long sentences.)
Q. Captain, will you please tell the board
what you know relative to the treatment of the late Mister Forrestal? A. Perhaps I should begin by saying that the treatment was directed by Captain George Raines who is the chief of the neuro-psychiatric service and my role was supportive to his therapeutic endeavors and consultive at any time when it was deemed necessary and advisable. I first met Mister Forrestal on the day of his admission to the hospital which, I believe, was April second and subsequently saw him almost daily until May eighteenth at which time I left on authorized leave and didn’t return until after his demise. Through Doctor Raines and through my daily conversation with the patient I acquired some degree of familiarity with the emotional state which was responsible for his hospitalization. I found him to be a very cooperative patient and at all times quite willing to accept opinions concerning his illness and an expressed willingness on his part to avail himself of all the benefits which might be derived from his hospitalization here and the psychotherapeutic therapy which might be instituted. In the nature of our handling of his psychotherapeutic therapy it was an arrangement between Doctor Raines and myself that he would control all the therapeutic measures although I can sincerely state that we compared opinions almost daily, particularly in regard to the reactions of the patient and their import. Inasmuch as it is considered good psychiatric practice to avoid confliction and confusion in treatment, especially as it pertains to the interpretation of psychodynamics, that this rests entirely in the hands of one individual. As a result of this arrangement my discussions with Mister Forrestal were on a less personal level than would accrue from therapeutic endeavors. However, these conversations had a degree of intimacy and resulted in the establishment of a rapport with Mister Forrestal that I always interpreted as being friendly and comfortable. We talked of many diverse matters that had only a casual relationship to his illness as he was a man who not only was mentally alert but continued to maintain an active interest in all current matters on a level compatible with his broad public service and wide experience. These conversations ran a gamut from a discussion of matters of purely local interest to various philosophies and ruminations that touched on the behavior patterns of all people under various circumstances of stress and his astuteness and acumen were such that his comments and discourses were pregnant with comprehensive significance. As indicated previously, the matter of discussion of the more intimate aspects of his personal problems was left for his interviews with Doctor Raines. This Mister Forrestal and I both understood; that this was the arrangement and for that reason our tendency was to stay on less disturbing subjects. My interviews with him usually would last from fifteen or twenty minutes to perhaps an hour. In evaluating the course of his illness as I observed it he apparently was showing a continuous improvement with moderate fluctuations which were not incompatible with the type of emotional disturbance which he showed. He was acutely aware of his depressed state of mind and at times (illegible) interpretation of his own reaction to his predicament and (illegible) which might have led up to it although he not infrequently mentioned impending disaster. They were always of vague and non-specific character and had to do with matters which had been of paramount interest to him, namely, the safety of the country. Many times he expressed uneasiness about the future possibilities and windered (sic) whether or not people were as alert to these potentialities as they should be. Each time he would reassure himself by such assertions as, “I really have no uneasiness about the future of the country, I am certain that that is assured. But the travail might be easier if people were perhaps more concerned about some of these things.” We talked frequently of his recovery and the possible change in his pattern of living which would be possible with more leisure and greater opportunity for diversification of interest and a release from the tremendous pressure which his duties had imposed on him over the previous eight or nine years. He himself offered the opinion that he should have sensed that his burden had become too heavy many months previously and should have done something to correct it. He regretted that he hadn’t done so. Incidentally, he, on several occasions in connection with this type of thinking had offered the opinion that all men highly placed in public life should be more concerned about their emotional health and even perhaps come to a better understanding of the benefits which would result from a more profound knowledge of the emotional concomitant of continuous tension and strain. Inasmuch as he was a man who suffered with a depression and an interpretation of his own predicament through depressive eyes the matter of his recovery or non-recovery was discussed, even including self-destruction. He, at all times, denied any preoccupation with such thoughts and even though his construction of the future possibilities as they affected him were nebulous he not only agreed but frequently volunteered that he was certain that he would be able to reach a level of adjustment which would bring him greater happiness, especially through more intimate contacts with his family from whom he had felt somewhat separated because of the pressure of work and also because of the opportunities for less hurried and constructive endeavors which his new freedom would permit (emphasis added). He was actively interested in sports and had participated in them to a considerable extent when he was younger, following the various sporting events, not deeply but enough to be fully informed about them. He was interested in history, especially, and enjoyed discussions that pertained to historical backgrounds of various situations from the time of Alexander the Great on up to the present and often wove a very interesting course into the fabric of his conversation pertaining to these historical and philosophical backgrounds and would draw comparisons and analogies with recent happenings. Dr. Smith goes on in this vein for another page or so, describing a patient who was “rather heavily sedated” in the first week but exhibited substantial improvement and was generally able to sleep without sedation after a few weeks. Several marathon sentences later Dr. Smith volunteers, “At no time did I ever hear him express any uncertainty that he would not recover nor did I ever hear him express any threat to destroy himself.”
To make a long story short, something of which
Dr. Smith is utterly incapable, the James Forrestal described here is the old
familiar conscientious, public-spirited, learned and capable man whose
tombstone bears the inscription, “In the great cause of good government.” One
can easily imagine that, true to their sometimes-misguided profession, it was
usually the psychiatrists who steered the conversation around to what was
wrong with James Forrestal. The patient, demonstrating mental health that was
in important ways superior to that of his custodians, wanted to talk about
what was wrong with the country. From what we can read in the surviving,
published portions of his diaries and from his well-known public positions,
Forrestal had demonstrated that he had a better grip on reality than almost
anyone in the country. And if Dr. Smith were the only psychiatrist whose
report we were able to read, we would have to conclude that Forrestal was not
the least bit suicidal.
Whether it was because he was not giving the
responses that were expected of him or because their eyes were glazing over,
the board members had very few questions for Dr. Smith. The last person who
might have vouched for Dr. Raines ended up vouching for hardly anything at all
that Dr. Raines had to say about Forrestal’s suicidal tendencies, and like the
contradiction between the photographs showing a bed without even sheets on it
and the description that Nurse Turner gave, the board members just let it
pass.
Another Look at Rogow Now that we’ve had a chance to hear from virtually all the key witnesses on the night of Forrestal’s death, it’s time to look again at what author Arnold Rogow had to say. As we noted in the first installment of “Who Killed James Forrestal?”, in the absence of a public official report, the previously-mentioned 1963 book of Arnold Rogow has been pushed into the breach as the definitive source document on Forrestal’s death. Let us look again at what he has to say about Forrestal’s last few minutes alive:
Late on the evening of May 21 Forrestal
informed 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:
Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar
Wander around thee yet,
And sailors gaze upon thy shore
Firm in the Ocean set.
Thy son is in a foreign clime
Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,
Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,
Worn by the waste of time-
Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save
In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....
Woe to the mother in her close of day,
Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,
When she shall hear
Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!
“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry-
No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale-*
When Forrestal had written “night” of the word ‘nightingale,” he ceased his copying, inserted the sheets into the back of the book, and placed the open book on his night table. He then 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 end around his neck, he removed the screen, and jumped or hung from the window. When the diet kitchen was inspected later, it was found that the windowsill and the cement work immediately outside were scratched, suggesting but not establishing that Forrestal had hung suspended for a brief time and had tried to climb back through the window. But no one will ever know with certainty what transpired in those final moments. (Pp. 17-18)
*This version of the poetry lines, with the
same skipped lines, 11-20 after “grave,” is repeated by Hoopes and Brinkley.
Maybe both books were following the lead of Walter Millis in The Forrestal
Diaries, who wrote it that way in 1951.
Now we can see why Rogow provides no reference for any
of this. It appears that he has made it up In his effort to persuade us
that Forrestal was moved by morbid lines from “The Chorus from Ajax” to stop
his copying suddenly and go kill himself in a less-than-sudden, peculiar
fashion, Rogow has told us a lot of things that are not supported by the
official record. If Forrestal actually transcribed those lines, it was before
Corpsman Harrison came on duty, because the room was dark the whole time he
was on the job. None of the Navy officials would even speculate about the
dressing-gown cord being tied to the radiator, though Dr. Raines strongly
suggests that Forrestal must have tried to hang himself from something. It’s
an open question as to whether the poem transcriber even made it to the 26th
line, the one with “nightingale” in it. A
single page is included with the exhibits
provided to me. It looks as though the page is torn at the bottom and the
photocopier might have cut off a little of the bottom as well, but it’s hard
to believe that it would have cut off 11 lines. Only the first 15 lines of
the poem are on the page.
Rogow’s very unspecific and un-referenced
assertion that Forrestal “made at least one suicide attempt” (p. 6) at Hobe
Sound also looks pretty shaky in light of the testimony of Captains Raines and
Smith before the Willcutts review board. Even more outrageously wrong was the
assertion of the very influential columnist and radio commentator, Drew
Pearson, that Forrestal had made four attempts to kill himself, three times
while at Hobe Sound and once at Bethesda Naval Hospital (Rogow, pp. 32-33).
Also called into serious question is the claim by the politically connected
Wall Street journalist Eliot Janeway to biographer Douglas Brinkley that
Ferdinand Eberstadt had told him privately that Forrestal had made one suicide
attempt at Hobe Sound.
The
Common Thread
Upon closer examination we find that there is a
thread that connects these people who are trying so hard to persuade us that
Forrestal’s death was indeed a suicide, and the connecting thread might well
run to those that I have previously identified as likely prime suspects in his
murder. The dust jacket to Rogow’s book says that he is the author of four
other books. It does not name them. Maybe that is because this biographer
who strongly suggests that Forrestal’s opposition to recognizing the state of
Israel was based upon Forrestal’s personal anti-Semitism had previously edited
the collection entitled The Jew in a Gentile World: An Anthology of
Writings about Jews by Non-Jews. His dangerously paranoid, ethnocentric
orientation is well summed up by this sentence from the preface: “Jew-baiters
and anti-Semites of one variety or the other–Greek, Roman, and Christian–have
largely dominated the Gentile world, and as a result that world has been one
in which the Jew has always had to move cautiously and, more often than not,
live dangerously.”
Later he wrote a chapter on anti-Semitism in
the International Encyclopedia of Social Science. His is the sort of thinking
that gave rise to the modern state of Israel, that is, that Jews can never be
safe living in majority Gentile populations, so they must have a state of
their own. As for Pearson, at the bottom of the article by John Henshaw entitled, “Israel’s Grand Design: Leaders Crave Area from Egypt to Iraq,” which appeared in The New American Mercury in the spring of 1968, we find the following: The late John Henshaw was chief legman for columnist Drew Pearson, who later broke with Pearson. At that time, Henshaw’s expenses were paid by the Anti-Defamation League, a lobby for Israel, which had a “special relationship” with Pearson. Thus Henshaw’s Middle East insights are unique.
Recall from the first installment of “Who
Killed James Forrestal” that the other powerful columnist and radio
commentator slandering Forrestal over his Israel opposition, Walter Winchell,
also had a very special relationship with the ADL and its domestic spying and
eavesdropping operation. Janeway’s Jewish connections are more tenuous. Though born Eliot Jacobstein of New York Jews of Lithuanian origin, he changed his last name in his teens and concealed his Jewishness from everyone around him, including his children. If he plumped for Israel, it would more likely have been on behalf of his employer, Time magazine, than out of a sense of ethnic or religious solidarity.
Occasionally with [Time publisher Henry] Luce
and others, not often, he raised a word or hand on that nation’s behalf, from
the point of view of a power broker toward an ally. But this was never
personal, and he never acknowledged even in a vague way Jewish religion,
culture, or heritage. — Michael Janeway, The Fall of the House of Roosevelt, Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ, 2004.
And if Janeway was quite consciously lying when
he relayed what the safely dead Eberstadt had supposedly said about that
Forrestal suicide attempt to Doug Brinkley, it, too, would have been from the
point of view of a power broker toward an ally. It would also have been
completely in character. Janeway regularly did flack work and wrote speeches
for New Deal Democrats while on the Luce payroll as a supposedly objective
reporter on these same Democrats who were running the country. He had a taste
for power and influence and a nose for seeking it out. In spite of having
been expelled from Cornell, probably for selling stolen library books and
having been such an active communist that he wrote for the Moscow Daily News
for a time in Russia, he had been able to use his connections to avoid service
in the military in World War II. All of this we learn from Janeway’s son in
the latter’s new and very revealing book, cited above.
In sum, the sources of the stories that
Forrestal had previously attempted suicide are of a highly questionable,
biased quality. They are as questionable as the stories, themselves, which
lack any details, whatsoever. Pearson’s stories, in particular, are
undoubtedly fabrications. The fact that someone felt the need to make up such
stories suggests very strongly, just by itself, that Forrestal did not commit
suicide. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that Pearson made up these stories
himself. What is more likely is that they originated with the people who were
responsible for Forrestal’s death. The report of the Willcutts Review Board reveals additional misinformation in Arnold Rogow’s frequently cited book. Consider the following Rogow passage:
In the spring of 1949 Forrestal also had
evidence that he was not persona non grata to all Jews and Jewish
organizations. Although he declined to be present, he was invited in February
to attend a celebration at one of Washington’s Reformed Jewish Temples. When
his resignation was announced in March, he received a letter commending him
for his past services and expressing regret from Myer Dorfman, National
Commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Many persons of Jewish extraction,
during his stay at Bethesda, wired or wrote him expressing their hopes for an
early recovery, and several added that his anti-Zionist position had by no
means concealed or confused his great service to the country as our first
Secretary of Defense. Forrestal, of course, never received these messages, and in any case it was then too late to relieve by ordinary means the guilts, fears, doubts, and anxieties that had precipitated his illness. However history may ultimately judge his opposition to the establishment of Israel, by 1949 it was clear that Forrestal was, in a sense, one of the casualties of the diplomatic warfare that had led to the creation of the Jewish state (pp. 194-195, emphasis added). Notice how, in a few lines, Forrestal is shown to have become such a basket case that he couldn’t even be allowed to read his mail, and the suggestion is made that he should have been wracked with guilt over the courageous, principled, and patriotic position he took–along with virtually all the Middle East experts in the United States government–against U.S. sponsorship of a new, ethnically exclusive, but essentially European country in the heart of historically Arab territory. But we see from the testimony of Captain Raines what Rogow would have us believe was a self-evident fact was not true: From the very first Mister Forrestal’s mail and other communications were handed to him unopened. He was allowed to see all of them on the theory no one can live in a vacuum and might just as well be exposed to whatever came along; that is the method of dealing with it; it would depend on how well he was or how sick he was. It was as simple as that. Actually he dealt quite well with almost everything. Rogow’s diagnosis of paranoia is not only undercut by the testimony of all the doctors at Bethesda, but also by a telling footnote on page 181 in his own book. First we have the passage to which the note applies: Finally, [Forrestal’s position on Palestine] encouraged suspicion in both gentile and Jewish circles that Forrestal personally was not merely anti-Zionist but anti-Semitic. Nor should it be overlooked that one consequence of these suspicions was that Forrestal, during his last months in office, harbored a conviction that he was under day-and-night surveillance by Zionist agents; and when he resigned as Secretary of Defense in March, 1949, he was convinced that his resignation was not unrelated to pressures brought to bear on the Administration by American Jewish organizations. Now here’s the footnote: While these beliefs reflect the fact that Forrestal was a very ill man in March, 1949, it is entirely possible that he was “shadowed” by Zionist agents in 1947 and 1948. A close associate of his at the time recalls that at the height of the Palestine controversy, his (the associate’s) official limousine was followed to and from his office by a blue sedan containing two men. When the police were notified and the sedan apprehended, it was discovered that the two men were photographers employed by a Zionist organization. They explained to the police that they had hoped to obtain photographs of the limousine’s occupant entering or leaving an Arab embassy in order to demonstrate that the official involved was in close contact with Arab representatives. So, in all likelihood, the conviction that Forrestal harbored that he was under constant surveillance was correct. And as we saw in part 1 of this essay, intimidation and blackmail were among the uses to which such surveillance was intended to be put. Naturally, Rogow takes the culprits’ explanation at face value, putting the best possible face on it. He also conceals from the reader the name of the shadowed Forrestal associate, preventing the inquiring reader from learning even more damning information from that source. He also fails to give us the name of the guilty Zionist organization.
Finally, with regard to Rogow’s misstatements,
there is one that we failed to recognize as such in part 1 of this essay. We
observed that, unlike Hoopes and Brinkley, he did mention that the Navy had
conducted an official investigation that had been kept secret, even though the
fact merited with him no more than a passing mention in a footnote. What he
said was that the results had not been made public. In fact, only
the very sketchy results were made public, and, as noted earlier, nowhere
among the short list of results was there a conclusion that Forrestal had
committed suicide.
Missing Witnesses
As noted previously, only Navy personnel were
called before the Willcutts Review Board as witnesses, and, even so, a couple
of important ones were overlooked. First, and obviously, there is Admiral
Morton Willcutts himself, although calling him would have been pointless if he
were to receive the same deferential treatment afforded to Admiral Stone. He
had eaten dinner with Forrestal on Friday before the fateful next night, and
according to published reports he had described the patient as in very good
shape and excellent spirits. As a medical man his opinion as to Forrestal’s
emotional condition would have been worth something. More importantly, he
could have answered questions about the larger picture had the board been
inclined to ask them. What role, if any, did the White House and non-medical
considerations play in Forrestal’s hospitalization and treatment? Upon what
legal authority was the private citizen Forrestal put up in the Bethesda Naval
Hospital in the first place? Who was paying for it?
Admiral Willcutts also showed up at the
hospital very early on that fateful, May 22 morning, and as the Commander of
the National Naval Medical Center, he was the officer in charge. Everything
that was done from the moment he arrived, and maybe even from the moment he
was notified of the death by telephone was his responsibility. He was the one
for the board to ask about the laundering of Forrestal’s room and the delay in
photographing it and about any determinations that might have been made about
fingerprints, the broken glass, and the cord around Forrestal’s neck.
Along with Admirals Willcutts and Stone, there
was a third important Admiral who arrived at the death scene shortly after
Forrestal’s plunge. That is Surgeon General of the Navy Clifford A. Swanson.
He was important not for what he might have observed that night, though, but
for what he might have learned from Forrestal early in the hospitalization.
From the nurses notes of 10:00 a.m., April 3,
the first full day Forrestal was at Bethesda, we find this: “Pt. Asked to see
Adm. Swanson; Dr. Smith notified. Pt. states “It is of the utmost importance
for the Navy.” Slightly agitated. Five minutes later we see that he was
given sodium amytal, but that he is “still asking to see Adm. Swanson.”
At 10:10 we have this notation: “Pt. seen by
Dr. Raines @ this time.
The next notation is at 10:40: “Pt. sleeping
very soundly.”
Admiral Swanson did arrive to see the patient
at 1700 hours that same day, however. It would be very interesting, indeed,
to know what they talked about. The nurse’s notes also record several
subsequent visits by Admiral Swanson, and his name appears among the Princeton
library list of the 932 people who corresponded with Forrestal in 1948. He
was apparently among the very few old associates who visited Forrestal while
he was at Bethesda, and his observations, if candid, might have been very
revealing. There are also a number of non-Navy people among the missing witnesses. First, there is Forrestal’s wife, Josephine. The nurse’s notes reveal that she was her husband’s most frequent visitor from outside. Although their marriage was apparently a troubled one, she would have known the man better than anyone and likely could have provided great insight into her husband’s psychological condition. We learn from Rogow’s book, as noted in Part 1, that Forrestal’s life insurance policy would not pay in cases of suicide and that through her lawyer she claimed that the death was accidental. Had she meekly accepted that her husband committed suicide, the press would certainly have trumpeted it, as they did with Vincent Foster’s widow. The fact that they didn’t suggests strongly that she no more believed that Forrestal committed suicide than did that even more important missing witness among his relatives, older brother Henry.
In Part 1 we heard, through the author Cornell
Simpson, Henry’s bitter denunciation of the government and the press and his
claim that when he visited his brother late in the latter’s stay at Bethesda
that he was as normal and healthy as he had ever been. We also hear that he
was planning to arrive that Sunday and take his brother away from the
hospital. Did he arrive in Washington that day? Are the claims in the
Simpson book true? The nurse’s notes confirm Henry’s one late visit to
Bethesda some days before his brother’s death, but, otherwise, he is not
mentioned. At one point in his testimony, recall, Dr. Raines says that he
thinks Forrestal would have needed only one more month at the hospital
to be completely cured, as though he knew nothing of the brother’s plans to
take him away forthwith.
Not everyone who visited Forrestal got noted in
the nurse’s notes. One such person, who two of the testifying doctors tell us
visited on the afternoon of Forrestal’s last day was his personal financial
manager, Paul Strieffler. So close was he to Forrestal that, along with his
former secretary, Strieffler was the only non-family member to be bequeathed
money in Forrestal’s will. The author, Rogow, tells us on page 46 that he
received $10,000, a substantial sum in 1949. Might not important information
have been gleaned from learning what Forrestal and Strieffler talked about
hours before Forrestal’s death? Was he making plans like a man who fully
expected to be around for quite a few more years? How normal and healthy did
Forrestal appear to this long-time associate, whom Forrestal had mentioned in
1933 Congressional testimony as advising him on some questionable investments
when he was president of the Wall Street investment banking firm of Dillon,
Read (Rogow, pp. 83-85).
Another person that the Willcutts Review Board
should have questioned is Dr. F. J. Broschart, the Montgomery County, Md.,
medical examiner. We learn from the Monday, May 23, newspapers that Dr.
Broschart declared the death a suicide on Sunday. This is not the only
politically charged case in which a government doctor has made a suicide
ruling. Enron executive, Clifford Baxter, and former National Security
executive, Gus Weiss, come to mind, but it cannot be stressed too strongly
that a doctor does not have either the training or the resources to determine,
alone, whether a death is the result of suicide, an accident, or of foul
play. He might be able to determine the medical cause of death with an
autopsy–although in this case Broschart was not even the autopsy doctor–but he
cannot tell us who caused the death. This is a police matter. The police are
supposed to treat all violent deaths as homicides until they have examined all
the circumstances surrounding the death sufficiently to rule out that
possibility. Dr. Broschart should have been summoned by the board and asked
on what basis he made his suicide determination. Why did he do it so
hastily? How could he possibly know that Forrestal was not thrown from the
window? Was he aware of the broken glass in Forrestal’s room? How could he
know for sure that Forrestal had not been rendered unconscious by one means or
another before he took his long plunge? Very recently, the name of another prime candidate for interviewing by the Willcutts board has come to light. The revelation was in a June 20, 2004, Washington Post article on the United Press Washington correspondent, Ruth Gmeiner. She was eulogized as the first woman reporter to cover the Supreme Court, among other accomplishments. Here are the closing lines of that article:
The night of the Gridiron Club dinner in 1949,
[UP] news editor [Julius] Frandsen was alerted to get out to Bethesda Naval
Hospital. He left an after-dinner party and picked up Gmeiner, his reporter,
on the way. While he and other journalists hollered for information outside
the hospital, Gmeiner sweet-talked her way into the 16th-floor room
of former secretary of defense James V. Forrestal and found, next to his bed,
a book of poetry open to Sophocles’ “Ajax,”(sic) which includes the lines:
When reason’s day Sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay
Better to die, and sleep The never-waking sleep, than linger on
And dare to live when the soul’s life is
gone. Her soon to be husband [the editor Frandsen] made that the first paragraph in Gmeiner’s story on Forrestal’s suicide.
If the story is true it solves the mystery of
who it was that discovered the book of poetry in Forrestal’s room. The
Willcutts review board, recall, failed to identify that person, and apparently
made no attempt to do so. I made a telephone call to the writer of the
article, Patricia Sullivan, who revealed that her source for this information
was Gmeiner’s family. To her knowledge, she said, the story that Gmeiner got
into Forrestal’s room and discovered the book had never before been
published. She said that she had looked up the UP story on Forrestal’s death
and the allegation was accurate, that is, that those poetry lines led off the
story, not that Gmeiner, herself, had found the book.
It would have been an extraordinarily
unorthodox way to begin a newspaper report, and Sullivan’s claim sent the
author to the library to check it out. The claim is interesting, as well,
because the lines quoted are toward the end of the poem and are not among the
part repeated by the mainstream authors on Forrestal, Millis, Rogow, and
Hoopes and Brinkley, because they were not included in the alleged Forrestal
transcription (Notice that there is no claim in the recent Post story that
Gmeiner also found the transcription.). The UP story revealing the death that the author found appears with a Washington, May 22, dateline in the morning San Francisco Chronicle. It starts like this: Former Defense Secretary James Forrestal committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor of Bethesda, Md. Naval Hospital early today. He had been reading classical Greek poems keyed to the theme of death.
Farther down in the article the reporter gives
us the lines that appear in the Post article, telling us that they appear
shortly after the section that Forrestal had transcribed, that is, the first
26 lines, ending after the “night” portion of “nightingale” had been written.
Interestingly, Gmeiner’s son, Jon Frandsen, a Washington
journalist whom I called on July 26, 2004, was unaware that there was any
transcript involved in the story. As the story had been related to him by his
parents, Gmeiner actually brought the book back downstairs and showed it to
her editor, the elder Frandsen, whom she would marry some years later. It was
he, they told their son, who first recognized the significance of the quoted
lines. Jon also volunteered to me what I had already discovered, that is,
that The Post’s Sullivan had stretched the truth a bit in saying that the
lines actually led off the story.
The Synthesis of News If Gmeiner was, indeed, the poetry book discoverer, she seems to have failed to get anything resembling a scoop on UP’s competitors with her intrepid action, a fact that surprised the younger Frandsen when I told him by telephone. Here’s how the Associated Press article that appeared in the May 23 Philadelphia Inquirer begins:
Former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal
committed suicide today, plunging from a high hospital window. In his room he left a book of Greek poetry, a page opened to a quotation saying “when reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die and sleep.”
You’d think that Gmeiner was writing for the AP
rather than for the UP, because this beginning accords even more closely to
what was reported in The Post article than does the UP article’s beginning.
Both, like the New York Times and The Washington Post and every other
journalist who covered the story, use the Sophocles poem to promote heavily
the suicide conclusion, not to mention the fact that they all say in a matter
of fact manner that it was suicide, not even using the hedging adjective,
“apparent,” that we saw in the Vincent Foster case.
Two slightly different story lines emerge from
careful inspection, however. The reports that were submitted earliest,
apparently, emphasize the book open to the page with the morbid poem. They
quote these later lines of the poem, the ones seen in the recent Post article,
leading the reader to conclude that Forrestal had surely been reading this
poem and had taken the “better to die” suggestion to heart. That’s what we
see in the Los Angeles Times AP story and in the Chicago Tribune story written
by their reporter, Robert Young (who also wrote, with no evidence presented:
“He was reported to have made at least two previous attempts to kill
himself.”). They make no mention of any transcription of part of the poem
having been discovered as well.
The stories apparently written later, but also
published in the May 23 morning newspapers, reveal that Forrestal had been
actually copying “The Chorus from Ajax,” stopping after “night” in the word
“nightingale.” At the same time, with the exception of The New York Times,
they continue to emphasize in the first part of their stories the later lines,
the ones that were not copied but seem to encourage suicide more strongly (and
also seems to have inspired the sardonic English poet, A. E. Housman, who was
also a great classical scholar, to write the poem, “If it chance your eye
offend you, pluck it out, lad, and be sound: ‘Twill hurt, but here are salves
to friend you, And many a balsam grows on ground. And if your hand or foot
offend you, Cut it off, lad, and be whole, But play the man, stand up and end
you, When your sickness is your soul.”). By the time the book writers,
Millis, Rogow, and Hoopes and Brinkley got around to it, all mention of the
later lines had been dropped. The addition to the story seems to have confused the reporter and the editors at The Washington Post. Here is what they have to say a few paragraphs from the start on the front page: From a book of verse found lying open on a radiator beside his bed he had copied several verses of Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax.” In firm and legible handwriting these lines stood out: “When Reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die, and sleep the never-ending sleep than linger on, and dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.”
Later in the article, on the continuation page,
they reprint the entire poem with the transcribed part, they say, in italics.
The italics duly end with the first syllable of “nightingale,” well before the
lines appear that they had told us earlier stood out “in firm and legible
handwriting.”
They would have the reader believe that they
were sitting and looking at the transcription as they wrote, so detailed was
their description, but clearly they weren’t or they could never have made such
a blunder. This raises anew the question of where the story of the discovery of the transcription–and the open poetry book as well–originated. None of the newspapers, as The Times does with respect to the details of the actions of Forrestal and his attendants on that fateful night, attribute it to anyone with the Navy or even explicitly to an anonymous source. They just somehow know that it was “found” (It is highly unlikely that it was, as The Post says, lying open on a radiator “beside the bed.” As we see from the photograph, the nearest radiator is more than an arm’s length from the bed and it is rather narrow and rounded at the top. Rogow has it more plausibly on the night stand, at the other side of the bed.).
The mystery of the poetry transcription deepens
when we consider the actual page that was included with the medical records in
the Willcutts Report, the one that Dr. Raines said looked like it was written
in Forrestal’s handwriting. As noted previously, only the first 15 lines of
the poem are there.
If what I have been provided with my FOIA
request is all there is, and all there ever was, then the part about Forrestal
ending his transcription in the middle of the word “nightingale,” 11 lines
later, was made up out of whole cloth by someone. Upon making this discovery,
I wrote the Judge Advocate General’s Office of the Navy on June 8, 2004,
asking them if what I was sent is all there is to the transcription, noting
that the newspapers talked of 26 lines. If I never get a response, which as
time passes is beginning to look most likely, I must assume that what I have
is the full transcription and all the newspaper reports were wrong (hardly an
unprecedented development).
Nightingale
If, in fact, the “nightingale” line was never
in the transcription that was “found” by someone, and maybe even if it was,
what with the growing emphasis placed upon it, the line might have some
significance that has been overlooked up to this point. Hoopes and Brinkley,
citing John Loftus as their source for the speculation, make much of the fact
that “Nightingale” was the name of a secret group of Ukrainian refugees who
had been recruited by the CIA in the post-war period to conduct a covert war
behind the Iron Curtain, and that as a member of the National Security
Council, Forrestal had been among those authorizing the action. The problem
with that, from the perspective of Loftus, who also co-authored The Secret
War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People,
was that many of the members of the Nightingale force had been collaborators
with the Nazis during World War II and, in that capacity, were guilty of a
number of atrocities against the Jews in the Ukraine. Hoopes and Brinkley
don’t come right out and say it, but there reason for bringing it up seems to
be to suggest that Forrestal might have been overcome by a sudden rush of
guilt upon reaching that word in his writing, prompting him to dash out and
take the poet Housman’s admonition, derived from Sophocles, quite literally.
Now we have seen from the testimony of
Forrestal’s guard that well more than an hour had passed since Forrestal had
done any reading or writing, so it couldn’t have happened that way, and it is
highly doubtful that the fiercely anti-Communist Forrestal ever felt the
slightest pang of guilt over America’s use of Ukrainian refugees, whatever
their personal history, to undermine the Soviet Union.
But there is extremely bad blood between many Christian
nationalists in the Ukraine and organized Jewry, as one can easily learn from
a visit to the former’s web site at
http://www.ukar.org. “Nightingale” may not have
been a particularly meaningful word to Forrestal, but it would have been
heavily freighted with meaning to Forrestal’s enemies in the Jewish
community. Loftus, in his Secret War book, seems to be very closely in
touch with that aggrieved group and cites many covert sources among them for
the information in his book. Maybe with the “nightingale” emphasis, they mean
to send the message that Forrestal’s destruction and death represents the
settling of an old score for them. Perhaps Arnold Rogow knew more than he
told when he characterized Forrestal as a casualty of the creation of the
state of Israel.
The Diary’s Revelations In part one, we saw that Forrestal had become something of a lightning rod for the hostile emotions of the partisans for Israel. For his part, he was absolutely sure that the consequences of our sponsorship of this alien entity in the midst of the Arab world would ultimately be disastrous for us. Two February 3, 1948, meetings recorded in the version of his diary edited by Walter Millis and published in 1951 capture well his principled position and the risk he was running in propounding it:
Visit today from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.,
who came in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish State in Palestine, that we
should support the United Nations “decision,” and in general a broad,
across-the-board statement of the Zionist position. I pointed out that the
United Nations had as yet taken no “decision,” that it was only a
recommendation of the General Assembly, that any implementation of this
“decision” by the United States would probably result in the need for a
partial mobilization, and that I thought the methods that had been used by
people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and
duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto
scandal. He professed ignorance on this latter point and returned to his
general exposition of the case of the Zionists. He made no threats but made it very clear that the zealous in this cause had the conviction of trying to upset the government policy on Palestine. I replied that I had no power to make policy but that I would be derelict in my duty if I did not point out what I thought would be the consequences of any particular policy which would endanger the security of this country. I said that I was merely directing my efforts to lifting the question out of politics, that is, to have the two parties agree they would not compete for votes on this issue. He said this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans gain by such an agreement. I said I was forced to repeat to him what I had said to Senator McGrath in response to the latter’s observation that our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California–that I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States. The second meeting that day was with very nearly the most powerful man in America who was not in the government, the Jewish financier, elder statesman, and adviser to presidents:
Had lunch with B[ernard] M. Baruch. After
lunch, raised the same question with him. He took the line of advising me not
to be active in this particular matter and that I was already identified, to a
degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations
policy on Palestine. He said he himself did not approve of the Zionists’
actions, but in the next breath said that the Democratic Party could only lose
by trying to get our government’s policy reversed, and said that it was a most
inequitable thing to let the British arm the Arabs and for us not to furnish
similar equipment to the Jews.
Baruch clearly did not know his man when he
attempted to influence him by appealing to Forrestal’s own self-interest. He
might have known more than he was telling, though, when he hinted at the
danger that Forrestal faced for the courageous position he had taken. In part one I speculated that among the important things that might have been censored out of the Walter Millis version of the Forrestal Diaries was a detailed revelation of the dirty tactics, alluded to in the Loftus-Aarons book, that the Zionists had used to get U.S. and U.N. support for creation of the state of Israel. A hint that that is the case is found on pp. 507-508 of Millis: At the National Security Council meeting that day (October 21, 1948), Forrestal spoke with apparent asperity of another disconnection in our policy-making. According to an assistant’s note, “Mr. Forrestal referred to the State Department request for four to six thousand troops to be used as guard forces in Jerusalem in implementation of the Bernadotte Plan for Palestine. This unexpected request was an example of how the Palestine situation had drifted without any clear consequent formulation of United States policy by the NSC. Mr. Forrestal said that actually our Palestine policy had been made for ‘squalid political purposes.’... He hoped that some day he would be able to make his position on this issue clear.”
One must wonder how much elaboration has been
cut after the word “purposes.” Might he have delved into the squalid methods
as well, or was that elsewhere in his diaries, or was he leaving that to that
future day when he hoped he would be able to shed more light on the subject.
As of the end of October 1948, he hardly
sounded like a man who had given up on having an effect on the direction of
his country, whether he was in the government or out of it. Instead, he
sounds exactly like the man with the unfinished agenda that brother Henry
described from his last visit with him in the hospital. Insofar as he was
looking back instead of into the future, it was not to lament any mistakes
that he had might have made but to deplore the errors of the national
leadership, manipulated, as it had been, to pursue policies that were contrary
to the interests of the American people. He comes across, in short, not as a
prime candidate for suicide, but for assassination.
Truman Blackmailed?
In part one I also noted that President Harry
Truman would have been too compromised by his affiliation with the Kansas City
political machine of Tom Pendergast to have stood in the way of any foul play
directed toward Forrestal. If Truman could have been blackmailed to look the
other way while Forrestal was murdered, though, he could just as easily have
been blackmailed to pursue policies that put the interests of Israel ahead of
those of the United States. If Zionist leader David Ben Gurion would have
employed blackmail against Nelson Rockefeller to get him to use his influence
on Latin American leaders for United Nations votes, as the connected,
pro-Zionist authors, John Loftus and Mark Aarons claim, why wouldn’t they have
used it for the much bigger prize of the support of the United States? It
would have been relatively easy with the great influence over the press that
they wielded. That, rather than his pursuit of the Jewish vote for the
Democrats, would explain why Truman overruled his entire foreign policy
establishment to recognize the new state of Israel. Two recent books on the Mafia give us an appreciation of how easy it would have been to blackmail Truman over some of the things Truman would have had to have done as one owing his livelihood and career to Pendergast. From Thomas Reppetto’s American Mafia: a History of Its Rise to Power (2004), we have this:
Missouri boss Tom Pendergast ran up impressive
city and state totals for the party while his administration did business with
Charlie Corallo, boss of the Kansas City underworld. Gambling ran wide open,
nude waitresses served lunch in the 12th Street dives, and drug and
prostitution rings flourished. As [U.S. Treasury investigator] Elmer Irey
noted, “You could buy all the morphine or heroin you could lift in Kansas
City; and the man who wanted to keep his job as a police captain...had better
keep his prostitute file correct and up-to-the-minute so Tom’s machine would
be certain that no girl practiced her ancient art without paying full tribute. Pendergast’s machine made the career of Harry Truman. During World War I, farmboy Truman had commanded a field artillery battery in France that was full of tough kids from Kansas City who hit it off with their captain. After the war Truman opened a haberdashery shop in Kansas City. When it went bankrupt, his friends persuaded the machine to elect him county judge, an administrative post equivalent to county supervisor in other jurisdictions. Though personally honest, Truman had to hire some patronage employees whom he later described as “no account sons of bitches.” (pp. 194-195).
It’s hard to see what’s “personally honest”
about knowingly putting likely criminals in responsible positions in the
government–and who knows what else–at the behest of a mob boss.
This latter term for Pendergast is used
advisedly. On page 41 of his 2001 book, The Ouifit, The Role of Chicago’s
Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America, Gus Russo describes the first
national meeting of the country’s major crime lords that took place at the
Hotel President in Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 13-16, 1929. Present were
Albert Anastasia, Dutch Schultz, Louis Lepke, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano,
Longy Zwillner, Moe Dalitz, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and Al Capone.
“Of particular note was the presence of the
notorious Kansas City machine politician Tom Pendergast, the sponsor of Harry
Truman, future president of the United States.”
Secret Testimonials
Obviously, after all the witnesses had been
heard and the exhibits collected, someone in authority realized that the
Willcutts review board had not made anything like a persuasive case that
Forrestal had killed himself or that the Navy had acted properly either in the
care and protection of Forrestal or in the investigation of his death.
Something more had to be done. What that something turned out to be was the solicitation of endorsements from the prominent psychiatric community. The voice of authority had to be substituted for what anyone with adequate critical faculties could see for himself. The two short letters supporting Dr. Raines by Dr. William Menninger, President of the American Psychiatric Association and Professor of Psychiatry, Raymond W. Waggoner, M.D., of the University of Michigan, sent from Montreal on May 25 where they continued to attend the annual ASA convention, which were included among the exhibits, were apparently deemed to be insufficient. So the first thing one encounters upon opening the Willcutts file are letters of praise for the clearly inadequate work of the review board from three more psychiatrists. The first one is dated September 19, 1949, and it is from the superintendent of the federal mental hospital in Washington, DC, Dr. Winfred Overholser. After a recitation of credentials, the letter states:
I have read carefully the report of the very
thorough inquiry conducted by a Board of Investigation convened at the United
States Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, on May 23, 1949 to investigate and
report upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal at
that hospital on May 22, 1949. From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression. It is my further opinion that the care and treatment given to Mr. Forrestal during his stay at the Naval Hospital were entirely in accord with modern psychiatric principles, and that his death was not due to the negligence, fault, intent, or inefficiency of any of the physicians, nurses, or ward personnel concerned in his care. The second endorsement is addressed to Rear Admiral G. L. Russell, Judge Advocate General of the Navy (the same office that furnished the Willcutts Review Board report to me) and is dated September 13, 1949. It is from Dr. John C. Whitehorn, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland. It begins:
The proceedings and findings of the board of
investigation in the case of the late Mister James V. Forrestal, with
accompanying exhibits, were delivered to me by Lt. Cmdr. Kelly this morning. In or telephone conversation yesterday you asked me to study this material and to express my professional opinion on two essential points of psychiatric principle and practice involved. The two points boil down to whether it is a good idea to ease up on the restrictions on a psychiatric patient like Forrestal in due time and whether that time had arrived in Forrestal’s case. Dr. Whitehorn’s concluding paragraph was surely everything they could have wanted from him: There are risks, therefore, of one kind or another, in the making of every such decision. In the case of so distinguished a person as Mister Forrestal, there would have been much incentive to follow the more conservative, restrictive regime. Dr. Raines’ decisions displayed courage in the application of psychiatric principles to provide the best chances for good recovery. For this he should be commended.
So, after a quick once-over of the
investigation, Dr. Whitehorn concludes that his fellow psychiatrist was not
negligent, he was courageous.
The third endorsement comes from the Chairman of the Department of the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, Edward A. Strecker, who also happens to be a professor of psychiatry there. He claims as well to have studied the proceedings of the investigation and he endorses it, but his endorsement is couched quite conservatively. He states only that his “considered opinion is in complete accord” with “The Findings of Facts,” the review board’s conclusions, the ones that were finally released on October 11 and buried away in the back pages of the nation’s newspapers. Then, to make sure that there is no misunderstanding, he summarizes them to conclude his letter:
(1) The identification of the body of Mr. James
V. Forrestal;
(2) The approximate date of the death of Mr.
Forrestal and the medical cause of death;
(3) The review of the behavior of the deceased
during his residence in the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the diagnosis of the
mental condition as “mental depression;” (4) The review of the treatment and precautions in the treatment of Mr. Forrestal, and an opinion that “they were within the area of accepted psychiatric practice and commensurate with the evident status of the patient at all times”; (5) That in no manner was the death of Mr. Forrestal due to “intent, fault, negligence or inefficiency of any person or persons in the Naval Service or connected therewith”. This belated effort to lend much needed credibility to the review board’s work by soliciting endorsements by prominent psychiatrists is not without its comic aspects. Anyone responding that either the care and treatment of Forrestal or the investigation of his death was faulty could have been assured that his writings would never see the light of day, and it could certainly could not have been good for that person’s career. As it turned out, though, the testimonials did not see the light of day for another 55 years. They became, in effect, secret testimonials.
The Fruits of Secrecy
The great American patriot, James Forrestal, was as
badly betrayed in death as he had been in the closing weeks of his life.
Those powerful friends and associates who had failed to visit him when he was
in the hospital held their tongues while the report of the investigation of
his death continued to be kept secret. No hue and cry was raised. Since no
one with any real influence was clamoring for the release of their review
board’s report, the Navy obviously felt that the safest thing to do was just
to sit on it. In the meantime, in the absence of any revelation of the actual
facts surrounding his death, the field was left open to Forrestal’s opponents,
who dominate the country’s opinion-molding business. The last man who stood in
the way of the subordination of America’s foreign policy to the interests of a
foreign country had been silenced, and his reputation all but ruined. The
price that America has paid for the cravenness of its leaders in this matter
has been very high, and if present trends continue, the price is likely to go
much higher (See Alfred M. Lilienthal’s
What Price Israel?).
David Martin, September 19, 2004
Appendix
1 On December 12, 2003, I received the following e-mail from J. Bruce Campbell, commenting on the first installment of “Who Killed James Forrestal?”:
I have since confirmed that Western Islands, the
publisher of the lone book suggesting that Forrestal did not commit suicide,
Cornell Simpson’s 1966 The Death of James Forrestal, is the house organ
of the fringe right-wing John Birch Society. That would explain why it was
completely ignored by the mainstream press. See
part
one for my assessment of Simpson’s book. In
subsequent e-mails
Campbell related stories of his experiences as a
high-ranking Birch Society member, lending credibility to his observations
about that organization.
Appendix 2 Beginning in early August, 2004, I sent the following e-mail message to a number of organizations: To whom it may concern:
Through the Freedom of Information Act, I have
obtained the report of the review board convened on May 23, 1949, by Admiral
Morton Willcutts, Commander of the National Naval Medical Center, to
investigate the death of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. The
report had been secret for some 55 years. Exhibits accompany it, and there are
no redactions in the text. The report reveals a number of glaring inaccuracies
in the accounts of Forrestal's death by biographers Arnold Rogow and Townsend
Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. It also reveals that there was broken glass on
Forrestal's bed and on the carpet at the foot of his bed and that his room had
been well "laundered" before the crime scene photographs were taken several
hours after his fatal fall.
I have had all the materials, including
photographs and my transmission letter from the Navy's Judge Advocate
General's office, put on a compact disc, which I would like to mail to you. If
you are interested in receiving these materials and would give them due
publicity, I would appreciate your letting me know.
Sincerely, David Martin Those organizations were as follows:
The Harry S. Truman Library
The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton,
N.J., which houses the Forrestal papers.
The Library of Congress
The John Birch Society
The Eisenhower Center at the University of New
Orleans, which is headed by historian, Douglas Brinkley
The Ludwig von Mises Center
The Cato Institute
The Howland Library in Beacon, New York, James
Forrestal’s hometown. The representative of the Mudd Library, immediately recognizing the document’s historical significance, responded enthusiastically and was sent a copy of the long-suppressed report. Even though no one there responded to the e-mail, the Library of Congress does now have a copy of the Willcutts Report because on August 19, 2004, I personally presented the CD to the head of the U.S. Acquisitions Section of the Anglo-American Division of the library. My e-mail had clearly never reached the people at that level. Like the representative of the Mudd Library at Princeton, he and his assistant easily understood how important the document was, and they were quite pleased to get it.
Larry Greenley, Director of Research for the John
Birch Society responded positively on August 25, apologizing that my original
e-mail had become buried in the volume of correspondence that they get. He
concluded, however, “I can’t promise that we’ll publicize the Forrestal
materials, or if we do, how much; that is up to the editorial staff and others.”
I wonder who the others might be. On Wednesday, September 8, 2004, I attended a lecture in Washington, DC, by David Eisenhower on the presidential library system. My purpose was to publicize my Forrestal work with a question for Dr. Eisenhower relating my experiences, both good and bad, with the Truman Library. As it turned out, the head of the Truman Library was present, and I personally presented him with a copy of the CD. I felt like I was serving a summons. I also gave one to Dr. Eisenhower, the well-known grandson of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In a personal discussion afterward he volunteered that his grandfather was “tasked [by Truman] to push Forrestal out.” His tone of voice hardly matched his words, but then, realizing his faux pas, he clarified that he meant “out of office,” not “out the window.” In my initial shock and then my amusement I failed to ask for further clarification of why the retired General Eisenhower might have been chosen for such a job and how he would have been expected to accomplish it. I know of nothing on the official record or in the historical literature connecting Eisenhower to Forrestal’s dismissal as Defense Secretary. Who Killed James Forrestal?
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