by David Martin
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 would have been for the same reasons. 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 Michael Janeway in his very revealing book.
In sum, the sources of the stories that Forrestal had previously at-tempted suicide are of a highly questionable, biased quality. They are as questionable as the stories, themselves, which lack any details, what-soever. 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. And the blame for the long-lived undefined and unsupported charge that Forrestal was an “anti-Semite” is not very far removed from these allegations of Forrestal suicide attempts.
The Diary’s Revelations
In Chapter 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.102
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.103
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 Chapter One we 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 in 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.”104
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.
__________
86 Loftus and Aarons, p. 213.
87 They don’t even give us this passage from Forrestal’s diaries: “22 December 1945: Played golf today with Joe Kennedy [Joseph P. Kennedy, who was Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Great Britain in the years immediately before the war]. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on....Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war.” Millis, pp. 121-122.
88 Ibid., p. 157.
89 Gabler, p. 385.
90 Rogow, pp. 191-192. It should be noted that Zacharias, the Navy Captain mentioned here, was the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence through whom Forrestal operated in his attempt to bring about an earlier end to the Pacific War through unauthorized peace feelers to the Japanese. See Zacharias, “How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender,” Look magazine, June 6, 1950, available online at http://ussslcca25.com/zach12.htm.
91 On August 20, 2007, we were able to interview John Spalding, Forrestal’s Navy driver who was 87 years old at the time. Spalding told us that when Forrestal visited New York City he often called upon a prominent rabbi, whose name Spalding could not recall. The interview is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU5MDsgvfzg&t=1335s. Spalding also informed us that upon the news of Forrestal’s d
eath, he was ordered not to speak to anyone about his service with Forrestal and was given his choice of assignments outside the country to which he would be immediately reassigned. He chose the base in Guantánamo, Cuba. This development fits with what Simpson reports on page 42 of The Death of James Forrestal, that is, that the nurse in charge of the 16th floor that night was immediately transferred to Guam, far out of the reach of most U.S. reporters.
92 Quoted by Alfred M. Lilienthal in The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace?, p. 424. Lilienthal’s reference, in turn, is James G. McDonald, My Mission to Israel, Simon and Schuster, 1951, p. 17.
93 Dorwart, p. 157.
94 Hoopes and Brinkley, pp. 390-391.
95 Harry Truman’s offending passage, newly discovered at the time by a librarian at the Truman Library was, “[The Jews] I find are very very selfish. They care not how many Latvians, Finns, Poles, Estonians and Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DPs [displaced persons] as long as Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler or Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment for the underdog." Truman had also added, "the Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgement on world affairs". See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/truman-diary-reveals-anti-semitism-and-offer-to-step-down-95825.html.
96 The authors of the book with that and many other reckless charges against Forrestal seemed to have gotten by with it. As of this writing, The Secret War against the Jews has 95 reviews on Amazon.com with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
97 http://www.sobran.com/establishment.shtml. Sobran’s temerity in taking on Jewish power in the country earned him obituaries of unseemly viciousness in The Washington Post and The New York Times when he died in 2010. See David Martin, “A Tale of Two Obituaries,” http://dcdave.com/article5/140820.htm and “Death of a Giant,” http://www.dcdave.com/poet15/101003b.htm.
98 Jeff Gates, Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, State Street Publications, pp. 131-132. His reference on the charges against the Anglican Church is Helen Nugent, “Chief Rabbi Flays Church over Vote on Israel Assets,” Times (London), February 17, 2006.
99 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1951, p. 89. Hoffer’s quote in the first paragraph is from Pensées, by 17th century Christian mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. His entire book makes useful reading for a better understanding of Zionist political fanaticism.
100 https://theamericanmercury.org/2011/01/israels-grand-design/.
101 Michael Janeway, The Fall of the House of Roosevelt, Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 124. The younger Janeway also parrots the Forrestal suicide line, telling us on page 59 that Forrestal’s friend, the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, felt some guilt when Forrestal “jumped out of a sixteenth story window of Bethesda Naval Hospital,” because he had just been planning to visit him, implying that he might have eased his troubled mind in some way.
102 Millis, pp. 362-363.
103 Ibid., p. 364.
104 Ibid., pp. 507-508.
CHAPTER 3
Who Was Cornell Simpson?
The Double Game
Here’s how our operatives have their way,
And the populace dupe and confuse:
All the contestants are in their pay,
But most are competing to lose.
In 2003, the year after we posted our first long essay on the death of James Forrestal on the Internet, we received several emails from J. Bruce Campbell, the man widely credited for having founded the militia movement in the United States. He had once been a high-ranking member of the conservative, fiercely anti-Communist John Birch Society, he informed us. He also told us flatly, confirming our initial suspicions, that “Cornell Simpson” was a nom de plume, although he did not say how he knew that. It was also from him that we learned that the publisher of Simpson’s The Death of James Forrestal, Western Islands Press, was a Birch Society company.
In 2006 we had the opportunity to give a presentation about our Forrestal findings to a small audience at the National Press Club in Washing-ton, DC, called the Sarah McClendon Study Group, created by the late longtime head of her own independent news organization and member of the White House press corps, McClendon. After the talk, an older member of the audience who seemed to have a great familiarity with the John Birch Society told me with a great air of authority that the man using the pseudonym, “Cornell Simpson,” was actually Medford Evans, the father of the notable conservative journalist and author, M. Stanton Evans. Shortly after that we finished the fourth part of our series of essays bearing the same title as this book and we took the occasion to announce at the end with a footnote what we had been told by our informant at the press club, that is, that “Cornell Simpson” was, in reality, the late Medford Evans.
That is how things stood in my mind and for anyone reading that essay for a little more than five years, when I received an email from Mark LaRochelle, M. Stanton Evans’ research assistant, informing me that I was wrong. As it turned out, the efforts that I made to confirm his charges tended to confirm some of the other suspicions I had about The Death of James Forrestal besides the fact that it had an anonymous author.
In his email, he said that it was he who had made the discovery of our assertion that Medford Evans was “Cornell Simpson” and that he had brought it to the attention of the younger Evans, Medford’s son, who was quite old by that time, and Evans had immediately expressed surprise. He said that he had never even heard of the book and requested that LaRochelle get a copy for him to read. After reading it, he offered four reasons why it could not have been the work of his father:
1. At one point, the writer says “data is,” when Medford, like his son, a Yale English major, would always have rendered it with the correct plural verb, “data are.”
2. Cornell Simpson has the employment of Ben Mandel wrong, a man whom both Evanses knew well. Simpson has him working for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, when, in fact, he worked for the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
3. At the time the book came out, 1966, the younger Evans was already a practicing journalist and was in frequent contact with his father and would surely have known about any project as important as this.
4. Medford Evans never used anything but his own name for any of his published work.
We had surely erred in proclaiming publicly that the elder Evans was the actual author of the book in question based upon the word of only one person. The John Birch Society has a web site, so we lodged a query with them—which we should have done in the first place—asking them what they could tell us about “Cornell Simpson’s” identity. On April 25, 2011, an email arrived from Bonnie M. Gillis of the John Birch Society research department. Citing an April 1967 review article in the Birch Society magazine, American Opinion, she confirmed our original suspicion that “Cornell Simpson” was a pen name and that everything about the man had been kept secret for the man’s protection, in support of which she provided this quote from the review’s text:
Cornell Simpson for reasons best known to himself, disappeared. I could not blame him too much. He knew too much—as you will see for yourself—and the wrong people knew him. The only reason I can be so frank now is that I honestly haven't the slightest idea where he is today, or whether he is alive. It would be impossible to imagine a more devastating—or convincing—exposé than The Death of James Forrestal.
The writer of the review was none other than Medford Evans. So my informant had not been far wrong. The “Simpson” book and its subject were of such interest to the father of M. Stanton Evans that he wrote a glowing review of it. To the four pieces of evidence that the younger Evans supplied me we can now add one more that might be the clincher, that is, that
Medford Evans said that he wasn’t “Cornell Simpson,” but that he knew who “Simpson” was.
I say that it “might be the clincher” because there is always the possibility that Medford Evans was not telling the truth. Medford, like his son, was a Yale man, and Yale is known to be a primary supplier of talent to the CIA, whose very business is lying. While Ms. Gillis had provided me with the strongest evidence yet that Medford Evans was not “Cornell Simpson,” she had also undermined one of the younger Evans’ reasons why he wasn’t, that is, that M. Stanton knew all about Medford’s writing projects in 1966.
Earlier in his email Mr. LaRochelle told us that the younger Evans had never even heard of this book, described by his father as “devastating” and “convincing” and about a topic so important and sensitive that the author, though protecting himself with a pen name, had still found it prudent to go into permanent hiding. The book is also right down the younger Evans’ research alley (more on that later). I suppose that it’s possible that the father never mentioned the book or its subject to his son, but it does strain credibility quite a bit.
Maybe one can find clues in the book review as to authorship. American Opinion is no longer published, and when it was, not many libraries carried it. The Birch Society will provide an electronic copy of the 8-page article for $20 or will mail it to you for $1 a page plus $4.95 for shipping and handling. I passed on that and got my copy at the Library of Congress. Here’s how it starts: