The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Bryant also notes, quoting from Mullins’s Murder by Injection, that the Rockefellers were the primary financiers of the John Birch Society, having purchased Robert Welch’s candy company for a good deal more than the market price.

  Whatever we might say about the Birch Society goes for Medford Evans because of his affiliation with them. But what can we say about his son, M. Stanton? Certainly, his whiffing on James Forrestal and David Niles in his McCarthy book is not a good sign. Still, he had the excuse that he knew nothing about the Cornell Simpson book, although he certainly knew of McCarthy’s own writings about his personal debt to Forrestal concerning information on Communist infiltration of the government.

  M. Stanton Evans died in 2015 at the age of 80. His last major work was Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, written with Herbert Romerstein, which we reviewed at http://www.dcdave.com/article5/130201.htm. Long before he died we had made sure that he knew all about the suspicious circumstances surrounding James Forrestal’s death, but to our knowledge, this great anti-Communist Evans wrote nothing at all about the likely assassination of the great and important anti-Communist Forrestal.

  At the close of the previous chapter we noted that the fabrication of a number of press stories that Forrestal had made several suicide attempts before his fatal plunge from that window at Bethesda Naval Hospital was a strong indicator, just in itself, that the man was murdered. Would not the publication of an entire book, purposely confined to a very small audience that exposes the crime but directs readers away from the likely perpetrators, be another very strong indicator that Forrestal was murdered?

  As for the John Birch Society as it exists today in the United States, we do not profess to be experts. We do not follow their publication, The New American, on any regular basis. Furthermore, one might under-stand why, as a leading conservative, anti-Communist organization they might tend to bend over backward to avoid the poisonous “anti-Semitism” charge, when the Jewish element has undeniably been such a strong part of Communism in general and in the United States in particular. Even with all their efforts in that direction, they have not been able to stay completely out of that line of fire. This quote is from a 1967 article, just after the publication of Simpson’s book:

  America’s “radical right” has created “a huge patchwork blanket” of radio broadcasts, has made easier the recruitment of members by the John Birch Society, which “contributes to anti-Semitism,” and poses “the greatest danger” to the civil rights movement, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was warned today.

  The warning came from Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the ADL, and Arnold Forster, the League’s general counsel. They presented a special report dealing with the radical right to the League’s national commissioners at the closing session of the ADL’s 54th annual meeting, which has been in session since Friday.111

  Such charges persist right up at least to 2013 from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

  John F. McManus, the president of the arch conservative John Birch Society (JBS) is also listed as a speaker at the Canadian conference. JBS has been dogged for decades by charges of anti-Semitism, accusations society leaders vehemently deny. Those same leaders, however, take great pride in JBS being at the forefront of the conspiracy-fueled attacks on Agenda 21, a non-binding United Nations plan for sustainable development around the world.112

  One might gauge the genuineness and the courage of the Birch Society today in standing up to the most pernicious aspects of Zionism by their response to the publication of this book.

  __________

  105 Simpson, p. viii.

  106 Crown Forum, 2007.

  107 We don’t have to guess about this, and neither would Evans have had to have done so to acknowledge the Forrestal provenance for the quote. We know that he has read McCarthy’s book, The Fight for America, and the following is from page seven of that book: “Many of [the Communist subversives’ names] I heard discussed for the first time by a man who was later to be hounded to his death by the Communists. I arrived in Washington in December, 1946, about two weeks before being sworn in as a senator. Three days later my administrative assistant and I received an invitation to have lunch with Jim Forrestal. “I have often wondered how the extremely busy Secretary of the Navy discovered that a freshman Senator had arrived in town and why he took so much time out to discuss the problems which were so deeply disturbing him. More than an equal number of times I have thanked God that he did. “Before meeting Jim Forrestal I thought we were losing to international Communism because of incompetence and stupidity on the part of our planners. I mentioned that to Forrestal. I shall forever remember his answer. He said, ‘McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.’ This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. (The Devin-Adair Company, 1952)

  108 Simpson, pp. 85-86.

  109 There might be a hidden reason why Evans and other Yale stalwarts and supposed McCarthy defenders William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell, Jr., whom Evans invokes, have jumped all over McCarthy for that Marshall speech. We might find here a key, as well, to McCarthy’s ultimate destruction. In the book version, America’s Retreat from Victory, The Story of George Catlett Marshall (Devin-Adair, 1951, pp.11-12) in a section omitted from the June 14, 1951 speech, McCarthy, citing information found in George Morgenstern’s 1946 book, Pearl Harbor, claims that Marshall and others had knowledge of the impending December 7 attack as early as December 4, and they issued no warning to the garrison in Hawaii.

  110 http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/NetLoss/NetLoss-Oliver.html; Revilo Oliver, America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative, Londinium, 1982, Chapter VI. This book is even harder to come by than Simpson’s The Death of James Forrestal. Only the Library of Congress has it in the Washington, DC, area. No library in Virginia has it. The next nearest place to find it is the library of the University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus. After that, one has to go to the NYU library in New York City or the UNC Chapel Hill library. The cheapest used copy to be found online costs $130.

  111 Jewish Telegraphic Agency,“ADL Warned of Anti-Semitism in ‘Radical Right’ John Birch Society,”January 31, 1967, https://www.jta.org/1967/01/31/archive/adl-warned-of-anti-semitism-in-radical-right-john-birch-society.

  112 Hate Watch, “Ron Paul, Birch President to Speak at Anti-Semitic Conference,” August 20, 2013, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2013/08/20/ron-paul-birch-president-speak-anti-semitic-conference.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Cover-up Collapses

  Willcutts Report Released

  Secret Forrestal Investigation

  Did James V. Forrestal murder himself,

  Or was he assassinated?

  To examine the Navy’s official report,

  For more than a half-century we waited.

  Is there official skulduggery here?

  We’ll let the readers decide,

  But usually when someone keeps something hidden,

  It’s because he has something to hide.

  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 li
ghter, in short, no sign that James Forrestal or anyone else had, shortly before, been a patient there, is clearly not the room as described, as we shall see, by the nurse, Lieutenant junior grade Dorothy Turner. Nothing is supposed to be moved at the photograph of a crime scene, but in one of the photographs, a chair is at the foot of the bed, but in another it is not there. (see frontispiece)

  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.

  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.113 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, as we have seen, 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 (See frontispiece.) 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 West neat 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, and here we skip ahead to that testimony:

  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 Mi
ss 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 any-thing 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.