by David Martin
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).
The nurse in charge of the 16th floor, identified as 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 through2K.............................................................................4
Clinical record of the deceased, Exhibit 3..............................................8
Bathrobe cord, Exhibit4...........................................................................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.). 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. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that there is something in the death scene photographs that they don’t want anyone to see. It must be really embarrassing for the government’s suicide case or they would never have gone so far as to make up such an obvious cock and bull story as this. Further on in our analysis, we speculate as to what that something might be.
Also missing are some key props that played such an important 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 di
d 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.).114
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. Turn-er. 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 played 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 wh
en 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.