by David Martin
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 New York 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 logbook 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 is seen to have some serious flaws. Using Arnold Rogow as their source, they describe an unnamed “new corpsman” looking into the room at 1:45 and noticing Forrestal busily copying something from that leather-bound book of literature, which they later learned was the translation of a morbid poem by Sophocles. Shortly thereafter Forrestal sent the corpsman away on some odd errand, presumably to get him out of the way so that Forrestal could do himself in unmolested.115
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.
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 speculation as to the possibility that he was a ringer. 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.
We learn from the Nurse’s Notes accompanying the witness testimony in the Willcutts Report that the person that Harrison relieved was one C. F. Stuthers. He is one of a number of people who should have been called as witnesses by the board, but were not. We could have learned from him if the Hoopes and Brinkley account is true, for what it’s worth. The board also should have also been interested in his observations about Forrestal’s normal demeanor at that time of night in comparison to that final night.
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, wheth
er they were expected to make much of an effort to prevent it.
The authorities also didn’t seem to have a problem letting us know that he was the corpsman on duty when Forrestal went out the window. The newspapers name him freely, as does Cornell Simpson, who presumably got his information from the newspapers. They never name the person who preceded him, though, and go even further to reduce that person’s significance by telling us erroneously that Harrison’s shift began at 9:00 p.m. rather than at midnight, a falsehood that Simpson repeats.
A 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, Edward Prise, 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 that undated outline of an unpublished manuscript by John Osborne, as relayed by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley that we saw in Chapter One.
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 Harrison, 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 by Simpson 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 that Forrestal had said that he did not expect to leave the hospital alive.116 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.
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nbsp; 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.” The email from his daughter, discussed in Chapter One, confirms the fact.
Clearly 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 be-ginning 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.