by David Martin
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. As we have noted, 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.
That leaves us with the greater likelihood that the name was misspelled intentionally, and the implications of that are quite sinister, indeed. The email we received from Prise’s daughter in 2017 virtually seals that conclusion in stone. 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...117
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 be-longed 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.”118
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 seems 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, that is, that the whole poem transcription business was a red herring to distract people away from the fact that the almost compulsive writer Forrestal wrote no suicide note.119
Having employed this trick successfully in 1949, the authorities would use it once again in 1993, making a big fuss over the torn-up note supposedly belatedly found in Vincent Foster’s briefcase. In that note, the writer expresses displeasure at how various things are going, but nothing mentioned is nearly serious enough to make a person want to kill himself, but as far as the press was concerned it might as well have been a suicide note.
In light of what we learned from Prise’s daughter as described in Chapter One, he knew a lot more than what was elicited from him in this testimony. That obviously explains the lengths that were gone to to conceal his identity from the public.
Another Misnamed Witness
Sometime after we posted our analysis of the Willcutts Report in 2004, we received a communication from an elderly military veteran whose wife, a former Navy nurse, was acquainted with several of the Navy nurses who had been on duty on the night of Forrestal’s death. He said that she had told him that none of them believed that Forrestal had committed suicide. Most intriguingly, he also told me that the head nurse on duty that night covering the floors from 12 to 17, starting at 10 p.m. and continuing until 7 a.m., identified as Lieutenant Regina M. L. Harty, was really one Margie Hardy. That “M” probably stood for “Marjorie,” the name for which “Margie” is most commonly the short form. When the pen-named “Mark Hunter,” whose real name I do not know, did his htm version and analysis of the Willcutts Report, I put him in touch with my informant, and you can see his reflection on this misnamed witness on his web site.120
We learn from her testimony, which came right after Prise’s late on the third day, that while making her rounds, she encountered Forrestal twice, the first time a little after 11 p.m. and he was with Prise across the hall in that fateful kitchen, drinking a glass of orange juice.
“I spoke to him then and he was very calm and self-assured and quite pleasant,” she stated. If he had been wrought up earlier, as the testimony of Prise suggests, he would appear to have been completely calmed down by this time. As we saw, there was nothing in Prise’s testimony about that little late orange juice social. She checked his room again at approximately 1:30 a.m. Only the nightlight was on, and she assumed that he was sleeping, and returned to her desk down the hall around a corner. Harrison, who was on duty by that time, promptly informed her that Forrestal was not sleeping, because, she says, Harrison said that Forrestal had asked who it was that had come to the door. She was at that desk at the time that Forrestal would have gone out of the window, and Harrison says that he was there, too, making routine entries in the log.
Altogether, she was asked only twelve questions by the board.121 Although from her desk she could not see to the door of Forrestal’s room or the kitchen across the hall, she was only a short distance away, and she was never asked if she had heard anything unusual. One would think that, at the very least, the breaking of that glass found on the bed and on the carpet at the foot of the bed would have produced a sound that she would have heard. The lack of curiosity of this board of Navy medical doctors is really quite stunning.
Considering the falsification of her name and, if we are to believe Cornell Simpson’s report that her name was withheld from the public at the time and that she was promptly transferred to Guam to keep her out of the reach of prying reporters (as if there were any such creatures when it comes to Deep State shenanigans such as this), we must wonder what she really knew. Perhaps one day I will receive an email from one of Margie Hardy’s offspring.
The Officer in Charge
When Forrestal’s death occurred, Captain Raines, and the number two psychiatrist at the hospital who was also 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 th
ough 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 death scene photographs that we were initially told we couldn’t see on account of the sensitivity of surviving Forrestal family members and were later told were simply lost doubtless would have shown the cord around Forrestal’s neck. Might it have been obvious that there was not enough of the long end left over to stretch all the way to the radiator and to tie a knot attaching it to the radiator?
Another possibility is that there wasn’t any “long end” of the bathroom belt and that the witness or the preparers of the written report embellished the testimony to make it accord more closely with the preferred suicide conclusion. If the belt had been used to throttle Forrestal, what is most likely is that his assailant would have naturally held the belt near the middle with about an equal amount left over at each end, and that might well have been obvious from the never-to-be-seen photographs. Whatever the case, it is highly likely that the photographs would have rendered the radiator-tying theory even more absurd than it appears on its face.
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 be reacclimated 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 ones by Hoopes and Brinkley and Rogow. 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 that might require 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 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, that is, that he was suffering from “involutional melancholia,” a manic-depressive form of schizophrenia most typically occurring in middle age and manifesting itself in paranoia and “nihilistic tendencies.”122
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 they never say what they mean by that. 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.”