by David Martin
Dr. Smith goes on in this vein for another page or so, describing a patient who was “rather heavily sedated” in the first week but exhibited substantial improvement and was generally able to sleep without sedation after a few weeks. Several marathon sentences later Dr. Smith volunteers, “At no time did I ever hear him express any uncertainty that he would not recover nor did I ever hear him express any threat to destroy himself.”
To make a long story short, something of which Dr. Smith is utterly incapable, the James Forrestal described here is the old familiar conscientious, public-spirited, learned and capable man whose tombstone bears the inscription, “In the great cause of good government.” One can easily imagine that, true to their sometimes-misguided profession, it was usually the psychiatrists who steered the conversation around to what was wrong with James Forrestal. The patient, demonstrating mental health that was in important ways superior to that of his custodians, wanted to talk about what was wrong with the country. From what we can read in the surviving, published portions of his diaries and from his well-known public positions, Forrestal had demonstrated that he had a better grip on reality than almost anyone in the country. And if Dr. Smith were the only psychiatrist whose report we were able to read, we would have to conclude that Forrestal was not the least bit suicidal.
Whether it was because he was not giving the responses that were expected of him or because their eyes were glazing over, the board members had very few questions for Dr. Smith. The last person who might have vouched for Dr. Raines ended up vouching for hardly anything at all that Dr. Raines had to say about Forrestal’s suicidal tendencies, and like the contradiction between the photographs showing a bed without even sheets on it and the description that Nurse Turner gave, the board members just let it pass.
Providing a tremendous reinforcement to this analysis of Dr. Smith as a strong dissenter from the expressed view of Dr. Raines that Forrestal was suicidal—or perhaps that he was in need of psychiatric help at all—is the unpublished manuscript of John Osborne. Recall that it is from Osborne that Hoopes and Brinkley made the attendant, Edward Prise, into the major supporter of the suicide claim, which we now know from his daughter’s email and the hiding of his real name is probably the opposite of the truth. Osborne wrote that the doctor "second in rank and authority to the psychiatrist in charge of the case believed throughout its course that Forrestal was wrongly diagnosed and treated. But he also thought that Forrestal was recovering despite the treatment..."126
Osborne does not name him, but that doctor was Stephen Smith. It goes without saying that Hoopes and Brinkley chose to ignore that passage.
Another Look at Rogow
Recall now that without any source for his assertion Arnold Rogow wrote, and Hoopes and Brinkley repeated, that late on the night of May 21 Forrestal had informed the unnamed Navy corpsman on duty that he didn’t want any artificial sleep aid because he planned to stay up late and read and that when the corpsman looked into the room at about 1:45 Forrestal was busy copying from that precisely described book of poetry. He then provides the 17 lines of the depressing Sophocles poem that he got from Walter Millis, telling us that Forrestal stopped after having written the “night” part of the word “nightingale” and went across the hall and tried to hang himself out of the kitchen window.127
Now we can see why Rogow provides no reference for any of this. It appears that he has made it all up In his effort to persuade us that Forrestal was moved by morbid lines from “The Chorus from Ajax” to stop his copying suddenly and go kill himself in a less-than-sudden, peculiar fashion, Rogow has told us a lot of things that are not supported by the official record. If Forrestal actually transcribed those lines, it was before Corpsman Harrison came on duty, because the room was dark the whole time he was on the job. None of the Navy officials would even speculate about the dressing-gown cord being tied to the radiator, though Dr. Raines strongly suggests that Forrestal must have tried to hang himself from something. It’s an open question as to whether the poem transcriber even made it to the 26th line, the one with “nightingale” in it. A single page is included with the exhibits provided to us. It looks as though the page is torn at the bottom and the photocopier might have cut off a little of the bottom as well, but it’s hard to believe that it would have cut off 11 lines. Only the first 15 lines of the poem are on the page.
Rogow’s very unspecific and unreferenced assertion that Forrestal “made at least one suicide attempt” at Hobe Sound also looks pretty shaky in light of the testimony of Captains Raines and Smith.128 Even more outrageously wrong was the assertion of the very influential columnist and radio commentator, Drew Pearson, that Forrestal had made four attempts to kill himself, three times while at Hobe Sound and once at Bethesda Naval Hospital.129 Also called into serious question is the claim by the politically connected Wall Street journalist Eliot Janeway to biographer Douglas Brinkley that Ferdinand Eberstadt had told him privately that Forrestal had made one suicide attempt at Hobe Sound.
The report of the Willcutts Review Board reveals additional misinformation in Arnold Rogow’s frequently cited book. Consider the following Rogow passage:
In the spring of 1949 Forrestal also had evidence that he was not persona non grata to all Jews and Jewish organizations. Although he declined to be present, he was invited in February to attend a celebration at one of Washington’s Reformed Jewish Temples. When his resignation was announced in March, he received a letter commending him for his past services and expressing regret from Myer Dorfman, National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Many persons of Jewish extraction, during his stay at Bethesda, wired or wrote him expressing their hopes for an early recovery, and several added that his anti-Zionist position had by no means concealed or confused his great service to the country as our first Secretary of Defense.
Forrestal, of course, never received these messages, and in any case it was then too late to relieve by ordinary means the guilts, fears, doubts, and anxieties that had precipitated his illness. However history may ultimately judge his opposition to the establishment of Israel, by 1949 it was clear that Forrestal was, in a sense, one of the casualties of the diplomatic warfare that had led to the creation of the Jewish state (emphasis added).130
Notice how, in a few lines, Forrestal is shown to have become such a basket case that he couldn’t even be allowed to read his mail, and the suggestion is made that he should have been wracked with guilt over the courageous, principled, and patriotic position he took—along with virtually all the Middle East experts in the United States government—against U.S. sponsorship of a new, ethnic-supremacist, essentially European country in the heart of historically Arab territory. But we see from the testimony of Captain Raines what Rogow would have us believe was a self-evident fact was not true:
From the very first Mister Forrestal’s mail and other communications were handed to him unopened. He was allowed to see all of them on the theory no one can live in a vacuum and might just as well be ex-posed to whatever came along; that is the method of dealing with it; it would depend on how well he was or how sick he was. It was as simple as that. Actually he dealt quite well with almost everything.
Rogow’s diagnosis of paranoia is not only undercut by the testimony of all the doctors at Bethesda, but also by a telling footnote on page 181 in his own book. First, we have the passage to which the note applies:
Finally, [Forrestal’s position on Palestine] encouraged suspicion in both gentile and Jewish circles that Forrestal personally was not merely anti-Zionist but anti-Semitic. Nor should it be overlooked that one consequence of these suspicions was that Forrestal, during his last months in office, harbored a conviction that he was under day-and-night surveillance by Zionist agents; and when he resigned as Secretary of Defense in March, 1949, he was convinced that his resignation was not unrelated to pressures brought to bear on the Administration by American Jewish organizations.
Now here’s the footnote:
While these beliefs reflect the
fact that Forrestal was a very ill man in March, 1949, it is entirely possible that he was “shadowed” by Zionist agents in 1947 and 1948. A close associate of his at the time recalls that at the height of the Palestine controversy, his (the associate’s) official limousine was followed to and from his office by a blue sedan containing two men. When the police were notified and the sedan apprehended, it was discovered that the two men were photographers employed by a Zionist organization. They explained to the police that they had hoped to obtain photographs of the limousine’s occupant entering or leaving an Arab embassy in order to demonstrate that the official involved was in close contact with Arab representatives.
So, in all likelihood, the conviction that Forrestal harbored that he was under constant surveillance was correct. And as we saw in Chapter One, intimidation and blackmail were among the uses to which such surveillance was intended. Naturally, Rogow takes the culprits’ explanation at face value, putting the best possible face on it. He also conceals the name of the shadowed Forrestal associate, preventing the inquiring reader from learning even more damning information from that source. He also fails to give us the name of the guilty Zionist organization.
Missing Witnesses
As noted previously, only Navy personnel were called before the Willcutts Review Board as witnesses, and, even so, a couple of important ones were overlooked. First, and obviously, there is Admiral Morton Willcutts himself, although calling him would have been pointless if he were to receive the same deferential treatment afforded to Admiral Stone. He had eaten dinner with Forrestal on Friday before the fateful next night, and according to published reports he had described the patient as in very good shape and excellent spirits. As a medical man, his opinion as to Forrestal’s emotional condition would have been worth something. More importantly, he could have answered questions about the larger picture had the board been inclined to ask them. What role, if any, did the White House and non-medical considerations play in Forrestal’s hospitalization and treatment? Upon what legal authority was the private citizen Forrestal put up in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in the first place?
Admiral Willcutts also showed up at the hospital very early on that fateful, May 22 morning, and as the commander of the National Naval Medical Center, he was the officer in charge. Everything that was done from the moment he arrived, and maybe even from the moment he was notified of the death by telephone was his responsibility. He was the one for the board to ask about the laundering of Forrestal’s room and the delay in photographing it and about any determinations that might have been made about fingerprints, the broken glass, and the cord around Forrestal’s neck.
Along with Admirals Willcutts and Stone, there was a third important Admiral who arrived at the death scene shortly after Forrestal’s plunge. That is Surgeon General of the Navy Clifford A. Swanson. He was important not for what he might have observed that night, though, but for what he might have learned from Forrestal early in the hospitalization.
From the Nurse’s Notes of 10:00 a.m., April 3, the first full day Forrestal was at Bethesda, we find this: “Pt. Asked to see Adm. Swanson; Dr. Smith notified. Pt. states “It is of the utmost importance for the Navy.” Slightly agitated. Five minutes later we see that he was given sodium amytal, but that he is “still asking to see Adm. Swanson.”
At 10:10 we have this notation: “Pt. seen by Dr. Raines @ this time.
The next notation is at 10:40: “Pt. sleeping very soundly.”
Admiral Swanson did arrive to see the patient at 1700 hours that same day, however. It would be very interesting, indeed, to know what they talked about. The nurse’s notes also record several subsequent visits by Admiral Swanson, and his name appears among the Princeton library list of the 932 people who corresponded with Forrestal in 1948. He was apparently among the very few old associates who visited Forrestal while he was at Bethesda, and his observations, if candid, might have been very revealing.
There are also a number of non-Navy people among the missing witnesses. First, there is Forrestal’s wife, Josephine. The nurse’s notes reveal that she was her husband’s most frequent visitor from outside. Although their marriage was apparently a troubled one, she would have known the man better than anyone and likely could have provided great insight into her husband’s psychological condition. We learn from Rogow’s book, as noted in Chaper One, that Forrestal’s life insurance policy would not pay in cases of suicide and that through her lawyer she claimed that the death was accidental. Had she meekly accepted that her husband committed suicide, the press would certainly have trumpeted it, as they did with Vincent Foster’s widow. The fact that they didn’t suggests strongly that she no more believed that Forrestal committed suicide than did that even more important missing witness among his relatives, older brother Henry.
In Chapter One we heard, through the author Cornell Simpson, Henry’s bitter denunciation of the government and the press and his claim that when he visited his brother late in the latter’s stay at Bethesda that he was as normal and healthy as he had ever been. We also hear that he was planning to arrive that Sunday and take his brother away from the hospital. Did he arrive in Washington that day? Are the claims in the Simpson book true? The nurse’s notes confirm Henry’s one late visit to Bethesda some days before his brother’s death, but, otherwise, he is not mentioned. At one point in his testimony, recall, Dr. Raines says that he thinks Forrestal would have needed only one more month at the hospital to be completely cured, as though he knew nothing of the brother’s plans to take him away forthwith.
Not everyone who visited Forrestal got noted in the nurse’s notes. One such person, who two of the testifying doctors tell us visited on the afternoon of Forrestal’s last day was his personal financial manager, Paul Strieffler. So close was he to Forrestal that, along with his former secretary, Strieffler was the only non-family member to be bequeathed money in Forrestal’s will. The author, Rogow, tells us that he received $10,000, a substantial sum in 1949.131 Might not important information have been gleaned from learning what Forrestal and Strieffler talked about hours before Forrestal’s death? Was he making plans like a man who fully expected to be around for quite a few more years? How normal and healthy did Forrestal appear to this long-time associate, whom Forrestal had mentioned in 1933 Congressional testimony as advising him on some questionable investments when he was president of the Wall Street investment banking firm of Dillon, Read.132
Another person that the Willcutts Review Board should have questioned is Dr. F. J. Broschart, the Montgomery County, Md., medical examiner. We learn from the Monday, May 23, newspapers that Dr. Broschart declared the death a suicide on Sunday. This is not the only politically charged case in which a government doctor has made a suicide ruling. Enron executive, Clifford Baxter, and former National Security executive, Gus Weiss, come to mind, but it cannot be stressed too strongly that a doctor does not have either the training or the resources to determine, alone, whether a death is the result of suicide, an accident, or of foul play. He might be able to determine the medical cause of death with an autopsy—although in this case Broschart was not even the autopsy doctor—but he cannot tell us who caused the death. This is a police matter. The police are supposed to treat all violent deaths as homicides until they have examined all the circumstances surrounding the death sufficiently to rule out that possibility. Dr. Broschart should have been summoned by the board and asked on what basis he made his suicide determination. Why did he do it so hastily? How could he possibly know that Forrestal was not thrown from the window? Was he aware of the broken glass in Forrestal’s room? How could he know for sure that Forrestal had not been rendered unconscious by one means or another before he took his long plunge?
After we received the Willcutts Report, the name of another prime candidate for interviewing by the Willcutts board came to light. The revelation was in a June 20, 2004, Washington Post article on the United Press Washington correspondent, Ruth Gmeiner. She was eulogized as the first woman reporter to cove
r the Supreme Court, among other accomplishments. Here are the closing lines of that article:
The night of the Gridiron Club dinner in 1949, [UP] news editor [Julius] Frandsen was alerted to get out to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He left an after-dinner party and picked up Gmeiner, his reporter, on the way. While he and other journalists hollered for information outside the hospital, Gmeiner sweet-talked her way into the 16th-floor room of former secretary of defense James V. Forrestal and found, next to his bed, a book of poetry open to Sophocles’ “Ajax,” (sic) which includes the lines:
When reason’s day
Sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay
Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on
And dare to live when the soul’s life is gone.
Her soon to be husband [the editor Frandsen] made that the first paragraph in Gmeiner’s story on Forrestal’s suicide.
If the story is true it solves the mystery of who it was that discovered the book of poetry in Forrestal’s room. The Willcutts review board, recall, failed to identify that person, and apparently made no attempt to do so. I made a telephone call to the writer of the article, Patricia Sullivan, who revealed that her source for this information was Gmeiner’s family. To her knowledge, she said, the story that Gmeiner got into Forrestal’s room and discovered the book had never before been published. She said that she had looked up the UP story on Forrestal’s death and the allegation was accurate, that is, that those poetry lines led off the story, not that Gmeiner, herself, had found the book.
It would have been an extraordinarily unorthodox way to begin a newspaper report, and Sullivan’s claim sent the author to the library to check it out. The claim is interesting, as well, because the lines quoted are toward the end of the poem and are not among the part repeated by the mainstream authors Millis, Rogow, and Hoopes and Brinkley, because they were not included in the alleged Forrestal transcription (Notice that there is no claim in the Post story that Gmeiner also found the transcription.).