The Assassination of James Forrestal
Page 21
The UP story revealing the death that the author found appears with a Washington, May 22, dateline in the morning San Francisco Chronicle. It starts like this:
Former Defense Secretary James Forrestal committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor of Bethesda, Md. Naval Hospital early today. He had been reading classical Greek poems keyed to the theme of death.
Farther down in the article the reporter gives us the lines that appear in the Post article, telling us that they appear shortly after the section that Forrestal had transcribed, that is, the first 26 lines, ending after the “night” portion of “nightingale” had been written.
Interestingly, Gmeiner’s son, Jon Frandsen, a Washington journalist whom I called on July 26, 2004, was unaware that there was any transcript involved in the story. As the story had been related to him by his parents, Gmeiner actually brought the book back downstairs and showed it to her editor, the elder Frandsen, whom she would marry some years later. It was he, they told their son, who first recognized the significance of the quoted lines. Jon also volunteered to me what I had already discovered, that is, that The Post’s Sullivan had stretched the truth a bit in saying that the lines actually led off the story.
The Synthesis of News
If Gmeiner was, indeed, the poetry book discoverer, she seems to have failed to get anything resembling a scoop on UP’s competitors with her intrepid action, a fact that surprised the younger Frandsen when I told him by telephone. Here’s how the Associated Press article that appeared in the May 23 Philadelphia Inquirer begins:
Former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide today, plunging from a high hospital window.
In his room he left a book of Greek poetry, a page opened to a quotation saying “when reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die and sleep.”
You’d think that Gmeiner was writing for the AP rather than for the UP, because this beginning accords even more closely to what was reported in The Post article than does the UP-article’s beginning. Both, like The New York Times and The Washington Post and every other journalist who covered the story, use the Sophocles poem to promote heavily the suicide conclusion, not to mention the fact that they all say in a matter of fact manner that it was suicide, not even using the hedging adjective, “apparent,” that we saw in the Vincent Foster case.
Two slightly different story lines emerge from careful inspection, however. The reports that were submitted earliest, apparently, emphasize the book open to the page with the morbid poem. They quote these later lines of the poem, the ones seen in the recent Post article, leading the reader to conclude that Forrestal had surely been reading this poem and had taken the “better to die” suggestion to heart. That’s what we see in the Los Angeles Times AP story and in the Chicago Tribune story written by their reporter, Robert Young (who also wrote, with no evidence presented: “He was reported to have made at least two previous attempts to kill himself.”). They make no mention of any transcription of part of the poem having been discovered as well.
The stories apparently written later, but also published in the May 23 morning newspapers, reveal that Forrestal had been actually copying “The Chorus from Ajax,” stopping after “night” in the word “nightingale.” At the same time, with the exception of The New York Times, they continue to emphasize in the first part of their stories the later lines, the ones that were not copied but seem to encourage suicide more strongly. By the time the book writers, Millis, Rogow, and Hoopes and Brinkley got around to it, all mention of the later lines had been dropped.
The addition to the story seems to have confused the reporters and editors at The Washington Post. Here is what they have to say a few paragraphs from the start of a front-page article:
From a book of verse found lying open on a radiator beside his bed he had copied several verses of Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax.” In firm and legible handwriting these lines stood out:
“When Reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die, and sleep the never-ending sleep than linger on, and dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.”
In an accompanying article, on the continuation page, they reprint the entire poem with the transcribed part, they say, in italics. The italics duly end with the first syllable of “nightingale,” well before the lines appear that they had elsewhere told us stood out “in firm and legible handwriting.”
The writer of the first article would have the reader believe that he was looking at the transcription as he wrote, so detailed was the description, but clearly, he wasn’t, or he could never have made such a blunder.
This raises anew the question of where the story of the discovery of the transcription—and the open poetry book as well—originated. None of the newspapers attribute it to anyone with the Navy or even explicitly to an anonymous source. They just somehow know that it was “found” (It is highly unlikely that it was, as The Post says, lying open on a radiator “beside the bed.” As we see from the photograph in the frontispiece, the nearest radiator is more than an arm’s length from the bed and it is rather narrow and rounded at the top. Rogow has it more plausibly on the nightstand, at the other side of the bed.).
The mystery of the poetry transcription deepens when we consider the actual page that was included with the medical records in the Willcutts Report, the one that Dr. Raines said looked like it was written in Forrestal’s handwriting. As noted previously, only the first 15 lines of the poem are there. Furthermore, as we see in the frontispiece, they include five lines cut off by the ellipsis after “yawning grave.”
If what we have been provided with our FOIA request is all there is, and all there ever was, then the part about Forrestal ending his transcription in the middle of the word “nightingale,” was made up out of whole cloth by someone. Upon making this discovery, we wrote the Judge Advocate General’s Office of the Navy on June 8, 2004, asking them if what I was sent is all there is to the transcription, noting that the newspapers talked of 26 lines. Never receiving a response, we must assume that what we have is the full transcription and all the newspaper reports were wrong (hardly an unprecedented development).
Nightingale
If, in fact, the “nightingale” line was never in the transcription that was “found” by someone, and maybe even if it was, what with the growing emphasis placed upon it, the line might have some significance that has been overlooked up to this point. Hoopes and Brinkley, citing John Loftus as their source for the speculation, make much of the fact that “Nightingale” was the name of a secret group of Ukrainian refugees who had been recruited by the CIA in the post-war period to conduct a covert war behind the Iron Curtain, and that as a member of the National Security Council, Forrestal had been among those authorizing the action. The problem with that, from the perspective of Loftus, who also co-authored The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, was that many of the members of the Nightingale force had been collaborators with the Nazis during World War II and, in that capacity, were guilty of a number of atrocities against the Jews in the Ukraine. Hoopes and Brinkley don’t come right out and say it, but their reason for bringing it up seems to be to suggest that Forrestal might have been overcome by a sudden rush of guilt upon reaching that word in his writing, prompting him to dash out and take the poet Housman’s admonition, derived from Sophocles, quite literally.
Now we have seen from the testimony of Forrestal’s guard that well more than an hour had passed since Forrestal had done any reading or writing, so it couldn’t have happened that way, and it is highly doubtful that the fiercely anti-Communist Forrestal ever felt the slightest pang of guilt over America’s use of Ukrainian refugees, whatever their personal history, to undermine the Soviet Union.
But there is extremely bad blood between many Christian nationalists in the Ukraine and organized Jewry. The Jewish Virtual Library reports that since the fall of the Soviet Union, 80% of Ukraine’s Jews have left the co
untry. This is a truly remarkable exodus, taking place, as it has, in little more than two decades. That same Jewish web site states, “Many Ukrainian citizens still distrust Ukrainian Jews and believe that the Jews’ primary loyalty is to the Jewish people and not to the Ukrainian nation.”133 “Nightingale” may not have been a particularly meaningful word to Forrestal, but it would have been heavily freighted with meaning to Forrestal’s enemies in the Jewish community. Loftus, in his Secret War book, seems to be very closely in touch with that aggrieved group and cites many covert sources among them for the information in his book. Maybe with the “nightingale” emphasis, they mean to send the message that Forrestal’s destruction and death represents the settling of an old score for them. Perhaps Arnold Rogow knew more than he told when he characterized Forrestal as a casualty of the creation of the state of Israel.
Truman Blackmailed?
In Chapter One we argued that President Harry Truman would have been too compromised by his affiliation with the Kansas City political machine of Tom Pendergast to have stood in the way of any foul play directed toward Forrestal. If Truman could have been blackmailed to look the other way while Forrestal was murdered, though, he could just as easily have been blackmailed to pursue policies that put the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States. If Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion would employ blackmail against Nelson Rockefeller to get him to use his influence on Latin American leaders for United Nations votes, as the connected, pro-Zionist authors, John Loftus and Mark Aarons claim, why wouldn’t he use it for the much bigger prize of the support of the United States? It would have been relatively easy, with the great influence over the press that the Zionists wielded. That, rather than his pursuit of the Jewish vote for the Democrats, would explain why Truman overruled his entire foreign policy establishment to recognize the new state of Israel.
Two 21st century books on the Mafia give us an appreciation of how easy it would have been to blackmail Truman over some of the things Truman would have had to have done as one owing his livelihood and career to Pendergast. From Thomas Reppetto’s American Mafia, we have this:
Missouri boss Tom Pendergast ran up impressive city and state totals for the party while his administration did business with Charlie Corallo, boss of the Kansas City underworld. Gambling ran wide open, nude waitresses served lunch in the 12th Street dives, and drug and prostitution rings flourished. As [U.S. Treasury investigator] Elmer Irey noted, “You could buy all the morphine or heroin you could lift in Kansas City; and the man who wanted to keep his job as a police captain...had better keep his prostitute file correct and up-to-the-minute so Tom’s machine would be certain that no girl practiced her ancient art without paying full tribute."
Pendergast’s machine made the career of Harry Truman. During World War I, farm boy Truman had commanded a field artillery battery in France that was full of tough kids from Kansas City who hit it off with their captain. After the war Truman opened a haberdashery shop in Kansas City. When it went bankrupt, his friends persuaded the machine to elect him county judge, an administrative post equivalent to county supervisor in other jurisdictions. Though personally honest, Truman had to hire some patronage employees whom he later described as “no account sons of bitches.”134
It’s hard to see what’s “personally honest” about knowingly putting likely criminals in responsible positions in the government—and who knows what else—at the behest of a mob boss.
This latter term for Pendergast is used advisedly. Gus Russo describes the first national meeting of the country’s major crime lords that took place at the Hotel President in Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 13-16, 1929:
Present were Albert Anastasia, Dutch Schultz, Louis Lepke, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Longy Zwillner, Moe Dalitz, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and Al Capone.
“Of particular note was the presence of the notorious Kansas City machine politician Tom Pendergast, the sponsor of Harry Truman, future president of the United States.”135
Russo could well be mistaken that Pendergast, himself, actually at-tended the conference. John William Tuohy reports that he sent his right-hand man, Johnny Lazia, which seems more likely, but that hardly changes the fact that Harry Truman’s mentor, the man to whom he owed his entire political career, was a big-time mobster.136
Secret Testimonials
Obviously, after all the witnesses had been heard and the exhibits collected, someone in authority realized that the Willcutts review board had not made anything like a persuasive case that Forrestal had killed himself or that the Navy had acted properly either in the care and protection of Forrestal or in the investigation of his death. Something more had to be done.
What that something turned out to be was the solicitation of endorsements from the prominent psychiatric community. The voice of authority had to be substituted for what anyone with adequate critical faculties could see for himself. The two short letters supporting Dr. Raines by Dr. William Menninger, President of the American Psychiatric Association and Professor of Psychiatry, Raymond W. Waggoner, M.D., of the University of Michigan, sent from Montreal on May 25 where they continued to attend the annual ASA convention, which were included among the exhibits, were apparently deemed to be insufficient. So the first thing one encounters upon opening the Willcutts file are letters of praise for the clearly inadequate work of the review board from three more psychiatrists. The first one is dated September 19, 1949, and it is from the superintendent of the federal mental hospital in Washington, DC, Dr. Winfred Overholser. After a recitation of credentials, the letter states:
I have read carefully the report of the very thorough inquiry conducted by a Board of Investigation convened at the United States Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, on May 23, 1949 to investigate and report upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal at that hospital on May 22, 1949.
From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression. It is my further opinion that the care and treatment given to Mr. Forrestal during his stay at the Naval Hospital were entirely in accord with modern psychiatric principles, and that his death was not due to the negligence, fault, intent, or inefficiency of any of the physicians, nurses, or ward personnel concerned in his care.
The second endorsement is addressed to Rear Admiral G. L. Russell, Judge Advocate General of the Navy (the same office that furnished the Willcutts Review Board report to the author) and is dated September 13, 1949. It is from Dr. John C. Whitehorn, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland. It begins:
The proceedings and findings of the board of investigation in the case of the late Mister James V. Forrestal, with accompanying exhibits, were delivered to me by Lt. Cmdr. Kelly this morning.
In a telephone conversation yesterday you asked me to study this material and to express my professional opinion on two essential points of psychiatric principle and practice involved.
The two points boil down to whether it is a good idea to ease up on the restrictions on a psychiatric patient like Forrestal in due time and whether that time had arrived in Forrestal’s case. Dr. Whitehorn’s concluding paragraph was surely everything they could have wanted from him:
There are risks, therefore, of one kind or another, in the making of every such decision. In the case of so distinguished a person as Mister Forrestal, there would have been much incentive to follow the more conservative, restrictive regime. Dr. Raines’ decisions displayed courage in the application of psychiatric principles to provide the best chances for good recovery. For this he should be commended.
So, after a quick once-over of the investigation, Dr. Whitehorn concluded that his fellow psychiatrist was not negligent, he was courageous.
The third endorsement was from the Chairman of the Department of the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, Edward A. Strecker, who was also a professor of psychiatry there. He claimed as well to have studied the proceedings of the investigation
and he endorsed it, but his endorsement was couched quite conservatively. He stated only that his “considered opinion is in complete accord” with “The Findings of Facts,” the review board’s conclusions, the ones that were finally released on October 11 and buried away in the back pages of the nation’s newspapers. Then, to make sure that there was no misunderstanding, he summarized them to conclude his letter:
(1) The identification of the body of Mr. James V. Forrestal;
(2) The approximate date of the death of Mr. Forrestal and the medical cause of death;
(3) The review of the behavior of the deceased during his residence in the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the diagnosis of the mental condition as “mental depression;”
(4) The review of the treatment and precautions in the treatment of Mr. Forrestal, and an opinion that “they were within the area of accepted psychiatric practice and commensurate with the evident status of the patient at all times”;
(5) That in no manner was the death of Mr. Forrestal due to “intent, fault, negligence or inefficiency of any person or persons in the Naval Service or connected therewith”.
This belated effort to lend much needed credibility to the review board’s work by soliciting endorsements by prominent psychiatrists is not without its comic aspects. Anyone responding that either the care and treatment of Forrestal or the investigation of his death was faulty could have been assured that his writings would never see the light of day, and it could certainly could not have been good for that person’s career. As it turned out, though, the testimonials did not see the light of day for another 55 years. They became, in effect, secret testimonials.