The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Since Forrestal was the first secretary of defense to preside over the Pentagon, Vogel had to write about him, and writing about him meant also writing about his untimely demise. It also meant, predictably enough, that he would write the same tired old, now provable, lies. Vogel happened to have a book presentation at a bookstore near me shortly after the book’s release, and I used the occasion in the question and answer period to point out his inaccuracies. Noting that in his presentation he had talked of tracking down a couple of people who worked on the Pentagon and interviewing them, I suggested that in the process of correcting his errors he might perform a real service by tracking down possible surviving witnesses on the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital the night that Forrestal went out the window, particularly Hospital Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison.

  Vogel showed not the slightest interest and demonstrated an almost Bill Murray sort of boredom at having his errors about Forrestal's last hours pointed out to him and the gathered audience. "That was not what the book was mainly about," was how he dismissed the whole matter.

  To make sure that he understood the full gravity of his falsehoods about Forrestal's death, I was moved to write him a letter as a follow-up. At this point we must request the reader’s indulgence in reading things that already have appeared in the book. It is repeated, as it will be done several times throughout the work so readers can see precisely what facts have been given to various influential people, facts that they have all scrupulously kept to themselves:

  Dear Mr. Vogel,

  Since you managed to brush me off rather effectively at your book presentation at the Bailey's Crossroads Borders last Wednesday night (June 13), I would like to take this opportunity to state, in detail, what is not true in your account of the death of our first Defense Secretary, James Forrestal. Here is what you wrote in your recently published book, The Pentagon: A History:

  On the night of May 21, Forrestal stayed up late reading. A Navy corpsman stationed outside his room looked in on Forrestal around 1:45 A.M. and found him writing on sheets of hospital paper, copying a poem from a red leather-bound anthology of world poetry. About 3 A.M., while the corpsman was on an errand--possibly sent by Forrestal himself--the former defense secretary left his room and slipped across the corridor to a kitchen. Forrestal removed the unsecured screen from the window and tied one end of his bathrobe sash around a radiator below the window and the other end around his neck. He climbed out the window and was perhaps suspended for a few moments before the sash slipped off the radiator. The soaring granite tower conceived by Franklin Roosevelt and built by John McShain nearly a decade earlier proved to be more than an adequate platform for Forrestal to end his life. His broken body was discovered on the roof of a third-floor passageway connecting to another wing of the hospital.

  On the bedside table in Forrestal's room, his book was found open to the poem he had been copying, "The Chorus from Ajax" by Sophocles. It included these 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.140

  Your account is almost completely consistent with the very first news accounts of Forrestal's death, even down to the quoting of the lines of poetry that were not part of the hand-written transcription that was said to have been found in Forrestal's room along with the book. How-ever, none of the newspapers reported that Forrestal's Navy guard, hospital apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, actually saw him copying the poem. That was reported for the first time by the author Arnold Rogow, whom you give as one of your two sources, in his 1963 book, James Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy. Your other source, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, also says that the guard witnessed Forrestal copying the poem, but their source is Rogow. Rogow, however, has no source, and he could not have a source, because we now know that what he wrote is simply not true. I should think that it would bother you that you have repeated Rogow's fabrication. (You also must have more sources than the two you supplied, because neither of them quotes the lines of the poem that you do.)

  Mr. Rogow probably thought that his lie would never be discovered because at the time of his writing the report of the official investigation of Forrestal's death had remained secret for over a decade and would remain secret for more than four more decades until I was able to obtain a copy through the Freedom of Information Act in the spring of 2004. I provided a copy to the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University, which houses Forrestal's papers, and they put the entire document on their web site in the fall of 2004, where it has been ever since. They also sent out a press release announcing that they had put up this important document that had not seen daylight for 55 years.

  Unfortunately—though not surprisingly—this important news was not reported by any mainstream press organs. Its significance was recognized, however, by the History News Network of George Mason University, which did announce the availability, at long last, of the official report on Forrestal's death and by the web site, Secrecy News. Since you cover the Pentagon for The Washington Post, I would say that there is a very high likelihood that the Princeton press release passed across your desk.

  Here is the exchange between members of the panel of the review board convened by Admiral Morton D. Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Medical Center, and Hospital Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, who came on duty at 11:45 on the night of May 21, 1949:

  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. 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 Mister Forrestal do any reading?

  A. Not while I was on watch, sir.

  So much for your assertion that the hospital attendant saw Forrestal transcribing a poem from a book shortly before he went out the window (That would be 2 A.M., not 3 A.M. as you mistakenly have it.). So much, as well, for your speculation that the attendant might have been sent on an errand by Forrestal.

  Why is this important? Those who want to convince us that Forrestal took his own life would have us believe that he was so suddenly moved by the rationale for suicide in the poem that he rushed out and killed himself—though he was not in such a rush as to just jump out the 16th floor window, but, curiously, in the little time he had before the attendant would return, went to the trouble to hang himself out of the window by a belt that might not have been long enough for the job.

  But don't we have the book open to the page and the transcription of the poem? Maybe he copied the poem earlier in the evening and the suicide was just a delayed reaction, you might argue.

  First, there's a problem with the book. In the Willcuts review board's investigation, the book never enters into evidence. Since it is absent entirely, no one is identified who might have found it. One can look at the "crime scene" photographs taken of Forrestal's room, and there's no book, either on the table beside his bed, as you have it, or on the nearby radiator, as some other accounts have it. There is, however, broken glass on the carpet at the foot of Forrestal's bed, and the nurse who first saw Forrestal's fully lighted empty room testified that she saw broken glass on the bed.141 These apparent signs of a struggle are hard facts that have been reported only on my web site, as opposed to the gossamer about Forrestal copying a morbid poem that you
in the mainstream press have woven.

  Gossamer? But we have the transcription in Forrestal's very own handwriting, I can hear you protest.

  There's a big problem with the transcription, though. It was never examined by anyone for handwriting authenticity, and if you have a look at it, along with a number of examples of Forrestal's writing obtained from the Truman Library you can see why it was not authenticated.142 It's clearly not authentic. It wouldn't be right to call it a forgery, because no effort was made even to attempt to copy Forrestal's distinctive writing style.

  So where does that leave you as an author who has written something about a matter of great importance that is patently untrue—that you should have known was untrue? Fortunately, you're not just an author, but a reporter for one of the world's most powerful newspapers, and the Forrestal story is on your beat. It's not too late for you to set the record straight.

  I'm sure you will understand why I am not at all optimistic, however, that your employer will permit you to redeem yourself, whatever your personal inclination might be. What is far more likely, I'm sure you will agree, is that they will continue in this as in other important matters with what author Rodric Braithwaite, in describing Soviet movies of the late Stalin era, calls "their breathtaking disdain for historical truth, [making] them feel almost greasy to the touch."143

  My prediction was, of course, accurate. I heard nothing from Vogel, and the publisher came out with a paperback edition the next year with the same old untruths in it. In the meantime, I have ended my Washington Post subscription; the newspaper was beginning to give me the same feeling that those Soviet movies gave to Braithwaite.

  __________

  138 David Martin, “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression,” http://dcdave.com/article3/991228.html.

  139 See David Martin, “America’s Dreyfus: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” http://www.dcdave.com/article1/961127.htm.

  140 Steve Vogel, The Pentagon: A History, Random House, 2007, p. 350.

  141 At this point I linked to http://www.dcdave.com/article4/040916.htm, which has the photographs we see in the frontispiece.

  142 A link was given to http://www.dcdave.com/article4/040916.htm, where the photographs seen in the frontispiece can be found.

  143 Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 284.

  CHAPTER 6

  Britain’s Forrestal

  Irgun Murder Plots

  Re: Forrestal and Bevin,

  I can tell you this:

  For Menachem Begin,

  It was hit and miss.

  I magine this scenario: A powerful, radical Middle Eastern movement, with a record of terrorism, decides to embark upon a program of bombings and assassinations of high government officials in the home territory of a major Western power. The plot is to be carried out by five teams infiltrated into the Western country, and the primary target is the leading government minister opposing the actions and the aspirations of the radical group.

  As luck would have it, the secret service of the Western country discovers the plot, and the terrorist movement has to fall back to a plan of sending 20 letter bombs to various government officers, including the aforementioned leading opponent of the terrorists as well as his predecessor. The letter bombs also fail to reach their intended targets.

  What would the Western power do in response to these bombing and assassination attempts? You would be right if you answered that it would keep quiet about them for sixty years. In the meantime, it would be a party to giving the terrorist group everything it hoped to get, and more, from the failed assassination. It would even help the terrorists to develop their own nuclear weapons.

  The scenario is not fanciful. According to British intelligence documents declassified in 2006, it actually happened. The targeted official was British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin. His targeted predecessor was Anthony Eden. The terrorists were the Zionist gang Irgun Tsvai Leumi, or Irgun, for short. Its leader at the time of the assassination attempts in 1946, before the state of Israel had been carved out of Palestine, was Menachem Begin. Begin would later become Israel’s Prime Minister and would be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1978 for the agreement that he would reach with Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, known as the Camp David peace accords.

  The intelligence documents were declassified in early March of 2006. The assassination attempts occurred in 1946 and 1947; the sup-plying of plutonium to Israel by Britain first occurred in 1966, but it had supplied heavy water, another nuclear weapons ingredient, in the 1950s. The Times of London reported on the failed assassinations on March 5, and the BBC reported on the illegal nuclear assistance on March 9.144

  These shocking, extraordinarily important new revelations shed a lot of light upon what we have virtually proved to be the assassination of America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal. The parallels in the government careers of Bevin and Forrestal are great. Although Bevin came up through the labor movement and was a member of the opposition Labor Party, Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made him his Labor Secretary during World War II. In that capacity, he played a key role in mobilizing Britain’s economy for the war.

  As noted previously, Forrestal was a Wall Street investment banker whom Franklin Roosevelt made Under Secretary of the Navy. A tireless worker, Forrestal was the key liaison person between the Roosevelt ad-ministration and the private industrial sector, and he was largely responsible for the transformation of the economy from production for consumption to production for the war effort.

  When the Labor Party won a majority after the war, Bevin was appointed foreign secretary in the new government. Forrestal had been elevated to Secretary of the Navy when the previous Secretary died near the end of the war. He continued in that position when Harry Truman replaced Roosevelt upon the latter’s death in 1945. When the National Security Act of 1947 consolidated the armed services, Truman made Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense.

  Though both men were very popular and both were very successful in their government careers, each suffered major setbacks over the issue of the creation of a state for Jews in the territory of Palestine. The Labor Party, heavily influenced by its Jewish members, when out of power during the war actually favored expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine to clear the way for a Jewish state. As Foreign Minister of the new Labor government, Bevin, repulsed by Zionist terrorist actions directed at British military and government officials in Palestine, steered the British government toward a position more heavily favoring the rights of the Arab residents of the region. In doing so, he made himself British public enemy number one of the Zionists.

  Also, as we have previously noted, Forrestal was enemy number one of the Zionists in the United States. Near the end of Chapter One we told of the December 4, 1948, letter to The New York Times signed by a number of prominent Jews, including Albert Einstein, warning the American public about Menachem Begin and his terrorist organization upon Begin’s visit to the United States. At the conclusion of the letter recounting the Begin organization’s murderous activities, we asked this question, “Would men like Menachem Begin and his followers have hesitated at assassinating the most popular, outspoken, and powerful critic of the nascent state of Israel in the United States if given the opportunity?”

  How apt that question was has now been made manifest! Since 2006, we now know that they had no compunction against assassinating Forrestal’s precursor and counterpart in Britain. The main difference seems to be that the powers that be in Britain did not give them the opportunity, while those in the United States did. Maybe that is a measure of the relative power of the Zionists in the two countries. The federal government and the organs for molding public opinion were penetrated at the very top in the United States by the most extreme and violent elements of the Zionist movement, and they continue to be so, or, at least, effectively so.145

  That is not to say that the Zionists are exactly weak in Britain. Offici
al Britain hardly reacted with appropriate fury at the outrage. Rather, the country sat on information about the attempted assassination, and soon fell into line behind the United States in its pro-Israel policies. It even got a bit ahead of the United States over the nuclear weapons issue, as we have noted, and also during the Eisenhower administration when the British, the French, and the Israelis attempted a power grab known as the Suez Crisis.

  The release of the news of the outrage of the attempted Bevin assassination was, in fact, extremely timid. A search of the Internet some three weeks after the initial revelation showed only one other major newspaper in the world picking up on the story, the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.146 It had a slightly different version of events, though, claiming that it was the Stern gang, rather than Irgun, that planned the assassinations, though both stories are ostensibly based upon the same release of British intelligence documents. The Times, itself, has barely squeaked out the news. When I telephoned the newspaper, attempting to locate the reporter of the story, Peter Day, the person I talked to was unable to find Day in their directory, nor could he find the article in the hard copy of the March 5 Times. The online version of the story lists no page number. The folks at The Times foreign desk, with whom I was then connected, were familiar with the story, which the first contact person was not, but they did not know Mr. Day. They were able to confirm only that he was not one of their own regular reporters. Later I would learn that, curiously enough, his regular place of employment was with the Telegraph. Maybe the publishers of The Times had some second thoughts about what they did in letting this news out. It seems that the article never appeared in the newspaper’s hard copy, and as of April 5, 2006, the article could no longer be found on its web site., either.

  The veritable radioactivity of the subject would explain, as well, the complete blackout of this news by the mainstream news organs of the United States. The news suppression is of a piece with the complete failure of the U.S. press to report that the long secret report on the investigation of Forrestal’s death was finally made public in 2004. The Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University even sent out a press release, and the online History News Network of George Mason University made mention of it, but the mainstream press made certain that this very important news, like the news of the attempted assassination of Britain’s foreign minister, never reached the attention of the general public.