The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Avraham Stern's memorial day is attended every year by Israeli political and government officials. Given Israel's effort to gain international support for its ongoing war against terrorism of all kinds, you wouldn't expect Israeli leaders to associate themselves with the memory of someone who led a terrorist organization. Indeed they don't - like me they believe that Lehi, while sometimes using extreme measures, was not a terrorist organization.

  I'm not really trying to convince you that Lehi was not a terrorist organization (you are entitled to your own opinion on that) - only that the issue is disputed. Since it is indeed so, the proper place to discuss it is on the Lehi page - rather than have it stated on every page which mentions Lehi.

  This is a perfect example of the attitude toward the attempted Bevin assassination described in the aforementioned London Times article:

  Lord Bethell, author of The Palestine Triangle and an expert on Soviet intelligence, said Bevin was detested by Zionist groups. He added, however: “Zionists would be very angry if you compared these people with terrorists now. You have to remember that Irgun were the grandfathers of today’s ruling politicians.

  “They would say they were at war with the British and behaved well, fighting under Marquess of Queens berry rules. They would say that they didn’t target civilians.”

  James Forrestal, as the leading opponent in the United States government of the new state of Israel would have been regarded as anything but an "innocent civilian," and that would have made this great American patriot fair game for assassination in Zionist eyes. Hardly anything could be more incriminating of them than their own words, unless it is their known deeds.155

  __________

  144 Curiously, The Times took the article down from its web site after only one week. It is preserved on the Internet, though, by Information Clearing House at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12205.htm.

  The BBC still has its article up at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/03_march/09/israel.shtml. The story was not completely new in 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia had a short, sketchy article about the letter bomb part of the plot in 1947, attributing it to the Stern Gang. See https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18029698.

  145 See John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books, March 23, 2006, pp. 3-12. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby.

  146 “Telegram told of plot to kill MPs,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2006. https://www.smh.com.au/world/telegram-told-of-plot-to-kill-mps-20060307-gdn3mr.html.

  147 The Telegraph, unlike The Times, has not taken its article down from the Internet, at least, as of this writing. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1430766/Jewish-groups-plotted-to-kill-Bevin.html.

  148 https://www.birminghampost.co.uk/news/local-news/plot-bomb-london-thwarted-heroic-7411721.

  149 The story has now made it onto Rabbi Korff’s Wikipedia page. One will even find some expression of outrage toward the good rabbi: “Korff became an active supporter of Richard Nixon, despite Nixon's known anti-Semitism.” His attempted mass murder in London, on the other hand, has been treated with a good deal more solicitude. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Korff.

  150 Ira R.T. Smith with Joe Alex Morris, “Dear Mr. President...” The Story of Fifty Years in the White House Mail Room, Julian Messner, Inc., 1949, pp. 229-230; Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, Morrow, 1973, pp. 489-490. See David Martin, “’Jews’ Tried to Kill Truman in 1947, http://www.dcdave.com/article5/120510.htm.

  151 Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, Henry Regnery Company, 1953, pp. 72-73.

  152 Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, William Morrow and Company, Inc., p. 54.

  153 Truman Library, Oral History Interview of Stephen J. Spingarn. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sping1.htm.

  154 http://www.savethemales.ca/310702.html.

  155 “Who used terrorism first?” Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web, http://qumsiyeh.org/whousedterrorismfirst/.

  CHAPTER 7

  James Carroll on Forrestal

  Guilty Accusers

  How can our press pretend to condemn

  The peddlers of products illicit,

  When they cover up the largest of crimes,

  Making themselves complicit?

  Throughout House of War, Carroll hammers

  home his heavy-handed theory that Forrestal's suicide

  is a metaphor for the Pentagon.

  Dierdre Donahue,USA Today156

  In our letter to Steve Vogel, the Washington Post author of the 2007 book on the Pentagon, we alluded to the press release sent out by the Princeton library announcing the availability of the Willcutts Report. Here is that document:

  For immediate release: November 29, 2004

  Contact: Daniel J. Linke, (609) 258-6345, mudd@princeton.edu

  Princeton obtains long-secret report on Forrestal's death

  Willcutts Report details investigation around death of first secretary of defense

  PRINCETON, N.J. – The investigation into the death of the nation's first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, resulted in a lengthy report long kept from the public. Admiral M. D. Willcutts, the commanding officer of the National Naval Medical Center, convened the review board that looked into James Forrestal's death in 1949. Now, more than 55 years later, the Navy has released the report, which is available electronically through Princeton University's Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library Web site at: http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/.

  The documents were procured by David Martin of Virginia via a Freedom of Information Act request in April 2004. Martin scanned the report and gave the files to the Mudd Library, which also included five photographs obtained through the request.

  The Willcutts Report, issued in July 1949, investigated the circumstances around Forrestal's death. Forrestal, a member of Princeton's class of 1915, was a Wall Street investment banker who, on the eve of World War II, became undersecretary of the Navy. He became secretary of the Navy in 1944 and, with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, President Harry S. Truman appointed him the first secretary of defense. He resigned in March 1949 and entered the Bethesda Naval Medical Center suffering from exhaustion similar to battle fatigue, and soon after fell to his death from a window.

  The Willcutts Report supplements documents included in the James V. Forrestal Papers held at the Mudd Library, which include Forrestal's diaries. The report, along with a guide to the holdings of Forrestal's papers, may be viewed at the Mudd Library's Web site. For more information about this collection, contact the Mudd Library at (609) 258-6345 or mudd@princeton.edu.

  Also, as we mentioned in our letter to Steve Vogel of The Washington Post, The History News Network of George Mason University, picked up on the press release and further spread the news of the belated availability of the investigation with its September-December, 2004, report.157

  Then it was ignored. It is as though the Warren Report on the death of President John Kennedy had been withheld from the public for more than half a century and then was made public, and the entire American press and history community found the matter completely unworthy of their notice. Furthermore, historians, journalists, and other authors have continued to write about Forrestal's death as if there were no public Willcutts Report, repeating important "facts" from now-discredited secondary sources.

  The first person to do so was the excommunicated leftist Catholic priest and Boston journalist, James Carroll, and he doled out the misinformation in a spectacular fashion in his tendentious 2006 book, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of U.S. Power, in which he assigns virtually all blame for the Cold War upon warmongers in the U.S. government. Who knows if the findings of the Willcutts Report had come to his attention, because it was in his interests to ignore it. Like Loftus and Aarons, who would want us to believe that anti-Zionism is crazy, it was convenient for them to further the my
th that the leading anti-Zionist in the country went crazy and killed himself, so it Is convenient for Carroll to have us believe the same thing about the government’s leading anti-Communist, who was the same man, James Forrestal.

  There is certainly no evidence in his book that Carroll knew anything about the fruits of our research, which included by that time most of the analysis of the Willcutts Report that we now see in Chapter Four. His sources are almost exclusively the three superseded and largely discredited books, primarily Rogow and Hoopes and Brinkley. Worse than that, he gives great prominence to the story clearly invented by prominent Leftist columnist Drew Pearson that in the throes of his breakdown Forrestal, hearing sirens late at night, had run out of his house exclaiming, “The Russians are coming.” Carroll knows that that is not true, indicating in an endnote that Pearson had made a number of unverifiable and scandalous charges against Forrestal that call his credibility into question. Nevertheless, the anecdote is just too good for his malign purposes for Carroll to let go of it. A central thesis of his book is that the Cold War was a product of the paranoia centered in the Pentagon and that we never had anything to fear from the Communist menace. That the loudest voice warning of the Communist threat—which would soon manifest itself in North Korea’s attempt to take over the entire country by force of arms—should be that of an insane man driven to suicide by his paranoia fits his thesis too well for him to concern himself too much with mere truth. Do I exaggerate? Here he is promoting his book on WAMU’s Diane Rehm show. WAMU is a National Public Radio affiliate in Washington, DC.158

  Interviewer Susan Page: You talk about the apostolic succession. What does that mean?

  Carroll: I'm a Catholic. The apostolic succession is a phrase that refers to handing on of the power of the Church from St. Peter forward through the bishops. I use the analogy with the handing on of powers of nuclear assumptions and strategic air war and the entire dynamic toward war that's generated in the Pentagon, a succession that begins with James Forrestal who was the first Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was a man who embraced a paranoid notion of Soviet threats. He put in place... He was the single most important architect, I argue, with early American Cold War mentality. He was the sponsor of George Kennan's important "long telegram" and "Mr. X" article. He embraced a kind of quasi-religious notion of the threat from Soviet communism. He saw the world in radical good and evil terms. He was, in that sense, a Manichean. Every threat loomed so large in his imagination that he argued we had to be doubly, triply quadrupally prepared to meet it. It was under Forrestal that this terrible mindset really took hold in the Pentagon and in America. He had protégés. His first protégé was George Kennan. The equal to Kennan in those years was a young man named Paul Nitze who had come down to Washington with Forrestal from Wall Street. Nitze and Kennan became competing protégés. When Kennan, seeing what happened to Forrestal, was appalled and frightened by it, Forrestal's political paranoia had a personal aspect and he wound up committing suicide having been reported only a few days before he was institutionalized and found in the streets in his pajamas screaming, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" It seems like something out of a film but it happened. Or is reported to have happened. That's the defining moment at the beginning of a particularly paranoid mindset in American. It was carried forward by a succession of figures...

  Is it possible to imagine a more dishonest human being than James Carroll? With his sentence fragment, “Or is reported to have happened,” he shows that he knows that this story is not true, as he must know almost everything he passed on about Forrestal’s “suicide” from those books is not true. By the year 2006, almost all serious research began with a search of the Internet, and anyone researching Forrestal’s death could hardly have failed to discover the report of the Willcutts Review Board. Actually, Carroll was even more dishonest than we initially thought. Sometime after our first reading, we took another look at his endnote on “The Russians are coming” episode reported by Pearson. His basic source is page 739 of David McCullough’s Truman, but the full McCullough quote is, “Drew Pearson reported that Forrestal was ‘out of his mind’ and claimed incorrectly that in Florida Forrestal had rushed out into the street screaming, ‘The Russians are coming’.” (emphasis added). Could he really have failed to notice the words that I have emphasized?

  Consider, as well, how he begins his answer of the interviewer’s question: “I’m a Catholic,” he says. Here’s what C. Joseph Doyle had to say about that in the March 2000 issue of the Catholic World Report:

  After abandoning his orders and his vocation, Carroll would marry outside the Church before he was laicized; he mentions in his autobiography that he thus incurred the penalty of excommunication—a fact which has not deterred him from regularly identifying himself as a member of the Catholic Church.

  Carroll would claim he left the priesthood because of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical reaffirming traditional Catholic opposition to artificial birth control, saying the Pope was “in the grip of a savage Catholic neurosis about sex.” Yet Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, a year before Carroll was ordained. An April 1997 Boston Globe article on Carroll offered a different explanation for his decision to leave the priesthood, saying that he was unwilling to give up social activism—although he was deeply involved in social activism throughout his brief priestly career. Whatever actually motivated him to leave the priesthood, the decision evidently brought upward social mobility, in the form of a home on Boston’s exclusive Beacon Hill, a summer cottage on Cape Cod, positions at the Boston Globe and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and an education for his children at the elite, historically Protestant Milton Academy.159

  That a liar like Carroll should exhibit an affinity for the malicious utterances of a liar like Drew Pearson is only natural, one must suppose. In their testimony before the Willcutts review board, Forrestal’s doctors are unanimous that he had never attempted suicide before his fatal fall, but shortly after that fall, Pearson wrote that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts, the latest of which had occurred right there at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  The Encounter

  As luck would have it, Carroll, while in Washington on his book promotion tour, spoke at the Politics and Prose bookstore on the night of May 25. This came only a couple of days after his interview on the local Diane Rehm Show. He didn’t come down quite as hard on Forrestal in his talk as he did in his interview or he does in his book, but he did allude to him as one of his “villains.” He also gave us a good lead-in to our comments and question by his response to the questioner ahead of me, which had to do with nuclear proliferation. Carroll expressed his dismay at the build-up of nuclear weapons in the world and, predictably, laid the full blame on a procession of Pentagon warmongers.

  I began by saying that as an opponent of the use of nuclear weapons, he was way off base to make James Forrestal a bad guy in his book. If Forrestal had been listened to when he was Secretary of the Navy, I said, we would never have committed the greatest war crime in human history, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because a negotiated surrender would have already taken place. Furthermore, there would have been no Korean War, because the surrender would have taken place before the Russians entered the war against the Japanese and they wouldn’t have had the chance to grab half of Korea. That was Forrestal’s primary interest in hastening the surrender of the Japanese, who knew that they were thoroughly defeated by the end of 1944.

  Knowing from experience that moderator Barbara Meade was poised to cut me off by demanding that I ask a question or sit down, I then asked this: “On the matter of Forrestal’s death, why would you rely exclusively on three books, one of which was published by the John Birch Society over a pseudonym and none of which has any direct evidence from anyone who was on Forrestal’s floor of the hospital around about the time he went out the window? Why would you do that when the long-secret official report on his death, which does have the testimony of the witness
es, has been on the web site of the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University since the fall of 2004?”

  At that point Carroll, not challenging my initial statement in support of Forrestal’s peace role with respect to Japan, offered to give some background to my question. I interjected with the background that Forrestal had been committed to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for some sort of breakdown and had been kept there involuntarily for seven weeks before going out a 16th floor window in the wee hours of May 22, 1949.

  The background he had in mind, responded Carroll, was that the fatal fall of a prominent Czech anti-Communist leader not too long before Forrestal’s fall was thought by many people to be an assassination, so this could easily lead people to be suspicious of Forrestal’s death. “But does the report say anything different from what is in the books?” he asked (He gave the impression that he was hearing about the Willcutts Report for the very first time and asked me to come up and tell him more after the questions and book signing were over.).

  “Indeed, it does,” I responded. “For one thing it has among its exhibits the handwritten transcription of a morbid poem that served as Forrestal’s ‘suicide note,’ and it was clearly written in a hand other than Forrestal’s. You and the books also say that Forrestal was paranoid, but none of the Bethesda doctors who testified ever described him as paranoid, or even used the words “paranoid” or “paranoia.”

  “So, if he was killed, who do you think killed him?” asked Carroll.

  “You want me to solve the crime?” I asked, knowing that there would be no opportunity to build any kind of a case in that venue.