The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  We have seen previously that Dr. Raines was probably misleading in his explanation for the corpsman leaving Forrestal's room. Now he volunteers that the copied poem appears to be done in Forrestal's handwriting, when, in fact, the handwriting looks nothing like Forrestal's (See enclosures.). You and other commentators have also made much of the "fact" that the transcription cuts off in the middle of the word "nightingale." The one included in the exhibits sent to me, however, ends 11 lines before the line with the word "nightingale" in it is reached. I wrote the Navy's Judge Advocate General's office, the people who supplied me with the Willcutts Report, and asked them if they were sure that they had sent me the entire transcription, noting that all published accounts had said that more of the poem was copied. I received no reply.

  In addition to the handwriting enclosures, I have enclosed some of the forensic photographs of Forrestal's room. The proper time to take them would have been between 2 and 3 am, while everything was as Forrestal had left it. You will notice from the angle of the light entering the room that the photographs were taken some 8 hours or more later, and that all bedclothes have been stripped from the bed. The elapsed time has clearly been used for tampering with the "crime scene.”

  In announcements that I have seen about your new Theodore Roosevelt Center, you say that one of the things you'd like to do would be to organize symposia around important topics in American history. Might I suggest that this would be a very good way to get a lot of important facts cleared up with respect to Forrestal's death? It could also be an opportunity for the public to get insights into how professional historians and biographers go about their work.

  I would be particularly interested to hear about your use of the undated, unpublished outline of a manuscript by John Osborne to describe the goings on before and after midnight on the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of Forrestal's death. As you know, in the contemporary newspaper accounts and in previous books about Forrestal, there was only one naval corpsman with primary responsibility for Forrestal on duty through all of those key hours. The newspapers and the author Cornell Simpson say that this person's shift began at 9:00 pm. For the author Arnold Rogow, the corpsman who earlier reported that Forrestal had declined his sleeping pill and the corpsman on duty when Forrestal went out the window were the same person, consistent with Simpson and the newspaper accounts. Osborne says, on the other hand, that there were three shifts for Forrestal's primary attendant, and he concentrates on the account of the one whose shift, he says, ended at midnight.

  I would very much like to know how you came across this Osborne material and why you chose to believe that he was correct and the other accounts were not with respect to the guard shifts. As it happens, Os-borne was right about that, as verified by the Willcutts Report. He even has the corpsman's name spelled correctly, Edward Prise, while the Willcutts Report spells it Price incorrectly throughout. Osborne is also consistent with the Review Board testimony of Captain Stephen Smith, read somewhat between the lines, when he reports 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..." This is quite a revelation, by the way, though it went unreported in your book.

  On the other hand, Osborne says that he has interviewed "every person known to have been with Forrestal after his collapse and now alive and available..." and the only person he cites to lend credence to the suicide thesis is the corpsman Prise, whose evidence is based on nothing more than his worries, noted above, over Forrestal's restlessness, and his presumed clairvoyance: "In his barracks room, two hours after he left Forrestal, Prise cannot go to sleep. He dresses; he is walking across the hospital yard to a canteen for a cup of coffee when he becomes aware of commotion all about him. Instantly, he knows."

  This, I trust that you recognize, is really no evidence at all. Perhaps Osborne, his editor, or his potential publisher recognized it as well, which might explain why his work was never published. One must also wonder what all those witnesses who were actually on duty at the time of Forrestal's death had to say to Mr. Osborne and why he chose to cite none of them, and why he had nothing to say about the celebrated poem transcription.

  Would you not agree that it is much better to live in a country whose history is based upon openness and truth rather than on secrecy and lies? I look forward to hearing what plans you might have to correct the historical record, now that so much more evidence is available than when you and Townsend Hoopes wrote your Forrestal biography.

  Sincerely,

  David Martin

  Professor Brinkley never responded to the letter, just as he did not call me after he promised to do so after our encounter at the Politics and Prose bookstore. It is hard to escape the conclusion that his later skipping out of the reception at Catholic University had something to do with these two previous failures.

  Letter to David Roll

  November 1, 2005

  Mr. David Roll

  Steptoe & Johnson

  1330 Connecticut Avenue, NW

  Washington, DC 20036

  Dear Mr. Roll,

  As you will recall, during the question and answer period following your October 18 Eisenhower Institute presentation on your new book, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, co-written with Keith McFarland, I noted that new research had shown that an observation of yours on page 153 is entirely incorrect. The passage, which follows, was written to support the popular conclusion, which your book endorses, that Johnson’s predecessor as Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, had committed suicide:

  “But everyone knew [Forrestal] was deeply disturbed. Moments before his death, he was copying Sophocles’ poem ‘The Chorus from Ajax,’ in which Ajax, forlorn and ‘worn by the waste of time,’ contemplates suicide.”

  With respect to the first sentence, I noted that those who worked most closely with Forrestal certainly did not “know” that he was “deeply disturbed.” Most notable among them was his top assistant, Marx Leva. This comes from the oral history interview of Leva by Stephen Hess found on the web site of the Truman Library:

  HESS: What do you recall about the unfortunate mental breakdown that overtook Mr. Forrestal?

  LEVA: Well, I may have been in the position of not being able to see the forest for the trees because I was seeing him six, eight, ten, twelve times a day and both in and out of the office. A lot of his friends have said since his death, "Oh, we saw it coming," and, "We knew this and we knew that." The only thing that I knew was that he was terribly tired, terribly overworked, spending frequently literally sixteen hours and eighteen hours a day trying to administer an impossible mechanism, worrying about the fact that a lot of it was of his own creation. I knew that he was tired, I begged him to take time off. I'm sure that others begged him to take time off.

  http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/leva.htm.

  In your defense, you said that you had relied completely upon Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley for information concerning Forrestal’s death. However, Leva’s observations are reinforced by this quote from page 426 of their book:

  “Given the extent and pace of his decline, it is astonishing that col-leagues at the Pentagon, including members of his inner staff, failed to recognize it. In retrospect they attribute their failure to Forrestal’s formidable self-control, his brusque, impersonal method of dealing with staff, and the simple fact that they saw him too frequently to note much change in his condition or demeanor. “

  Though Hoopes and Brinkley do not support your claim concerning what everyone knew about Forrestal, they are clearly the source for the account of Forrestal transcribing a specific morbid poem “moments before his death.” They are proved to be wrong on this point, however, by recently uncovered evidence. Their sole source for the claim that Forrestal was actually seen copying the poem shortly befor
e he plunged from a 16th floor window was Arnold Rogow, in his book, James Forrestal, a Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy. Rogow, though, has no source at all, and it is no wonder, because it is now clear that he made the story up. The naval corpsman who was in charge of Forrestal’s security and who was the witness, according to Rogow, of the transcribing incident, testified that Forrestal did no reading while he was on duty and that the last time he looked in, Forrestal was apparently sleeping in the darkened room. That is precisely the time, 1:45 a.m., that Rogow says that the corpsman saw Forrestal busy copying the poem.

  The following passage comes from testimony of Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, who came on duty at 11:45 p.m. the night of Forrestal’s death. It has only been available since its release through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004:

  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.

  And this comes a little later in Apprentice Harrison’s testimony:

  Q. Did Mister Forrestal appear cheerful or depressed in the time that you observed him?

  A. He appeared neither, sir.

  Q. Did Mister Forrestal do any reading?

  A. Not while I was on watch, sir.

  It goes without saying that if he did no reading, he did no copying from any books. So much for the statement as to what Forrestal was doing “moments before his death.”

  Actually, what we now know amounts to far more than a mere quibble over the timing of Forrestal’s actions. On October 18, 2005, I gave you a copy of the handwritten transcription that appears among the exhibits accompanying the official investigation, along with a couple of samples of Forrestal’s handwriting that I obtained separately from the Truman Library. These can be found at http://www.dcdave.com/article4/041103.htm. From a mere glance one can easily see that the lines of the poem were copied by someone other than Forrestal.

  Nevertheless, with this evidence in hand, at a presentation at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, on October 29 you made the statement that internecine squabbling within the newly-created Defense Department contributed to Forrestal’s demise and ultimate “suicide.” Afterward, you will recall, I told you that you could not possibly still be maintaining that Forrestal committed suicide if you had examined the evidence that I had given you more than a week before. You replied that you had not yet looked at the evidence.

  I’m sure that your clients would expect you to be a good deal better prepared to defend them than you were to defend what you have written in your book and repeated in your book-promoting presentation. At the very least, I should think you would have exhibited just a little bit of natural, human curiosity. Perhaps it is that old saying about feline curiosity that has prevented you from wanting to know the truth, even when you are on record with a demonstrably untrue statement.

  Fortunately, your co-author, Keith McFarland, whom you seem to have protected from the evidence I gave you, participated with you in that Politics and Prose presentation. He told me that he was “open-minded” and that he has told his students in the past that history writing is an ongoing process and that we should always be prepared to revise our views as we learn more. Let us hope that he is as good as his word in this case and that you and he will soon take steps to correct your error.

  Might I remind you that James Forrestal was the leading government official warning against pursuit of the foreign policy that has us in our current mess in the Middle East? I realize that, to many, that is ample reason why the news that he did not commit suicide, but was actually assassinated, should be suppressed. But to anyone interested in truth and justice and concerned about the fate of this country and the world, it is even greater reason why this unpleasant news should be spread widely and quickly. Anyone who, at this late date, has perpetuated the false story of Forrestal’s suicide has a special obligation to set the record straight.

  Sincerely,

  David Martin

  cc: Dr. Keith McFarland

  As noted at the beginning, this letter led to an unproductive lunch meeting with Roll, but I never heard anything further from Professor McFarland, who was at the time president of Texas A & M University Commerce.

  __________

  160 Keith D. McFarland and David L. Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America: The Roosevelt and Truman Years, Indiana University Press, 2005.

  161 http://ariwatch.com/VS/JamesForrestal/WillcuttsReport.htm.

  162 https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC051/c04531.

  CHAPTER 9

  Academic Ostriches

  Academic Ostriches

  Bring up the death of Forrestal

  Historians run and hide.

  They’d like to believe Count Bernadotte

  Committed suicide.

  David E. Kaiser, with both a bachelors and a Ph. D. from Harvard University, was a professor in the strategy and policy department of the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1990 to 2012. He has a blog entitled “History Unfolding” with the subtitle, “A historian’s comments on current events, foreign and domestic.” We discovered that on December 18, 2005, he had written favorably there on Drew Pearson and his attacks on Forrestal. This was more than a year after the release of the Willcutts Report, yet Kaiser routinely described Forrestal's death as a "suicide" in the process of praising the execrable Pearson. Hoping that his intentions might not be all that bad and that he had simply been misguided, perhaps by his ideology or by lack of information, we wrote him as follows on December 13, 2007:

  Dear Professor Kaiser,

  I thought you would like to know that a couple of days ago I left a comment on your December 18, 2005 "History Unfolding" blog at http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2005/12/they-were-giants-in-those-days.html. The title of your article is "They were giants in those days," and you are referring primarily, and most appallingly as I see it, to the journalist, Drew Pearson. Here is my comment:

  Your admiration for the smear specialist, Drew Pearson, is, in my opinion, completely misplaced. Nowhere are you more off the mark than in the following quote:

  "During early 1949 Pearson had been writing that James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, was mentally unstable, and eventually he reported correctly that Forrestal had tried to commit suicide."

  Pearson did, indeed, write scurrilous things about Forrestal, including that he consciously cowered in his New York apartment while his wife was assaulted outside it, which was not true. It is also not true that Forrestal had attempted suicide. The day after Forrestal's death from a fall from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Pearson reported that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts. That claim, according to the doctors who treated Forrestal at Bethesda, was also false.

  Looking at Pearson's record, I tend to agree with what President Franklin Roosevelt wrote about him in a letter to General Patrick Hurley on August 30, 1943, "His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a pity that anyone anywhere believes anything that he writes."

  You might regard my words as a bit harsh, but, all things considered, I think that I have been quite forbearing. You went on to say, after all, that Forrestal did commit suicide shortly after the purported attempt, and you wrote those words near the end of 2005. Here's what I had to say about the author, James Carroll, on my web site: "Anyone who would write about Forrestal’s death in 2006 and ignore completely the evidence contained in the Willcutts Report would have to be very irresponsible, indeed." See “James Carroll on James Forresatal.”163 The Willcutts Report is the long suppressed official investigation of Forrestal's death, made public with a press release by the Seeley Mudd Library of Princeton University in the late summer of 2004 [Sic. Writing fr
om memory, I forgot that the library did not send out its press release until a couple of months after posting the report on its web site.]. One can readily see why the report had been kept secret.164 The information it contains thoroughly undermines the case for Forrestal's suicide.

  Although you were writing at about the same time as Carroll, you are perhaps less at fault for getting your facts wrong. You were writing only a short article whose subject was mainly Drew Pearson. Carroll, in his book about the Pentagon, on the other hand, writes about Forrestal at considerable length. Your scholarly reputation is also a good deal higher than his, so I am proceeding upon the assumption that you have simply made an honest mistake. Carroll, on the other hand, is well beyond such consideration. I conclude in my article that Carroll is clearly a conscious spreader of lies:

  "As those of us who care about truth and justice in this country have discovered more about the alarming facts surrounding Forrestal’s death, the molders of public opinion are working overtime to see that what the American public thinks it knows about the death is, in fact, false. The opinion molders have chosen the right man to spread the falsehoods."

  With my following sentence, which concludes the essay, I might well have been writing about someone like you:

  "How long will we have to wait for a recognized scholar, who is also honest, to take up the subject?"

  When I was able to get through on C-Span to Forrestal biographer Douglas Brinkley and fault him for failing to mention that there was even such a thing as an official investigation of Forrestal's death, much less that it had been kept secret, he responded that he would consider correcting his omission if there were a paperback edition. See “Letters Concerning James Forrestal.”165 That is the advantage of having a blog. You don't have to wait for such an opportunity.

  Sincerely,

  David Martin

  Sadly, exactly one week later, Professor Kaiser revealed that he was not at all the sort of person I was looking for by responding peremptorily and dismissively—not to say insultingly. Perhaps he considered it his prerogative as a Harvard man.