The Assassination of James Forrestal
Page 28
He began loftily, saying that he couldn’t see much purpose in discussing the matter of Forrestal’s death with me because my interpretation of events was “a bit too creative” for him. He allowed as how, from his quick look at the Willcutts Report that it was clear from the doctors’ views that Forrestal “was depressed and very suicidal.” The main question at issue in the report, it seemed to him, was whether the victim had attempted to hang himself from the window or had merely jumped. The number of times Forrestal had actually attempted to kill himself before he regarded as little more than a quibble, which could only be ascertained by examining Drew Pearson’s notes on his Hobe Sound sources, something for which he lacked the time. He also volunteered that the report confirmed that Forrestal would have had no way of knowing what Pearson was writing or saying about him during his hospitalization, absolving Pearson of blame, I suppose, for driving Forrestal to suicide, as others such as West brook Pegler had suggested.
He then concluded in the same tone with which he began, and with finality: “It’s a free country and a free internet. I don’t see any reason to alter what I wrote.”
As one might imagine, his response got my juices flowing. It was evident that either he had spent very little time with the Willcutts Report and even less with my “creative interpretations,” or he had shown himself to be quite lacking in critical faculties. I responded on the same day, immediately upon receiving the email:
Dear Professor Kaiser,
May I take it, then, that with regard to whether or not Forrestal committed suicide, you consider of no consequence the revelations that:
1. the handwriting of the transcribed poem, which, for the press, served as his suicide note, does not resemble Forrestal's at all
2. that broken glass was on his bed and on the carpet at the foot of the bed
3. that Forrestal's room was not photographed until many hours after he was found dead and that when it was it did not resemble the room that the nurse who first got a good look at the vacated room described. The photos show a bed with nothing but a bare mattress and pillow on them, whereas Nurse Turner testified that, as one might expect, "The bed clothes were turned back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and [the slippers] were right there as you get out of bed." No slippers or any other sign that the room had been occupied are evident in the photographs, either.
4. that the influential biographer, Arnold Rogow, apparently fabricated the story that the guard saw Forrestal transcribing the mor-bid poem when he last looked in on him, because the guard testified that when he last looked in the room Forrestal was apparently sleeping and the lights had been off and Forrestal apparently did no reading or writing during the guard's time of duty which began at midnight
5. that the influential newspapers reporting on the death apparently fabricated the story that the transcription ended in the middle of the word "nightingale" or, depending on which article in The Washington Post you read, the transcription included the lines, “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.”
6. that the findings of the Willcutts Report were not issued until several months had passed and then, the findings did not include the conclusion that Forrestal had committed suicide
7. that photographs of Forrestal's body were first withheld from the FOIAed material on the grounds that they might disturb Forrestal's surviving loved ones, and when told that there were no surviving loved ones the Navy changed its story and claimed that they were lost
8. that the book from which Forrestal supposedly copied the damning poem does not appear in official evidence nor is the supposed discoverer of either the book or the transcription ever officially identified
9. that the Willcutts Report was kept secret for 55 years, when its whole purpose was to clear the air and establish the facts publicly concerning the nature of Forrestal's death?
Surely, with respect to Drew Pearson's credibility, you don't believe, as you imply, that it is immaterial that Pearson wrote that Forrestal had made four suicide attempts, the last of which such attempts had occurred right there at Bethesda Naval Hospital, when those claims are contradicted by the Bethesda doctors and Pearson had no details or named sources for his claims?
I must say that I am amazed that it is I, in contrast to Pearson, that you regard as the "creative" one when it comes to interpreting the evidence surrounding Forrestal's death. What I have done is to analyze the evidence carefully, with a skeptical eye. Doing so, I certainly do not conclude as you do (see Part 2), that, "The doctors explain in great detail that he was depressed and very suicidal."166 Only Captain Raines, whose credibility is called into question by many other things he said, claimed that he was suicidal, and the second in command of the doctors, Captain Stephen Smith, appears to contradict him. That he does contradict him, even apparently with respect to the "depressed" diagnosis, is reinforced by the unpublished manuscript of the Time magazine writer, John Osborne, as I mention in my previously-referenced letter to Douglas Brinkley. Furthermore, there seems to be virtual unanimity among those who saw Forrestal near to the time of his death that he seemed to be quite normal by that time. That was the reason given for relaxing the guard and allowing access to belts, razor blades, etc., after all.167
Finally, I am puzzled by your assertion, for what it is worth, "that there is no way that Forrestal could have read or heard about what Pearson had broadcast and written during his hospitalization." Could he not have heard about it from any number of visitors, particularly his wife, or from letters? This is from testimony by Captain Raines that I quote in Part 2:
"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 exposed 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."
In sum, based upon how you have handled the evidence up to now, it's possible that you may not actually see any reason to alter anything that you have written, but I surely do. As at least your figure of speech would have it, though, it's a free country.
Sincerely,
David Martin, Ph.D.
Several years have now gone by and it has become pretty clear that Professor Kaiser has taken refuge in the tall grass and will not be further heard from, content, apparently, in the belief that power effectively trumps truth.
With the floor now all to myself, may I note a further error in Kaiser's admittedly incomplete reading of the Willcutts Report? With respect to the question of what caused Forrestal's death, he says, "...the only doubt seemed to be about whether he purposely jumped out the window or was trying to hang himself."
In fact, the question was never addressed in those terms. How could it have been? Surely no one suggested that Forrestal went to the trouble to tie a bathrobe belt tightly around his neck before jumping, freestyle and untethered, out the 16th floor window. What purpose, then, could the belt tied to his neck have possibly served?
One must wonder if this is the sort of critical thinking that Professor Kaiser is teaching America's leading Naval officers to apply to important historical events. What must he tell them, for instance, about the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty?168
In our exchanges I also failed to mention one of the worst of Drew Pearson's slanders of Forrestal. Here is the account from Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal:
Pearson had, in fact, decided to fire his heaviest ammunition in a radio broadcast on April 9 [1949]. He charged that Forrestal, awakened by the sound of a fire siren (on the night of April 1 at Hobe Sound), had rushed out of his cottage screaming, "The Russians are attacking." He defined Forrestal's condition as "temporary insanity." In subsequent newspaper columns he asserted that Forrestal made
three suicide at-tempts while in Florida—by drug overdose, by hanging, and by slashing his wrists. According to a later statement by [Navy psychiatrist Captain George] Raines, all of these assertions were lies.169
Since Raines was the one doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital who maintained in his testimony to the Willcutts Review Board that Forrestal was suicidal and would therefore be more likely to embrace any story that buttressed his case, his debunking of Pearson's unsupported claims carries particular weight.
So much for Professor Kaiser's journalistic "giant."
Christopher Sharrett
In early February of 2008 I discovered another article (which I cannot now locate) that said that James Forrestal committed suicide. Since the article by tenured professor of communications at Seton Hall University, Christopher Sharrett, boldly challenged the official line in the John F. Kennedy assassination, the prospects seemed bright that we might have found someone who would actually be excited over my Forrestal discoveries and would publicly embrace my conclusion that Forrestal was assassinated. On February 3 I sent the following email to his Seton Hall address:
Dear Professor Sharrett,
I just ran across your 1999 article on the Net in which you characterize the John Kennedy assassination as a coup d’état. You are quite right, of course. I drew the same conclusion in a poem called “Barren Summit” on the 40th anniversary of the killing.170 It was a coup that involved the active participation of our press, as you can see here, and other important opinion molders.171 See "Chomsky, the Fraud" and "Martin Lies about Kennedy Assassination" for samples of the latter.172 As Gregory Treverton has written, "Propaganda is the bread and butter of covert action."
Unfortunately, and I hope inadvertently, you have perpetuated some of that pernicious propaganda with one statement that you make in the article, and I quote:
"The national security state's lapdogs in the press, including Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, ridiculed Forrestal, terming him a 'liar and a coward.' Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually committed suicide."
The first sentence is true; the second sentence is false. Writing as you were in 1999, you certainly had a good excuse for making such a mistake. At that time, the only thing written that seriously questioned the conventional wisdom of suicide in James Forrestal's case was a very obscure book published by the John Birch Society, The Death of James Forrestal, by someone taking the nom de plume of "Cornell Simpson."
Fortunately, with the ready availability of the Internet, you can easily set the record straight and sever the connection between your professional reputation and a gigantic historical lie. To be sure, there has been a degree of stubbornness in which other residents of the groves of academe have clung to the lie, as I document in Part 5 of "Who Killed James Forrestal?"173
Your article on the Kennedy assassination suggests to me that you might be different. I hope that I am right.
Sincerely,
David Martin
My email was greeted with silence from Professor Sharrett, so I wrote him on February 14 as follows:
Dear Professor Sharrett,
Almost two weeks have now gone by, and I have had no response to my email to you notifying you of the serious historical error you have in your article of the Kennedy assassination, and I have had no response. Perhaps I should ask you what, if anything, you plan to do to correct the error. I await your response.
Sincerely,
David Martin
The chance that Professor Sharrett will take up the cause of justice for James Forrestal now appears remote. It is not only his failure to respond to my emails that leads me to that conclusion. Perhaps he never received them for some reason. The full paragraph of his article in which the quote about Forrestal's "suicide" appears is telling:
Cold War propaganda gave legitimacy to the national security state, although debate raged on within state and private power against the backdrop of the sleepy fifties. Many felt that the creation of the "garrison state" would bring about an enormous deficit and weaken us in relation to our Western capitalist rivals. Kennedy was not the first victim of the fierce internecine battles that began almost immediately with the creation of the national security state. Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal became a victim in 1949 of what was referred to as "the revolt of the admirals." As each sector of the military fought over their share of public revenues, with the Joint Chiefs "at each other's throat" in a climate of unbridled avarice, Forrestal attempted at least to inject a note of civility as the military sensed its unprecedented authority. Forrestal was eventually "ground down by the bickering and backstabbing in the Pentagon." He was "under constant attack from the admirals and generals he supposedly commanded." The national security state's lapdogs in the press, including Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, ridiculed Forrestal, terming him a "liar and a coward." Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually committed suicide.
If Forrestal was under fire from the press, led by Winchell and Pearson, it was not because of his earnest efforts to bring order to the Pentagon, but because of his principled position against the creation of the state of Israel. Winchell was a cold warrior, but Pearson was not; he came a lot closer to being pro-Communist. The big thing that the two had in common, as we have seen, was that they were strong Zionist partisans.
Although he goes a step further than either of them when it comes to pursuit of the truth in the JFK assassination, Sharrett's "national security state" boilerplate—so reminiscent of The Washington Post in its 50th anniversary article—and his studied avoidance of the outsized role of the Zionists in Forrestal's demise suggest that he is in the same faux leftist league as the aforementioned Noam Chomsky and the notorious James Carroll.
A blurb from Sharrett's employer, Seton Hall University, is also revealing. "Sharrett frequently works with media," it says, "and has been interviewed by such widely known national news media as The History Channel, USA Today, Dallas Morning News and FOXNews.com."
These organizations are not exactly known for their pursuit of the truth in the Kennedy assassination or in any other major scandal, for that matter. When these propagandists publicly consult Professor Sharrett, they must know that the expertise that he brings to bear is not in unvarnished truth-seeking.
Forrestal Killing More Sensitive than JFK’s?
Scores of books have been written challenging the conclusions of the Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy. As of this date, the only people doing any serious original research into the preposterous “suicide” story in Forrestal’s case are the present writer and two people choosing to remain anonymous, “Cornell Simpson” and “Mark Hunter,” the proprietor of the Ariwatch.com web site.174 Had I kept those facts in mind, I probably would have not been so disappointed in the brush-off I received from Professor Sharrett.
We jump ahead to 2015 and across the Atlantic to Great Britain for another example of a writer who would freely take issue with the authorities over the JFK murder while parroting the popular propaganda line with respect to Forrestal. We are talking about John Simkin.
Perhaps it’s just too ambitious a project for one man to carry on. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:
Spartacus Educational is a free online encyclopedia with essays and other educational material on a wide variety of historical subjects (including British History and the History of the USA, as well as other subjects including the First World War, Second World War, Russian Revolution, Slavery, Women's Suffrage, Nazi Germany, Spanish Civil War, and The Cold War). It is used by history teachers and students.
Based in the UK, Spartacus Educational was established as a book publisher in 1984 by former history teacher, John Simkin, and Judith Harris. It became an online publisher in September 1997.
A survey carried out by the Fischer Family Trust showed that the Spartacus Educational website was used by more history students in the UK than any other website, including that of the BBC. The Spartacus Educational website is recommended by
a number of online educational resources, such as Manchester Metropolitan University, SchoolHistory.co.uk, Science and You, and St Mary's College, Hull.
At some point Judith Harris seems to have fallen by the wayside be-cause Simkin’s is the only name currently appearing on the site. I have not spent enough time at the site to profess to be any sort of an authority on its overall probity. Simkin’s willingness to look with seriousness at alternative explanations to the Warren Report for President John F. Kennedy’s assassination certainly marks him as a cut above anything one is likely to find associated with the establishment press in the United States. On the other hand, those school endorsements and what Simkin has to say about himself on his home page make him look very much like a member of the British establishment:
As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project(E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.
It is rather obvious that he toes the U.S. establishment line on Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s apparent assassination—calling it a suicide—is because it is a lot hotter political potato than JFK’s assassination.
The “hot potato” factor, then, is probably the best explanation for the fact that what Simkin has to say about Forrestal’s death is little different from what one would find in the U.S. mainstream. It is not consistent with the evidence that I have discovered, though. On his biography page Simkin writes, “If you find any mistakes on any of my web pages please send details to: john@spartacus-educational.com.” I accepted his invitation and sent him the following email:
Hi John,