by David Martin
I think that it is about time that you corrected your conclusion on your James Forrestal page that Forrestal "committed suicide by throwing himself out of a 16th floor hospital window."175 I see that you updated the page in August of last year, but when you did so you must have overlooked virtually everything that I have discovered in recent years, particularly the official transcript of the Navy's inquiry into his death.176 I was able to obtain that inquiry through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004. The fact that it had been kept secret for 55 years should be enough to raise anyone's suspicion as to the veracity of the conclusion of suicide.
Please note that I do not say official conclusion of suicide. That inquiry, which we may call the Willcutts Report after the convening officer of the board of inquiry, Admiral Morton C. Willcutts, may be considered the government's last word on Forrestal's death, and it did not conclude that Forrestal committed suicide. It concluded only that the cause of his death was the fall from the window and that no member of the Navy had any responsibility for that fall.
Your statement that he "threw himself" from the window is not even consistent with the conclusion reached by the press in the matter. A bathrobe belt was tied around Forrestal's neck. The newspapers at-tempted to account for it by saying that he must have been attempting to hang himself from the 16th floor window by tying one end to the radiator beneath the window and then climbing out the window to hang himself--as if the long plummet would not do the job. Various writers on the subject have said that the belt either broke, came untied, or unexplainably just "gave way." The Willcutts Report in its conclusion—like anyone who says simply that Forrestal jumped or threw himself out the window—makes no attempt to account for the presence of the belt. They address the belt only by implication, concluding that the fall rather than the belt had killed him. And, oh yes, they do conclude that the belt was intact and had not broken.
The list of what you call “primary sources” is really nothing of the sort. They are secondary sources. The best primary source on Forrestal's death at this point is the Willcutts Report. You will also find there a copy of the morbid poem that Forrestal was said to have been transcribing shortly before his plunge from the window. I have found copies of Forrestal's handwriting and it is evident that someone else did that transcription. Your "primary source," biographer Arnold Rogow, wrote that the navy corpsman guarding Forrestal's room had witnessed him doing the transcribing, but in his testimony to the Willcutts review board, the corpsman said that the room had been dark the entire time he was on duty and he had seen no reading or writing going on. Rogow had no source for his clearly fabricated assertion.
You also cite the scandalous columnist Drew Pearson as an authority for several of his negative assertions about Forrestal. No source could be less reliable. Pearson also claimed that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts, an obvious falsehood with no source for the claim. For more about Pearson’s spurious assertions see my article "Oliver Stone on James Forrestal."177
If you will examine only the short articles to which I have referred you, I am sure you will conclude that the claim that Forrestal threw himself from that hospital window is not the truth; rather, it is what one would expect from the Ministry of Truth.
Dave178
As you might expect, in spite of his public invitation to anyone who would offer corrections to any mistakes he might have made, Simkin gave me the Professor Sharrett treatment and ignored me. His Forrestal page remains completely unchanged. Maybe the late Don Bohning was right when he wrote in 2008, “In the guise of education, John Simkin’s website delivers agitprop.”179 Says Bohning, “It takes a little digging to figure out Simkin is much more interested in indoctrination than education, in keeping with his unreconstructed left-wing views. Simkin exemplifies the kind of militant socialists, once peculiar to the Labour Party, who were all but run out of that party by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”
If Simkin is an ideologically blinded left-winger as Bohning describes him, maybe that would explain his different treatment of the Forrestal and Kennedy deaths. The Kennedy assassination is generally regarded to be more of a left-wing issue, certainly more than the suspicious death of the dedicated anti-Communist Forrestal, about which only the Birch Society has published a critical book.
Though Simkin did nothing to refute the specific charges that Bohning leveled at him, Bohning did not get out of the exchange unscathed. Simkin revealed that Bohning had been an informant for the CIA while working as a reporter for the Miami Herald.180
I can assure you that Simkin will be unable to find any such dirty linen in this writer’s closet, and that he will likely simply remain silent and leave his Forrestal page unchanged. The best bet, in other words, is that his reaction will be no different from what one would expect from an employee of the Ministry of Truthin George Orwell’s 1984.
We also had unsatisfactory exchanges with Donald A. Ritchie, U.S. Senate Historian; Nickolas Roth of the Nuclear Files Peace Foundation; and Loren Ghiglione, the Richard Schwarzlose Professor of Media Ethics at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism concerning errors in their writing about Drew Pearson and Forrestal’s death. Those ex-changes can be found at “Who Killed James Forrestal, Part 5.”181 Further letters of complaint to the Arlington Cemetery and Find a Grave web sites, producing no results, are at “Persistent Lies about James Forrestal.”182
__________
163 http://www.dcdave.com/article5/060609.htm.
164 https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC051/c04531.
165 http://www.dcdave.com/article4/060102.htm.
166 “Who Killed James Forrestal?” Part 2, http://dcdave.com/article4/040922.html.
167 My “Part 2” reference is to the second installment of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” http://dcdave.com/article4/040922.html.
168 See “Remember the Liberty” http://dcdave.com/article5/170608.htm.
169 Hoopes and Brinkley, pp. 455-456.
170 http://www.dcdave.com/poet12/031122.html.
171 “Fake Media Critic?” http://www.dcdave.com/article3/990808.html.
172 http://www.dcdave.com/article4/010318a.html; http://www.dcdave.com/article3/010122.html.
173 http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080113.htm.
174 We purposely exclude those writers who claim that Forrestal was killed because of what he knew about the Roswell UFO incident. All these people have contributed is a possible motive for his assassination, which is most likely a distraction from the much more obvious real one. They have broken no new ground at all as to the particulars of Forrestal’s death. I detest the expression, “conspiracy theorist,” but there are instances where it might just be fitting. See Richard Dolan’s September 18, 2018, YouTube presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKPtUc4MJQ.
175 https://spartacus-educational.com/USAforrestal.htm.
176 http://dcdave.com/article4/040927.html.
177 www.dcdave.com/article5/151016.htm.
178 http://ariwatch.com/Links/DCDave.htm#JamesForrestal.
179 Don Bohning, “Indoctrination U,” June 11, 2008, http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2008/06/simkin.html.
180 https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbohning.htm.
181 http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080113.htm.
182 http://www.dcdave.com/article5/150108.htm.
CHAPTER 10
Oliver Stone on Forrestal
Orwell Lives
I never thought that I’d learn how it feels
To experience dystopia in action,
But it’s day after day of spinning your wheels:
The truth can’t get any traction.
One need not spend the time slogging through all 784 pages of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States to realize that what you are going to get is what one might call “approved establishment-left history.”183 It might as well have been co-written by Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman or a team of writers from Z Magazine. (Wh
o knows? Maybe it was, or by a team at Langley, Virginia.) In fact, Goodman has already given the co-authors a softball promotional interview on her program.184
To an awful lot of people these days, by far the biggest untold story in American history concerns what really happened on September 11, 2001. By that litmus test, at a book presentation in California, in the view of one of the attendees, the authors are complete failures, if not phonies.185 But they do pass the establishment-left test with flying colors.
That they have the ruling establishment’s stamp of approval is shown by the fact that the book was piped into lots of homes by the Showtime cable-TV network in the form of a 10-part mini-series. Showtime is owned by CBS, which is really all that we need to know.186 Superficially, there would appear to be a bit of a contradiction here in that CBS has been a leader in attacking any challenge to the official lone-nut and magic-bullet story of the John Kennedy assassination, when Stone’s movie JFK is still probably the best known such challenge. Stone, though, in this instance, along with American University history professor Kuznick, is primarily wearing his left-liberal, virtually pro-Communist hat. Recall that it was CBS and their newsman Edward R. Murrow who did the big hatchet job on anti-Communist crusader Senator Joe McCarthy, as celebrated by the movie, Good Night and Good Luck.187 If anti-anti-Communism is primarily what you’re hawking, Showtime is the natural platform from which to hawk it.
And if you’re gunning primarily at American anti-Communism in the mid-20th century, the godfather of the movement, James Forrestal, must also be in the crosshairs.188 Forrestal, as we have seen, was a formidable man, one of the most talented, hard-working, farsighted public servants this country has ever had. They say he killed himself, but we have demonstrated beyond any serious doubt that he was assassinated. In spite of all the falsehoods that we have revealed in the mainstream press’s story of Forrestal’s demise, Stone and Kuznick show us that focus upon this supposed “suicide” remains the primary means by which his persistent enemies attack his message. Nothing sums up the approach better than the caption under their photograph of Forrestal on page 225:
The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, suffered a nervous breakdown and, tormented by his own anti-Communist paranoia, committed suicide, jumping from his sixteenth floor room at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The core supporting text is as follows:
Drew Pearson informed his radio audience that Forrestal was “out of his mind” after Forrestal was discovered in the street and shouting, “The Russians are coming!” He believed that the Russians had invaded the United States. Pearson later reported that during his brief stay in Florida, Forrestal had attempted suicide four times by hanging, slashing his wrists, and taking sleeping pills. (pp. 224-225)
Alone in his room, he suffered constant nightmares. He thought he would suffer the same fate as Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk—to be pushed out of a window. But his condition began to improve, and on the night of May 22, 1949, he stayed up late copying Sophocles’ “The Chorus from Ajax,” in which the hero ponders his fate far from home. At the word “nightingale” he put his pen down and jumped. (p. 226)
Their references are a newspaper article by the scurrilous Pearson and Boston Globe establishment-left journalist, James Carroll’s2006 book, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of Pentagon Power. How’s that for scholarship? They would have done a lot better with Wikipedia.
The reference to Carroll is page 151 of his book, which is in Chapter 3 entitled “The Cold War Begins” with section heading titles like “Forrestal Agonistes,” “Foundational Paranoia,” and “The Russians are Coming,” which encompasses page 151. Sure enough, referring to Forrestal’s brief stay in Hobe Sound, Florida, at the estate of Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett, Carroll has this passage:
Rumors flew around Washington. One radio report had it that Forrestal was found in his pajamas a few blocks from Lovett’s house, and he was calling out, “The Russians are coming!”
At that point Carroll has an endnote, which Stone and Kuznick have apparently chosen not to have noticed. Carroll’s reference is to page 739 of David McCullough’s Truman, but he adds the following:
Drew Pearson was the source of this report. His previous vilifications of Forrestal make the report unreliable, but Forrestal’s mental illness definitely included delusions that the Soviets had invaded the United States. See also Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 451, 455.
Unreliable indeed! Furthermore, Carroll’s assertion that Forrestal definitely believed the Soviets had invaded the United States is a flat-out lie...if not a “delusion” reflecting, perhaps, his own “mental illness.” Turning to those pages in Hoopes and Brinkley, we find nothing resembling a belief by anyone that the Soviets had invaded the United States. What we get is a rehash of Arnold Rogow’s attempt to paint Forrestal as paranoid because of his very legitimate concern that two groups with proven homicidal track records were out to get him, the Communists and the Zionists, and that they were monitoring his conversations. As he put it upon arriving in Florida, “Bob, they’re after me.” They were, and they still are. (See Chapter One, especially the “On the Beach” and “Forrestal Was Bugged” sections.)
Just as Stone and Kuznick should have checked out Carroll’s endnote before relaying Drew Pearson’s fanciful Forrestal vilification as gospel truth, Carroll should not have stopped his Hoopes and Brinkley reading at the end of page 455. As it happens, the key passage is quoted on the Wikipedia page for “The Russians are coming,” and it has been there since 2006:
The allegation originated with Forrestal's bitter political enemy, columnist Drew Pearson, and has been verified by no other person. This is what Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley have to say about the episode in their 1992 book, 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. 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 attempts 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. — pp. 455-456.
New York Times reporter Arthur Krock is too kind to Pearson in his speculation about the origins of the “Russians are coming” story. This is from his 1968 Memoirs (The “Z” to whom he refers is clearly Ferdinand Eberstadt, as we are able to deduce from other sources.):
After dinner Forrestal went to bed and slept soundly, and Z and Forrestal’s former aide, Rear Admiral John Gingrich, watched him through the night. He slept so soundly, with the aid of a sedative, that he did not hear a siren blow at about six o’clock in the morning. After noting that this had not awakened Forrestal, Z went down to the beach for a swim. He thinks that whoever was reporting to Drew Pearson saw Z come out of the house at that point, and that this gave rise to Pearson’s statement that Forrestal had rushed out of the house when the siren blew, thinking the Russians had attacked the United States.189
What he means is that this at-best mistaken identity episode “gave rise” to a complete fabrication for malign purposes. But it gets even worse for Pearson and Carroll, and, by extension, for Stone and Kuznick. Carroll’s basic reference for his “Russians are coming” assertion, page 739 of McCullough’s Truman, has this passage, “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)
So, as we pointed out previously, Carroll knew that the information didn’t just come from an unreliable source but that it was revealed as untrue by the Truman biographer whom he references for it. Nevertheless, he goes forward with his Forresta
l slander, making it the title of a section heading and the centerpiece of his case against the former defense secretary. Stone and Kuznick then proceed to state it as fact because it was reported by Drew Pearson and repeated by James Carroll. Is this scholarship, dear readers, or is it out-and-out propaganda of the Big Lie variety?
Now let’s look at the rest of what Stone and Kuznick have written about Forrestal’s demise, starting with the photo caption. Did Forrestal really suffer a nervous breakdown and was he tormented by paranoia? What did the doctors who treated him at Bethesda Naval Hospital have to say? Until 2004, when this writer was able to shake the official investigation free from the government with repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, we didn’t know what that was, except for sketchy statements to the press by lead psychiatrist Captain George Raines and various hospital spokesmen. Now we not only have the Willcutts review board interviews of all the doctors online, but since February of 2010 we have it in a searchable htm format.190
Give it a try. You’ll see that the word “nervous” comes up only once when a testifying doctor describes his qualifications. “Nervous breakdown” does not appear. “Paranoia” shows up only in this sentence by the editor, the host of the ARI Watch web site, “Mark Hunter”: “Forrestal has been called crazy, yet you will search the report in vain for such words as delusion, persecution, anxiety, paranoia.” You won’t find “paranoid” either, except again in the words of the editor telling us that Forrestal’s Navy driver said that he was neither depressed nor paranoid.
Not that it matters a great deal, but the word “nightmare” doesn’t turn up either nor can it be found as anything that Forrestal experienced at the hospital in Arnold Rogow’s exercise in quack psychoanalysis. That Forrestal might have feared that he would suffer the same fate as the anti-Communist Jan Masaryk appears more as a manifestation of common sense rather than paranoia, not unlike his belief that he was being bugged and followed by Zionist operatives or that U.S. support for the creation of the state of Israel would in due time cause us to be dragged militarily into the Middle East and would alienate the Arab world.