The Assassination of James Forrestal
Page 30
Not only is virtually everything that Stone and Kuznick say about Forrestal’s demise provably false, but they don’t even do a very good job of parroting their flawed sources. Drew Pearson didn’t say that Forrestal tried to kill himself four times during his brief stay in Florida. The fourth unsuccessful attempt supposedly occurred at Bethesda Naval Hospital, according to Pearson. We have seen that Captain Raines denied that any such attempts took place, and it’s really very hard to imagine that anyone as capable as Forrestal could have been so incompetent at the suicide act. Raines, as we have seen, by the way, was alone among the doctors in even suggesting that Forrestal might have had any suicidal tendencies. One can tell that he was trying his very best to uphold the suicide story without resorting to outright whoppers.
Forrestal did not go out the window of his hospital room; he went out the window of the kitchen across the hall from his room. Also, in saying twice that Forrestal “jumped” Stone and Kuznick fail to address the question of what that bathrobe belt was doing tied around his neck. The newspapers and the establishment authors, as we have seen, have solved that conundrum by speculating that he must have been trying to hang himself out the 16th floor window, as improbable as that sounds. It’s not quite the same thing as freestyle jumping, as suggested by Stone and Kuznick.
We also know that Forrestal was not seen writing from any book just be-fore he went out the window. The Naval corpsman on duty, testifying before the Willcutts review board, said that when he looked in at that time the room was dark and Forrestal appeared to be sleeping and that he had witnessed no reading or writing by Forrestal the whole time that he had been on duty.
Finally, Forrestal didn’t copy “Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles that night or at any other time, even though Dr. Raines, trying his best to help the suicide case, volunteered in his testimony that the handwriting looked like Forrestal’s. The reader can see for himself that it looks nothing of the sort.
Drew Pearson
We first encountered Pearson, from a historical chronology standpoint, acting as a shill against Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-Communist, anti-Zionist emissary General Patrick Hurley. The story is told in “The Old Zionist Smear Machine.”191 Hurley’s letter of complaint to Roosevelt elicited the following response:
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL August 30, 1943
Dear Pat:
Thanks for yours of August nineteenth referring to a printed story in Drew Pearson's column. You are quite right in answering none of the letters from Jews or others who believe Drew Pearson's columns.
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.
So much for Mr. Drew Pearson.
Always sincerely,
(s) FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
The following passage from Arthur Krock’s Memoirs speaks volumes about the character of Drew Pearson and of the American press generally:
But not until the succession of radio broadcasts by Drew Pearson of which Forrestal was the target did I get an impression of irrationality and indecisiveness that was so completely at variance with the man I had known so well. After each of these Sunday broadcasts Forrestal would telephone me to discuss, but never decide, what to do about them.
Then came a broadcast that upset him more than any—a report that when Mrs. Forrestal was being held up in front of their Beekman Place home in New York City, her husband “hid” in his quarters. It happened by chance that I was in a position to refute the charge, having spent that evening in Forrestal’s company and having slept in his guest room that fronted on the East River, a location where we could not—and did not—know of the holdup until the following morning. It was typical of Mrs. Forrestal that she did not awaken her husband to inform him of what, after all, was a fait accompli.
To Forrestal’s fervently expressed relief, I volunteered to acquaint Pearson with the facts, offering the opinion that he would undoubtedly withdraw the charge. But though Pearson, on receipt of a written and detailed account, wired me “THANKS. WILL DO,” the retraction was never forthcoming. From that time forward I did observe a deterioration of spirit in Forrestal, though, in fairness, it should be noted that the broadcast was only one of the causes.192
Indeed, I should think a bigger cause for despondency on Forrestal’s part would have been that his friend Krock, who wrote for the most influential newspaper in the country, would treat something like this as primarily Forrestal’s problem and a reflection upon Forrestal because he was unable to solve it. The New York Times by itself had the power to expose Pearson, even to drum him out of the profession. No one of his character should have been permitted the national megaphone that he had, both with a widely circulated syndicated column and a Sunday night broadcast. His standards of probity were demonstrably so low that he should not have been allowed into the company of decent people, much less to practice journalism. And to think, it is the likes of a Drew Pearson that Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick exalt as an authority and whose allegations form the very centerpiece of their book, and it is the likes of the deeply patriotic and dedicated James Forrestal that they disparage.
Stone and Kuznick and James Carroll are not alone in coming down on Forrestal, the reason for which was obviously his anti-Communism and, much more importantly, his anti-Zionism. It started early when his “friends” in the journalistic community like Krock and Walter Trohan lay low while Pearson and Winchell poured out their calumnies.193 It continued when he was confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for almost two months and not one of his powerful friends and admirers bothered to pay him a visit. These included Robert Lovett, Artemus Gates, Ferdinand Eberstadt, and Bernard Baruch. Not even the man closest to him at the Pentagon, top aide Marx Leva, bothered to come see him. It is likely that they could all see which way the wind was blowing.
Forrestal could no doubt see it himself. He knew all about how Communist infiltration of the executive branch had resulted in making Joseph Stalin the biggest winner of World War II. He must have known about the letter bombs that the Stern Gang had sent in an attempt on the life of President Truman in 1947. What must he have thought when he saw the whole episode hushed up? He must have felt like Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster’s sons when they read the unanimous opinion of the press that their father had committed suicide and further, that the police had been turned away from the Foster house the night of his death and that they, the sons, had never come back to the house that night when they knew none of it was true.194
The abandonment of Forrestal continued when Pearson’s preposterously false claim of four previous suicide attempts went unchallenged at the time and when the delay in issuing the report of the investigation of his death dragged on and on. It continued when only the sketchy conclusions of the report were released some four and a half months late and no one seemed to notice that the report did not conclude that Forrestal had committed suicide. Then, they all held their tongues—including those great press “friends” of his, Krock and Trohan—as the report of the investigation itself was held back and kept secret. The American molders of public opinion continued to hold their tongues when Princeton’s Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library put out a press release announcing that after 55 years the report on Forrestal’s death was finally available to the public.
Down with Forrestal, Up with Wallace
It is hardly a surprise that authors who would make the anti-Communist, anti-Zionist Forrestal a major villain of their book should make FDR’s vice-president before Truman, Henry Wallace, a hero. Consider this excerpt from a predictably glowing review by The Nation:
At many pivotal moments, Stone argues, history could have taken a radically different course. The missed opportunities, the roads not taken—these are Stone’s central themes, which he argues with energy, passion and a mountain of evidence (the companion volume has eighty-nine pages of footnotes).
Case number one: if Henry Wall
ace had won the vice presidential nomination in 1944, he would have become president when Roosevelt died in 1945, and we probably would not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and could have avoided the cold war as well. It’s a startling and intriguing argument. Usually we teach about Wallace as the hopeless, left wing third-party candidate of 1948, when he split from the Democrats and ran on the Progressive Party ticket. McCarthyism had already taken hold of American politics, and Wallace was redbaited into a crushing defeat.
Four years earlier, however, the situation was very different: Wallace was Roosevelt’s incumbent vice president, and the Soviets were our allies. A Gallup poll in July 1944 asked likely Democratic voters whom they wanted on the ticket as veep. Sixty-five percent said Wallace, while Truman came in eighth, with just 2 percent. Roosevelt announced that, were he a delegate, he would vote for Wallace. Claude Pepper, a Democratic senator from Florida, tried to nominate Wallace at the convention, but the conservative party bosses, who opposed him, adjourned the proceedings. “Had Pepper made it five more feet [to the microphone] and nominated Wallace,” Stone argues, “Wallace would have become president in 1945 and...there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War.”195
We have had a brief look at the quality of those “eighty-nine pages of footnotes,” and it is not encouraging. But if Forrestal had been listened to, not only would we not have dropped atom bombs on Japan or anyone, but it is very likely neither China nor North Korea would have been captured by the Communists.196 Furthermore, you can take it to the bank that if Wallace had succeeded Roosevelt, all of the Korean peninsula would now be under the Red boot of the latest ruler from the Kim family-dynasty. Communist sympathizer Owen Lattimore might well have been his Secretary of State.197
Here is some more pertinent information about Wallace. It comes from an undated article in the Jewish Post online:
[Henry] Wallace attracted many Jews: around 30% of his followers were Jews. Among them his fund-raiser, William Gailmore, was an ex-rabbi. He controlled the Bronx thanks to Leo Isaacson who was elected to the congress as a member of the progressive party. Many communists and Jewish communists supported Wallace who always was blamed as a front for Moscow. But Wallace did something else, he never forgot to declare his support of Zionism and a Jewish state. On Dec. 1947, he visited Palestine as a guest of the Labor movement. Wallace also believed in the Judeo-Christian idea and a project to develop the Middle-East for Jews and Arabs alike. Furthermore, he helped the 'Friends of Lehi in the U.S." (the so-called 'Stern Gang.') And Karabell wrote that on July 23, 1948 the Progressive Party's convention hosted "the Stern Gang, the Israeli underground paramilitary organization that had blown up buildings and assassinated British officials in Palestine..." He wrote that the Lehi (Freedom Fighters of Israel) were close to the Irgun's Menachem Begin, but Yitzhak Shamir was the Lehi's commander together with Natan Yellin- Morand Israel Eldad. Truman was pushed by his pro-Zionist advisors (Mark Cliford) [sic] to support Israel in 1948 in order to attract the Jewish vote away from Wallace's camp. Also, Dewey was pro-Zionist.198
Consider also the following passage from an article “Former VP Henry Wallace, Forgotten Zionist, Stars in Oliver Stone’s New TV Series” in The Algemeiner, which fashions itself “the fastest growing Jewish news-paper in America”:
Annoyed by Wallace’s pressure for a more conciliatory U.S. position to-ward the Soviet Union, Truman ousted him in 1946.
Wallace then became editor of The New Republic. In its pages he strongly defended the Zionist cause, at one point going so far as to suggest that the Jewish underground’s guerrilla war against the British was “in some respects like the fight the American colonies carried on in 1776...”
In October 1947, Wallace spent 10 days in the Holy Land, surveying Jewish settlements and industries and meeting with leaders such as Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion. Wallace’s glowing prediction that the Zionists would turn the Negev desert into “a veritable garden” received widespread attention. He also met with Irgun Zvai Leumi underground chief Menachem Begin.199
Where to start? First, Wallace did not just become editor of The New Republic, he was chosen for the job by a spy for the Soviet Union affiliated with the Cambridge Five, publisher Michael Whitney Straight.200 Second, this Lehi organization that he was said to have helped, and which supported him, is the Stern Gang, the terrorists who tried to kill Truman and perpetrated numerous other outrages. And not long after Wallace saw fit to cozy up to Irgun leader Menachem Begin in Israel, as we noted in Chapter One, a group of prominent Jewish American intellectuals led by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote a letter to The New York Times detailing the Irgun’s numerous crimes and out-rages. Wallace was ousted from the Democratic ticket in 1944 in the nick of time and we slowly began to resist the Communist takeover, but the warning by Einstein et al. was not heeded, and the capitulation to the worst elements of Zionism continues apace. That it is a complete certainty that no one in the mainstream press will point out Oliver Stone’s lies about the death of James Forrestal is but one measure of the degree of our capitulation.
__________
183 Simon and Schuster, 2012.
184 https://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/16/oliver_stone_on_the_untold_us.
185 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW3jRvFEV84&feature=youtu.be.
186 David Martin, “Clinton and Cronkite, Odd Couple?” http://www.dcdave.com/article2/082798.html.
187 David Martin, “M. Stanton Evans on Good Night and Good Luck.” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/110614.htm.
188 David Martin, “James Forrestal and Joe McCarthy,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/110928.htm.
189 Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Funk and Wagnalls, 1968, p. 256.
190 https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC051/c04531; http://ariwatch.com/VS/JamesForrestal/WillcuttsReport.htm.
191 David Martin, http://www.dcdave.com/article5/061108.htm.
192 Krock, pp. 250-251.
193 On the conservative Chicago Tribune’s Walter Trohan, see David Martin, “The Pearl Harbor Betrayal and James Forrestal’s Death, http://www.dcdave.com/article5/121004.htm.
194 See David Martin, “Seth Rich Equals Vince Foster” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/170525.htm.
195 John Wiener, “Oliver Stone’s ‘Untold History’,” The Nation, November 14, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/oliver-stones-untold-history/.
196 David Martin, “Forrestal Ignored: Korean War Fought, China Lost to Reds,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/110530.htm.
197 David Martin, “Truman Administration Adviser Counseled Surrender of Korea to Reds,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/110602.htm.
198 Gad Nashon, “The Last Campaign: How Truman Won in 1948,”Jewish Post, http://www.jewishpost.com/archives/news/the-last-campaign-how-truman-won-in-1948.html.
199 Rafael Medoff, “Former VP Henry Wallace, Forgotten Zionist, Stars in Oliver Stone’s New TV Series,” The Algemeiner, November 18, 2012, http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/11/18/former-vp-henry-wallace-forgotten-zionist-stars-in-oliver-stone%E2%80%99s-new-tv-series/.
200 See Roland Perry, Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, the Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring, Da Capo Press, 2005; Washington Post review at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/07/AR2005080700970.html?noredirect=on.
CHAPTER 11
Spook Shrink Flubs Script
Respected Spook?
They say that the writer’s “respected,”
But his C.V. suggests he’s connected
To the CIA.
If so, there’s no way
That with deceit he would not be infected.
Readers will notice that in the following letter to George Washington professor, Jerrold M. Post, M.D., I adopt a somewhat different tone than I have in previous letters to members of the academic community with respect to the death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. In those instance
s, I held out at least the faint hope that I was communicating with honest men who might actually overcome the strong herd instinct of the species and embrace the truth once it had been pointed out to them. One need not linger long over Professor Post's pedigree to see that such assumptions have no place in his case. One might as well write a hopeful letter on this matter to a representative of the American news media or to a Congressman.
Here is the email I sent to Dr. Jerrold M. Post, who at the time was Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology and International Affairs and Director of the Political Psychology Program at The George Washington University, and who also founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the Central Intelligence Agency:
March 8, 2008
Dear Professor Post,
I realize that truth is not exactly a CIA long suit, but you really ought to be a bit more careful in your writing. It would help your credibility if you would at least make your "facts" consistent with the popular fiction produced by others writing for a similarly deceptive purpose. I refer in particular to the conclusion of your section on the death of James Forrestal on page 64 of Leaders and their Followers in a Dangerous World:201
"Before he leaped to his death, Forrestal copied in a notebook the melancholic chorus from Sophocles' play Ajax:
Thy son in a foreign clime
Worn by the waste of time
Comfortless, nameless, hopeless
Save in the dark prospect of the yawning grave.
Oh, when the pride of Grecia's noble race
Wanders, as now in darkness and disgrace,
Better to die and sleep
The never waking sleep than linger on
And dare to live when the soul's life is gone.
"A psychiatrically trained medical corpsman would have recognized this as a literary suicide note, but the corpsman assigned to Forrestal paid no attention to the poignant despair conveyed by this selection."