by David Martin
I dare say that no psychiatric training at all is necessary to recognize the fairly obvious suggestions of suicide in the passage, and the press, from day one, has certainly energetically sold it as a "literary suicide note," but belaboring the obvious is not your biggest offense here. Dramatic though those last three lines may be, they were never transcribed by Forrestal, even according to the approved script. Although one Washington Post reporter on the day after the death wrote that those lines stood out "in a firm and legible hand" in the transcription, a longer article in the same newspaper reproduced the whole poem, with the part he was said to have transcribed in italics. The italics stop in the middle of the word "nightingale," many lines before those last three lines are reached. That story is the one that has been repeated by authors of books on Forrestal, from Walter Millis, to Arnold Rogow, to Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, and it is the one to which a proper professional in your trade should conform.
Furthermore, Hospital Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, Forrestal's guard that night, was hardly remiss in not recognizing the ominous nature of the words. According to biographer Rogow, Harrison (whom Rogow does not name) last looked in on Forrestal at 1:45 am and saw him transcribing something from a book. By the time anyone got a look at what had been written, Forrestal had gone out the window. The transcription was reportedly found later (not in a notebook as you have it, but on a loose sheet of paper from a hospital notepad). Interestingly, no contemporary newspaper accounts said that Harrison witnessed Forrestal copying from the book. They only reported that the transcription and book had been found, but never by whom. Some accounts say the book was found open on the radiator near the bed, others that it was found open on the table next to the bed.
When I wrote about the matter somewhat more carefully and less credulously than you, two years before your book was published, I speculated that Rogow had probably made up the story that Forrestal was witnessed transcribing the poem. He had cited no source for his claim, and he was alone in making it. It turns out that I was right.
In 2004, when you were busy sloppily parroting the fable about a depressed man copying a morbid poem and then plunging out a high window, I was submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for the long suppressed official investigation of Forrestal's death. On my third attempt, I got it.
In his testimony to the review board convened by the head of the National Navy Medical Center, Admiral Morton Willcutts, Apprentice Harrison said he last looked in on Forrestal at 1:45 am, exactly the time that Rogow had Harrison witnessing Forrestal copying the poem. He testified that the room was dark and Forrestal was apparently sleeping. He related further that the room was, in fact, dark the whole time that he was on duty, starting at midnight, and he did not see Forrestal do any reading.
It gets worse, much worse, for your nice, neat suicide-from-depression thesis. The book of poems that the newspapers described so precisely was never entered into evidence, nor was anyone produced who claimed to have found either it or the transcription. A transcription of the first few lines of the Sophocles poem was among the exhibits, and Captain George Raines, the lone doctor who claimed that Forrestal made suicidal statements, volunteered that the handwriting looked like Forrestal's. That one very brief mention, virtually in passing, is the only appearance that the "literary suicide note" makes in the entire report. Nothing, whatsoever, is said about its text.
It's little wonder that the review board steered so far clear of it. Have a look at the note along with known Forrestal handwriting samples. What do you think? It's not even close to Forrestal's handwriting, is it? And not that it matters much compared to the patent fraudulence of the note, but the transcription also cuts off several lines short of the line with the "nightingale" in it, which was supposed to be the stopping place.
Wrong on Foster, Too
Backing up to page 63, I see that you also colored outside the accepted lines in your account of the aftermath of the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster. In your over-eagerness to sell the ever-popular suicide-from-depression story in this case, too, you write, "When his body was found, he had with him an unfilled prescription for an antidepressant from his doctor in Little Rock and the names of three Washington area physicians, whom he never consulted."
The official story, as contained in the report by Kenneth Starr and reported in the newspapers, is that the prescription was conveyed by telephone to the Morgan Pharmacy in Georgetown the night before Foster's death and that Foster had taken the medicine. There was no written prescription for Foster to have had on his person when his body was found, and, certainly, no one has been reported to have found such a prescription. Furthermore, the doctor said that at the small level of dosage prescribed, the medication was only for the treatment of insomnia, not depression.
The likelihood is high that none of these stories about medicine prescribed from Arkansas is true. No telephone records of the call from Foster to the doctor or from the doctor to the pharmacy, nor the prescription, nor the pills themselves were ever entered into evidence. In the toxicology report accompanying the autopsy, it was reported that there were no drugs in Foster's system, and antidepressants were among the drugs being searched for. In the early days after the death when the official word was that no one had any idea why Foster might have killed himself, the doctor in Little Rock held his tongue, as did everyone close to Foster. On July 24, four days after the death, White House spokesperson Dee Dee Myers is quoted as saying that, "His family says with certainty that he'd never been treated [for depression]." Nothing was said about any prescription for it.
There are problems with that list of Washington-area doctors, as well. It first appeared on the official record in an article on page A8 of The Washington Post of July 28 with these lines, "White House officials searching the office of Vincent Foster, Jr. last week found a note indicating the 48 year-old deputy White House counsel may have considered psychiatric help shortly before he died July 20 in what investigators have concluded was a suicide, federal officials said yesterday."
The note, as it turned out, was that list of physicians, who, in an article two days later, The Post said were two in number, and it named them. In that article, the discovery site was said to be Foster's car at the park where the body was found, although the Park Police, too, had held their collective tongues when the word had been that no one had any idea why Foster might have killed himself. The “three psychiatrists” number that you report is consistent with the Park Police report released almost a year later. The names of the doctors in that report are redacted. They later appear unredacted in released Senate documents. The first name, that of the doctor not previously identified by The Post, is written in block letters; the latter two in cursive style. Strange!
Scruples aside, I can almost sympathize with you and your journalistic cohorts sometimes. It's not easy to sell a story that keeps changing. I gather, though, noting the nine members of your profession who weighed in back in 1998 on behalf of admitted would-be double murderer, Ruthann Aron, that this is the sort of thing that you are paid to do as an expert witness from time to time.202 With that experience, you should have done a slicker job than you have done in your recent volume.
Finally, if I might dare to poach on your dubious turfa bit, I must take issue with your postmortem personality profiles.203 I know that you are doing only brief, thumbnail sketches, but I find it most unfortunate that you should seize upon the word "ambitious" to sum up both Foster and Forrestal. It conjures up in the mind the power-hungry careerist type, who, like Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons, would jettison everything that is good and noble for his own personal advancement. From everyone who knew Forrestal, in particular, it is hard to imagine anyone who was more completely opposite from that kind of person. Hoopes and Brinkley chose well when they titled their biography of Forrestal, Driven Patriot.
To cite just two of many possible examples, a personally ambitious person would hardly have risked being sacked for insubordinati
on for the efforts he made to bring about Japanese surrender on terms different from those desired by the White House, as Forrestal did as Secretary of the Navy in 1944, and he would not have brushed off his friend Bernard Baruch's warning that he had become too closely identified with opposition to the creation of the state of Israel for his own good, as he did as Secretary of Defense in 1948.204 I think that even the historical psychoanalyst, Rogow, would have found your suggestion novel in the extreme that Forrestal became "depressed" because he had seen his "political future destroyed."
Foster, for his part, was a man of broad interests and great accomplishment in the legal field. He was known for the style and clarity of his legal briefs, so different from the text of the peevish, sophomoric note, torn into 27 pieces (but without residual fingerprints) said to have been found in a briefcase that had previously been emptied in the presence of a number of people. He shunned the limelight and was trying to quit his job and go back to his practice in Little Rock. To me, that doesn't sound like much of a Richard Rich type, either. Rather, the personality type seems to fit much better the husband and wife couple for whom he worked.
I'm not much into pop psychology myself, but your manner of describing these two men looks to me like a classic case of projection.205
Sincerely,
David Martin
Hardly surprisingly, Professor Post did not respond, nor did anyone respond on his behalf, and I am still alive to record the experience here.
__________
201 Cornell University Press, 2004.
202 David Martin, “Expert Witnesses,” http://www.dcdave.com/article1/040198.html.
203 David Martin, “Mencken on Psychology.” http://www.dcdave.com/article3/000910.html.
204 Under “terms different from those desired,” we embedded a link to the June 6, 1950, Look magazine article, “How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender,” by Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias. http://ussslcca25.com/zach12.htm.
205 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection.
CHAPTER 12
The Mendocracy
Versus the Citizenry
Drop the Subject
Was James Forrestal thrown from that window?
Was he murdered for reasons of state?
Well, didn’t Frank Olson of the CIA
Suffer a similar fate?
Speaking of Deep State operatives, consider the first man in the national mainstream silence to mention the Willcutts Report. After having ignored the long-delayed publication of the official proceedings of the Navy board of investigation into the violent death of the first U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the national opinion-molding apparatus (NOMA)finally broke its five-year-long silence. Some of the discredited “facts” are still there, but in his book published in 2009, Nicholas Thompson in The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War perpetuates the myth of Forrestal’s suicide and explicitly acknowledges the Willcutts Report as one of his sources.206
One could hardly have found a more representative member of the American establishment opinion-molding club to do the silence breaking than Thompson. Here’s what they had to say about him on the now taken-down web site for his book:
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker, a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television, and the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.
Prior to The New Yorker, Mr. Thompson was a senior editor at Wired, a senior editor at Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He has written about politics, technology, and the law for numerous publications, and he currently writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review. He is a frequent guest on CNN’s American Morning, NBC’s Today Show, and Live with Regis and Kelly. He has also appeared multiple times on every other major cable and broadcast news network. He is also currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an official panelist on CNN International’s “Connect the World” with Becky Anderson.
Updating Thompson’s résumé, he is now editor-in-chief of Wired, a contributor to CBS News, and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also happens to be Paul Nitze’s grandson.
Not surprisingly, his book was heavily publicized and widely distributed. Working across the street at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the time, I discovered the paperback version prominently displayed at the Union Station branch of the national chain of the now defunct B. Dalton bookstores. The book’s web site listed favorable quotes from reviews in The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Post Book Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The National Review, Booklist, Library Journal, The Daily Beast, Talking Points Memo Café, and the major British weekly, The Economist.
Even Stephen Colbert gave him a book-promoting softball interview on his popular Comedy Channel show, The Colbert Report. Not since James Carroll, with his 2006 book on the Pentagon, had an author been given so great an opportunity to spread untruths about the violent death of the leading U.S. opponent of the creation of the state of Israel (Oliver Stone’s book came four years later in 2012.). The following is from pp. 88-89 (He has endnotes in which the source is given for particular passages. We show them in parentheses.):
Forrestal lasted six weeks [sic] in the hospital, until the night of Saturday, May 21, 1949. According to a report long kept secret, he spent most of the evening pacing. At 12:20, he got a cup of orange juice and said he was going to bed; at 12:35, he got up to grab a cup of coffee; ten minutes later, he was apparently asleep. At 1:30, he popped out of bed and the corpsman on duty asked if he wanted a sleeping pill. Forrestal said no, but the corpsman went to ask the doctor whether he could have one anyway. When he returned, Forrestal was gone. (Admiral M.D. Willcutts, "Report on the Death of James Forrestal," part 2, p. 176.)
Lower in the building, people heard a thud. Forrestal's body, dressed in pajamas, was found face-down on the asphalt and cinder block ledge outside room 384. He had plummeted thirteen floors, bouncing off other ledges as he fell. His bathrobe sash was tied tight around his neck (ibid. part 1, p. 62); upstairs, a razor blade (ibid. p. 81) was found near his slippers. He had tried to hang himself and then either jumped or fallen out the window. At some point that evening he had copied out lines from a translation of Sophocles' Ajax, where the Chorus laments, "Better to die, and sleep/The never-waking sleep, than linger on/And dare to live when the soul's life is gone."
In the first paragraph, the part about Forrestal pacing the floor does come from the Willcutts Report. To this writer’s knowledge, it had not been reported elsewhere in the mainstream press or books. It can be found in the testimony of the orderly on duty before midnight, Edward Price/Prise. The coffee and orange juice drinking after midnight are also reported for the first time in the Willcutts Report, but the exact times given here can only be described as spurious. Navy nurse Regina M. L. Harty/Margie Hardy and hospital apprentice Edwin Utz agree that Forrestal had coffee at around 1:00 am. He apparently had orange juice twice, once when Price/Prise was on duty and again shortly before he had the coffee, but the orderly at that time, Robert Wayne Harrison, could not recall the time. The news that Forrestal popped out of bed at 1:30 can’t be found in anyone’s testimony, nor can the revelation that Harrison was absent from Forrestal’s room because he had gone to inquire about a sleeping pill. Harrison testified that at 1:45 he looked in on Forrestal, and he was apparently sleeping in a darkened room. He said he was absent when Forrestal disappeared from the room because he had gone down the hall to write in the nurse’s log.
Thompson is most disingenuous in the beginning of that second sentence, “According to a report long kept secret....” Kept secret? Why would the government want to keep such a report secret? He doesn’t even speculate. And how was the secrecy ended, why was it ended, and when, exactly, was it ended? The reader must guess about all of
that.
It’s pretty clear that he does not want people to know that the report was held back for 55 years and would most likely still be secret but for the efforts of this writer. We first announced the fact that the report was available to the public in Part 2 of our series, “Who Killed James Forrestal?” published in September of 2004. Simultaneously, as we have noted, the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University, which houses Forrestal’s papers, posted a copy of the report that we had sent them on their web site.207
And why did the Navy keep the report secret? In 2003 we drew the common-sense conclusion that it was because they had something to hide.208 As it turned out, with the release of the report some months later, we were quite right, in spades. That’s apparently something that Thompson doesn’t want you to know, either.209
In his second paragraph, quoted above, the description of the surface upon which Forrestal landed clearly comes from the Willcutts Report, except that Thompson has not read very carefully. It is from the testimony of the autopsy doctor, Captain William M. Silliphant, who once describes the surface as “asphalt and cinder rock” and again as “asphalt and cinder-rocks,” not “cinder block,” as Thompson has it. The bouncing off several ledges is original with Thompson, and it is preposterous on its face if you think about it. The review board, without any testimony to support it, says at one point that he first struck a ledge of the fourth floor. That is probably accurate, though. Nurse Dorothy Turner speaks of hearing a “double thud.” What the board describes as a ledge was more than likely the sloping roof of a bay window, seen in the photograph of the tower. (See frontispiece)
Thompson’s mention of the discovered razor blade—also from Will-cutts Report testimony—is obviously strategic, meant to convey the impression that Forrestal was accumulating a veritable arsenal of self-killing devices. Also strategic is Thompson’s tired old account of the supposed morbid poem transcription by Forrestal. From the first day that Forrestal’s death was reported, that poem has been placed on center stage as evidence of Forrestal’s suicidal intentions. In spite of the manifest evidence of its lack of authenticity, Thompson keeps it there.