The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Nurse Turner’s Crucial Testimony

  As with his first paragraph, what’s really important is what Thompson leaves out. To know about the razor blade, he had to be familiar with the testimony to the Willcutts review board of the nurse, Lieutenant Turn-er. Her name had appeared in contemporary newspapers only as the person who heard Forrestal land on the third-floor roof. What the press did not tell us is that she had rushed upstairs and was the first person to get a good look at Forrestal’s lighted vacated room. Here is part of what she said:

  So I went up to tower sixteen and told Miss Harty there was a man’s body outside the galley window and he wasn’t mine. We both went into his room and he wasn’t there and we noticed the broken glass on the bed and looked down and noticed the razor blade and told him he was missing (sic) and she said it was one forty-eight.

  Broken glass on the bed!!?? How could anyone ignore that fact as if it were insignificant? But Thompson is not alone; the review board, as we have seen, ignored it as well. They completely pass over the mention of the broken glass, asking only about the razor blade that she had mentioned (and slippers that she had not) in the recorded transcript:

  Q. You said you saw his slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?

  A. The bed clothes were turned back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and they were right there as you get out of bed.

  In her answer, Lt. Turner drops another bomb in light of what the re-view board had been shown up to that point. She is testifying on the third day of the proceedings. On the first day, the board had gone to see Forrestal’s hospital room. On the second day, it had heard the testimony and examined the photographs of the vacated room. One can see from the photographs of the room that there are no bedclothes on the bed, turned back or otherwise. (see frontispiece)

  No one on the board had a thing to say about the inconsistency, nor does Thompson. Surely it must have dawned upon at least one of the Navy doctors—all employees of the National Naval Medical Center with no qualifications as criminal investigators—the moment they laid eyes on that room that something was seriously amiss. It bears no resemblance whatever to a room that has been lived in for over six weeks and hastily abandoned in the middle of the night, that is, to the room that Lt. Turner saw.

  As we observed in Chapter Four, the board must have had their marching orders because, not only did they know what not to ask Lt. Turner, they knew what not to ask the photographer, as well. In contrast to their questioning of the first photographer, the one who photographed the body, they didn’t ask when the room photographs were taken. Had they done so, they would have had to have asked him why there was a delay of several hours, as is evident by the bright sun streaming in the windows. They also didn’t ask the first photographer, who showed up promptly, if he had also taken room photos, and if not, why not, and if so, what they showed.

  After Thompson makes a complete muddle of an attempt to explain why there was a bathrobe sash tied around Forrestal’s neck, he shows that he must have marching orders as well with his reference to the famous poem transcription. From the Willcutts Report, he must know that the account by Forrestal biographers Arnold Rogow and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley that the corpsman (Harrison) looked in on Forrestal at 1:45 and saw him transcribing the poem is a complete fabrication. Harrison testified that at that time the room was dark, and Forrestal was apparently sleeping. Furthermore, he said, the room was dark the whole time that he was on duty and Forrestal did no reading or writing. Thompson knows now that he can’t just parrot what the “definitive” biographies have said, so he has the unseen writing occurring at some time earlier in the evening. As others have done, he then quotes from the particularly morbid last lines of the poem that occur well past the purported transcribed lines.

  The big problem with this continued invocation of the transcription as though it amounted to some sort of a suicide note is that, as we show in Chapter Five, Forrestal didn’t do any transcribing of a Sophocles poem that evening or any evening. The handwriting of the transcription is clearly that of someone other than Forrestal.

  Now one might argue that since no one in the “mainstream” has picked up on it, Thompson might simply be ignorant of the fact that the transcription is bogus, because he is unaware of my web site. That is not very likely because the Wikipedia site for Forrestal up to that time had linked to my handwriting samples for several years, and one would think that simple curiosity alone would have made him check out Forrestal’s Wikipedia page. It might not have the last word on a subject, but for most serious writers of non-fiction these days, Wikipedia is one of the first stops to make.

  Bad Psychology and Bad References

  There is further evidence that Thompson has marching orders, that he is not his own man, and the evidence involves that Forrestal Wikipedia page. To get to it we must quote Thompson some more, going back to the bottom of page 87 when he first broaches the subject of Forrestal’s supposed breakdown. Note that he makes it entirely the result of the strains of fighting the Cold War:

  In Kennan’s view, at least, Forrestal ultimately went too far. He helped Kennan considerably in setting up the Office of Policy Coordination. But reflecting back decades later, Kennan would lament OPC’s growth and blame the Pentagon for it. He wanted it small and elite; Forrestal and the Pentagon wanted black propaganda offices franchised in embassies worldwide. “There is no method, there is no way except the method of worry, of constant concern, and of unceasing energy that will give us our security,” (Jeffery Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal, p. 149) the defense secretary said in 1947.

  The constant concern eventually devoured Forrestal: by the late 1940s, he had begun a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Isolated and profoundly alarmed, he saw demons everywhere. Nitze’s sister once found him in the bushes near the Plaza Hotel in New York. She asked what he was doing. Watching people, he said. I am just watching people going about their business. (Paul Henry Nitze, Tension between Opposites, p. 97)

  In March 1949, the president replaced Forrestal as secretary of defense. Soon, he had become completely paranoid. Zionists were trailing him and the Soviets had bugged beach umbrellas all over Miami. Early that spring, he was committed to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where the doctors began treating him with psychotherapy and insulin injections. (Willcutts Report, part 1, p. 35) They considered, but rejected, using electro convulsive therapy. (ibid. p. 41)

  In contemporary newspaper accounts, through the 1992 book, Driven Patriot, The Life and Times of James Forrestal, those making the suicide argument gave prominent place to the pressures and press attacks that Forrestal had suffered on account of his opposition to the creation of the state of Israel. With its 1999 article, written upon the 50th anniversary of Forrestal’s death, noted in Chapter Five,The Washington Post began a trend of Soviet-style airbrushing of that out of history. We saw the same thing in the online article the same year by the Seton Hall professor with the numerous mainstream media connections, Christopher Sharrett. Thompson continues the trend; there’s no trace of the big Israel dust-up in his account, making Forrestal’s legitimate concern that he was being trailed and bugged by Zionist agents look all the loonier.

  Concerning Forrestal’s supposed imaginary demons and paranoia, one may contrast Thompson’s spin on the story showing Forrestal’s quite normal penchant for people-watching with the observations in Driven Patriot that his staff had noticed no change in his condition or demeanor at all.210 His closest aide, Marx Leva, we noted in Chapter One, echoed those observations.

  Note, furthermore that Thompson has no reference for the fantastic claim that Forrestal said that, “Soviets had bugged beach umbrellas all over Miami.” Doubtless, he has taken liberties with an account in Driven Patriot and elsewhere of Forrestal’s conversation with Robert Lovett at Hobe Sound, Florida. The Driven Patriot reference is Arnold Rogow’s biography of Forrestal, but Rogow has no reference. Also, as noted in Chapter One, a Department of
Defense oral history interview of Lovett has nothing about bugged beach umbrellas, only Forrestal telling Lovett that “they’re really after me.” All the indications are that he was right.

  Thompson’s final quoted sentence about the medical treatment at Bethesda is meant to suggest that Forrestal badly needed it. It comes from the testimony to the Willcutts board of the lead doctor, Captain George Raines. Bear in mind that this is the same man, as we see in Chapter Four, who volunteered that the handwriting of the transcribed poem looked like Forrestal’s. We have also seen from John Osborne’s unpublished manuscript that Captain Stephen Smith, “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...."

  Another Version of the Willcutts Report?

  Now let’s look a little more closely at Thompson’s Willcutts Report references. The first one in the first paragraph cited above is “part 2, p. 176.” The only public copy of the Willcutts Report available when Thompson’s book came out in September of 2008 was the one online at the site of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. It does not have a “part 1” and “part 2.” Rather, it displays the report as “First Half” and “Second Half.” The second half is simply a collection of unnumbered nurses’ records and various exhibits. The body of the report itself is all in the library’s first half. Scrolling to the bottom, one can see that it is only 61 pages in length and that it does not have a “part 1” and a “part 2.” No regular member of the public looking for Thompson’s citation would find it.

  The same thing can be said for all of his other references, that is, as of the time that the Thompson book was published. The page numbers are not right for the Willcutts Report, proper, as one sees it at the Seeley Mudd site. They do work, however, if one converts the entire file to html from the pdf file that one sees at the Seeley Mudd site. Then the computer program generates its own page numbers, starting with the various solicited endorsements included before the review board’s actual work begins. Thus, when the Willcutts Report is telling us on its page 1 what happened on the first day, Thompson’s copy is already up to page 28. He apparently does not realize that he is using a sort of insiders’ copy that has been generated for him by someone else. (Heaven only knows how that first page reference came about.) Otherwise, he would have made his references in accord with the version one sees at the library site.

  At this point things really begin to get interesting. On May 14, 2008, an extremely eclectic and copious contributor to Wikipedia who uses the signature “JDPhD”inserted a section to the page on James Forrestal entitled “Psychiatric Treatment.”211 The timing corresponds quite well to the period when Thompson’s book would have been in preparation. The purpose is clearly the same as Thompson’s, to make Forrestal look insane, and the reference is to the page numbers for Captain Raines’s testimony as they would appear in an html version. This “JDPhd,” like young Nicholas Thompson (assuming that he is not Thompson, himself), obviously doesn’t realize that he is referring people to a version of the Willcutts Report to which he and some privileged few others might have access, but the public does not.

  Recall at this point what we noted in Chapter Five about that 50th anniversary Washington Post article by Alexander Wooley. From the detailed description he gave of Forrestal’s room and of the kitchen across the hall from his room, Wooley seems to have had access to the photographs that were only available to the general public more than five years later.

  Watching their apparent bumbling, we are reminded of conversations with the late Bernard Yoh, a former intelligence operative for Nationalist Chinese leader, Chiang Kaishek: ”Yoh denied to me that he had ever worked for the CIA, saying that he thought they were too stupid for him to have anything to do with them....”212 Also coming to mind is the young Jeff Redfern character, of “Red Rascal” fame, in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip. As a product of Yale University, Trudeau should have some familiarity with the elite covert political world.

  Other Voices Weigh In

  We know how the page numbers work out when the entire Willcutts file is converted to htm/html, because early in February 2010, the proprietor of the web site ARI Watch put anhtm up version on his page.213 There you can see the same page numbers as they appear on the Mudd Library version as well as the computer generated page numbers, which show up in faint print bracketed by italics. The site is extremely valuable, not just because it makes things much easier to find in the report, but also, as we noted previously, because the ARI Watch proprietor, who uses the pseudonym of “Mark Hunter,” has an introduction with his own analysis of the report.

  To demonstrate the utility of the htm version as a research tool, we might try checking on the assertion by Thompson and a host of other journalists and historians that Forrestal suffered from paranoia by using “edit/find” on the computer’s toolbar. The words “paranoia” and “paranoid” come up only in the editor’s commentary, not anywhere in the Willcutts Report itself. The testifying doctors, who were questioned at much greater length than the witnesses to the actual physical evidence, never used either word or any word close to them in meaning.

  Psychologist Arnold A. Rogow, in his very influential 1963 book, James Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy, wrote “Raines diagnosed Forrestal’s illness as involutional melancholia, a depressive condition sometimes seen in persons who have reached middle age.” It sounds very precise and clinical. He follows it up with a long discussion explaining how that condition manifests itself. But if you try searching the rare term, “involutional,” or the more common word, “melancholia,” on the Willcutts Report itself, neither one comes up. He also says that Forrestal was suffering from a “severe psychosis,” but “psychosis” doesn’t come up, either. All one will find are the various forms of the poorly defined diagnosis, “depressed.” Dr. Raines never used those impressive sounding mumbo jumbo expressions when testifying before his fellow doctors on the Willcutts review board. One has to wonder where Rogow got them. He has no reference. As we have discovered with respect to his claim that the corpsman saw Forrestal copying from a book when he looked in on him at 1:45, they are almost certainly Rogow fabrications.

  Having communicated with him only through email, as noted before, we do not know who “Mark” is, but we are grateful to him for indexing our articles on his web site, and every serious student of history should be grateful to him for his work on the Willcutts Report.

  With his introduction, Mark covers some of the same ground that we do, but even when he does, he does so with fresh insights and a slightly different perspective. His work and mine are as much complementary as repetitive. He talked by telephone with our contact, the military veteran with the former Navy nurse wife, and confirmed that “Regina M. J. Harty” was really Margie Hardy. He also reported the observation of the veteran that there were likely other patients on the floor—a point that even Cornell Simpson and I had overlooked—who could have been fake patients waiting for their moment to strike. From reading the Willcutts Report or anything else written about Forrestal’s hospitalization, one gets the impression that Forrestal had the entire floor all to himself. We have previously observed that the review board did not ask Nurse Hardy, at her station just down the hall and around a corner from Forrestal’s room if she had heard anything from that room at around the time the broken glass found there might have been broken, but Mark noted, as well, that they made the same omission in the case of the corpsman on duty, Robert Wayne Harrison, who was at Lt. Hardy’s duty station at the same time. They do ask Harrison if he heard any unusual sounds from the kitchen, but not from the bedroom where an apparent struggle occurred.

  We have given only a small sample of Mark’s fresh insights. Mark also references the writing of a friend of ours, Hugh Turley, concerning an interview to which we alluded in a footnote in Chapter Two:

  Forrestal’s ch
auffeur was a Navy enlisted man named John Spalding. Now living in Littlestown, Pennsylvania, in 2008 at the age of 87 he re-vealed in a recorded interview (“Handwriting Tells Dark Tale?” by Hugh Turley, Hyattsville Life & Times December 2008) how the Navy treated him right after Forrestal’s death.214 He was called into the office of Rear Admiral Monroe Kelly. “He had a big map and he said where do you want to go for duty ... You are going to leave tonight.” Mr. Spalding decided on the base at Guantánamo, Cuba. (In 1949 Havana was a famous vacation spot, so this is not as strange as it would be today.) Monroe Kelly and his aide Lieutenant James A. Hooper made him sign a statement swearing that he would never speak to anyone again about Forrestal. Also in the interview Mr. Spalding said that Forrestal had never appeared depressed, paranoid or in any way abnormal in his presence.

  Altogether, what Mark’s work shows, along with this writer’s observations, is that the Willcutts Report represents a veritable gold mine for anyone interested in the vitally important historical event of James Forrestal’s death in the prime of his productive life at the age of 57. Most remarkably, for all we know, Mark’s and mine represent the only two sets of eyes in the whole world who have gone over the report with anything resembling a critical eye, in spite of the fact that it has now been publicly available for more than fourteen years. One really has to wonder why that should be.

  The Canary Who Could Sing but Couldn’t Fly

  An interested reader of our “Who Killed James Forrestal?” series—certainly not a professional historian—noting the manner of Forrestal’s apparent murder, suggested that there might be a connection to Operation Underworld and the major Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky. Operation Underworld “was the United States government's code name for the cooperation of Italian and Jewish organized crime figures from 1942 to 1945 to counter Axis spies and saboteurs along the U.S. northeastern seaboard ports, avoid wartime labor union strikes, and limit theft by black-marketeers of vital war supplies and equipment,” as defined by Wikipedia.215