by David Martin
The reason he thought of it, he said, was the great similarity of Forrestal’s death to that of the New York Jewish mobster, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Reles was the key informant whose testimony led to the arrest, conviction, and execution of several members of the infamous Murder Incorporated in the early 1940s.216 But he was just getting started. New York District Attorney William O’Dwyer had hidden him away at a Coney Island hotel under constant police guard. Nevertheless, he somehow managed to fall to his death from the sixth-floor window of his room. Several sheets were found tied together hanging from the window, and the death was ruled accidental, with the conclusion that he had been trying to escape and lost his grip. Conveniently overlooked was the fact that the body was lying some twenty feet from the base of the hotel. To reveal that the police had been bribed to allow the killing of the witness would have been too great an embarrassment for all concerned.217
The possible organized crime connection to Forrestal’s death is intriguing, and it is well known from anyone familiar with the JFK assassination that Deep State connections to the mob hardly ended with Operation Underworld. They could have easily furnished the muscle for what transpired on the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital that night, but common criminals hardly have a monopoly on that method of killing. It’s right there in the early 1950s CIA assassination manual: “The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.”218
We might also remind readers of the manner of the timely death of the anti-Communist Czech leader mentioned in our first chapter. Two witnesses in the case of accused high level Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, also died from falls, Justice Department attorney, W. Marvin Smith and former State Department official and suspected spy, Laurence Duggan. Smith was found dead at the bottom of a seven-story stairwell in the Justice Department building in Washington, DC, on October 20, 1948. Duggan, working at the time for the Institute of International Education in New York City, fell from the window of his office on the 16th floor on December 20, 1948. Cornell Simpson names the Communists as the most likely candidates in their fatal falls.219
The 1940s hardly has a monopoly on such suspicious deaths with political connections. On August 15, 1993, Jon Parnell Walker, Whitewater investigator for the Resolution Trust Corporation, fell to his death from his Arlington, Virginia, apartment balcony.220 During the George W. Bush administration there was State Department official John J. Kokal on November 7, 2003, and former Reagan administration Cold Warrior, Gus W. Weiss, on November 25, 2003. Kokal fell from the roof of the State Department building in Foggy Bottom.221 Weiss fell from the Watergate Building where he had an apartment, also in Foggy Bottom not far away. Like Walker’s death and Forrestal’s, both deaths were ruled suicides.
Very early in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Edward Grant Stockdale, a man who had served as Kennedy’s Ambassador to Ireland and was said to have known a lot about LBJ-crony Bobby Baker’s shady business dealings and even about LBJ’s connections to the JFK assassination, fell from the window of his office on the thirteenth floor of the Alfred I. Dupont Building in Miami on December 2, 1963.222
Most recently, Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon reported on April 4, 2014, that a senior unnamed CIA official had died from a fall from a CIA building somewhere in Northern sometime in the previous week, also ruled a suicide.223 That death seems to have been reported nowhere else, and the Washington Free Beacon had no follow-up.
One such “suicide” eventually discovered to be an almost certain unsolved homicide was the 1953 10-story fall of CIA scientist, Dr. Frank Olson, from a New York City hotel. Olson had apparently become conscience stricken over some of the dirtiest of the CIA’s human experimentation programs and had to be “terminated.”224 The CIA had “admitted” to secretly giving him LSD, causing him to go temporarily out of his mind and crash through a window of the hotel. When the family had the body exhumed and re-examined, they discovered persuasive evidence of a fatal hammer blow to the head.
The manner of Forrestal’s death aside, the Jewish-dominated U.S. government has been so closely tied in with organized crime for such a long time that it’s hardly a stretch to characterize any Deep State murder as a mob hit. First, let’s look at the following exchange with Chicago mobster Sam “Mooney” Giancana as recalled by his younger brother, Chuck on the eve of the 1948 presidential election. Chuck speaks first:
"Isn't it for sure that Truman will get in?"
"Well, let's put it this way...Dewey won't win, even if he does. Get my point?"
"Yeah." Chuck hesitated. "But really what difference does it make? ...Like you said before, they're all alike."
"Well, not this time. Luciano still hates Dewey for puttin' him in jail in the first place.... Costello's worried that the self-righteous son of a bitch has a short memory, probably doesn't even know how to conduct business. We'd have to give Dewey a few lessons and I got a feelin' he's a slow learner," Mooney said smiling. "But Truman, well, he can bullshit all he wants about bein' a common man--people eat that up--but the truth is, he grew up with our boys in Kansas City."
"Really...I didn't know that. How come nobody talks about it?"
"Christ, because it's just like Chicago out there. They had a mick mayor, Pendergast, on the take big time...loved to bet on the ponies. And they got the Italians for muscle and to make money with the rackets. So, fact is, Truman owes everything he's got to us. Pendergast made him a judge and then, with the Italian muscle behind him, got him to the Senate. When the forty-four election came up...Kelly here in Chicago got him on the ticket with Roosevelt. Shit, Chicago got Roosevelt and Truman nominated and elected. We were good to Roosevelt; he was good to us. He died and Truman's been our man in the White House ever since. It's smooth sailing with him there."
"I thought he was a schoolteacher or somethin'. He always seemed clean.... I know what you said before, but I guess I didn't know he was really connected."
Mooney sighed. "Jesus, I guess you think General MacArthur was a choirboy out there fightin' for America, too? Like I always told you, 'Give me a guy who steals a little and I'll make money.' "
He shook his head. "Well, there's connected, Chuck, and then there's connected. We pull the strings...so, shit, yeah...if they can be bought, they're connected."
Chuck took a drink and thought for a moment. "So Dewey would just fuck things up...or at least make things more'--he searched for the right word--"more uncertain?"
"Exactly. So now, think you'd like to place a bet? Truman or Dewey? Take my advice and put your money on Truman?"225
The following quote concerning Las Vegas developer and casino mogul Hank Greenspun reveals the U.S. mob connection with Israel:
With support from Meyer Lansky, Greenspun had become a gunrunner for Israel in 1948 and thereafter performed as an Israeli operative. Bugsy Siegel reportedly gave $50,000 to support Irgun while “celebrity gangster” Mickey Cohen sponsored an Irgun fundraiser in 1947. The Jerusalem Post insisted of Greenspun, “He’s like God in Israel...his contribution to the establishment of the Jewish state is widely considered to be greater than any other American.” Compared to what Greenspun did for Israel, “Jonathan Pollard’s act was pure innocence.” In October 1961 Kennedy pardoned Greenspun who was caught smuggling U.S. military hardware to Israel and convicted of violating the Neutrality Act of 1950.226
In case anyone might think things have changed in any material way since the heyday of Greenspun and Giancana, see this writer’s review of Sally Denton and Roger Morris’s The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America, particularly the short section on the likely mob connections of current president, Donald Trump.227
__________
206 Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and the History of the Cold War, Henry Holt and Co., 2008.
207 https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC051/c04531.
208 David Martin, “Secret Forrestal Investigation,�
�� http://www.dcdave.com/poet12/031026a.html.
209 The release of the report might have been a fluke. We twice filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the report with the National Naval Medical Center, following their procedures to the letter. Our request was, quite illegally, ignored both times. The law requires a response of some kind within 20 business days, with the possibility of a 10-day extension. We were on the verge of filing a FOIA lawsuit when we happened upon a Navy web site that allowed for online FOIA requests, which we made in a matter of minutes. Within a couple of weeks we received a letter from the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Office promising me the report, and, indeed, it did arrive forthwith. The rest is history, except that it’s not yet history to the historians and other major opinion molders, the Thompson work notwithstanding.
210 Hoopes and Brinkley, p. 426.
211 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Forrestal&diff=next&oldid=212470547.
212 David Martin, “Spook Journalist Goulden,” http://www.dcdave.com/article1/081198.html.
213 http://ariwatch.com/VS/JamesForrestal/WillcuttsReport.htm.
214 http://www.dcdave.com/article5/090130.htm. Spalding died in 2009. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/john-spalding-obituary?pid=126202844.
215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Underworld.
216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder%2C_Inc.
217 Joe Bruno on the Mob: https://joebrunoonthemob.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/joe-bruno-on-the-mob-abe-%E2%80%9Ckid-twist%E2%80%9D-reles-the-canary-who-could-sing-but-couldnt-fly/.
218 Vikram Murthi, “Wormwood digs up Frank Olson’s body and looks through the CIA’s assassination manual,”https://www.avclub.com/wormwood-digs-up-frank-olsons-body-and-looks-through-th-1821521874.
219 Simpson, pp. 126-128.
220 https://100percentfedup.com/just-close-friend-hillary-clinton-planned-step-away-politics-found-dead-apparent-suicide/. See #19 on the list.
221 Wayne Madsen, “Did John Bolton ‘Defenestrate’ Anyone?” Gumshoe News, March 24, 2018, https://gumshoenews.com/2018/03/24/did-john-bolton-defenestrate-anyone/; David Martin, “Connected Iraq War Opponent a ‘Suicide’” http://www.dcdave.com/article4/031207.html and “Three Important Assassinations? Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Gus Weiss,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/111220.htm.
222 Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: From Mastermind to “The Colossus,” Skyhorse Publishing, 2014, pp. 239-245.
223 David Martin, “Anonymous CIA Official Dies Violently,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/140410.htm.
224 Chris Floyd, “The CIA, the Bush Gang and the Death of Frank Olson,” Counter punch, August 28, 2002, https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/08/28/the-cia-the-bush-gang-and-the-death-of-frank-olson/.
225 Sam and Chuck Giancana, Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America, Warner Books, 1992, pp. 161-162. (The co-author with Chuck is not the mobster himself but his godson with the same name.)
226 Gates, p. 33.
227 David Martin, “The Money and the Power: A Review,” http://dcdave.com/article5/160310.htm.
CHAPTER 13
Historians Unmoved
Timorous Eunuchs
In the universities
You’ll find our finest minds.
The problem isn’t with their brains.
Oh no, it’s with their spines.
“The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in United States presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history and strives to apply the lessons of history to the nation’s most pressing contemporary governance challenges. The Miller Center is committed to work grounded in rigorous scholarship and advanced through civil discourse.”228
In a word, the Miller Center is at the very heart of the academic establishment of writers of United States history. “Previous directors include Dr. Phillip Zelikow (1999-2005), currently White Burkett Miller Professor History at the University of Virginia and previously the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, in addition to numerous posts in many levels of government service.”229
Need we say more? Under the general category of U.S. Presidents, their page for James V. Forrestal (1947-1949), under Harry S. Truman now reads, oddly enough:
Shortly after his resignation, Forrestal was hospitalized because of severe depression. On May 22, 1949, he committed suicide when he allegedly climbed out of a window to hang himself and fell to his death from the sixteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.230
Climbing out a sixteenth-floor window for the purpose of hanging oneself certainly must count as one of the most bizarre ways of committing suicide ever, so the sages at the Miller Center felt it necessary to hedge themselves in a bit by describing this scenario as a mere allegation. One might think, then, that that would make the suicide claim an allegation as well, but one would reckon without the determined adherence of this clutch of scholars and experts to popular propaganda. The only alternative suicide scenario we are left with, after all, is that Forrestal went to the trouble to tie a bathrobe belt around his neck for no reason at all before taking his long plunge.
No, "suicide" it is, and suicide it will remain on the Miller Center's web site, in spite of the fact that the last official word from the government—the result of its official inquiry into the death—is only that Forrestal died from injuries caused by the fall. The report offered no conclusion as to what caused the fall. The Miller Center's excuse for stubbornly clinging to their suicide conclusion, in spite of the availability of the official investigation report since 2004—a report that thoroughly undermines that conclusion—remains, in effect, that "established historians" still cling to it. None of those worthies, you see, has yet seen fit to weigh in on Forrestal's death in light of the latest revelations. This is a particularly disingenuous rationalization for the Miller Center to make, though, when it houses a veritable stable of such types.231
That statement is actually an improvement over what appeared there before we emailed them in 2008, informing them that what they had written was based upon information available before the release of the Willcutts Report, and was therefore almost four years out of date.232 It took several emails back and forth to get to the unsatisfactory statement that has been there since 2008. One can gather how the statement read before from this last-word email to me from a Miller Center spokesperson:
Based on your email, we have read the Willcutts report and revised some of the text on James Forrestal on American President: An Online Reference Resource. As you mentioned, the report does not use the term “nervous breakdown” but instead mentions repeatedly that Forrestal suffered from severe depression. We also changed the wording about Forrestal jumping out of a window because sources indicate that he fell out the window while allegedly trying to hang himself.
But as far as whether or not Forrestal committed suicide, I think you have misunderstood the role of American President. The web site is an educational site for general users. As such, we see our responsibility as providing our users with a mainstream interpretation of history. We do not publish groundbreaking new scholarship or challenge the historical consensus that is derived from secondary sources written by established academics. If you can point us to secondary sources written by established historians that discuss the Willcutts report and cast doubt on whether Forrestal committed suicide, we would be very interested in reading them. However, until historians have analyzed and weighed the report against other historical materials and written about their findings, we will not introduce unsubstantiated theories and rumors into American President. (emphasis added)
To help us achieve our mission at American President, we enlist Consulting Editors who review our materials and add their own interpretations to various degrees. Each Consulting Editor is listed on the home page for each President. The Consulting Editor for Harry S. Truman and his administration, right on the Truman home page, is Alonzo Hamby, who is a distinguished professor of
history at Ohio State University [sic. It’s Ohio University] and author of Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. He has approved the changes to the Forrestal essay.
We appreciate how strongly you feel about this subject and your determination to have the Willcutts report incorporated into the historical record. Nevertheless, American President seeks to represent the consensus of academic historians.
You’d think that they were Wikipedia with their no original research, the truth be damned, rules, but one can hardly argue with that last sentence. As of 2008 the consensus of what passes for academic historians in the country, four years after the release of the Willcutts Report, was still that Forrestal had committed suicide. As for their own reading of the Willcutts Report, it would appear that they were no more perceptive than Professor David E. Kaiser, with whom we had the exchange described in Chapter Nine. It would have been pointless to present the detailed case to the Miller Center that I presented to Kaiser, because they have already told me that their fingers are stuffed in their ears until the David Kaisers of the world speak up.
If you are wondering why they did not invoke Nicholas Thompson as someone who had read the Willcutts Report and was still calling Forrestal’s death a suicide, that is because his book had not yet come out. That would be the following year. Even had he been honest and had drawn the proper inference from the evidence, that still would not have measured up by their lights because Thompson, as a mere media figure, lacks the proper credentials. He might have the right pedigree, but he is not an “academic historian.”