by David Martin
We knew that the words would be wasted, but we could not restrain ourselves, and we responded immediately. We omit the first paragraph of pleasantries, only:
Contrary to your speculation about my understanding of the role of American President—as opposed to the role of the history community of the University of Virginia, with whom I should expect you at least rub shoulders—I have never labored under the illusion that you would write anything that went against prevailing historical sentiment. With respect to James Forrestal's death, however, my intent was to educate you to the fact that that sentiment is apparently based entirely upon what was known prior to the release of the best evidence in the case (not "unsubstantiated theories and rumors"), which is the long-suppressed official investigation of Forrestal's death. Just as you have asked me to alert you to anything written by "established historians" that discusses the Willcutts report and casts doubt on the suicide conclusion, I dare say that you will not be able to point me to any historian who has had anything to say about it at all since it was made available to the public in the fall of 2004. I think you would have to agree that that fact alone does not reflect particularly well upon our established historians.
And thus it has always been with this group with regard to the Willcutts report. As a prime example, in their comprehensive 1992 Forrestal biography, Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, the main source for Hamby in his Truman biography on Forrestal's death, neglect to tell the readers that there was such a thing as the Willcutts Report, much less that it was kept secret. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, not one American historian since 1949 has made any public complaint or has voiced the slightest suspicion over the fact that this official investigation was kept secret, that is, that by definition a cover-up has taken place. With that sorry record before us and with the resounding silence with which the 2004 release of the Willcutts report by the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University has been greeted by the history community, I must say that I am not at all optimistic that the Miller Center will have to give up its published theory that Forrestal committed suicide anytime soon.
Yes, I did say "theory." You may read the 5-point conclusion of the last official word of the government on Forrestal's death, that is, the results of the Willcutts report, all you want and you will not find anywhere the conclusion that James Forrestal committed suicide. It is as though the Warren Commission had not concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. To be sure, within hours of his death, the county coroner said that Forrestal committed suicide and the Bethesda Naval Hospital is-sued a statement saying that he had committed suicide, and all the newspapers said that he did, but none were qualified to make such a ruling at that point. The fact of the matter is that after all the testimony was taken (though it was far from all that should have been taken) and all the evidence was gathered (again, less than there should have been), the Willcutts review board could not find it within itself to say that Forrestal committed suicide.
And as far as "unsubstantiated theories" go, I know you call it merely an allegation, but the notion that Forrestal in the fleeting time available would have gone to the trouble to attempt to hang himself out of a 16th story window is about as unsubstantiated as a theory can get. Certainly nothing in the Willcutts report comes close to supporting it. Hoopes and Brinkley write that the bathrobe cord "gave way," suggesting that it broke, but that conclusion is completely contradicted by the testimony of Hospitalman William Eliades, as close as the report gets to the subject:
"I looked to see whether he had tried to hang himself and see whether a piece of cord had broken off. It was all in one piece except it was tied around his neck."
The question of whether enough of the cord was left over for it to have been tied to the radiator under the window or whether the longest loose end appeared by its wrinkles to have been recently tied to any-thing was not addressed.
While in the interests of historical accuracy I would prefer that you not parade on your site the outlandish notion that Forrestal might have tried to double-kill himself by hanging from a 16th story window, as one who wouldn't mind seeing more skepticism of the insupportable suicide theory engendered in the public, I'd just as soon that you leave it alone for now.
As a final point, Professor Hamby, with whom I imagine you will share this email, is not supported at all by the doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital in his assertion in his book that Forrestal was exhibiting classical signs of paranoia. The words "paranoia" and "paranoid" are completely lacking from the descriptions of Forrestal by the doctors. The second in command of the doctors, Captain Stephen Smith, on the other hand, was particularly impressed with Forrestal's exceptional command of reality.
I shall continue in my efforts to inform historians of the existence of the Willcutts report and of what is contained therein. Examples can be found at http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080113.htm. You could render a great public service by lending a hand. Whatever you might choose to do, I am satisfied that, in due time, the truth will out.
What we have seen that they have chosen to do now for one more decade is to leave their statement on Forrestal’s death unchanged. There has been no reason for them to make any change, because the established historians have held the suicide line.
John Lewis Gaddis
As academic historians go, you don’t get much more established than Gaddis. The New York Times, according to Wikipedia, has called him the “Dean of Cold War Historians.”233 In response to a question by this writer on the night of December 8, 2011, Gaddis claimed that he knew nothing about the release of the official investigation of the death of James Forrestal (the Willcutts Report).
According to Wikipedia, "Gaddis is best known for his critical analysis of the strategies of containment employed by United States presidents from Harry S. Trumanto Ronald Reagan..."
Also according to Wikipedia, "Biographers Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley have dubbed Forrestal "godfather of containment" largely on account of his work in distributing [George F.] Kennan's writing.234 Wikipedia calls Kennan "the father of containment."
In my question to Gaddis, I noted that he states flatly on page 354 of his later Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Kennan, the promotion of which had brought him to the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, that Forrestal "had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide."235 "Could it be," I asked, "that you are unfamiliar with the official investigation of his death, kept secret for 55 years and released only in 2004? That report is on the web site of the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University. No critical reader of that report could conclude that Forrestal committed suicide."
Gaddis responded that, indeed, he knew nothing of this official investigation and its belated release. In stating that Forrestal had committed suicide, he said, he was simply repeating the "prevailing opinion" on the matter, sounding like the Miller Center three years earlier.
Consider what we have here. The leading opponent in the U.S. government of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, the one most responsible for the change of U.S. policy toward the Communists from one of accommodation to one of confrontation and containment, died violently and mysteriously. Stalin is well known for assassinating his opponents, wherever they might be. Abundant evidence has been produced that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were laced with Stalin's agents, right up to the very top. The news that the official investigation of this violent death was suppressed for 55 years, only to be released through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004, had been on that leading opponent of Communism's Wikipedia site for some years prior to Gaddis’s book publication and his promotional presentation in Washington, DC, as had been the key evidence showing that the death was, in all probability, a murder. But America's leading scholar on the confrontation claims not to know the first thing about this and reflects as much in his book.
It is possible, we suppose. He is, after all, a professor of history at Yale. It's not very likely, though. As we said, he's a professor of
history at Yale, the very cradle of the mendacious CIA. In fact, he is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale. Lovett was the Yale Skull and Bones member to whose Florida estate, recall, Forrestal was flown after his strange, likely drug-induced, seizure in Washington.236 That was just prior to Forrestal's eventually fatal transfer to the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
As one would expect, Gaddis includes Nicholas Thompson’s The Hawk and the Dove in his bibliography. There are therefore three possibilities with respect to Gaddis’s claim of ignorance of the Willcutts Report, (1) Gaddis has read the book but forgot about that section, (2) he included the book in his bibliography without having read all of it, or (3) he was not telling the truth when he said that he had never heard of the Will-cutts Report. None of these possibilities gives one much confidence in Gaddis as a historian.
Gregg Herken
H.L. Mencken aptly called them “the timorous eunuchs who posture as American historians.”237 That was in 1920, but little has changed. It might be a freshly minted Ph.D. from TCU, teaching at a backwater university in Texas, like Matthew A. McNiece, or the man often described as the foremost historian of the Cold War, Yale history professor John Lewis Gaddis, but the fake authoritativeness and the real pusillanimity are at least as evident today as they were in Mencken’s day.238 That is certainly the case when it comes to their writing about the very important subject of the violent death of the U.S. government’s leading opponent of the creation of the state of Israel, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.
Now comes a man who has achieved a station in the profession that, but for his inability to write coherent English, young McNiece might aspire to, University of California at Merced professor emeritus Gregg Herken. You know that Herken has made it with the ruling establishment when you see that his book on the movers and shakers who lived in the Georgetown district of Washington, DC, during the Cold War era got reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Weekly Standard, and numerous other publications.239 That he has the stamp of approval as a certified court historian is further evidenced by the fact that for 15 years he was chairman of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
What strikes one in listening to his presentation about his book at Washington’s Politics and Prose bookstore is his apparent lack of any sense of outrage over the very cozy relationship that existed (and still exists, we must presume) between prominent putative journalists and people at the very highest levels of America’s intelligence community, that is to say, our secret government.240 People so completely in bed with the most sinister people in the government can hardly be proper watchdogs upon them.
When it comes to ignoring everything that has been revealed about James Forrestal’s death in the 21st century, Herken is comfortably in the mainstream. His offense is worse than most, though, because we know he knows better. One of his references, as I note in the March, 2015, email that I was moved to write to him (below), is to the article in which I reveal the phoniness of the transcription of the morbid poem that was sold to the public as a sort of suicide note:
Dear Professor Herken,
I was impressed by the scholarship that you demonstrated in your letter to The New York Review of Books, reinforcing with new evidence your already persuasive argument that Robert Oppenheimer was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States.241 I was especially disappointed, then, to see how completely your scholarly skills seemed to have deserted you when you wrote about the death of our first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, in your most recent book, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington:
Dismissed from his Pentagon post by Truman in March for his intransigence in the defense budget debate, Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown weeks later and was confined to a secure wing of the navy's hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. During the early morning hours of May 22, 1949, after a restless night spent copying lines from the chorus of Sophocles's play Ajax, Forrestal fell to his death from the window of his room on the hospital's sixteenth floor.
He would be the first senior-ranking American casualty of the Cold War. (pp. 94-95)
Taking your small inaccuracies first, Forrestal did not fall from "the window of his room." There were at least three windows in his room, but Forrestal, according to the official record, did not go out any of them. He went out the window of the kitchen across the hall from his room.
No diagnosis of "nervous breakdown" was made by any of the doctors examining Forrestal at Bethesda Naval Hospital. You can search the transcript of the official "investigation" of Forrestal's death and find that the word "nervous" appears only once, in the endorsing letter of Dr. James Strecker in which he states his own qualifications on the subject of nervous disorders.
It is also unwarranted to state flatly that Truman sacked Forrestal be-cause of his "intransigence in the defense budget debate." There are any number of reasons why Truman replaced Forrestal with Louis Johnson, but by giving that sole reason you do manage to make your insupportable conclusion that Forrestal was a "casualty of the Cold War" sound somewhat plausible. Arnold Rogow's carefully hedged-in conclusion is much more supportable, which is why I lead off with it in “New Forrestal Document Exposes Cover-up.”
However history may ultimately judge his opposition to the establishment of Israel, by 1949 it was clear that Forrestal was, in a sense, one of the casualties of the diplomatic warfare that had led to the creation of the Jewish state.242
All these inaccuracies are relatively slight, though, compared to your statement about Forrestal's restless night spent copying those lines from Sophocles. You should have told your readers, as all the other promoters of the suicide thesis have, that the poem in question reflects a bleak and despairing state of mind. More importantly, though, you should have shared with readers the evidence that most of those other writers did not have, that is, that the handwriting of the transcription doesn't resemble Forrestal's in the least and that the corpsman on duty looking over Forrestal said that in those last two hours of Forrestal's life when the corpsman was on duty the lights were off in his room and he did no reading or writing, and that no book was entered into evidence during the official investigation.
You then proceed to compound your error in the endnote that accompanies the quoted passage:
Internet conspiracy theorists have suggested that Forrestal was actually murdered by Soviet spies, or possibly by Mossad agents, because of his opposition to creation of the state of Israel. While some of Forrestal's "paranoia" turns out to have been justified—he was right in believing that the U.S. government had been penetrated by Russian spies—his personal papers at Princeton leave little doubt that he was deeply depressed for some time prior to his death.
Since the Mossad would not exist until a half year after Forrestal's death, not even those people you tar with the meaningless pejorative "Internet conspiracy theorists" have ever, to my knowledge, suggested that that organization had anything to do with Forrestal's death. That pro-Israel and pro-Communist partisans within the Truman government were, however, behind Forrestal's death has been suggested—by me in particular. You have referenced my work so you must know that I name the powerful White House aide David Niles as the most likely culprit in the plot to murder Forrestal. He was identified in the Verona intercepts as a person cooperating with Communist agents and he was eventually dismissed by Truman for passing important military secrets to Israel.
Because you specifically cite Part 3 of my “Who Killed James Forrestal?” —by web address though not by name—you know as well that I am on the firmest of ground when I say that the Sophocles transcription was not in Forrestal's handwriting. That is the article, after all, in which I revealed the dissimilarity between the handwriting in the transcription and several Forrestal handwriting samples:http://www.dcdave.com/article4/041103.htm.
Surely you must agree that nothing that might be foun
d among Forrestal's personal papers that is suggestive of his suicide can compare in significance to the evidence that I have presented in this short email that is suggestive of his murder. The lead doctor at Bethesda, Captain George Raines, after all, said that he was suicidally depressed (although his second in command, Captain Stephen Smith, seems to have disagreed rather vigorously), but that evidence of suicide hardly compares to the physical evidence of murder: the ginned-up "suicidal transcription,” and broken glass on the bed and the laundered crime scene that I discuss in Part 2 of "Who Killed James Forrestal?"
I would very much like to hear what you might have to say in defense of what you have written about Forrestal's death in light of the facts that I have presented. Should I hear nothing I shall take it as a concession that what you have written is, as it seems to me on its face, indefensible.
Sincerely,
David Martin
March 28, 2015
There was no more likelihood that he would respond than would the George Washington University psychiatrist, Jerrold Post, and he did not. No doubt he has concluded that a person with a mainstream approval rating like his need not be bothered by anything so trivial as the truth. Nobody who might threaten his aerie, in his judgment, has said anything about his errors concerning Forrestal’s death, after all, so he needn’t be bothered. As we have seen, he has lots of sorry company.
__________
228 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Center_of_Public_Affairs.
229 Ibid. On September 10, 2002, Professor Zelikow spilled some beans before an audience at the University of Virginia. Our upcoming invasion of Iraq was not really motivated by any threat to us or to the Europeans by those mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel. And this is the real threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it’s not a popular sell.” Gates, p. 9. With equal candor these days, Zelikow might well say as much for the threat from Iran.