The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Phillip F. Nelson

  Since his retirement from the insurance profession, Phillip Nelson has been busy filling in a lot of the important gaps left by the courtiers who practice the history trade in academia. His subject has been President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and anyone reading Nelson on Johnson would have to conclude that there is no contest as to who the worst President in U.S. history was. His books, in order, have been LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination; LBJ, From Mastermind to “The Colossus”; Remember the Liberty! Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas; and Who Really Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Case against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover.

  What we do in Chapter One, Nelson does in his Chapter Five, of LBJ, From Mastermind to “The Colossus, that is, he reports that Johnson paid a visit to Forrestal at his room in Bethesda Naval Hospital, to which the latter had been confined after he had experienced some sort of mysterious breakdown. He also makes explicit reference to our work on the subject. We can rule out that it was an innocent social visit by a well-wisher. We learned of the visit, recall, from Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley and they learned of it from an interview by the late Hoopes of Forrestal assistant Marx Leva, who also told them that it was “against Forrestal’s wishes.”

  Johnson and Forrestal were on far opposite sides of the fence over the question of recognition of the new state of Israel. Nelson speculates that the purpose of the visit might have been to subject Forrestal, in his weakened emotional state, to the notorious “Johnson Treatment,” a combination of “supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, and hint of threat.”252

  He is suggesting, I suppose, that the intent was to drive Forrestal even further over the edge and perhaps to induce him to kill himself so others wouldn’t have to do it. Since their political differences should have been well known and since Forrestal would have surely communicated to his doctors that Johnson’s visit was unwanted, it amounts to virtual medical malpractice for the visit to have been permitted. Not surprisingly, the subject never came up when the Navy conducted its review. Furthermore, there is no mention at all in the Nurse’s Notes to the Willcutts Report of that LBJ visit. That does not mean that Leva is wrong and that no such visit took place, because, as we have noted, we know of other people who visited Forrestal during his seven weeks at Bethesda who do not show up in the hospital record.

  My own guess is that Johnson was brought in on that action in the manner in which a member of the Mafia becomes a “made man.” Maybe he was asked to report on the means of access to Forrestal’s room for the phony patients on the same floor who would eventually throttle him and throw him out the window. The role might have been wholly superfluous, but he had been made a party to a monumentally treacherous political act of the sort that would mark his entire political career, and it would have been done on behalf of the people whom he would serve throughout his life.

  In the overall scheme of things, our differences with Nelson amount to little more than hair-splitting. Anyone who has read what Nelson has written about the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and of Martin Luther King, Jr. would readily believe that James Forrestal was assassinated. Others might need to read a few chapters of our book to come around.

  Paul L. Williams

  In a break through for a book from a mainstream publisher, the award-winning journalist, Williams, citing my“Who Killed James Forrestal?” series, states flatly in his provocative Operation Gladio that Forrestal “was thrown out the window of the sixteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had been a patient.” Consistent with the theme of his book, however, he hints implausibly, to my mind, that it was because of the influence that Forrestal had wielded as Navy Secretary three years before in getting Deep State-connected mobster, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, deported to Italy.253

  __________

  243 http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-deadly-world-of-post-war-politics/.

  244 http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-adl-in-american-society/.

  245 Clarity Press, Inc., 2009.

  246 See David Martin, “Dr. Einstein or Dr. Frankenstein?” http://dcdave.com/article5/171004.htm.

  247 http://www.alanhart.net/911-open-letter-challenge-to-adl%E2%80%99s-abe-foxman/

  248 Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.

  249 David Martin, “The New York Times and Joseph Stalin,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080309.htm; David Martin, “American Victims of the Soviet Gulag,” http://www.dcdave.com/article5/130226.htm; See also E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Fidelity Press, 2008.

  250 “A Jewish Defector Warns America: Benjamin Freedman Speaks on Zionism,” http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/freedman.htm.

  251 Dolphin Press (Pty) Ltd., 1978, Durban, South Africa.

  252 Nelson, p. 231.

  253 Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia, Prometheus Books, 2015, Chapter 2 at footnote 42 (Kindle edition).

  CHAPTER 15

  Deserted by the Church

  Rendering unto Israel

  There are those who pull strings in this nation

  Who have a strong Israel fixation.

  Many things become clear

  That have taken place here

  When one comes to this realization.

  What is it about Catholic political leaders in the United States? The first Roman Catholic American president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. His younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who stood a good chance of succeeding Lyndon Johnson as president, was also assassinated.254 The most prominent Catholic political leader in the United States before the Kennedys, Senator Joe McCarthy, was politically assassinated, and today, as a 20th century villain in popular imagination, his name ranks right up there with Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, there is a very good possibility that McCarthy’s death at age 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital was no more of natural causes than Forrestal’s was an accident, in which case his assassination was not just political.255

  The great Catholic monk and writer, Thomas Merton, was not a political leader, but his antiwar writing and his writing about the corruption of the American political and opinion-molding system had great political power. Hugh Turley and this writer have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that Merton’s death in Thailand on December 10, 1968, was not a result of accidental electrocution by a faulty (Hitachi) electric fan as those opinion molders would have us believe and that he, too, was assassinated.256

  The Wikipedia page for James Forrestal says that he was Catholic, although he had not been a practicing Catholic since leaving Princeton University. He certainly had a strong Catholic upbringing. His father was a Catholic immigrant from Ireland and his mother fancied that he had the makings of a priest. As we have seen, furthermore, in his last few weeks alive he seemed to be making a serious effort to get back in touch with his Catholic faith. What is more, the Catholic press in the United States, which seems to be about as subservient to the ruling secular authority as the Polish church was under the Communists, has been about as active in covering up Forrestal’s assassination as it has been of Merton’s.

  The most recent example, in the case of Forrestal, was posted on February 27, 2015, on the web site of The American Catholic. The subtitle under their masthead reads, “Politics & Culture from a Catholic Perspective.” Attorney Donald R. McClarey wrote the article in question entitled, “James Forrestal and His Prophecy.”257

  Whether we might say that it is about a “fellow Catholic” or not, what “cradle Catholic” McClarey wrote in The American Catholic about Forrestal’s death is an affront to the man’s memory. It does violence to the truth. Everyone, Catholic or otherwise, should be appalled by it. Here are the offending lines:

  Appointed the first Secretary of Defen
se in 1947, Forrestal fought against budget cuts proposed by President Truman that he thought endangered the nation’s security. He also opposed the proposal to unify the services which would gut the Navy and eliminate the Marine Corps. On March 31, 1949, Harry Truman, angered over Forrestal’s opposition to his policies, fired him. Tragically, Forrestal, who had worked non-stop on Defense issues since he joined the Roosevelt ad-ministration in 1940, had a nervous breakdown. While undergoing psychiatric treatment he committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor of the National Naval Medical Center. He left behind a note with a quotation from Sophocles’ Ajax:

  Then he repeats the lines found in Millis, Rogow, and Hoopes and Brinkley, ending in “nightingale.”

  There’s really no excuse for anyone to be writing such things in 2015. We now have the Internet—The American Catholic is an Internet publication, after all. Since 2004 the official report on Forrestal’s death has been available online, and the evidence that it contains shows beyond serious doubt that McClarey has repeated falsehoods.258 Research these days begins with the Internet because it’s so easy. Simply typing in the name “James Forrestal” into any search engine leads one quickly to our dcdave.com web site and the discoveries that we have made.

  One might think that McClarey was just negligent. He was merely repeating what was in the 1992 Hoopes and Brinkley biography, after all, and Forrestal’s death was only tangential to the subject of his article, which is primarily a sort of flag-waving defense of the U.S. Marine Corps. (Concerning that point, as we noted in Chapter One, had Forrestal’s counsel been taken, the bloody battle of Iwo Jima, to which McClarey refers later on in his article, would likely never have been fought because Japan would have already surrendered.259 The possibility that McClarey had made an honest error, more on the order of a sin of omission caused by insufficient research diligence underlay the email that we sent him a little over two months after his article first appeared.

  Ten days passed and we received no response, so we concluded that the likelihood was great that McClarey’s was a sin of commission from the beginning. The fact that his editor, Tito Edwards, at The American Catholic also failed to respond to our May 18 email to him virtually seals it, except for the Delphic “Update” that was appended later and that we have only recently discovered. We shall discuss that further on. Here is the latter email, which includes the original email to McClarey:

  Dear Mr. Edwards,

  On May 8, 2015, I sent the following email to a writer for your publication:

  Dear Mr. McClarey,

  A friend has called my attention to your February article in The American Catholic. You seem not to be aware of what we have learned since the release of the official report on Forrestal's death in 2004. For starters, that poem transcription that you quote was in someone else's handwriting. Taken all in all, the evidence points heavily toward murder and cover-up and not to suicide. See my latest article on the subject here.260 For a brief introduction to the subject see “New Forrestal Document Exposes Cover-up.”261 I believe that it is incumbent upon you to write a follow-up article correcting the record. I have come to expect government propaganda from the mainstream press. The Catholic press should not abet them.

  The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood; the second, not to fear to tell the truth. - Pope Leo XIII

  Sincerely,

  David Martin

  I would have preferred to make my comment about the article online on your web site, but when I attempted to do so, I received a message that comments had been closed on the article. May I ask you why that is so? Looking at your site's "comments policy," I see nothing about any comments period or any reason for closing comments. What possible reason could there be for closing comments on any topic, but particularly for doing it so quickly after there had been so few comments on a topic of such great importance? I have taken note of your "three strikes and you're out," treatment of those you deem in violation of your rules, though I may not agree with them. Continuing the metaphor, how do you decide that a person will not even be allowed up to the plate?

  Ten days have now passed, and Mr. McClarey has not responded to my email. I sent it through a lawyer referral service, so I have every reason to believe that he received it on the day I sent it. In case he didn't, would you please forward the message you see above to him?

  Your responsibility hardly ends with fulfilling that errand request, however. Your web site has published information about the death of a great American public servant that is contradicted by the best evidence now available. The misinformation is so bad that the man who put it out is apparently unwilling to defend what he has written. If he will not do it, you have an obligation either to defend it or to retract it publicly.

  Sincerely,

  David Martin

  All those practicing evil hate the light and will not come to the light lest their deeds should be exposed. - John 3:20

  Mr. Edwards never responded, either, and no correction to the article or retraction was made.

  Catholic Apologists for the State

  Reflecting upon this non-response from a publication that displays an eagle and an American flag with the cross (not a crucifix) on its masthead, we are reminded that our local diocesan newspaper the Arlington Catholic Herald did not print our letter exposing archneocon George Weigel for the duplicity of an article of his that they had published.262 We are also reminded that it is a rare American Catholic church these days that does not have an American flag in its sanctuary along with all the Christian iconography, and that the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, has taken to hanging a massive flag from its bell tower on patriotic occasions like Memorial Day and Independence Day.263

  The Catholic Church seems to have replaced the late Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority as the most consistent supporters of jingoism and militarism within our government, and McClarey’s article is certainly consistent with that trend. With one issue, that of the undeniably worthy position against abortion, taking precedent over all others, the Church’s support for rampant militarism becomes virtually inevitable. Parishioners are encouraged to support candidates who oppose abortion on demand, but those people are almost always Republicans who are also the biggest supporters of an aggressive foreign policy, although, in recent years, Democrats and Republicans seem hardly indistinguishable in that regard.

  Even if it is genuine, the Church’s effort to obtain a Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe v. Wade is doomed to failure as long as it gives a pass to the powerful opinion molders in favor of abortion. The annual March for Life would be much more effective if it ended up in front of the Washington Post building instead of the Supreme Court Building

  Most disturbing of all from a Christian standpoint is that the Church’s embrace of the government and its flag has entailed a growing divorce from the truth. That is because the government’s foreign policy, in particular, is built upon an ever-growing edifice of lies. Furthermore, it is a foreign policy that, at least since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is much more in the interests of Israel than it is of the United States. It would be more honest if the flag being waved in support of the mindless patriotism that the Catholic Church has fostered were the one depicting the Star of David instead of the Stars and Stripes.

  It is at this point that the misbegotten foreign policy and the disregard for truth come together in The American Catholic. James Forrestal, as we have noted repeatedly, was the leading opponent within the United States government of the creation of the Jewish-supremacist state of Israel in Palestine. Parroting the propaganda line as it has developed, starting with that fiftieth anniversary article in The Washington Post in 1999, The American Catholic not only makes no connection between Forrestal’s death and his principled position on Israel, but it also completely avoids mentioning that fact as a major reason for the vicious press that he received in the last year of his life, culminating in his firing by President Truman.

  Now let us di
scuss the belated and very curious reaction that The American Catholic made to our letters. As of this writing, it is at the bottom of the article, and it reads as follows: “Forrestal’s suicide has ever been a feeding ground for conspiracy theorists. Go here for a prime example.”

  The lawyer McClarey appears to believe that the mere invocation of the “conspiracy theorist” epithet effectively trumps hard, irrefutable evidence. Under the word, “here,” you see, The American Catholic has em-bedded a link to our article as it appears with illustrations on the B’Man’s Revolt web site.264 The article, which is primarily what we have in this chapter, effectively destroys the suicide conclusion to which McClarey has leaped in his article (along with the factually incorrect statements that Forrestal “jumped” from a window and that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown.”). Did he and the editor Edwards not even bother to read the article or the letters that we wrote to them? Are they severely challenged in reading comprehension skills, or are they both so contemptuous of the Catholic “flock” making up their readership that they believe that their authoritative sounding repetition of the “suicide” mantra and their “conspiracy theorist” slur will blind their followers to the actual facts? Could Edwards and McClarey not realize how bad this makes them look in the eyes of anyone with the ability to think clearly and with the courage to resist the mentality of the herd?265

  Such a shoddy performance, participating in the cover-up of the assassination of the great public servant, James Forrestal, whether he was a Catholic or not, by people who wear their Catholic religion on their sleeves, hardly reflects well upon these prominent representatives of the American Catholic Church. It is a good deal worse than a Catholic organization giving a platform to a Jewish writer to slander Forrestal by writing falsely that he had “anti-Jewish sentiments” and that possessing such sentiments amounted to a “character stain,” described in Chapter Two. At least that article has since been taken down.