Then I walked her back to her sons, who stood at the grave-side, standing, heads lowered, at the edge of where the casket had been lowered. That was when it occurred to me: this was the first time-in all the years I’d known them, in the various jobs I’d done for our late Secretary of Defense-I had ever seen Jim and Jo Forrestal together.
The suicide of Dr. Joseph Bernstein-no surviving relatives-was buried in the back pages, with no mention that he had been one of James Forrestal’s psychiatrists, in fact no mention that he had worked at the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. Nobody, not even Drew Pearson, picked up on the amazing coincidence of the two interrelated suicides in one night.
Nobody questioned me. Whether they suspected me or not, who can say? I had wiped my fingerprints from the few surfaces I had touched in Bernstein’s dream house, and had driven Maria’s Studebaker back to the hospital parking lot, wiping it clean of prints. No one seemed to have seen me leave the car there, and get in my own and drive away.
The biggest risk had been leaving the bullet that killed Maria behind; it was lodged, no doubt, somewhere in the woodwork of that house, having traveled at close range through her brain. If anyone had thought to check with the Chicago police department, or probably the FBI-who had that thick file on me, remember-a ballistics match to my weapon might have been possible. The nine-millimeter was a gun I had carried since my father’s suicide, and it had left its own fingerprints, here and there.
I wasn’t worried about it, not when the newspapers carried no word of Maria’s death. She had vanished, like a magician’s assistant. Bernstein, in that harassed way, got mentioned; a psychiatrist was too high-profile to just disappear. A nurse was far less significant. She could do a vanishing act.
That gave me the worst nights, thinking about the family she must have had, somewhere. We never spoke of it, but hell-even I’d had a mother and father. What he had the government told them about their daughter’s death? Where, if anywhere, had her remains been interred? Not on an oak-studded knoll in Arlington, I’d wager.
The only conversation I had with a government official bearing at all on Forrestal’s death was a rather oblique one with onetime Capone nemesis and former Secret Service chief Frank J. Wilson, the evening before the big funeral. The meeting-he’d asked to meet me for a cocktail in the Ambassador’s High Hat Cocktail Lounge-was ostensibly a social one; but soon it revealed itself as business, pertaining to Wilson’s consultant role with the Atomic Energy Commission.
Chatting over beers, Wilson and I sat in a back booth, with the privacy only a boisterous public place can provide. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, and with that stern cleft-chin countenance of his, he didn’t look much like a guy out for a night on the town.
“You should know that the Commission is aware of your inquiries at Walker Air Base,” Wilson said, “and in Roswell…. I understand you were poking around for Drew Pearson, about that so-called flying saucer crash.”
“That’s right.”
“We’d just as soon not see any further attention drawn to that. The incident had its flurry of press interest, at the time, which has long since died down.”
“Since when is the Atomic Energy Commission concerned about little green men?”
He twitched a smile, sipped his beer. “I can clear some things up for you-if you’ll agree to keep quiet. You can’t give this to Pearson. Not to anyone, Nate-not your priest, not your best girl.”
My best girl had been recently shot and killed, and lately everybody had been reminding me I was a Jew; so none of that seemed a problem.
“Okay, then, Frank-just between us girls.”
He held his glass of beer with both hands, as if it were something precious, leaning forward, ever so slightly. “Obviously, that was no flying saucer. There’s a top-secret project … no, that’s not quite right. Actually it’s classified Top Secret A-1, the same national security rating as the Manhattan Project.”
My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “And you’re telling me about it? In the cocktail lounge at the Ambassador Hotel?”
“I’m not going to tell you in detail. But the material Major Marcel recovered was debris from a fallen balloon.”
“Weather balloon, yeah. Hell, like Daffy Duck says, ‘That’s no military secret.’ The government’s been peddling that sliced baloney since two hours after the saucer story broke.”
Wilson shook his head, no; his expression grave, his voice hushed. “This isn’t a weather balloon … it’s not one balloon at all, but a train of as many as twenty-three balloons, a massive affair designed to climb to high altitudes, for intelligence-gathering purposes.”
“Okay,” I said, as if accepting all that. “If the Atomic Energy Commission is involved, then I can probably guess the kind of intelligence-gathering you’re talking about.”
“You probably can. As for some of the descriptions you no doubt heard, of the strange debris, this balloon train included a very sophisticated new aluminum material, with rubberized backing.”
“Which accounts for the tales of crumple-proof metal from outer space. What about these so-called hieroglyphics people say they saw?”
“That’s a funny story.” And Wilson smiled, having cued himself. “Apparently the radar reflectors were contracted from a toy company, who used some tape they had on hand for reinforcement purposes-with flowers, diamonds, circles, other childish designs … ‘hieroglyphics.’ As for the unbreakable ‘beams,’ they were balsa wood treated with a special-formula glue.”
I sipped my beer. “That is a funny story, Frank. Almost as funny as trained Army Air Force personnel mistaking that stuff for a crashed flying saucer.”
His eyebrows climbed his endless forehead and then made the long trip back down. “That I can’t explain, other than that some of these materials were sophisticated, and differed greatly from the run-of-the-mill balloons that would have commonly come down in the Southwest, which those Air Force people would have immediately recognized…. And that’s all I can say, Nate-other than, as a friend, to ask you to try, to the best of your ability, to quash Pearson’s interest in the Roswell story. It might draw … unwanted attention.”
The implication, of course, was Soviet attention; and my assumption was that these balloons were gathering the data that, oddly enough, Major Marcel at SAC was lately interpreting and collating, regarding whether or not the Russians were engaging in the testing of atomic weapons.
I went along with this, though I’ve always wondered whether straight-arrow Frank Wilson had knowingly passed disinformation along to me. The only way that train of weather balloons might have been involved in the Roswell crash was if that experimental aircraft codesigned by Germans and Japanese had collided with it-which I supposed was a possibility.
Nonetheless, as Wilson had requested, I did dissuade Pearson from pursuing the Roswell tale, informing him that I believed the accounts were riddled with disinformation, and that Majestic Twelve, while it might well exist, did not seem to have been formed to investigate saucers from outer space.
“Was somebody trying to make a sap of me?” Pearson asked over the phone, the afternoon after Forrestal’s funeral.
“That may be the intent, or possibly just a happy by-product of concealing the real purpose of Majic-12.”
“Which is just one of the many secrets-and sins-Forrestal took to the grave with him.”
The bitterness in Pearson’s tone didn’t surprise me; he had taken terrible blows to his reputation-and to his list of subscribing newspapers-by the blame others in the press were heaping on him; it was widely implied that Pearson, via his hounding, had “murdered” Forrestal. The New York Times pilloried Pearson for overstepping “the bounds of accuracy and decency,” the Washington Post spoke of the columnist’s “below the belt blows”-and this in Pearson’s home paper. (Many years later, Jack Anderson-who would take over the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column and distinguish himself as Pearson’s successor-would say with regret, “Our hand w
as surely in this tragedy.”)
“Tell me, Drew,” I asked him, just curious, “do you feel you bear any blame at all for Jim Forrestal’s demise?”
“It was the Navy’s fault-if they’d taken proper precautions, he’d be alive today.”
“There’s some truth in that,” I admitted. “But I thought maybe you could at least scrape up a little pity for the poor bastard.”
“Sorry, no. This was a man who spent all his life thinking about only himself, trying to fulfill his great ambition to be President of the United States. Anyway, is a public official immune from criticism or investigation, for fear his health might be impaired by the process?”
“You know, Drew-I know why you hated him so much, if you’re interested.”
“I didn’t hate him! … Why?”
“He reminded you of you.”
“That’s a despicable thing to say. You know better than most people what that man was capable of, to see that his point of view prevailed.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You two’re the original ends-justify-the-means twins. There’s only one thing Forrestal has over you, Drew, just one little thing …”
“And what would that be?”
“He had the decency to go out a high window.”
Well, I didn’t get any jobs from Pearson for a while, after that. But we did reconcile, when in later years he mellowed some, as his power dwindled. He accomplished many good things with his muckraking style, including paving the way for modern investigative journalism. One of his many positive accomplishments was to follow up my lead on our government’s collaboration with Nazis, exposing the likes of Luftwaffe Major General Walter Schreiber-who had been involved with medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates-forcing the Nazi general to flee from our shores in 1952. Toward the end of Pearson’s life, when he was receiving accolades for his long, illustrious career, the Forrestal case was dredged up and he suffered another round of criticism, dying of a heart attack in 1969.
James Forrestal’s legacy was probably more lasting than Pearson’s. The headquarters of the Defense Department bears his name; 1954 marked the christening of the USS Forrestal, the nation’s largest cant-deck aircraft carrier; and in 1975, Princeton University designated its corporate research park the Princeton Forrestal Center. More significant was the role of this paranoid schizophrenic as an architect of the Cold War-based largely on false, inflated data from an East-Bloc-countries-based Nazi spy network with whom our government was now collaborating-and in inspiring Senator Joe McCarthy to seek out the largely nonexistent Communists supposedly riddling our government. McCarthy himself, in 1952, credited Forrestal as the one who had alerted him to the “existence of traitors in high government positions.”
I liked Jim Forrestal, and as was the case with Pearson, the guy was a dedicated servant of the public who did a lot of good, particularly toward the winning of the Second World War; but there would have perhaps been better things to bequeath the nation he loved and served than Nazi collaboration, the Cold War and McCarthyism.
Caught up in the pressures of McCarthyism, his popularity eroded, Harry Truman left office largely unheralded, though with his position in history secure as the first (and at this writing only) U.S. president to use the atomic bomb in war; historians rate him a good to great president, a perception that had long since become evident by his death in 1972.
Teddy Kollek-who had fled to Canada from U.S. prosecution in April of 1949-was elected Mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, a position he held for twenty-eight years; much of the face of modern Jerusalem, it has been said, is his doing. His efforts toward tolerance for minority groups in his city, including Arabs, alienated some of his constituents, and his last two mayoral campaigns failed, despite efforts by such Hollywood supporters as his old friend Frank Sinatra. In 1991 he established the Jerusalem Foundation to help further aesthetic and cultural development of his beloved city.
Jo Forrestal was in and out of clinics for the rest of her life, for alcoholism and mental problems. In the first years after her husband’s passing, she traveled constantly, and lived for a time in France, Ireland and Jamaica, finally landing in Newport, Rhode Island, selling Morris House in 1951. She also maintained an apartment on Park Avenue in New York, and backed several theatrical productions in Newport as well as writing a play of her own, Democracy, never produced. Sporadic reports of her bizarre behavior continued until her death in January of 1976.
The Forrestals’ son Michael distinguished himself with service in the Kennedy White House, returning to law practice after the assassination; his life was devoted to improving understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. Unmarried, he died of an aneurysm in January 1989, at sixty-one; he was chairing a committee of the governing board of Lincoln Center, at the time. Brother Peter worked for his father’s old firm, Dillon, Read, then for Ferdinand Eberstadt’s company (Eberstadt died in 1969, leaving a personal estate of fifty million). Peter shared his mother’s love of and skill with horses, but also shared her love for, and lack of skill with, alcohol. He died at fifty-two of an abdominal hemorrhage due to heavy drinking, leaving behind a bride of a year, pregnant with a daughter he never knew.
Many of those I met on the Forrestal/Roswell job are gone-including two class acts of law enforcement, Frank J. Wilson and Hughie Baughman-and others I never saw again and couldn’t tell you what became of them, like the two medical corpsmen, Prise and Harrison, and the doctor who tore his sleeve, Deen.
But Roswell … that was another story.
For many years, the incident at Roswell-despite the historical significance of the Air Force issuing a press release announcing the recovery of a flying saucer-rarely received even a mention in the voluminous UFO literature of the late forties and on through the seventies.
But in 1978, Stanton Friedman-a nuclear physicist with an interest in UFOs-followed up a lead that led him to Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel, retired, who had spent his post-military years running a television repair shop in Houma, Louisiana. Marcel told Friedman the same story he’d told me back in 1949-a story he had apparently told no one since-and a Roswell floodgate opened.
A cottage industry of books by Friedman and others blossomed, with scads of television documentaries, in which Marcel and other witnesses-like Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Frank Joyce and Frank Kaufmann-came forward, becoming celebrities in UFO circles, even television stars, with the many appearances they made. Marcel’s son, a physician and pilot, with memories of the samples of strange “saucer” debris his father had brought home in ’47, joined in with his own recollections, taking over as family TV spokesman after his father’s death in 1986. These were solid citizens, clearly not kooks, and their reminiscences carried weight.
Some potential Roswell witnesses, however, received their fifteen minutes of fame posthumously.
Mac Brazel died in 1963, though relatives and neighbors told his story to researchers and on camera. His son Bill Brazel reported his father had been held by the Air Force for eight days in the base “guesthouse.”
Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard remained tight-lipped on the subject of Roswell, in public at least, though friends reported he’d said, when asked about the supposed saucer, “I’ll tell you this, what I saw I’d never seen before.” Shortly after the incident, he was promoted to general and, at the time of his death in 1966, was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
Sheriff George Wilcox did not run for reelection and his family considered the saucer incident to have gravely affected his health and outlook. Wilcox passed away before the renewed interest in the saucer crash; but family members, including his wife, Inez, came forward with tales of death threats from the military.
The daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, Frankie Rowe, told of the strange debris, scraps of which she had handled, and claimed that her father (part of a fire department crew called to the crash site) had described “aliens” being loaded into body bags. She also tearfully recounted death threa
ts to her father and herself by sinister figures from the government.
The resurgence of Roswell interest caused the Air Force to do something remarkable: they contradicted their previous explanation of the debris found on the Foster ranch with a thick official report in 1994, admitting the weather balloon story had been a cover-up for Project Mogul-which in 1947 had been classified Top Secret A-1. This-the third official explanation (first a flying disk, then a weather balloon, now Project Mogul)-was the intelligence-gathering balloon train described to me by Frank Wilson in 1949. An experimental attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet atomic explosions and missile launchings, Mogul utilized acoustical sensors, radar reflecting targets and other gizmos, all of which were attached to a train of weather balloons over six hundred feet long.
The flaw in this explanation-which I’ve never heard anybody point out, including the “UFOlogists”-is that Project Mogul would be the very device gathering information for Major Jesse Marcel at SAC in 1948 and ’49. Unless Marcel was part of a decades-spanning disinformation campaign-which seems very unlikely, considering his burst of UFO TV fame in his elderly years-this indicates Marcel, in the new job he’d been transferred to from Roswell, would have likely discovered that the strange debris he’d found in ’47 was from one of the devices gathering information for him in ’48. And he would not have spoken to me in 1949, nor a horde of Roswell researchers in the late seventies and early eighties, from the point of view of a man still bewildered by what he’d found on the Foster ranch.
The Project Mogul explanation, of course, didn’t speak to the many witnesses-Frank Kaufmann, Glenn Dennis and a number of others who came out of the woodwork in the eighties and thereafter-who spoke of the second crash site, the wedge-like aircraft and the alien crew.
So the Air Force rolled up its sleeves for a fourth official explanation. In 1997, in perhaps the most tortuous piece of logic to arise out of Roswell yet, the Air Force explained that the alien bodies that had been seen by witnesses in 1947 were crash-test dummies dropped by the USAF starting around 1952. Seems the residents of Roswell were simply confused about the time frame.
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