WikiPortallus: James Forrestal.html

Forrestal's sudden death in 1949 resulted from a fall out of a Bethesda Naval Hospital window. An official U.S. Navy Medical Review Board convened on his death, after examining all doctors and witnesses who were in the vicinity, could not establish the reason for Forrestal's fall (i.e. suicide, homicide, accident), and although an autopsy was performed, the autopsy report has never been made public.¹ The peculiar circumstances of Forrestal's death, and the U.S. government's withholding of the complete report of the review board until 2004 has led to much speculation and controversy.²

Early life and private employment

Forrestal was born in Matteawan, now Beacon, New York, the youngest son of James Forrestal, an Irish immigrant who dabbled in politics, and his wife, the former Mary Anne Toohey.³ After graduating from high school at the age of 16 in 1908, he spent the next three years working for a trio of newspapers: the Matteawan Evening Journal, the Mount Vernon Argus and the Poughkeepsie News Press.

Forrestal entered Dartmouth College in 1911, but transferred to Princeton University the following year. At the latter school, he served as an editor for The Daily Princetonian and was voted by the senior class as "Most Likely to Succeed", but left just prior to completing work on a degree.

After college, Forrestal went to work as a bond salesman for William A. Read and Company (also known as Dillon, Read & Co.). When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the Navy and ultimately became a Naval Aviator, training with the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. During the final year of the war, Forrestal spent much of his time in Washington, D.C., at the office of Naval Operations, while completing his flight training. He eventually reached the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade.

Following the war, Forrestal served as a publicist for the Democratic Party committee in Dutchess County, New York helping politicians from the area win elections at both the state and national level. One of those individuals aided by his work was a neighbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Forrestal then returned to William A. Read and Company, earning a partnership, in 1923, before eventually becoming president of the company in 1937.

By most accounts, Forrestal was a compulsive workaholic who was very cold and neglectful towards his family. One instance of this trait came when Forrestal, while working in England, received a phone call from his two sons, Michael, eight, and Peter, six. The two had missed their plane in Paris, but Forrestal simply told the boys to work out the problem themselves and meet him in London. His wife, the former Josephine Ogden (ex-Stovall), a Vogue writer whom he married in 1926, eventually developed alcohol and mental problems.⁴

Political career

Secretary of the Navy

President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Forrestal as an administrative assistant on June 22, 1940, then nominated him as Under Secretary of the Navy six weeks later. As Under-Secretary, Forrestal proved highly effective at mobilizing domestic industrial production for the war effort.

He became Secretary of the Navy on May 19, 1944, following the death of his immediate supervisor Frank Knox from a heart attack. Forrestal led the Navy through the closing year of the war and the painful early years of demobilization that followed. As Secretary, Forrestal introduced a policy of racial integration in the Navy.

Secretary of Defense

He was named as the nation's first Secretary of Defense in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman. Forrestal continued to advocate for complete racial integration of the services as Secretary of Defense, a policy that was eventually implemented in 1949.

During private cabinet meetings with President Truman in 1946 and 1947, Forrestal had argued against partition of Palestine on the grounds it would infuriate Arab countries who supplied oil needed for the U.S. economy and national defense. Instead, Forrestal favored a federalization plan for Palestine. Outside the White House, response to Truman's continued silence on the issue was immediate. President Truman received threats to cut off campaign contributions from wealthy donors, as well as hate mail, including a letter accusing him of "preferring fascist and Arab elements to the democracy-loving Jewish people of Palestine."⁵ Appalled by the intensity and implied threats over the partition question, Forrestal appealed to Truman in two separate cabinet meetings not to base his decision on partition, whatever the outcome, on the basis of political pressure.⁶ In his only known public comment on the issue, Forrestal stated to J. Howard McGrath, Senator from Rhode Island:

"...no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point it could endanger our national security."⁷

Forrestal's statement soon earned him the active emnity of some congressmen and supporters of Israel. Forrestal was also an early target of the muckraking columnist and broadcaster Drew Pearson (journalist), an opponent of foreign policies hostile to the Soviet Union, who began to regularly call for Forrestal's removal after President Truman named him Secretary of Defense.⁸ Pearson told his own protege, Jack Anderson that he believed Forrestal was "the most dangerous man in America" and claimed that if he was not removed from office, he would "cause another world war".

Upon taking office as Secretary of Defense, Forrestal was surprised to learn that the administration did not budget for defense needs based on military threats posed by enemies of the United States and its interests. According to historian Walter LaFeber, Truman was known to approach defense budgetary requests in the abstract, without regard to defense response requirements in the event of conflicts with potential enemies.⁹ The president would begin by subtracting from total receipts the amount needed for domestic needs and recurrent operating costs, with any surplus going to the defense budget for that year.¹⁰ The Truman administration's readiness to slash conventional readiness needs for the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps soon caused fierce controversies within the upper ranks of the armed forces.¹¹¹²

At the close of World War II, millions of dollars of serviceable equipment had been scrapped or abandoned rather than appropirate funds for storage costs. New military equipment en route to operations in the Pacific theater was scrapped or simply tossed overboard.¹³ Facing the wholesale demobilization of most of the US defense force structure, Forrestal resisted President Truman's efforts to substantially reduce defense appropriations,¹⁴ but was unable to prevent a steady reduction in defense spending, resulting in major cuts not only in defense equipment stockpiles, but also in military readiness.

By 1948, President Harry Truman had approved military budgets billions of dollars below what the services were requesting, putting Forrestal in the middle of a fierce tug-of-war between the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Forrestal was also becoming increasingly worried about the Soviet threat.¹⁵ His 18 months at Defense came at an exceptionally difficult time for the U.S. military establishment: Communist governments came to power in Czechoslovakia and China; West Berlin was blockaded, necessitating the Berlin Airlift to keep it going; the war between the Arab states and Israel after the establishment of Israel in Palestine; and negotiations were going on for the formation of NATO.

Soviet-inspired Communist takeovers of much of Eastern Europe, Soviet-supported communist military and political campaigns against the governments of Greece, Italy, and France, the impending Communist victory in China, and the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea would eventually demonstrate the legitimacy of Forrestal's concerns, but at the time these were not shared by the President or the rest of his cabinet. Dwight D. Eisenhower recorded he was in agreement with Forrestal's theories on the dangers of Soviet and International communist expansion. Eisenhower recalled that Forrestal had been "the one man who, in the very midst of the war, always counseled caution and alertness in dealing with the Soviets." Eisenhower remembered on several occasions, while he was Supreme Allied Commander,he had been visited by Forrestal, who carefully explained his thesis that the Communists would never cease trying to destroy all representative government. Eisenhower commented in his personal diary on 11 June, 1949, "I never had cause to doubt the accuracy of his judgments on this point." ¹⁶

Resignation as Secretary

In 1949, angered over Forrestal's continued opposition to his defense economization policies, and concerned about reports in the press over his mental condition, Truman abruptly asked Forrestal to resign.¹⁷ He was replaced by Louis A. Johnson, an ardent supporter of Truman's defense retrenchment policy.

Forrestal's greatest legacy may have been an unrealized one. Forrestal, along with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, in the early months of 1945, strongly advocated a softer policy toward Japan that would permit a negotiated armistice, a 'face-saving' surrender. Forrestal's primary concern was not the resurgence of a militarized Japan, but rather "the menace of Russian Communism and its attraction for decimated, destabilized societies in Europe and Asia," and, therefore, keeping the Soviet Union out of the war with Japan. Had his advice been followed, Japan might well have surrendered before August 1945, precluding the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.¹⁸ So strongly did he feel about this matter that he cultivated negotiation efforts that some regarded as approaching insubordination. [1]

Psychiatric treatment

In 1949, exhausted from overwork, Forrestal entered psychiatric treatment. The attending psychiatrist Dr. George N. Raines was a Navy Captain handpicked by the Surgeon General.

First week: narcosis with sodium amytal. Second week and for a period of four weeks: a regimen of insulin sub-shock combined with psycho-therapeutic interviews. According to Dr. Raines, the patient over reacted to the insulin much as he had the amytal and this would occasionally throw him into a confused state with a great deal of agitation and confusion. Fourth week: insulin administered only in stimulating doses; 10 units of insulin four times a day, morning, noon, afternoon and evening.

According to Dr. Raines, "We considered electro-shock but thought it better to postpone it for another ninety days. In reactive depression if electro-shock is used early and the patient is returned to the same situation from which he came there is grave danger of suicide in the immediate period after they return... so strangely enough we left out electro-shock to avoid what actually happened anyhow".¹⁹

Death

Although Forrestal had told associates he had decided to resign, he was shattered when Truman abruptly asked for his resignation. His letter of resignation was tendered after Truman's dismissal on March 28, 1949. On the day of his removal from office, he was reported to have gone into a strange daze and was flown on a U.S. Navy airplane to the estate of Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Forrestal's wife, Josephine, was vacationing. He was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital five days later. The condition was officially announced as "nervous and physical exhaustion"; his lead doctor, Captain George Raines, diagnosing his condition as "depression" or "reactive depression."

As a person who prized anonymity and once stated that his hobby was "obscurity", he and his policies had been the constant target of vicious personal attacks from columnists, including Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell.²⁰ Pearson's protege, Jack Anderson, later asserted that Pearson "hectored Forrestal with innuendos and false accusations."²¹

Forrestal seemed to be on the road to recovery, having regained 12 pounds since his entry into the hospital. However, in the early morning hours of May 22, his body, clad only in the bottom half of a pair of pajamas, was found on a third-floor roof below the 16th-floor kitchen across the hall from his room.²²

The official Navy review board, which completed hearings on May 31, waited until October 11, 1949, to release only a brief summary of its findings. The announcement, as reported on page 15 of the October 12 New York Times, stated only that Forrestal had died from his fall from the window. It did not say what might have caused the fall, nor did it make any mention of a bathrobe sash cord that had first been reported as tied around his neck. There were unsubstantiated reports in the press^{citation needed} of paranoia and of involuntary commitment to the hospital, as well as suspicions^{citation needed} about the detailed circumstances of his death, which have fed a variety of conspiracy theories as well as legitimate questions.

The exact contents of Forrestal's actual note, which some have alleged was an implied suicide note, was not released by the Department of the Navy until April 2004.²³

Assassination Allegations

Doubts have existed^{citation needed} from the beginning about Forrestal's death, especially allegations of suicide. The early doubts are detailed in the book The Death of James Forrestal (1966) by Cornell Simpson, which received virtually no publicity. As Simpson notes (pp. 40-44), a major reason for doubt is the fact that the Navy kept the full transcript of its official hearing and final report secret. Additional doubt has been raised by the 2004 release of that complete report, informally referred to as the Willcutts Report, after Admiral Morton D. Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Medical Center, who convened the review board.

Among the discrepancies between the report and the accounts given in the principal Forrestal biographies are that the transcription of the poem by Sophocles appears to many^who? to have been written in a hand other than Forrestal's. There was also broken glass found on Forrestal's bed,²⁴ a fact that had not been previously reported. Theories as to who might have murdered Forrestal range from Soviet agents, to U.S. government operatives sent to silence him for his knowledge of UFOs.²⁵

Forrestal's single known public statement regarding pressure from interest groups, and his cabinet position opposing the partition of Palestine has been significantly magnified by later critics into a portrayal of Forrestal as a dedicated anti-Zionist who led a concerted campaign to thwart the cause of the Jewish people in Palestine. These critics tend to characterize Forrestal as a mentally unhinged individual, a hysteric with deep anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish feelings. Forrestal himself maintained that he was being shadowed by "foreign men", which some critics and authors quickly interpreted to mean either Soviet NKVD agents or proponents of Zionism.²⁶ Author Arnold Rogow supported the theory that Forrestal committed suicide over fantasies of being chased by Zionist agents, largely relying on information obtained in interviews conducted with some of Forrestal's fiercest critics inside and outside the Truman administration.

However, those who see Zionist conspiratorial designs behind Forrestal's unexplained death note Rogow's footnote to his work:

New light was shed on Forrestal's concerns in March 2006 when The Times of London, referencing newly declassified documents, revealed that a serious attempt by Menachem Begin's Irgun Gang to assassinate Britain's anti-Zionist Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, had been thwarted by British intelligence in 1946.

Forrestal has also been alleged^{citation needed} to be an original member of a UFO-related group formed in 1947 with the purported code name of Majestic 12. Some writers have further speculated that Forrestal was killed for his knowledge of UFO investigations by the government.

There was also an press campaign against Forrestal, led by columnist Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell.²⁷ The campaign tried to make it appear that he was paranoid. Paranoia, however, was never mentioned in the official evaluations of his psychiatric state. One of Pearson's most spectacular claims was that while Forrestal was at Hobe Sound, Florida, shortly before he was hospitalized, he was woken by a siren in the middle of the night and ran out into the street exclaiming, "The Russians are attacking." This claim has not been confirmed by anyone who was there that night, and was described as a fabrication by Captain George Raines, the Navy doctor in charge of Forrestal's treatment²⁸