by David Martin
There were indications that Mr. Forrestal might also have tried to hang himself. The sash of his dressing-gown was still knotted and wrapped tightly around his neck when he was found, but hospital officials would not speculate as to its possible purpose.
And to this day no one in authority has told us what that sash was doing there. Might that be because the attempted hanging scenario is not just nonsensical, but it is impossible? If Forrestal was bent on killing himself, wouldn’t he have simply dived out the window, particularly when the attendant was likely to return at any minute? After the sash had been wrapped and tied tightly around his neck, was there enough of it left over for it also to have been tied at one time around the radiator beneath the window? Were there any indications from the creases in the sash that an attempt had been made to tie it around something at one end? How likely is it, anyway, that Navy veteran Forrestal would have been so incompetent at tying a knot that it would have come undone? Most importantly, how do we know that skilled assassins, working for people with ample motives to silence this astute and outspoken patriot (more about those people later) did not use the sash to throttle and subdue Forrestal before pitching him out the window?
The willingness of the authorities to withstand the thoroughly justified charge of cover-up by not releasing the results of their investigation, including the transcripts of witness testimony, speaks volumes, as does the extraordinarily deceptive description of the case by the likes of such establishment figures as Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. Their account is replete with deceptions, but there is none greater than this withholding of the information that all the key witness testimony has been kept secret, along with the results of the investigation itself, and that the investigation did not conclude that Forrestal committed suicide. Even Arnold Rogow states in a very matter-of-fact manner in a footnote on page 19, that the Surgeon General and the Navy both conducted inquiries and that the results of neither had been released.16 Actually, as we have seen, the results of the Navy inquiry were released. The problem is that the transcript of the inquiry itself was kept secret. That is to say, prima facie, there has been a cover-up and no one in the media or in the history community has had one word to say about it. Hoopes and Brinkley make their cover-up contribution by neglecting to mention that there ever was any such Navy inquiry.17
“Evidence” without Sources, and Sins of Omission
By leaving out the vital information that the official record of the case has been suppressed, Hoopes and Brinkley, cobbling together an account based on a hodgepodge of dubious sources, leave the reader with the impression that we know more about what happened than we really do. Take, for instance, the matter of Forrestal’s copying of a poem, interpreted as an advocacy of suicide, in the wee hours of the night. How do we know that the copying was done by Forrestal, himself, and not by someone who saw it as a clever substitute for a more difficult to compose fake suicide note? Well, they say that the substitute corpsman saw him copying away when he looked in on him at 1:45. And how do they know that? Their sole reference for that observation is Arnold Rogow, and, sure enough, that’s what Rogow says, although Rogow’s observer is apparently the regular guard, uh attendant, and not a substitute.
So how does Rogow know? We have no way of knowing, because he has no reference. One may surmise at this point that the Rogow account upon which Hoopes and Brinkley rely is not true. All The New York Times and The Washington Pos t have to say about the 1:45 encounter is that the corpsman found Forrestal awake, and he declined a sedative or sleeping pill. If the corpsman had actually witnessed him writing, with the poetry book open in front of him, the newspapers would surely have taken that opportunity to tell us, because they certainly do want us to believe that he was the transcriber. Here’s The New York Times account of May 23:
Mr. Forrestal had copied most of the Sophocles poem from the book on hospital memo paper, but he had apparently been interrupted in his efforts. His copying stopped after he had written “night” of the word “nightingale” in the twenty-sixth line of the poem.
Clearly, this is conjecture, and not based on what the corpsman had to say. This presumably copied poem by Forrestal was played up big by all the newspapers from the very beginning, because it was from that, as much or more than anything else, that the suicide conclusion that all of them immediately reached was made to seem plausible. It is highly unlikely that the newspapers would have passed up actual eyewitness evidence that Forrestal was transcribing the tragic lines just minutes before he had his fatal fall. We shall see later that our early deduction that Rogow had made up the story that Forrestal was witnessed transcribing the poem was accurate, because we were later able to get the words of the witness himself.
By now it should be clear to the reader that authors of well-publicized and distributed books in the United States on James Forrestal have taken no oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Take, as well, the treatment of Forrestal’s older brother, Henry, a solid and successful businessman who lived in the family home in Beacon, New York, where they and an older brother had grown up. We have seen that Hoopes and Brinkley note Henry’s doubts about the official verdict on Forrestal’s death, but they brush him aside and make him appear a tad outrageous with his suggestion that “the Communists” or “the Jews” might have been behind it, with the connivance of the highest officials in the U.S. government. As with the missing testimony of the witnesses, how much better would it have been to hear what Henry had to say himself about this matter! The authors had access to Cornell Simpson’s 1966 book, The Death of James Forrestal, and they could have given us at least something of the flavor of what one finds there.
The author Simpson tells us that he visited the brother Henry at his home in Beacon, New York, and Henry could not have been more certain that Forrestal did not kill himself. In fact, he was “the last person in the world” who would have committed suicide and he had absolutely no reason for doing so. Henry was bitter about how his brother had been kept confined within the hospital for such a long time in “virtual imprisonment” and how he had not been permitted the visitors that he wanted to see.
He was outraged at how the authorities had called the death a suicide immediately with no investigation at all, when he had seemed perfectly normal in conversation with his attendant just minutes before he went out the window with that belt tied around his neck. Furthermore, his appearance and demeanor had also seemed to be completely normal when he had had recent visits by President Truman, his own successor as Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, and by Henry himself. The timing of the death Henry found particularly suspicious because he was coming to take his brother out of the hospital a few hours later that very same day.
He was especially bitter about how the hospital authorities had prevented any visit by Forrestal’s close confidante, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy. Sheehy, according to Henry, was another person who did not believe the suicide story, although, as we shall see, he seems to have sung a different tune later for public consumption.
Monsignor Sheehy said that when he hurried to the hospital several hours after Forrestal hurtled to his death to try to learn what he could of the circumstances of the tragedy, a stranger approached him in the crowded hospital corridor. The man was a hospital corpsman, not young Harrison, but a warrant officer wearing stripes attesting to twenty years of service in the navy. He said to Monsignor Sheehy in a low, tense voice: "Father...you know Mr. Forrestal didn't kill himself, don't you."
But before Monsignor Sheehy could reply or ask the man's name, he said, others in the crowded corridor pressed about him closely, and the veteran warrant officer, as if fearful of being overheard, quickly disappeared.
What did this man know about Forrestal's death? What was it he did not dare tell even a priest?
What really happened in the hospital that fatal night?18
Hoopes and Brinkley also say in a matter-of-fact manner that Henry had visited his brother at the hospital four times, but th
ey don’t tell us what we learn in the obscure 1966 Simpson book. According to Simpson, Henry had been rebuffed several times by the lead psychiatrist Dr. George Raines and the acting hospital commandant, Captain B.W. Hogan when he tried to visit his brother. James Forrestal had been admitted to the hospital on April 2, and, according to Simpson, the hospital authorities relented only after Henry told Captain Hogan that he was going to the press and threatened legal action. Once he did get to visit his brother briefly, he found him “acting and talking as sanely and intelligently as any man I’ve ever known,” in Henry’s words to Simpson.19
There is no hint from Hoopes and Brinkley that Henry was ever kept away from his brother by the hospital. They do tell us of Henry’s futile efforts to persuade Dr. Raines to allow Forrestal’s friend and Catholic priest, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy, to visit, although they don’t tell us that, in fact, Raines turned Sheehy away on six separate occasions.
Otherwise, the accounts of Hoopes and Brinkley and Simpson are very similar on this prevention of Sheehy’s visit to Forrestal over the entire nearly seven-week period. The principal difference is that the former make the preposterous excuse for the authorities that they possibly feared that Forrestal might divulge sensitive classified information to a priest during a confessional, a supposed fear that would rule out giving any practicing Roman Catholic a security clearance. Hoopes and Brinkley tell us that on May 18 Henry Forrestal and Sheehy together took their complaint about Sheehy being denied permission to visit to Navy Secretary John L. Sullivan and he had overruled the Bethesda authorities, but before the meeting took place, Forrestal was dead. What they don’t tell us, as Simpson does, is that Henry had plans to take James out of the hospital the very day of James’s fatal plunge, according to Simpson.20
Simpson made no excuses for the inexcusable policy of Dr. Raines with respect to Father Sheehy. Rather, he says, “The priest later commented that he received the distinct impression that Dr. Raines was acting under orders. One might ask, under whose orders?”21
When Father Sheehy contacted Secretary of the Navy Sullivan, the Secretary seemed surprised to learn of the ban on his visiting. Simpson reaches the conclusion that the orders that Dr. Raines was following came from the White House, the same as the orders that had caused him to be committed to the hospital in the first place and kept there in near isolation on the top floor for seven long weeks.
Simpson goes on to reveal that Father Paul McNally, S.J. of Georgetown University had also tried and had been prevented from seeing Forrestal by Dr. Raines, as had at least one other important friend, unnamed, who “urgently wanted to talk with him.”22
Yet, The Washington Post reported on May 23, “During the past few weeks, Forrestal was allowed to have any visitors he wanted to see, a medical officer on duty said, adding that no log was kept of such visitors.” We shall see later that both assertions attributed to that anonymous medical officer are untrue. Maybe that’s why he wanted to remain anonymous, or perhaps The Washington Post simply made the story up. A log of visitors was kept, but it was apparently not a completely honest one. We know from other sources that there were people who visited Forrestal whose names do not appear on the log.
Odd Choice of Permitted Visitors
At the same time that Forrestal was being prevented visits by those he most wanted and needed to see, unwanted guests were being allowed in. These included his successor as Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, a man whom, according to Hoopes and Brinkley, Forrestal held in very low regard. As Assistant Secretary of War in the Roosevelt administration in the late 1930s, Johnson had been fired by FDR for undermining the authority of the Secretary, Harry Woodring, Forrestal aide John Kenney had described him as an overly ambitious troublemaker and Forrestal had told Kenney that Johnson was incompetent and felt degraded at the very idea of being replaced by such a man.23 Apparently the main thing that commended Johnson for the position was that he badly wanted it and that he had been Truman’s chief fund-raiser in the 1948 presidential campaign.
Interestingly, The New York Times of May 23, 1949, alongside its articles about Forrestal’s death is the headline, “Johnson Took Post on Forrestal Plea.” That article reported that on May 17 Louis Johnson had addressed a group called the Post Mortem Club and had told them at that time that he was reluctant to accept the post, but Forrestal had pleaded with him to take over the job from him. One might wonder if Johnson knew at that time that Forrestal would never be able to contradict him, although what is more likely is that Johnson knew that Forrestal was too big a man to do such a petty thing as to contradict him publicly over such an ultimately small matter.
Another guest who was probably unwanted, two weeks before Forrestal’s death, was the man who had actually made the decision to replace Forrestal with this crony and far lesser man, none other than President Truman, himself. Townsend Hoopes also learned in a January 1989 interview of top Forrestal aide, Marx Leva, that even young Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson “managed to gain entrance to the suite ‘against Forrestal’s wishes’.”24
This is a very strange revelation. LBJ, at that time, was a man of much less stature than Forrestal. It would have been extraordinarily presumptuous of him to bull his way into Forrestal’s hospital room when his visit was frankly not wanted. A likely reason why Forrestal would have considered Johnson a member of the enemy camp, albeit a low-level one, was Johnson’s great partisanship toward the fledgling state of Israel. As a Congressman, Johnson was considerably ahead of his time in that respect, at least for a Congressman outside the state of New York. We might imagine something of Forrestal’s attitude toward LBJ by noting a May 23, 1949, Washington Post article headlined, “Delusions of Persecution, Acute Anxiety, Depression Marked Forrestal’s Illness.” That article concludes as follows:
His fear of reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by some columnists on what they said was his opposition to partition of Palestine under a UN mandate. In his last year as Defense Secretary, he received great numbers of abusive and threatening letters.
One must truly wonder why Lyndon Johnson would have wanted to visit Forrestal in his hospital room and what on earth the two adversaries might have had to say to one another. Could LBJ have been playing something of a foot-soldier role for the orchestrators of Forrestal’s demise? Might he have been there to size up the overall situation, and at the same time contribute to “making his bones,” as it were, by participating in such an important operation?
We must wonder as well why none of Forrestal’s closest professional associates are known to have visited or attempted to visit him. One would think that men like Ferdinand Eberstadt, Robert Lovett, and Marx Leva, who, as we shall see, were at his side during his days of decline, would have exhibited continuing personal concern for his well-being by periodic visits to the hospital. Did they all realize at that point that it would not be good for their future in the government to be suspected of being too close to Forrestal, who they could see from an insider’s reading of the political tea leaves was a doomed man?That speculation seems particularly apt in the case of Eberstadt, whom author Jeffery M. Dorwart characterizes as Forrestal’s closest friend and who was at his side during the days before Forrestal’s commitment to the hospital. Eberstadt’s son, Frederick, in fact, “found it unimaginable” that his father failed to pay even one visit to his friend in the hospital.25 It might well have had something to do with an observation that Eberstadt had made some weeks before, that is, “My friend has apparently gotten himself in very wrong with the Zionists.”26
Something we need not wonder about is whether Dr. Raines and the Naval Medical Center made decisions based upon what was best for the patient in this case. Clearly, they did not. Their visitor policy would appear to be more closely akin to torture than to therapy, or closer to the state-serving psychiatric profession of the old Soviet Union. Here’s what the aide, Leva, had to say about it in an interview for the Truman Library:
By the way, psychiatry, he was never
permitted to see the people he should have seen. I'm not sure he should have seen me, I would have reminded him of too much, but friends of his, people who loved him; Senator Leverett Saltonstall, just to mention one name, not really a political ally but just someone who really loved him; Kate Foley his secretary.
The great vice of military medicine is that you see who they want you to see. Louis Johnson came out to see him and he saw him and that was the last person that he should have seen you know. Captain Raines couldn't say no to Louis Johnson, but that's the last thing that should have been done...
And only a Navy doctor could put a VIP patient on the seventeenth floor [sic] you know. I mean nobody else would put anybody above the second floor with that particular illness. Who is to know whether that had gone so far? I mean he apparently was beyond being neurotic, I mean it was apparently paranoid (sic) but I didn't see it at all. It's a long way to tell you that I did not see it at all until the day after he left office.27
Forrestal’s Condition
However much he might have improved, whether because of or in spite of his treatment at the Naval Hospital, one must wonder if Forrestal wasn’t a bit off in the head and therefore possibly prone to suicide, as even Leva grudgingly seems to have accepted. A number of statements made in the wake of the death could leave one with hardly any other impression. This is from the May 24 New York Times:
Captain George M. Raines, the Navy psychiatrist who had been treating Mr. Forrestal, said that the former Secretary ended his life in a sudden fit of despondency. He said this was “extremely common” to the patient’s severe type of mental illness.
And in the May 24 Washington Post, although Dr. Raines “categorically denied that Forrestal attempted suicide previously during his stay at the hospital” (which had been charged by columnist, Drew Pearson, who also said he had tried to hang himself, slashed his wrists, and had taken an overdose of sleeping pills while at Hobe Sound, Florida, where he had gone for relaxation), Raines did say:
