The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Simpson tells us in his foreword that he completed the manuscript in its entirety in the mid-1950s but then put it aside after a previous would-be publisher decided that it was too controversial, too “dangerous” to publish. He also says that he purposely chose not to update it to maintain the “close perspective” of the era. That is a great shame, for in following this course he gave Arnold Rogow, who published his book three years before, a free pass. Simpson could have easily made it clear what a poorly documented and poorly argued case for the suicide theory of Forrestal’s death Rogow had written.

  Quite early in Simpson we get some clarification of the oft-repeated, but vague assertion that Forrestal had made “at least one suicide attempt” at Hobe Sound. Forrestal’s friend Eberstadt, with Forrestal’s agreement, according to Simpson, summoned the renowned psychiatrist, Dr. William Menninger, who at the time was president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

  Dr. Menninger questioned Forrestal about a reported suicide attempt supposedly made by Forrestal after Dr. Raines’s arrival at Hobe Sound, and Menninger subsequently told The Washington Post he had satisfied himself that there was nothing whatsoever to this tale:

  “Mr. Forrestal told me that the night before I arrived he had put a belt around his neck with the intention of hanging himself, but the belt broke. Since there were no marks on his throat or body, I consider this [only] a nightmare. Also, we never found a broken belt of any kind.”

  In spite of Dr. Menninger’s statement, the suicide story was later exploited by unscrupulous newspaper columnists and by a man who was present and knew its falsity.53

  One does wish that Simpson had given the date of The Post edition in which the Menninger quote appeared. The man who was present at Hobe Sound, yet later exploited the attempted suicide story, from later observations by Simpson, appears to have been Dr. Raines. The Menninger statement is almost too bizarre not to be true. It also explains the vagueness of the various authors about the nature of Forrestal’s attempt (except for the specific, but false, claims of the outrageously irresponsible and vicious Drew Pearson). Were they to get specific about the means of suicide they would have to come to grips with the Menninger interpretation of the matter. Still, they can satisfy themselves that they are not lying because, against Menninger’s interpretation of what Forrestal told him and the lack of physical evidence, they have Forrestal’s own words.

  One would appreciate greater candor from all the authors who have written on the subject of Forrestal’s mental state. Even noted historian, David McCullough, in his widely praised 1992 biography, Truman, repeated the mantra that Forrestal “made at least one attempt at suicide” while at Hobe Sound.54 There is no doubt that at least for a few days the man was in a very bad way. If he could mistake a nightmare for an actual event he was clearly in need of help of some sort, but, in retrospect, forcible hospitalization hardly seems to have been called for. It very closely resembled, in fact, the notorious confinement of political dissidents to mental hospitals by the Soviet Union.

  We also can’t help but notice a strong resemblance between Soviet journalism and that practiced by the American press and book writers with respect to Forrestal’s demise. There is ample reason to question whether Forrestal was ever truly suicidal, and there is even stronger reason to question whether he was anywhere near his Hobe Sound emotional state some seven weeks later. When authors so regularly go beyond known and verifiable facts to create a desired impression, readers have a very good reason to be suspicious.

  By contrast, Cornell Simpson portrays Forrestal, after his rest and recovery, as not only quite normal in manner in the judgment of everyone who saw him, but also as a man with a good deal more to live for than the average person. He was very well fixed financially and he was in basically good health. The newspapers would have us believe, as with Vince Foster, that he was depressed over how the press had treated him, but, according to Simpson, it was all to the contrary. Forrestal had always been a fighter and the press smears merely “got his Irish up.” He had every intention, in fact, of setting the record straight by writing a book and plunging into the newspaper business himself. As for possible depression over losing his job, he had already realized that he didn’t fit with Truman and his Missouri cronies and was already prepared to move on. He just didn’t like the abrupt manner of his dismissal.55

  Hoopes and Brinkley provide corroboration that Forrestal was seriously interested in taking a big plunge into the news, that is, the opinion-molding business. He had told powerful Wall Street friends like Clarence Dillon, Eberstadt, and Paul Shields that he was interested in starting a newspaper or a magazine modeled after The Economist of Great Britain, and they had demonstrated a willingness to help him raise the start-up funds.56

  That was a couple of years before the press campaign against Forrestal, but he was still very well off financially and well connected on Wall Street. A James Forrestal in the publishing business would have been a serious force to be reckoned with in American public life, perhaps a greater force than he had been as a cabinet member.

  Forrestal’s writing and publishing plans provide the answer to the question, “Why would anyone bother to murder him when he had already been driven from office and disgraced by the taint of mental illness?” Had Forrestal lived and gone on with his writing plans, Drew Pearson’s lurid and irresponsible charges would have probably been all that anyone would have heard about Forrestal being “mentally ill.” There would have been no Arnold Rogow book psychoanalyzing the man. James V. Forrestal was a formidable man who knew a great deal about the inner workings of the government under Roosevelt and Truman, and he didn’t like the direction that the country was going.

  The compelling reasons for Forrestal to want to continue living were also compelling reasons for his powerful enemies to see to it that he did not. Forrestal had left his top job at Dillon, Read, and Company in June of 1940 to become an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of World War II he served as Under Secretary of the Navy. He became the Secretary of the Navy in April of 1944, and he was appointed the first Secretary of Defense after reorganization of the armed services in September of 1947.

  All during his period of high government service, Forrestal had kept a detailed diary. It would have been a gold mine for the book he planned to write. Who knows what he might have revealed, because Forrestal was thought of as a very forceful and independent-minded person, as nobody’s yes-man? Some areas where his diaries might have been revealing were the disastrous war strategy that needlessly prolonged the conflict and invited massive communist expansion in both Europe and Asia, the wholesale infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by Soviet agents, Communists, and Communist sympathizers, and the tactics employed by the Zionists to gain recognition of the state of Israel. Perhaps the underhanded means that, according to Loftus and Aarons, had worked on Nelson Rockefeller but failed on Forrestal, had also worked on some other high-level government officials.

  Simpson Versus McCullough

  The treatment of the question of the handling of Forrestal’s diary by the prominent historian McCullough and the little-known writer, Simpson, makes a very interesting contrast. McCullough writes of “rumors” that the White House had ordered that “pages” of Forrestal’s diary be “secretly removed” and that questions about the tragic death had persisted, like why had a person with suicidal tendencies been housed on the sixteenth floor? Had this strongest anti-Communist in the administration been “driven to his death” by “secret Communists on Truman’s staff.”57

  If this approach reminds you of number three in my “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression,” it is with good reason.

  Characterize the charges as “rumors” or, better yet, “wild rumors.” If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through “rumors.” (If they tend to believe the “rumors,” it must be be
cause they are simply “paranoid” or “hysterical.”)58

  We may contrast the McCullough virtual brush-off of suspicions with regard to Forrestal’s diary with Simpson’s long, serious treatment of the diary question.

  In Simpson’s view, the handling of the diaries holds the key to what was behind Forrestal’s assassination. He tells us that altogether they amounted to some three thousand pages in fifteen loose-leaf binders. The White House would later claim that while he was at Hobe Sound Forrestal had sent word that he wanted President Truman to take custody of the diaries, something that Simpson regards as utterly preposterous. What is most likely is that as men like David Niles went over what was in those diaries during the seven weeks of his confinement at Bethesda, Forrestal’s fate was sealed.59

  The version of the diaries edited by FDR apologist and New York Herald Tribune journalist, the Yale graduate Walter Millis, was a severely edited version of the original. By the time Millis had done his chopping the diaries had been gone over by both the White House and the Pentagon and there can be little doubt that they took out the most damaging and revealing things about the administration, the most important of which, according to Simpson, would have been how their policies were consciously aiding the Communist cause.60

  The original diaries would very likely have named names like Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie, people within the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who were doing the bidding of the Communists. Not only did Millis take a lot out, but he also put into the published version as much of his own analysis as that which came from Forrestal, often taking issue with Forrestal when he went against the approved “leftist line.”

  In addition to the sellout to Communism, another topic of great interest to Forrestal that was off limits in the published version of the diaries was anything having to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The closest that Millis gets to it is in his April 18, 1945 diary entry on Millis’s page 46, when Forrestal presents a list of recommendations to Truman. Simpson calls our attention to the ellipses in Item 5:

  5. PEARL HARBOR. I told him that I had got Admiral [H. Kent] Hewitt back to pursue the investigation into the Pearl Harbor disaster.... I felt I had an obligation to Congress to continue the investigation because I was not completely satisfied with the report my own Court had made....

  What was in that recommendation that Millis leaves out, Simpson wonders. Might he not have been pointing the finger of responsibility at the Roosevelt administration, itself?61

  The thing about the Millis version of the diaries, as Simpson sees it, rings particularly false is the generally favorable tone that is found there toward the man whom Simpson characterizes as Forrestal’s “perpetual antagonist,” General George Catlett Marshall. Every anti-Communist measure that Forrestal proposed, says Simpson, Marshall opposed. Forrestal’s true feelings toward Marshall and his policies, though, would have been devastating for the Truman administration and therefore, speculates Simpson, could simply not be permitted to see the light of day.62

  Unfortunately, the version of the truth with respect to the Forrestal diaries that even the most serious history students are ever likely to see is that of McCullough, or maybe that of Hoopes and Brinkley, and not that of Simpson. Hoopes and Brinkley say nothing in their text about the confiscation of diaries by the White House. They do, at the beginning of their notes on sources, credit Millis as a valuable source, while noting that government censors had deleted portions of it “on the grounds of national security.” They then reassure us that “all of these unpublished entries” have been made available for scholars at several research libraries.63

  One wonders how these authors can be so confident, in the absence of the diaries’ author, that everything that Forrestal put into the original version is now available in complete, unedited form. It only seems reasonable that the White House would have permanently removed anything that might be seen as wrongdoing on the part of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The contrast between Simpson’s claim that Millis left out 80 percent of the original to “a number of diary entries” were deleted for national security purposes—like McCullough’s rumors of “pages” being removed—is also striking.64

  To be sure, not everything that Cornell Simpson has written should be taken at face value, either. Nowhere does he tell us how he knows with such precision that there were originally exactly 3,000 pages in 15 notebooks in the Forrestal diaries. Simpson, himself, is something of a mystery man. This book on Forrestal’s death seems to be the only one he has written, and a search of the Internet for his name turns up only references to The Death of James Forrestal.65 He is a polished and skillful writer, and his knowledge of the degree of infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations seems almost like that of an insider. Many of the charges in his book, which echo those of Forrestal in his waning days in government, have been borne out by more recent discoveries. This is from the noted historian, Thomas Fleming:

  There was scarcely a branch of the American government, including the War, Navy, and Justice Departments, that did not have Soviet moles in high places, feeding Moscow information. Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, had so many informers in its ranks, it was almost an arm of the NKVD. Donovan’s personal assistant, Duncan Chaplin Lee, was a spy.66

  By count from the Venona decrypts (secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted, which became available to historians in 1995), there were 329 Soviet agents inside the U.S. government during World War II. The number of rolls of microfilm shipped to Moscow from the NKVD’s New York headquarters leaped from 59 in 1942 to 211 in 1943, the same year during which the American press and publishing industry were gushing praise of the Soviet Union. In the single year 1942, the documents leaked by one member of England’s Cambridge Five filled forty-five volumes in the NKVD archives. The Russian agent in charge of Whittaker Chambers’s spy ring boasted to Moscow: “We have agents at the very center of the government, influencing policy.” The OSS and the British SIS did not have a single agent in Moscow.67

  David Niles, the Communist

  One man in particular with some dubious connections was in a very strategic position to do harm to Forrestal. That is one of the few staff aides that Truman had inherited from Roosevelt, David Niles (Others were speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, press aide, Eben Ayers, and correspondence secretary, Bill Hassett.). In the foregoing, when we have said that “the White House” may have taken some action or other with respect to Forrestal, those actions might well have been the work of Niles, Harry Truman’s famous aphorism about where the buck stops notwithstanding.

  Hoopes and Brinkley tell us that White House aides Harry Vaughn and Matthew Connelly (remember him?) were pushing Truman to replace Forrestal as was Niles, who “disliked Forrestal intensely.” There were a number of things they had against him. As Navy Secretary he had opposed the unification of the armed services under the new Department of Defense; his wariness of the Soviet menace had made him oppose Truman’s new ceiling on military spending; he was trying to take personal control over the newly created National Security Counsel and its staff. What was likely most important, though, was his adamant opposition to the partition of Palestine. Hoopes and Brinkley characterize these internal Forrestal opponents as “small-minded loyalists.”68

  Tracking down Cornell Simpson’s numerous references to Niles leads the reader to suspect that Niles was a bit more than a small-minded White House loyalist. (The sentence fragments are in the original.):

  Soviet spy Alger Hiss, fair-haired boy of the State Department, who went to Yalta as Roosevelt's advisor and who was a chief planner of the present United Nations.

  Harry Hopkins, Lauchlin Currie, David Niles, Michael Greenberg, Owen Lattimore, Philleo Nash and others identified in sworn testimony as pro-Communists or outright Russian spies operating through the White House, who for years secretly influenced United St
ates presidents and shaped policy decisions to benefit the USSR.

  With characters such as the above and countless more like them dictating U.S. government policy, it is little wonder that Forrestal often felt he was the only pro-American in a nest of Communists. In December 1945 he made a brilliantly simple indictment of the wholesale treason in Washington when he told the newly elected U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R., Wis.): "Consistency never has been a mark of stupidity. If the diplomats who have mishandled our relations with Russia were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor."69

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  Another was David Niles, alias Neihuss, a powerful advisor to Roosevelt and Truman. The mysterious Niles, who had an office in the White House, operated very secretively; however when various Fifth Amendment Communists were asked by congressional committees if they knew Niles, they refused to answer on the grounds that if they did so they might incriminate themselves.70

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  Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, first chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, told this writer that a short time be-fore [former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank] Murphy died, Mrs. Dies and he met Murphy at the home of the late celebrated Washington hostess, Mrs. Evelyn Walsh McLean.

  "Justice Murphy was highly excited," Congressman Dies explained. "In fact, he was the most emotionally disturbed man I've ever seen. He paced back and forth, unable to sit down. He said he had recently 'gotten religion' and had returned to the Catholic church.

  "And then he told us, very excitedly, 'We're doomed! The United States is doomed! The Communists have control completely. They've got complete control of Roosevelt and his wife as well. It's impossible for anyone to see him now unless the appointment is cleared by David Niles and his gang.71

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  The campaign against Forrestal had a threefold purpose: to discredit Forrestal in the eyes of the American people, thereby permanently eliminating him as a public official; to harass and persecute him personally and drive him to a nervous breakdown if possible, thus wrecking his capacity to fight the Communist conspiracy even as a private citizen; to intimidate all other anti-Communists by instilling in them a fear of the terrible reprisals awaiting those who dare oppose Communism at home and abroad.