by Steve Vogel
Clifford later called Forrestal’s transformation the most “dramatic metamorphosis” he saw in forty-five years in Washington. “To put it simply, he realized that he had been wrong, and publicly admitted it. It was a brave but enormously costly decision for him, alienating many of his closest friends in the Navy, and it added enormously to the strain under which he was already working.”
By the latter part of 1948, Forrestal was exhausted and behaving in ways that, in retrospect, would be seen as signs of mental illness. His aides knew he was having difficulty concentrating and was unable to make even simple decisions. Sitting behind Forrestal at a Cabinet meeting, Clifford watched with alarm as the secretary constantly scratched at a raw spot on the back of his head. “He had opened an open sore there, and yet still couldn’t stay away from it,” Clifford recalled. “It was a nervous manifestation that I found very disquieting, and you could sense something was going on within the man.” Every time Clifford saw Forrestal, the sore was larger.
Forrestal’s anxiety was compounded by uncertainty over his status with the White House. In the months following Truman’s stunning upset victory in the 1948 presidential election, the president had grown frustrated with Forrestal’s increasing indecisiveness and odd behavior and came to the conclusion that he should replace his secretary of defense. Moreover, Truman had a most important benefactor he needed to satisfy: Louis Johnson, the chief fundraiser for his presidential campaign.
Shortly before his inauguration in January 1949, Truman informed Forrestal that he intended to replace him with Johnson. Forrestal went into a confused denial; while at times he expressed eagerness to leave office, in his frantic, debilitated mental state, he became convinced that he needed to stay at the Pentagon to unravel the mess he had helped create. With Forrestal making no real motion to leave office and his behavior becoming more eccentric, Truman summoned him to the White House on March 1 and asked for his resignation “at once.” The dismissal seemed to throw Forrestal over the edge. He had nothing but contempt for Johnson. “It just galled him to think that an office he had created to be above and beyond politics would become a spoil of the 1948 campaign,” Najeeb Halaby, then a young Forrestal aide, later said.
The ceremony to swear in Johnson was set for March 28 at the Pentagon. That morning, Eisenhower, laid up in bed with severe stomach cramps, got an urgent call from Forrestal. “Ike, I simply can’t turn over this job to Louie Johnson,” Forrestal said. “He knows nothing about the problems involved and things will go to pot. I’ll have to go to the President and withdraw my resignation immediately.”
Eisenhower later recounted, “I replied with all my strength, urging him not to do anything so foolish.”
Johnson was sworn in as the new secretary of defense before an audience of eleven thousand packed into the Pentagon courtyard; the ceremony, complete with marching bands and a thundering Air Force flyover, was so grandiose it was dubbed an inauguration. At the White House shortly afterward, Forrestal was led away speechless when Truman pinned the Distinguished Service Medal on his lapel. Forrestal was accorded further honors at a special House Armed Services Committee meeting held the next day. Afterwards, Forrestal went back to the Pentagon and retreated to a small office that had been set aside for his use in answering correspondence. His aide Marx Leva found him a little later, still wearing his hat, sitting entirely rigid, staring at a blank wall. Leva asked if there was anything he could do. “Yes,” Forrestal replied. “Call for my car. I want to go home.” Forrestal had no car—the secretary’s official limousine had passed on to Johnson. Leva “ran like hell” and found another official car to take Forrestal to his Georgetown home. The first secretary of defense, leaving the Pentagon for the last time, was bundled into the commandeered car and driven away.
Alarmed friends arranged for an Air Force plane to take him that evening to Florida, where his wife, Josephine, and his old friend Bob Lovett, assistant secretary of war for air under Stimson, were vacationing. Lovett met him at the airfield and was shocked at Forrestal’s haggard appearance. His sunken eyes darted about and his mouth was so tightly drawn that his lips had disappeared. Lovett tried to be jovial, suggesting they play some golf. Forrestal stared at his friend with a desperate look in his eyes. “Bob, they’re after me,” he replied. Walking the beach in subsequent days, Forrestal became convinced that metal sockets in the sand for holding beach umbrellas had been wired to monitor his conversations. The Kremlin had marked him for liquidation, he said. After at least one suicide attempt, Forrestal was admitted to the Bethesda naval hospital on April 2. Despite his suicidal tendencies, Forrestal was put in a VIP suite on the sixteenth floor, where he could be more easily isolated from the press.
Forrestal was diagnosed as suffering from severe reactive depression, not unlike combat fatigue, caused by intense pressures that had overwhelmed his mind and nervous system. Forrestal told a Navy psychiatrist he had failed at the Pentagon; instead of “banging heads together” as he should have, Forrestal blamed himself for naively believing the military services would bow to the common good to work together.
On the night of May 21, Forrestal stayed up late reading. A Navy corpsman stationed outside his room looked in on Forrestal around 1:45 A.M. and found him writing on sheets of hospital paper, copying a poem from a red leatherbound anthology of world poetry. About 3 A.M., while the corpsman was on an errand—possibly sent by Forrestal himself—the former defense secretary left his room and slipped across the corridor to a kitchen. Forrestal removed the unsecured screen from the window and tied one end of his bathrobe sash around a radiator below the window and the other end around his neck. He climbed out the window and was perhaps suspended for a few moments before the sash slipped off the radiator. The soaring granite tower conceived by Franklin Roosevelt and built by John McShain nearly a decade earlier proved to be a more than adequate platform for Forrestal to end his life. His broken body was discovered on the roof of a third-floor passageway connecting to another wing of the hospital.
On the bedside table in Forrestal’s room, his book was found open to the poem he had been copying, “The Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles. It included these lines:
When Reason’s day
Sets rayless—joyless—quenched in cold decay,
Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on
And dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone
I want that office
It had not been an auspicious start. Nor did it not soon get better.
Big, bluff, backslapping Louis Johnson, a savvy and nakedly ambitious West Virginian, was the virtual antithesis of the introverted Forrestal. Johnson had served as assistant secretary of war under Harry Woodring, working assiduously to undermine him. When the president replaced Woodring in 1940, Johnson had fully expected Roosevelt to name him to the job. Instead, FDR chose Henry Stimson. Nine years later, Johnson viewed his arrival at the Pentagon as sweet vindication, and, many suspected, a springboard to the presidency.
Moving into Forrestal’s office on the Mall side, Johnson found the accommodations not grand enough for his taste. Brigadier General Louis H. Renfrow, a bumptious Truman crony from Missouri serving as Johnson’s assistant, covetously eyed the suites above the River entrance occupied by the secretary of the army and the chief of staff, with the private elevator, dining room, and larger offices. Things were going to change. “I want that office,” Johnson declared. Forrestal’s “postage stamp”–sized desk was also deemed inadequate. The biggest desk in the Pentagon sat in an office set aside for General Pershing, but never occupied by the World War I commander before he died in 1948. The desk, a nineteenth-century, nine-by-five-foot solid walnut antique, had been used for years by Black Jack in the old State, War and Navy Building. Johnson claimed it.
Renfrow informed Army Secretary Kenneth Royall, who was planning to resign, that he was being “dispossessed” of his office a little early. Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, a five-star general
and one of the greatest of American soldiers, was likewise evicted. In April, movers packed up Royall and Bradley’s offices, including the Victorian grandfather clock and enormous globe on a carved wooden pedestal that Marshall had used. In came the Pershing desk and Johnson’s belongings, including a television set and a Buddha statuette with a bulging tummy, its hands upflung and roaring with silent mirth.
Room 3E-880 became and would remain the office of the secretary of defense. Bradley’s office would go to Johnson’s deputy. However ungracious, it was a shrewd move. In the hierarchical Pentagon, office size spoke volumes. “He wanted to establish his preeminence in the Pentagon,” Marx Leva, Forrestal’s aide, who stayed on to work for Johnson, later said. “…That was a symbol, but that symbol permeated at various echelons and he also wanted this to be known to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as to the civilian military establishment, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.”
Johnson did not stop at switching a few offices. Construction crews had been working night and day for months to remodel a pie-shaped ninety-thousand-square-foot slice of the Pentagon into a secure and soundproof area that would be home to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Walls were knocked down, and a huge map room, conference rooms, and rooms within rooms were built. Expensive acoustic tile went up. Thick doors with steel reinforcement were installed, and iron bars placed over windows. The $100,000 project was impressive, but there was one problem: It had been built near Forrestal’s office.
The carpenters and painters had just about finished, and the electricians were starting to install sophisticated communications systems, when Johnson declared in April he wanted the Joint Chiefs near his new office. Building superintendent Carl Muvehill, a testy, enormous man—almost five-sided himself, it was said—felt like weeping when the stop order came. Johnson ordered a new, identical hideout built for the Joint Chiefs, this time on the floor below his office. The area the workers had nearly completed would have to be turned back into regular offices.
The secretary of defense and his staff were taking over all the second and third floors along the E Ring on the River entrance side. Army offices would be concentrated on the first, second, and third floors on the Mall and on the southeast-facing side of the building. The Navy would be concentrated on the fourth and fifth floors along the Mall and west sides of the building. The Air Force would be on the fourth and fifth floors along the River and southeast sides. In all, 12,500 Pentagon workers were moved in “a gigantic game of musical chairs,” as one reporter put it.
Disruptive as it all was, the Pentagon was being converted into the nation’s command post for a unified military in the nuclear age. The Joint Chiefs’ area—once Muvehill’s men rebuilt it near Johnson’s office—was soon bustling with senior officers from all three services and was the most closely guarded area of the Pentagon. The Joint War Room lay behind double steel doors, its walls covered with large maps of the world. The area also included “The Tank,” the conference room where the Joint Chiefs—Bradley, Denfield, and General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff—regularly met. Nearby were “telecon” rooms, where the chiefs held secure conferences with commanders in Tokyo, London, or Berlin. Incoming messages were decoded and projected on a glass screen; outgoing messages were displayed on an adjacent screen.
The most important command post—even more critical than the Joint War Room—was the Air Force command post in the Pentagon basement. It was here, behind steel-shielded walls, that word of an enemy air attack would likely first come. A battery of direct-line telephones gave the command post instant contact with radar warning networks in the Arctic and on the North American coastlines, as well as with Air Force fighter and bomber bases around the world. The command post was manned twenty-four hours a day, with an Air Force general always on duty and empowered to make immediate decisions in the event of a crisis. Orders could be given to scramble fighters to intercept enemy aircraft, and—should Truman give the command—to launch long-range strategic bombers bearing atomic weapons on retaliatory strikes against Russian targets.
The threat of a nuclear attack on America took on real meaning about five months into Johnson’s tenure, on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb in Siberia. It was a shocking development, coming three years before U.S. intelligence had predicted. (Before the news was released in September, retired Lieutenant General Dick Groves confidently predicted the Soviets were “ten to twenty years” away from exploding a bomb.)
The news immediately rekindled questions that had been heard after Pearl Harbor about the wisdom of concentrating the military command in the Pentagon. Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin called on the military to immediately abandon the Pentagon, saying it was “suicidal” to keep the defense headquarters there. “We would be a sucker for a solar plexus blow which could knock our country out of an atomic war a few minutes after such a war started,” he said. Johnson, in response, announced a study to create an alternative command post in the event the Pentagon was attacked. By the spring of 1951, locals were buzzing about the construction crews excavating around the clock in secrecy underneath Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania near the Maryland border in the scenic Catoctin Mountains. Some 500,000 cubic yards of the hardest rock on the East Coast was blasted from the mountain’s core and hauled away, and a three-story, 220,000-square-foot building erected underground, its entrance protected by two heavy steel blast doors. It was designated Site R, the nation’s alternate military headquarters in the event of nuclear war.
George Marshall eventually admitted to second thoughts about the Pentagon. “If we’d known there’d be an A-Bomb, the Pentagon would probably never have been built,” he later said.
Pentagonians—as employees were generally referred to in those days—used gallows humor to deal with the anxiety. “No enemy would be stupid enough to bomb the Pentagon, because that would end the confusion in Washington,” a common joke went. Employees would eventually come up with a nickname for the hot dog stand in the middle of the Pentagon courtyard: The Ground Zero Cafe.
We weren’t ready to fight
Louis Johnson was in a dramatically stronger position at the Pentagon than Forrestal, yet he proved unable to capitalize on it. The Pentagon was in chaos. The fighting among the services grew worse; the generals and admirals were united only in how much they despised Johnson. In Omar Bradley’s view, “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”
Taking the opposite approach from Forrestal, Johnson vowed “to crack a few heads together.” The changes Forrestal had sought were passed by Congress and signed into law by Truman on August 10, 1949, giving the secretary of defense unequivocal power over the armed forces. The unwieldy National Military Establishment was converted into an executive department known as the Department of Defense. The Army, Navy, and Air Force secretaries were removed from the president’s cabinet and their power diminished. The position of chairman was created to preside over the Joint Chiefs.
Johnson launched a crusade against defense spending, but it came to a sudden halt on June 25, 1950, when the Soviet-supplied North Korean People’s Army rolled over the South Korea border and quickly captured Seoul. Poorly trained and poorly equipped U.S. 8th Army troops—living the high life of an occupation army in Japan—were rushed in to support the crumbling South Korean army. The first troops, Task Force Smith, were positioned on the highway north of Osan to stop the advancing North Korean tanks. But the 2.36-inch bazooka rockets fired by the U.S. troops could not penetrate the heavy armor of the T-34 tanks. The American force was overrun. The task force commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Smith, could see more tanks approaching, and behind them, stretching for miles, a line of infantry marching four abreast. “We had a pretty good idea right then that we had something that was going to cause us a hell of a lot of woe,” Smith recalled a half-century later. “We weren’t ready to fight, there’s no question about it.” After one week, three thousand U.S. soldiers were dead, wounded, captured, or missing.
The pathetic state of the American military had been revealed. Johnson received much of the blame for the debacle, even though he had been following Truman’s guidance to cut defense spending. The president, already angered by Johnson’s “inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” soon fired his second secretary of defense. Before delivering the news to Johnson, Truman had picked his third.
George C. Marshall had been vacationing in Michigan at the Huron Mountain Resort in August when he was called to the telephone at a nearby country store. It was the president, asking Marshall to come to the White House when he got back to Washington. Truman had already called Marshall back to service twice since he retired from the Army, once as an envoy to China, and then for a momentous two years as secretary of state, overseeing the creation of a recovery plan for Europe. Now, with the nation again at war, Truman turned to Marshall a final time, asking him to become secretary of defense. Marshall had been hoping to retire for five years, but his sense of duty made that impossible. He told Truman he would serve no more than a year.
On September 21, the day he was confirmed by the Senate, Marshall rode to the Pentagon in an old Studebaker and reported to Stimson’s old office, next door to the suite he had occupied as Army chief of staff. “Guess we have to go through the oath business,” he muttered. Ten minutes after being sworn in, Marshall called the Joint Chiefs in for a conference and they went to work. For Marshall, it was a familiar position, reminiscent of when he had been given charge of the Army in the dire days of 1939. “I was getting rather hardened to coming in when everything had gone to pot and there was nothing you could get your hands on, and darned if I didn’t find the same thing when I came into the Korean War,” Marshall later said. “There wasn’t anything.”
