James Forrestal
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James Vincent Forrestal (February 15, 1892 – May 22, 1949) was a Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense (September 17, 1947–March 28, 1949). He was a tremendous supporter of naval battle groups centered on aircraft carriers. The newly created Department of the Air Force opposed his plans to build new ones, claiming that operations could be accomplished from ground bases. The conflict between Forrestal and the Air Force was probably the foremost cause of his mental breakdown and ultimate suicide. One year after his suicide his ideas were vindicated by the Korean War, which showed an essential role for aircraft carriers in future wars. The Navy's first supercarrier, USS Forrestal was named in his honor.
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Early life and career
Forrestal was born in Matteawan, now Beacon, New York, the son of an Irish immigrant who dabbled in politics. 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.
He 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 (aka Dillon, Read and Company). 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, he served as a publicist for the Democratic 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 (aka Dillon, 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, ages eight and 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 Josephine, who he had married in 1926, also was a victim of this treatment and eventually developed alcohol and mental problems.
Government Work
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Forrestal as an administrative assistant on June 22, 1940, then nominated him as Under Secretary of the Navy six weeks later. In the latter post, Forrestal would prove to be very effective at mobilizing 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 then led the Navy through the closing year of the war and the demobilization that followed.
Forrestal opposed the unification of the services, but even so helped develop the National Security Act of 1947 that created the National Military Establishment (the Department of Defense was not created as such until August 1949), and with the former Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson retiring to private life, Forrestal was the next choice.
His 18 months at Defense came at an exceptionally difficult time for the US military establishment: Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia and China; West Berlin was blockaded, necessitating the Berlin Airlift to keep it going; Israel's declaration of independence brought war to the Middle East; and negotiations were going on for the formation of NATO. His reign was also hampered by intense inter-service rivalries.
In addition, President Harry Truman constrained military budgets billions of dollars below what the services were requesting, putting Forrestal in the middle of the tug-of-war. Forrestal was also becoming more and more worried about the Soviet threat (see The Russians are coming).
Forrestal's Death
Forrestal resigned on March 28, 1949, due to a "mental breakdown" and checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital five days later. The condition was officially announced as "nervous and physical exhaustion" with his lead doctor, Captain George Raines, diagnosing his condition as "depression" or "reactive depression."
A chief reason for Forrestal's fragile mental state was that his high-profile position was in sharp contrast to his personality. As a person who prized anonymity and once stated that his hobby was "obscurity", he and his policies had been the constant target of attacks from columnists such as Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell.
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 was found on a third-floor roof below the 16th-floor kitchen across the hall from his room. The Montgomery County (Maryland) County coroner called it a suicide within hours of the death.
The official Navy review board, which completed hearings on May 31, did not release a brief summary of its findings until October 12. The announcement 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 the bathrobe sash that was tied around his neck. There were reports of paranoia and of involuntary commitment to the hospital, as well as suspicions about the detailed circumstances of his death, which have fed a variety of conspiracy theories, some of which are described below.
His alleged suicide note was part of a poem from Sophocles' tragedy Ajax:
- Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar,
- Wander around thee yet,
- And sailors gaze upon thy shore
- Firm in the Ocean set.
- Thy son is in a foreign clime
- Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,
- Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,
- Worn by the waste of time–
- Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save
- In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....
- Woe to the mother in her close of day,
- Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,
- When she shall hear
- Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!
- “Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–
- No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail
- Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–
Compare Forrestal's handwriting to his suicide note [1] released by the Department of the Navy.
A Conspiracy?
Doubts have existed from the beginning about the conclusion that Forrestal committed suicide. These were fueled by the fact that the Navy did not release the transcript of its official hearing. The early doubts are detailed in the 1966 book, The Death of James Forrestal, by Cornell Simpson, which received virtually no publicity. Additional doubt has been raised by the 2004 release of the Navy investigation, 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 to have been written in a hand other than Forrestal's, and there was broken glass found on Forrestal's bed, a fact that had not been previously reported. Theories as to who might have murdered Forrestal range from Soviet agents (a view championed by Joe McCarthy) to U.S. government operatives sent to silence him for what he knew about UFOs. "He himself maintained that he was being tracked by Israeli security agents... Ironically, it was later learned that Israeli agents, fearing that America was making secret arrangements with Arab nations, had indeed been following him all along." [2]
The theory that Zionists were behind the alleged murder is buttressed by the 2006 revelations from British intelligence files that members of the Irgun gang, which was led by future Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, made an attempt on the life of British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1946. There was also a slander campaign against Forrestal, led by columnist Drew Pearson. The campaign tried to make it appear that he was paranoid (the claim that he once said, "The Russians are coming!" was later proven as unfounded), but paranoia was never even mentioned in the official evaluations of his psychiatric state.
Further reading
- Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal ISBN 0736625208 (1992)
- Cornell Simpson The Death of James Forrestal (Western Islands Publishers, 1966)
- Arnold Rogow, James Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (MacMillan, 1963)
- David Martin, Who Killed James Forrestal?, (2002-ongoing)
- Walter Millis ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951)
- Jeffrey M. Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal, A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949 (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press 1991)
External links
- DoD biography (includes more details of DoD formation process and budget negotiations)
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