Talk:James Forrestal

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Conspiracy theories aside, are there any modern postulations as to what mental illness(es) Forrestal may have suffered? jengod 19:47, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)

No one has gone past the diagnosis of the lead psychiatrist in the case, Capt. George Raines, who described the condition simply as "depression," as one can read in his official testimony at http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/forrestal/willcutts/report1.pdf

"DC Dave" Martin claims to have gotten hold of the original Willcutts report.[1] (Apparently JVF was against the invention of Israel - explaining the Israeli agents.) 142.177.21.40 15:37, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Actually, judging by the material quoted by DCDave, it's more accurate to say JVF was against the perpetual subordination of US interests to the protection of Israel—ie exactly what we've seen the past 50-odd years. Example, the quote attributed to James G. McDonald in his My Mission to Israel via Alfred M. Lilienthal Zionist Connection II: “He was in no sense anti-Semitic or anti-Israel nor influenced by oil interests. He was convinced that partition was not in the best interests of the U.S.…”[2] Or that attributed to Hoopes & Brinkley p5: “Forrestal's Jewish assistant, Marx Leva, thought him ‘patriotic, sensitive, intelligent, and just,’ entirely sympathetic to the plight of the European Jews and their desire for a homeland, but unable to agree that that desire should be allowed to override every other national consideration. ‘He was not anti-Semitic,’ Leva said flatly.” Kwantus 23:51, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm reading the Wilcutts report in a PDF, and it makes pretty clear that it was a suicide.

That's hardly the impression one gets from reading the analysis at http://www.dcdave.com/article4/040922.html .

The report is here, in two PDFs. -Penta 04:14, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have attempted to rewrite this in a more readable fashion by creating a separate section for the conspiracy theories involved in Forrestal's death. The previous version was extremely confusing, with the conspiracy theory interspersed through the whole article instead of in once place. Did i miss anything in this version? Please let me know....TSC, 22:45 EDT, 17 Oct 2005

I have edited the edit described above to set the facts straight, to impart some additional information, and to further improve the readability. GDM, 11:15 EDT, 21 Oct 2005

I have removed the last sentence in which Forrestal was described as a fanatical Roman Catholic and was said to be an extreme anti-Semite. His biographers agree that he was a fallen-away Catholic who was interested in getting back in touch with his religious upbringing. As for the "anti-Semite" charge, no one making it has produced any credible evidence. He made his fortune working for the Jewish-owned investment banking firm, Dillon Read. GDM 12-18-2005

Anecdotal evidence suggests he was not an anti-semite. ⇒ SWATJester Ready Aim Fire! 22:23, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I have added the Dorwart reference and corrected the date of the Hoopes and Brinkley book. It came out in 1992, not 1982. GDM 12-18-2005

This page still has the tone of lending credibility to the conspiracy theories. It seems that I cannot edit the first paragraph, which claims that Forrestal's conflict with the Air Force caused his mental illness. This is absurd. Establishing causation of mental illness is exceedingly difficult, and to reduce it to this cause alone is absolutely ridiculous. I would also like to see a footnote that proves that he never ran into the streets of Florida screaming "The Russians are coming!" Historian James Carrol, son of the first CIA director, recounted this anecdote on NPR as if it were fact, on the program "Forum," 6/5/06. He also confirmed that Forrestal was definitely mentally ill at the time of his suicide in 1949, and had been mentally ill during most, if not all of his tenure as the first Secretary of Defense. Carrol implies that the real reason some government agents tried to cover up the real circumstances of his suicide were simply that it wouldn't look very good for the Truman administration to have their Secretary of Defense being obviously mentally ill and jumping out of the window of the hospital where he was being treated, and this article does not reflect this possibility at all. RSW, 5 June 2006

  • First, concerning the allegation that Forrestal ran into the streets of Hobe Sound, Florida, screaming "The Russians are coming," it's pretty clear from his own book that Carroll doesn't believe it himself. Here's how he recounts it on page 151: "Rumors flew around Washington. One radio report had it that Forrestal was found in his pajamas a few blocks from [Robert] Lovett's house, and he was calling out, 'The Russians are coming.'"
At this point we are referred to an endnote that says, "Drew Pearson was the source of this report. His previous vilifications of Forrestal make the report unreliable, but Forrestal's mental illness definitely included delusions that the Soviets had invaded the United States."
Unreliable, I should say! Here's what biographers Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley say on pp. 455-456 about the episode:
"Pearson had, in fact, decided to fire his heaviest ammunition in a radio broadcast on April 9. He charged that Forrestal, awakened by the sound of a fire siren (on the night of April 1 at Hobe Sound), had rushed out of his cottage screaming, 'The Russians are attacking.' He defined Forrestal's condition as 'temporary insanity.' In subsequent newspaper columns he asserted that Forrestal made three suicide attempts while in Florida--by drug overdose, by hanging, and by slashing his wrists. According to a later statement by [Navy psychiatrist Captain George] Raines, all of these assertions were lies."
Hoopes and Brinkley were one of Carroll's main sources on Forrestal, so he knows that the evidence does not support Pearson's wild, irresponsible charge, but he repeats it as fact all over the airwaves nonetheless. Here he is on the Diane Rehm show http://prairieweather.typepad.com/the_scribe/2006/05/5106_npr_james_.html in Washington, DC: "Forrestal's political paranoia had a personal aspect and he wound up committing suicide having been reported only a few days before he was institutionalized and found in the streets in his pajamas screaming, 'The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!' It seems like something out of a film but it happened. Or is reported to have happened."
Or is reported to have happened. See, he knows it didn't happen. This Carroll is clearly a very dishonest fellow who should not be believed. That also goes for his charge that Forrestal was nuts all along. Here's what Forrestal's closest aide, Marx Leva, told his Truman Library interviewer, Jerry Hess:
HESS: What do you recall about the unfortunate mental breakdown that overtook Mr. Forrestal?
LEVA: Well, I may have been in the position of not being able to see the forest for the trees because I was seeing him six, eight, ten, twelve times a day and both in and out of the office. A lot of his friends have said since his death, "Oh, we saw it coming," and, "We knew this and we knew that." The only thing that I knew was that he was terribly tired, terribly overworked, spending frequently literally sixteen hours and eighteen hours a day trying to administer an impossible mechanism, worrying about the fact that a lot of it was of his own creation. I knew that he was tired, I begged him to take time off. I'm sure that others begged him to take time off.
Not only is James Carroll not honest, but he is not a historian, and he doesn't really claim to be. He is a journalist. He is also an excommunicated former priest who continues to represent himself as a Catholic. Most of all, he is a polemicist who constantly runs down the Catholic Church and anything or anybody that he perceives as conservative. He's something like the liberals' answer to Rush Limbaugh. Furthermore, his father was not the first head of the CIA, but of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The best indication that Carroll is no historian is that, in his discussion of James Forrestal's decline and death, he completely ignores the best available evidence, which is the report of the official investigation into the death by the U.S. Navy, which has been on the web site of the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University since the fall of 2004. That report, showing a "suicide" note written in someone else's handwriting and with witnesses' reports of broken glass on Forrestal's vacated bed and at the foot of his bed, lends great support to the "conspiracy theories." And, oh yes, the testimony of Forrestal's doctors lend no credence whatsoever to Carroll's charge that he had delusions about the Soviets having invaded the United States. It is an established historical fact that they had thoroughly penetrated the Roosevelt administration, and that Forrestal should have been concerned about that hardly made him mentally ill. Root50 02:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
I had originally described the campaign by certain members of the American press against Forrestal as a "slander campaign." The word "slander" was removed because that is a legal term and no one was charged or convicted of slander. Another editor filled the adjective vacuum with "press campaign," which is accurate as far as it goes. I have changed "press" to "smear," which is more descriptive and is certainly accurate, as well. This is from page 470 of Hoopes and Brinkley:
Democratic congressman Hale Boggs (from Louisiana) was one of the first to link the "tragic manner" of Forrestal's death with "a campaign of abuse and vilification the like of which I have never heard." Without naming Drew Pearson or Walter Winchell, he castigated "irresponsible elements " of the press for "attacking men of character and honor" with "the cruel weapons of distorted words," which are "more devastating than machine-guns or mortars."
And this is on page 471:
Several years later, Pearson's right-hand man, Jack Anderson, wrote a remarkable indictment of Pearson's behavior in the Forrestal case and of Anderson's own part in the deliberate, carefully calibrated character assassination.
It might be noted that with his most recent book on the Pentagon, James Carroll is in the Drew Pearson tradition. Root50 02:16, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

"One of Pearson's most spectacular claims was that while Forrestal was at Hobe Sound, Florida, shortly before he was hospitalized, he was awakened 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 treatment (See Hoopes and Brinkley, pp. 455-456.)." George Raines couldn't have known. The lack of witnesses proves little. Drew reported what was told to him and attacking Pearson for reporting seems pretty fishy to this old journalist. In any case, however wild the incident, Pearson was proved right--Forrestal was a nut roll wrapped in a fruitcake hidden in a nutburger (and died escaping from the nuthatch, to boot). He did believe obviously paranoid delusions and was visibly, physically weakened by lack of sleep and nutrition, either of which will make any psychiatric condition worse (except for obesity and catalepsy, of course). There is a LOT of editorializing in this and other articles featuring events in the late 40s and early 50s implying that Senator McCarthy was right and his opponents were wrong, that the government was riddled with communist spies, and so forth. In the bright light of day and supported by documents from the brief period of perestroyka, it is clear that McCarty was unjustified in his accusations. I think you may have acquired a right-wing mole who is undermining the reliability of the information in your biographical pieces by eschewing straight reportage in favor of establishing a popular basis for the basic paranoia that underlies a lot of right wing positions. The fact is that the right wing is the province of paranoids and latent homosexuals like Forrestal, McCarthy, and others. Not to diminish the contribution of Forrestal--the carrier fleet may have won World War II and dominated US hegemony during the middle of the 20th century--military and diplomatic. (It became obsolete and even a liability before Vietnam, however.) (I'm also an old sailor; in fact, I served aboard the USS Forrestal. We called it the suicide ship because I believe it to be the only warship named for a suicide, and it even attempted to destroy itself on at least two occasions.) But the guy was obviously plagued by demons that affected everyone who was close to him and he probably matured into a position where he was unable to deny them anymore (one of the more lethal of the Peter principles). The more your daily activities focus on thinking rather than carrying out orders, the harder it is to keep depression and failure out of central focus. It's why older people and retirees have such a high suicide rate, and I would argue it's why so many retirees die fairly young, shortly after retirement. I'd like to recommend that the originator of these editorial passages be found and encouraged to seek treatment from a psychiatrist. Once he is able to admit his homosexual feelings, he will probably make an effective contributor again. (I'm an old psychiatric social worker, too.) But while he is seeking detox and treatment, you should also review all biographies for entries by this mole and correct them, return them to editorial language, or delete them. 152.13.99.132 14:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

"George Raines couldn't have known. The lack of witnesses proves little."
Captain Raines would have known if anyone did. He was there at Hobe Sound, Florida, when the episode was supposed to have occurred. He would have no reason to lie about it, either. One can see from the long-suppressed Willcutts Report on Forrestal's death that he was the one doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital pushing the notion that Forrestal was suicidally depressed. He even volunteered that the handwriting on the transcription of the morbid poem looked like Forrestal's, when anyone can see that it looks nothing of the sort.
Drew Pearson's source is anonymous, just like his source for his claim that Forrestal had attempted suicide four times before, also in contradiction to the testimony of all the doctors at Bethesda. And Pearson, as Forrestal's determined enemy, had every reason to lie, and he had a lot of experience at it. Here's what a man who was pretty good at the art, himself, once wrote about him:
"His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a pity that anyone anywhere believes anything he writes." --President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Pearson, in letter to General Patrick J. Hurley, August 30, 1943, cited in Patrick J. Hurley, a biography by Don Lohbeck, 1956.
Not even James Carroll believes that Pearson is a credible source, as he admits in the endnote that accompanies his account of Pearson's "Russians Are Coming" story.
But our Pearson believer says he once served on a ship that tried to sink itself twice because it was named after this man who was purported to have committed suicide, which proves that the allegations are true. Who am I to argue with logic like that?
On the matter of Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration, here's a short summary of the latest knowlege on the subject:
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. --Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers' War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War within World War II, Basic Books, 2001, p. 319.
Root50 18:59, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Re: NPOV disputed--Citation is needed for the theory that Admiral Byrd was on a mission to locate a secret nazi base in Antarctica. Alternately this should be labelled as a "conspiracy theory". Also, why is this in the "reference" section rather than the conspiracy section immediately above? The theory of a secret nazi base is highly improbable due to the amount of funding necessary for its support and maintenance.Khalkhingol 22:25, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Why does the issue of Forrestal's sanity/insanity prove that he was or was not murdered. He could have been both insane and delusional as all get out and still have been murdered. Proving his sanity doesn't prove he was murdered and proving insanity doesn't prove he killed himself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.70.172.160 (talk) 06:14, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV

This article seems to have serious POV and due weight problems in terms of Forrestal's death. Aren't all these conspiracy theories fringe views? Do any legitimate scholars or Forrestal biographers believe that his death was anything but suicide? I have, at the very least, removed some nonsense about L. Ron Hubbard's view of Forrestal's death, but even with that gone, the whole thing is seriously problematic. I'm going to remove all the cruft about conspiracy theories, and change "alleged suicide" to just "suicide" unless someone can provide some evidence that this is anything but a lunatic fringe theory. john k (talk) 05:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

  • Since the release of the official report on Forrestal's death in 2004, no so-called "legitimate scholar" or Forrestal biographer has had anything to say on the subject. Therefore, all that is currently published in books, magazines, or newspapers is based upon out of date evidence. The report of the review board convened by Admiral Morton Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Medical Center, is on the web site of the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University. That report includes a photograph that shows broken glass on the carpet at the foot of Forrestal's bed and testimony that broken glass was on Forrestal's vacated hospital bed. The photographs also show a bed that has no covering of any kind, in contrast to the description of the first witness in the room. The report does not conclude that Forrestal "jumped" from a window. Rather, it concludes, "That the late James V. Forrestal died about 1:50 A.M. on Sunday, May 22, 1949, at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, as a result of injuries, multiple extreme, received incident to a fall from a high point in the tower, Building 1." In addition, among the exhibits in the Willcutts Report is the famous transcription of the morbid poem by Sophocles that Forrestal was supposed to have copied, but the handwriting bears no resemblance to Forrestal's handwriting. I believe that this site should not go beyond the known evidence, and in light of that evidence, the conclusion that Forrestal jumped from a hospital window is nothing more than conjecture from a particular POV. The word "jumped" should be removed as should the conclusion of suicide, a conclusion that goes beyond the last official government word on the subject of Forrestal's death. ElmoMotterson (talk) 20:30, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
I concur, however I do suggest that a separate section be created for the speculations and conspiracies as they are a part of this biography and are a necessary part of the history of this individual. True or not they exist, they are documented to exist and therefore should be mentioned as what they are, conspiracies and speculations.--Kumioko (talk) 20:38, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
It is not accurate to say, "all that is currently published in books, magazines, or newspapers is based on out of date evidence." One U.S. newspaper in Maryland published a report, Handwriting tells dark tale?, based on current news. The Hyattsville Life and Times, December 2007 edition (page 3), published comments from James Forrestal's personal driver, who was reported living in Pennsylvania. The newspaper published the handwritten poem from the Willcutts Review Board Report alongside a handwritten letter by Forrestal, obtained from the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. The article accurately reported the Willcutts Repot did not call Forrestal's death a suicide. Coffeehead (talk) 23:26, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
  • The section suggested does not need to be "created." All that needs to be done is to restore what was chopped away on March 4, a section that had withstood the scrutiny of Wikipedia readers for quite a long time. The major amputation was performed, I believe, by the same person who implies above that no one has presented evidence to suggest that it is anything but "a fringe lunatic theory," whatever that pejorative and most unscholarly and uncivil expression might mean. He apparently failed to read what was right on the page in front of him to infer that insufficient evidence has been presented to raise legitimate doubts about the conclusion of suicide.
Repeating what I wrote above, what sets this evidence apart is that it is what in a court of law would have to be treated as the best evidence. It is more recent and it comes from more authoritative sources. Prior to the release of the Willcutts Report, the most recent published source on Forrestal's death was probably the generally excellent biography, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. Their sources for what transpired on the 16th floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital on that fateful night, however, are very weak. They rely primarily on the previous biographer, Arnold Rogow, who said that when Forrestal's Navy guard last saw him, he was busy copying something from a book. Rogow has no source for that information, however. Hoopes and Brinkley add to that the impressions of Forrestal's demeanor supplied by the guard who went off duty some two hours before Forrestal went out a window. They did not interview that guard themselves; rather they got in from the unpublished manuscript of John Osborne, a writer for Time magazine. From the actual testimony of those two guards, as provided by the Willcutts Report, we find that at the exact same time Rogow said Forrestal was said to be reading and writing, he appeared to the guard to be asleep in his dark room. For his part, the guard who came before expressed no particular alarm over Forrestal's demeanor during his time on duty.
Here is a short summary of the main information contained in the Willcutts Report that calls into question the suicide theory:
1. The handwriting of the transcribed poem, which, for the press, served as his suicide note, does not resemble Forrestal's at all.
2. Broken glass was on his bed and on the carpet at the foot of the bed
3. Forrestal's room was not photographed until many hours after he was found dead and that when it was it did not resemble the room that the nurse who first got a good look at the vacated room described. The photos show a bed with nothing but a bare mattress and pillow on them, whereas Nurse Turner testified that, as one might expect, "The bed clothes were turned back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and [the slippers] were right there as you get out of bed." No slippers or any other sign that the room had been occupied are evident in the photographs, either.
4. No satisfactory explanation was given for the bathrobe cord that was tied tightly around Forrestal's neck. There was speculation that he had tried to hang himself out the window from a radiator under the window, but the cord was not broken and no effort was made to determine if one end of it had ever been tied to anything.
5. The influential biographer, Arnold Rogow, apparently fabricated the story that the guard saw Forrestal transcribing the morbid poem when he last looked in on him, because the guard testified that when he last looked in the room Forrestal was apparently sleeping and the lights had been off and Forrestal apparently did no reading or writing during the guard's time of duty which began at midnight
6. The influential newspapers reporting on the death apparently fabricated the story that the transcription ended in the middle of the word "nightingale" or, depending on which article in The Washington Post you read, the transcription included the lines, “When Reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die, and sleep the never-ending sleep than linger on, and dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.”
7. The findings of the Willcutts Report were not issued until several months had passed and then, the findings did not include the conclusion that Forrestal had committed suicide.
8. The book from which Forrestal supposedly copied the damning poem does not appear in official evidence nor is the supposed discoverer of either the book or the transcription ever officially identified
9. The Willcutts Report was kept secret for 55 years, when its whole purpose was to clear the air and establish the facts publicly concerning the nature of Forrestal's death? ElmoMotterson (talk) 19:50, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

One of the "Majestic Papers" whether bogus or not mentions that his death was nessessary now please realize that parts of this were Blacked out and "Edited". I am now Quoting from this document.

"In protecting the security operations of MAJESTIC it has been necessary to eliminate individuals who would compromise the intelligence efforts. While distasteful [Blacked]t times, the use of [Blacked] measures have been executed. The untimely death of Secretary Forrestal, was deemed necessary and [Blacked]" 76.167.168.13 (talk) 19:11, 21 April 2008 (UTC)