James
Vincent Forrestal,
the son of an Irish immigrant, was born
in Matteawan,
New York on 15th February 1892. After attending local schools he joined
the Matteawan Journal at the age
of sixteen. He also worked as a reporter on the Mount
Vernon Argus before becoming city editor on the Poughkeepsie
News Press.
Aware that
progress would be slow without a college education, in 1912 he went
to Princeton University. Three years
later Forrestal left Princeton without getting a degree and went to
work for the New
York World.
In 1916
Forrestal joined the banking firm Dillon, Read & Company
as a bond salesman in New York. The following
year he moved to Canada where he joined
the Royal Flying Corps. By 1918 he qualified
as a pilot but did not see active service in the First
World War.
After the
war Forrestal returned to Dillon, Read & Company. Progress was
rapid. He was appointed head of the New York office's sales department
and in 1923 was a partner in the firm. Three years later he became
vice-president and in 1938, when he was forty-six years old, he became
its president.
In 1940
Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed
Forrestal as one of his advisers. His duties included working as a
liaison officer between the president, the Treasury Department and
other governmental financial agencies. Roosevelt was impressed with
Forrestal and in August 1940 he was appointed under secretary of the
navy with special responsibility for procurement and production. In
1941 Forrestal went to London to negotiate
the Lend-Lease agreement.
When William
Knox died on 23rd April 1944, Forrestal became the new Secretary
of the Navy. In this post he visited the Pacific three times and Europe
twice and watched the D-Day landings in
June, 1944. Forrestal held the post until September 1947 when he became
Secretary of Defence.
After the
war Forrestal became associated with the campaign against communism.
This upset liberals in Washington
who still believed it was possible to develop good relations with
Joseph Stalin and the Soviet
Union. In September 1946 he joined with James
F. Byrnes to get Henry
Wallace sacked
after he made a speech calling for an end to the Cold War.
In 1948
the journalist Drew Pearson revealed
in his newspaper column that during the 1930s Forrestal had been guilty
of tax evasion and share manipulation. Other journalists made claims
that Forrestal had owned shares in large companies in Nazi
Germany and had used his influence to stop the bombing of German
cities during the Second World War.
Harry
S. Truman
was unhappy with Forrestal's performance as Secretary of Defence and
on 28th March 1949 forced him to resign from office. Soon afterwards,
Forrestal, suffering from depression, was admitted to Bethesda Hospital.
On 22nd May 1949 James Forrestal committed
suicide by throwing himself out of a 16th-floor hospital window.
(1)
James Forrestal, memorandum sent to Clark Clifford (6th March, 1947)
There is a serious,
immediate and extraordinarily grave threat to the continued existence
of this country.
These are the facts:
1.
The present danger which this country faces is at least as great as
the danger which we faced during the war with Germany and Japan. Briefly
stated, it is the very real danger that this country, as we know it,
may cease to exist.
2.
From 1941 to 1945 we won a war by enlisting the whole-hearted support
of all our people and all our resources. Today we are losing a comparable
struggle without ever having enlisted the strength of our people and
our resources - and the consequences of our loss will be the same
consequences that would have followed if we had lost the war of 1941-45.
3.
Of the strategic battlegrounds of the present struggle, we have already
lost Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and a number of others;
Greece is in imminent peril; after Greece, France and Italy may follow;
and after France and Italy, Great Britain, South America, and ourselves.
4.
We lost strategic battlegrounds in the war of 1941-1945, also-but
even while we were losing some battlegrounds, we were planning the
offensives by which we were to win the ultimate victory. And we won
the victory by pressing home our attacks - by landing our troops at
Guadalcanal, North Africa, Guam, Iwo Jima, Normandy, the Philippines,
and a host of other places.
5.
This country cannot afford the deceptive luxury of waging defensive
warfare. As in the war of 1941-45, our victory and our survival depend
on how and where we attack.
6.
By providing outstanding economic leadership, this country can wage
its attack successfully - and can thereby build the foundations of
a peaceful world. For the only way in which a durable peace can be
created is by world-wide restoration of economic activity and international
trade.
7.
In order to be successful, our product-our economic leadership-will
have to prove its superiority to the commodity which Russia has lately
been so successful in peddling. Russia has a product which is skillfully
tailored to appeal to people who are in despair-and thanks to German
and Japanese aggression, Russia has had a wealth of customers who
are sufficiently desperate to turn to anything. Moreover, the accomplishment
of Russia's aims has been greatly simplified by the fact that we have
heretofore offered the world no practical antidote for the Russian
poison.
8.
What we must do is create the conditions under which a free world
society can live. With that as our object, a group of our most competent
citizens should be called together in order to enlist the full support
of all elements of our economy in the accomplishment of this basic
American task. For only by an all-out effort on a worldwide basis
can we pass over from the defense to the attack. In making our all-out
effort, we will be forwarding not only world stability but also our
national interest-which includes, of course, business interest, labor
interest, and public interest.
9.
As specific examples of the sort of thing which we must do, the following
may be enumerated:
(a)
Japanese assets amounting to some $137,000,000 are presently impounded.
If these assets were set up as a revolving fund with which Japan could
import raw materials for its industries, Japanese exports could again
enter the channels of world trade-and Japanese workers would have
employment and something to eat.
(b)
A similar revolving fund could be set up for Germany, for a durable
peace can rest only upon a Germany that, while militarily impotent,
is industrially active.
(c)
Financial support should be provided for local enterprises in those
countries where a struggling economy needs a helping hand-but the
furnishing of such support should in every case be handled by competent
American personnel, in order to assure that the money goes into productive
enterprises that are of direct use both to the country involved and
to world trade. (Wherever possible, private capital in this country
should render the necessary financial assistance-for this is essentially
a business task, in which government's greatest contribution is the
creation of favorable conditions under which business can work.)
10.
The group referred to above should be called together promptly. It
should consist of our best brains-from, management, from labor, from
both the executive and the legislative side of the government, from
any source that has a contribution to make-for the issues to be faced
are crucial, and we must attack if we are to survive.
(2)
Drew
Pearson, comments made to Jack
Anderson in 1948.
Jack, Forrestal is the most dangerous man in America. Sure he's able.
Of course he's dedicated. But to what? He's
a man who lives only for himself. He has broken his word, turned his
back on his friends. He is driven by one ambition; he has always craved
to be top man - first of Wall Street and now of the United States.
Any principles he has are the kind that will cause another world war
- unless he's stopped first.
(3)
Jack
Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker
(1979)
I began to inquire quietly
into the reasons behind Drew's antipathy (towards James Forrestal)
and found they had been accumulating for twenty years. To begin with,
Drew held Forrestal accountable for the record of Dillon, Read &
Co. during the period he had been a dominant force there. It was a
record which sinned flagrantly against Drew's brightest passions and
darkest prejudices - his lifelong crusade to free Latin America from
U.S. exploitation, his championship of a homeland for the world's
displaced Jews, his loathing of Big Oil and his fundamental distrust
of the German nation, under whatever regime.
In the 1920's Dillon, Read
& Co. had loaned $20 million to Bolivia, which was used to finance
an aggressive war against Paraguay; it loaned hundreds of millions
to the German cartels of the Ruhr during the pre-Hitler period, reviving
industries which were to form the backbone of Hitler's war machine.
When Forrestal, as the strong man of the Truman Cabinet, pushed for
yet another restoration of the Ruhr industries and planned a lend-lease
program of arms to "friendly" Latin American military regimes.
Drew foresaw a magnification of the follies and tragedies of the past.
At Dillon, Read &
Co., Forrestal had been banker to Big Oil and had helped underwrite
its expansion into the Arab countries; and when, during World War
II, our Navy grossly overpaid the Arabian-American Oil Company for
petroleum, or when Forrestal vehemently opposed the partition of Palestine
and persuaded President Truman to reverse his initial support for
a new Jewish state, Drew saw the hated hand of the international oil
puppeteers at work. There were respectable national-interest arguments
to be made for the Dillon, Read loans and the Forrestal public policies,
but they ran afoul both of Drew's idealism and his demonology.
(4)
James Forrestal, diary entry (16th March 1948)
This country and its government are desperately anxious to avoid war.
It is simply a question of how best to do it. If all Europe lies flat
while the Russian mob tramps over it, we will then be faced with a
war under difficult circumstances, and with a very good chance of
losing it.
It is inconceivable that
even the gang who runs Russia would be willing to take on war, but
one always has to remember that there seemed to be no reason in 1939
for Hitler to start war, and yet he did, and he started it with a
world practically unprepared.
Our effort now is to try
to make the Russians see the folly of continuing an aggression which
will lead to war, or, if it is impossible to restore them to sanity,
that we at least have a start which will enable us to prevent our
being caught flat-tooted as we were in 1941.
(5) Drew
Pearson, Washington
Merry-Go-Round (15th
December, 1948)
Ever since
election day, Secretary of Defense Forrestal has been frantically
painting himself a true and loyal Democrat. But there is has been
frantically painting himself a true and loyal Democrat. But here is
an off-the-record talk indicating the kind of men Forrestal puts in
high position...
Practically all Latin America
is watching the State Department to see what we do about recognizing
the new Army dictatorship in Venezuela... the State Department's trigger-recognition
of Latin dictators has brought forth a rash of military revolts, the
latest being the Nicaraguan-inspired march against the peaceful government
of Costa Rica...
Secretary of Defense Forrestal
still favors his plan of sending more arms to Latin America under
a new lend-lease agreement, despite the fact that new arms to Latin
American generals are like a toy train to a small boy at Christmastime.
They can't wait to use them - usually against their own President.
General Somoza, the Nicaraguan
who has now inspired the fracas in Costa Rica, was trained by the
US Marines, later seized the Presidency of Nicaragua. President Trujillo,
worst dictator in all Latin America, was also trained by the US Marines.
Unfortunately, under the Forrestal-Marine Corps program, we train
men to shoot and give them the weapons to shoot with. But we don't
give them any ideas or ideals as to what they should shoot for.
Back
in the 1920's, Secretary Forrestal's Wall Street firm loaned 20 million
dollars to Bolivia, used to buy arms to wage war against Paraguay.
Some time after Forrestal loaned this money to Bolivia, the Remington
Arms Co., of which Donald Carpenter is now vice president, stepped
in to profit by it. Remington got a contract for 7.65 mm. and 9 mm.
cartridges. Carpenter had just joined the firm when this sale was
made. So Forrestal and Carpenter, once operators in indirectly fomenting
war in Latin America, are now together in running American defense.
(6)
In 1948 the US Secret Service began investigating James Forrestal's
behaviour.
Mr. Forrestal had become so overly suspicious that whenever the front
door was opened or the bell rang, he would go to the area and peer
out secretly to see who was there. And only the week before, Mr. Forrestal
had come into the kitchen while he, the butler, was there. The Defense
Secretary was wearing his hat around the house, apparently forgetting
that he had it on, or that he had decided to go out. On this occasion
he looked right at the butler and asked: "Where's my butler?"
When the butler said, "I'm here. Sir," Mr. Forrestal looked
confused and could not remember what he wanted.
(7)
General
Dwight
D. Eisenhower wrote
about Jim Forrestal in his diary (8th
January, 1949)
8th January, 1949: Jim is looking badly. He has a conscience
and a sense of duty. These, coupled with his feeling of urgency and
his terrific, almost tragic, disappointment in the failures of professional
men to "get together," leads him to certain errors. Among
these none is worse than the way he treats himself. He gives his mind
no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.
11th June, 1949: There
is no use trying, after his death, to decide exactly what I thought
of Jim Forrestal. But one thing I shall always remember. He was the
one man who, in the very midst of the war, always counseled caution
and alertness in dealing with the Soviets. He visited me in 1944 and
in 1945 and I listened carefully to his thesis - I never had cause
to doubt the accuracy of his judgments on this point. He said, "Be
courteous and friendly in the effort to develop a satisfactory modus
vivendi, but never believe we have changed their basic purpose,
which is to destroy representative government." He insisted they
hated us, which I had good reason to believe myself. I still do, but
now, everybody does. Moreover, those who were then asleep now are
professional patriots and Russian haters.
(8)
Arnold
A. Rogow, James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics and
Policy (1963)
Forrestal's
general mood was one of depression and despondency. Even when he was
relatively relaxed, the conviction expressed to Lovett, that "they're
after me," was never entirely absent. One afternoon, for example,
while walking along the beach, Forrestal pointed to a row of metal
sockets fixed in the sand for holding beach umbrellas, and remarked:
"We had better not discuss anything here. Those things are wired,
and everything we say is being recorded."
There
were also frequent indications that Forrestal was profoundly disturbed
by real or imagined threats to the nation's security. He was certain
that the Communists were planning an imminent invasion of the United
States. Indeed, at various times he talked as if the invasion had
already taken place. He expressed anxiety about the presence of Communists,
or communist influence, in the White House, the Defense Establishment,
and other agencies of the government. Convinced that the American
people had
been duped by Communists and communist sympathizers, Forrestal believed
that he had been chosen as their Number One target for liquidation
as a consequence of his efforts to alert Americans to the communist
menace.
(9)
Paul Shafter, speech on James Forrestal in the House of Representatives
(23rd May, 1949)
James V. Forrestal hated the Communists. He hated the thoughts of
their undermining this land of ours, in which he had been able to
work himself up from a poor man to one of wealth and high position.
He hated the thoughts of allowing the Communists to overrun Poland,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
and China. There is every reason to believe that the dangers of communism
and the manner in which so many of our citizens overlook those dangers
preyed on his mind, until, finding a weak spot, the pressure caused
his collapse which ended in his tragic demise. Let us pray that all
of us fight as good and as long a fight as did Jim Forrestal.
(10) Drew
Pearson, Washington Post (30th May, 1949)
In the end, it may be found that
Mr. Forrestal's friends had more to do with his death than his critics.
For those close to him now admit privately that he had been sick for
some time, suffered embarrassing lapses too painful to be mentioned
here.
Yet
during the most of last winter, when Jim Forrestal was under heavy
responsibilities and definitely not a well man, the little coterie
of newspapermen who now insinuate Jim was killed by his critics, encouraged
him to stay on. This got to be almost an obsession, both on their
part and on his, until Mr. Truman's final
request for his resignation undoubtedly worsened the illness.
The
real fact is that Jim Forrestal had a relatively good press. All one
need do is examine the newspaper files to see that his press was far
better than that of some of his old associates.
Are public officials to be immune from criticism or investigation
for fear of impairing their health? If we are to withhold the check
of congressional investigation or newspaper criticism from any public
official, no
matter how mild, because of health, then the Government of checks
and balances created by the Founding Fathers is thrown out of gear.
It
was not criticism which caused Jim Forrestal to conclude that his
life was no longer worth living. There were other factors in his life
that made him unhappy.
(11)
Drew
Pearson,
diary (22nd May, 1949)
Jim
Forrestal died at 2 a.m. by jumping out of the Naval Hospital
window...
I think
that Forrestal really died because he had no spiritual reserves. He
had spent all his life thinking only about himself, trying to fulfill
his great ambition to be President of the United States. When that
ambition became out of his reach, he had nothing to fall back on.
He had no church; he had deserted it. He had no wife. They had both
deserted each other. She was in Paris at the time of his death - though
it was well-known that he had been seriously ill for weeks. But most
important of all, he had no spiritual resources...
But James
Forrestal's passion was public approval. It was his lifeblood. He
craved it almost as a dope addict craves morphine. Toward the end
he would break down and cry pitifully, like a child, when criticized
too much. He had worked hard - too much in fact - for his country.
He was loyal and patriotic. Few men were more devoted to their country,
but he seriously hurt the country that he loved by taking his own
life. All his policies now are under closer suspicion than before...
Forrestal
not only had no spiritual resources, but also he had no calluses.
He was unique in this respect. He was acutely sensitive. He had traveled
not on the hard political path of the politician, but on the protected,
cloistered avenue of the Wall Street bankers. All his life he had
been surrounded by public relations men. He did not know what the
lash of criticism meant. He did not understand the give-and-take of
the political arena. Even in the executive branch of government, he
surrounded himself with public relations men, invited newsmen to dinner,
lunch, and breakfast, made a fetish of courting their favor. History
unfortunately will decree that Forrestal's
great reputation was synthetic. It was built on the most unstable
foundation of all - the handouts of paid press agents.
If Forrestal had been
true to his friends, if he had made one sacrifice for a friend, if
he had even gone to bat for Tom Corcoran who put him in the White
House, if he had spent more time with his wife instead of courting
his mistress, he would not have been so alone this morning when he
went to the diet pantry of the Naval Hospital and jumped to his death.
(12)
Walter
Lippmann, Today
and Tomorrow (24th May, 1949)
Since his breakdown I have
been remembering how for years, no matter what else we talked about,
Forrestal would bring up somewhere and somehow a variant of the same
theme: how this Government, which he knew was almost unmanageable,
could be made to work, how men could be found who were competent to
administer it, how methods and situations could be devised to make
it possible for competent men to be wise.
He was like a doctor who
had studied a disease and then contracts it himself. He saw with an
awful clarity his own mistakes and his failures so sharply that the
affection of his friends could not console him, that public tributes
could not deceive him. He saw them with such terrible conscientiousness
and scruple, so out of proportion in the record of his achievements,
that he was exhausted - not so much by the long hours he worked as
by the realization that he would never have a chance to repair his
mistakes and to achieve what he had been appointed to achieve.
I cannot help feeling Lippmann
added, that whatever the doctors may say, there is a public factor
in this tragedy, and that it lies in the destructive and soul-destroying
political custom of casting public men aside in the middle of their
careers. Of all the wastes in the American system of government, our
practice of re-
tiring public men is the most expensive.
I shall always believe
that if Forrestal had known before he left the Pentagon that he was
really wanted somewhere else, as indeed in all justice and common
sense he should have been, he would have had a reason for living,
and the fatigue the doctors talk about would not have overcome his
will to live.
(13)
Saturday
Evening Post (18th June, 1949)
It is
an interesting speculation as to what extent Forrestal's desperation
was deepened by a group of ill-assorted columnists and ideological
libertarians. During his whole Government service it was implied in
a continuous stream of billingsgate that Forrestal was in the Government
to serve his former partners in the investment-banking business, that
he was a "cartelist" and a truckler to fascism.
It is a little late to
go into all that, but it is not too late to make the obvious comment
that the responsibility for this abuse of a free press goes beyond
the malice of gossip columnists and rests firmly on the heads of publishers
who permit their newspapers to take from syndicated columnists libelous
and half-baked abuse which they would not print if it were written
by their own reporters.
It is not necessary to
have agreed with everything James Forrestal believed or did, but it
is reasonable to
insist that news and opinion regarding the acts of public men or private
citizens for that matter, be held to ordinary standards of accuracy,
fairness and decency.
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