Persistent Lies about
James Forrestal
From the Arlington
Cemetery and Find a Grave Web Sites
This is an email that I sent on December 18,
2014. It did not bounce back as
undeliverable, so I assume it reached its intended recipient. As of this date I have received no response
and the changes that I suggested have not been made. Consequently, I have decided to make the
email public:
Dear
Arlington National Cemetery Webmaster,
On
the site for our first
secretary of defense, James Forrestal, you state, "On May 22 [1949], after
several prior attempts at suicide, and after copying a passage from Sophocles'
"Chorus from Ajax", he jumped from the 16th floor hall window."
Only
the date in that statement is verifiably correct. The allegation of
several prior suicide attempts originates with the scandal columnist and
Forrestal enemy Drew Pearson. Pearson had no source for his allegations
and not one person has come forward to support it. Rather, everyone who
has looked into the multiple suicide attempts charge has found it to be bogus.
Biographers Townsend Hoopes and Douglas
Brinkley say that Eliot Janeway was told by Ferdinand Eberstadt that Forrestal
made an attempt to kill himself at Hobe Sound, FL, (with no details given), but
they did not interview Eberstadt, who was alive when they wrote their book, and
Janeway is at least as unreliable as Pearson.
Concerning
the passage from the poem by Sophocles, check out the copy that I obtained with
the Freedom of Information Act in 2004 and the samples of Forrestal's
handwriting here. Now do you still
want to say that he was the one who copied that excerpt?
He
did not go out the hall window, either; he went out the window of a kitchen
across the hall from his room. And if you still want to maintain that he
jumped, I suggest that you examine the handwriting on that surrogate suicide
note again and reflect upon the meaning of what you see.
Sincerely,
The Arlington National Cemetery web site in
question is not an official government site. On the siteÕs home page one is greeted with this message: ÒWelcome To
The Unofficial Site Devoted To AmericaÕs Most Hallowed Ground And To The Heroes
And The Pathfinders Who Rest In Eternal Peace And Honored Glory There.Ó
Above that is the message: ARLINGTON NATIONAL
CEMETERY (WEBSITE)
Where Valor Proudly Sleeps
The man whose name is behind the site is one
Michael Robert Patterson, and at the bottom of the page he tells us one more
time that he and his site are in no way associated with either the United
States government or its army. By
the manner in which he has treated the subject of James ForrestalÕs death, he and
his site would seem to be not very closely associated with the truth, either.
I first took note of the Arlington Cemetery siteÕs
Forrestal observations in Part 2 of ÒWho Killed James Forrestal?Ó published more
than ten years ago on September 22, 2004.
In Part 2, reading from the official inquiry on ForrestalÕs death, the Willcutts Report, we also have this exchange with the lead
psychiatrist in the case, Dr. George Raines:
Q. Did
Mister Forrestal make any attempts at suicide while he was under your care?
A.
None whatsoever. The matter of suicide in Hobe Sound, he told Doctor [William]
Menninger that he had attempted to hang himself with a belt. Menninger
and I were very skeptical of that and both he and I were of the opinion that it
was sort of a nightmare. The man had no marks on him and there was no
broken belt. Very frequently a depressed person has a fantasy of dying
and reports it as real. So far as I know he never made a single real
attempt at suicide except that one that was successful.
Captain
Raines is the one doctor among the several that Forrestal
had who testified that his patient had expressed suicidal urges to him. He also absurdly volunteered that the
handwriting of the transcribed poem looked like ForrestalÕs. For a man with an intimate knowledge of
the case, who was clearly doing his best to sell the suicide story, to deny
knowledge of Forrestal making any previous attempts at suicide virtually
confirms that there were no such attempts.
Even without this testimony, which did not come to light until 2004,
repeating Drew PearsonÕs completely uncorroborated and patently ridiculous
claims was irresponsible to begin with.
I
made reference to the erroneous claims of the Arlington Cemetery site again on
September 27, 2004, in a short summary article entitled ÒNew Forrestal Document Exposes Cover-up.Ó This repeated mention has obviously had
no effect on Mr. Patterson. After
the passage of a decade, I decided to make a more active effort to get him to bring
his statement concerning ForrestalÕs demise into closer conformity with the
known facts.
From
studying his home page, we should hardly be surprised at his failure to
respond. Taking him at his word
that he is not associated with the U.S. government, it is still hard to imagine
how his site would be different if it were wholly owned and financed by the
most war-profiting elements of the military-industrial complex. Consider his collection of quotes on his
home page, particularly the one laid out as though it were some lyrical poem at
the top of the second column:
Great
harm has been done to us.
We
have suffered great loss.
And
in our grief and anger we have found
our
mission and our moment.
--President George W. Bush, September 2001
This
celebration of the whipping up of war fever is very reminiscent of what Hermann
Gšring told American psychologist Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg:
Why, of course, the people don't want warÉ But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is
always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or
a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Éthe people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
danger. It works the same way in any country.
All
that is needed to give the Gšring observation a
particularly American flavor is to suggest that the war glorification be
wrapped in the cloak of religion.
To call this military cemetery sacrilegiously Òour most hallowed groundÓ is a step in that
direction. But thatÕs not enough for Patterson. With another of his quotes, he turns to
the master of the genre:
I
pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and
leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride
that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of
Freedom.
--Abraham
Lincoln, November 1864
From
a site that is devoted not to truth but to the glorification of war, then, I
donÕt suppose I should be holding out much hope that they would do justice to a
man who labored mightily to bring an end to the Pacific War well before the
assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the dropping of the atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to forestall our endless involvement in war in the Middle
East. Unfortunately, IÕm also
getting the same non-response from the less jingoistic Find A Grave. I sent the following message to Curator,
Senior Administrator Russ Dodge on the same day:
Hi
Russ,
Your misstatement concerning the
nature of James Forrestal's death is not as egregious as the one at the
Arlington National Cemetery site, but if you will read what I sent them (attached)
you will still see that what you have written is now indefensible. The
evidence is now really overwhelming that he was thrown from the window of the
main tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Find
A Grave has a number of other people working on their site, with their email addresses. Perhaps readers could join
me in importuning them.
January
8, 2015
Addendum
Readers
clicking on the word ÒmisstatementÓ in my letter to Russ Dodge of Find A Grave,
above, will see that there is no longer any obvious misstatement there. Previously it said that Forrestal
committed suicide by jumping from a 16th floor window of the
Bethesda Naval Hospital. Now it
says only that he fell from the window, which is in harmony with the
governmentÕs last word on the subject in the Willcutts
Report, the official investigation of ForrestalÕs death. It is also in harmony with his official biography from the Department of
Defense, whose last paragraph has this very telling statement:
In
fact, centralization of authority in the Office of the Secretary of Defense
became a constant objective under Forrestal and many of his successors.
Unfortunately, Forrestal was no longer in the Pentagon when Congress approved
these amendments. He left office on 28 March 1949 and died tragically less than
two months later.
One
can be sure that those words, which donÕt explain the nature of the tragedy,
whether he was murdered, committed suicide, or died by accident, were chosen
very carefully.
As
for the new statement at Find A Grave, we fancy that the change was made
because we decided to follow our own advice and write a more detailed follow-up
email explaining why it was inappropriate to say flatly that Forrestal
committed suicide, but this time with a copy to all of the other editors listed
on the web site. Readers who are
still inclined to communicate with them might thank them, as I did, for making
the necessary change.
That
leaves Michael Robert Patterson of the Arlington National Cemetery site with
the claim that Forrestal committed suicide. We hold out little hope, though, for
anyone who would state as fact the ridiculous uncorroborated claim by scandalmonger
and political enemy Drew Pearson that Forrestal made four previous attempts at
suicide. Furthermore, anyone who
would print approvingly President George W. BushÕs war cry on the eve of his
vengeful criminal assault on Afghanistan obviously just has an agenda and is
not really interested in the truth.
David
Martin
January
12, 2015
Addendum 2
Well,
what do you know? It looks like
Russ Dodge and the folks at Find A Grave have given us the old double
cross. The old erroneous concluding
statement is now back up: ÒHe was then placed under psychiatric care at the Bethesda
Naval Hospital where he committed suicide by jumping out of a window on the
16th floor at age 57.Ó TheyÕve
buried the truth again.
David Martin
September 26, 2018
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