CHAPTER 16

TRAGIC CLIMAX

The first man to hold the title of secretary of defense killed himself on May 22, 1949. The reasons behind the suicide of James Forrestal seem rather clear. His final moments, however, may always be shrouded in mystery.

In the early hours of May 22, a Sunday, Forrestal was awake in his spartan room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had been admitted in early April for the treatment of severe depression. Upon his admittance, news reports had described him as “worn out” and battling “operational fatigue.” His room was on the sixteenth floor of the hospital. It had three windows, securely locked, a narrow bed, and an uncomfortable chair. There was an oriental carpet on a dark tile floor, and a rotating fan on the wall. Just before his death, which took place around 2 a.m. on that Sunday, Forrestal was writing on a piece of paper, copying lines of Greek verse from a book titled The Anthology of World Poetry.

The verse was from Ajax, the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles. The play tracks a series of humiliations experienced by one of the greatest Greek fighters in the Trojan War. Ajax’s first humiliation occurs when the shield and sword of the dead Achilles—armor made invulnerable by the gods—is awarded by Agamemnon and Menelaus to Odysseus. Enraged, Ajax heads to the tents of the two kings to kill them in their sleep. But he is prevented from doing so when the goddess Athena afflicts him with madness. Deluded, Ajax instead attacks bulls, rams, and their herdsmen, the spoils of the Trojan War, mistakenly thinking he is taking vengeance on his enemies. Recovering his sanity, he is ashamed by what he has done and falls on his sword.

The verse Forrestal was copying comes from the lines of the chorus of sailors who underscore how the gods have punished Ajax for his pride, his rigid code, and his inability to recognize his own weaknesses. Forrestal wrote out two complete lines of verse from the chorus, but did not complete the final word of a third line:

“Woe, woe!” will be the cry—

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail

Of the lone bird, the querulous night…

The lone bird, from the play, is the querulous nightingale. Before completing the line, Forrestal had put the paper back in The Anthology of World Poetry and set it aside. He then dismissed the young naval corpsman assigned to guard his room and went across the corridor to a small kitchen. He was able to open a window, pulled out a screen, stepped onto the sill, and leaped.

Forrestal’s path to success allowed him to enjoy the fizzy, decadent Jazz Age evoked by fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Like Jay Gatsby, Forrestal forced his way into privilege. He was raised in a lower-middle-class Irish Catholic family, not far from Franklin Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, became a Navy aviator in World War I, and rocketed to a partnership at the investment bank Dillon Read by age thirty-one. He didn’t hide his affluence, buying bespoke suits from London, attending the opera, and dating debutantes. In 1926, at age thirty-four, he married a tall, slender, photogenic woman who would gradually lose her mind.

Josephine Ogden was a columnist for Vogue when she met James Forrestal at a cocktail party on Paris’s Left Bank. Mr. and Mrs. Forrestal had a five-story Georgian-style town house in Manhattan, and a thirty-acre estate on the North Shore of Long Island. Mrs. Forrestal soon became known for holding court at the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel, where she began drinking too much. Hallucinations and paranoia emerged. She never fully regained her health.

In the 1930s, Forrestal played a leading role in brokering an oil deal of gigantic importance. Dillon Read negotiated the merger of Standard Oil of California (Socal) with Texaco, forming Caltex, which in turn negotiated an exclusive sixty-year deal with Saudi Arabian ruler Ibn Saud to explore and exploit the country’s substantial oil assets. This was the beginning of what would become the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco). The U.S. State Department would later classify Aramco as the richest commercial prize in the history of the planet.

In 1940, as the Nazis occupied France, FDR recruited Forrestal to be an economic advisor. He concluded the war as secretary of the navy, overseeing a fleet that grew from eleven hundred vessels to fifty thousand. When hostilities ceased, Forrestal opposed Harry Truman’s draconian postwar budget cutting because he was sure the Soviets were already gearing up to rule the world. His assessment of the communist threat was all too simple and, nonetheless, generally accepted. Forrestal, as Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas write in The Wise Men, “was plagued by neither nuances nor doubts. Marxist-Lenin dogma, treacherous and insidious and evil, was dedicated to the destruction of the capitalist world and would do so unless forcefully checked.”

In 1947, Truman insisted that Forrestal accept the mighty task of unifying America’s military forces as the very first secretary of defense. As a senator, Truman had overseen military expenditures and was appalled by the waste and inefficiencies created by an Army, Navy, and Air Force operating like warring kingdoms incapable of sharing resources—or even communicating with each other. “We must never fight another war the way we fought the last two,” Truman told advisor Clark Clifford. “I have the feeling that if the Army and the Navy fought our enemies as hard as they fought each other, the war would have ended much sooner.”

Forrestal not only fought Truman’s attempts to trim defense costs, he also vehemently resisted the concept of the services reporting up to one cabinet member. Truman ignored the objections because he had already determined that Forrestal possessed the necessary force of personality and administrative skills to reorganize the Pentagon from top to bottom. Under Forrestal’s watch, the U.S. Navy had shone, winning the toughest and most important battles in the war against Japan. Said Clifford, “If Forrestal had remained Secretary of the Navy, he would have made life unbearable for the Secretary of Defense. If, on the other hand, he was the Secretary [of Defense], he would have to try to make the system work.”

To no one’s surprise, Forrestal became everyone’s enemy at the Pentagon, where a bureaucratic civil war immediately erupted. When Truman established a secretary of defense, he also made the Air Force fully independent from the Army. Following liberation, Air Force generals tried to maximize the leverage they’d obtained by having, at the time, the only method of delivering a nuclear weapon: the B-29 bomber. But neither the Army nor the Navy were ready to concede to the Air Force exclusive access to atomic weapons. The Navy already had plans for its own carrier-based nuclear-capable planes. A nasty spat ensued.

On July 17, 1948, Air Force secretary Stuart Symington departed from preapproved remarks in a speech in Los Angeles and criticized Forrestal for supporting the maintenance of aviation wings in the Army and Navy. Forrestal’s anger was intensified by a sense of betrayal. Symington had become a good friend, a regular golf and tennis partner. “If the account of your speech in Los Angeles… as reported in The New York Times… is accurate, it was an act of official disobedience and personal disloyalty. I shall await your explanation.” Accounts differ about what came next. It seems Forrestal was reluctant to fire Symington lest he be accused of anti–Air Force bias. Symington had also been a prominent businessman in Truman’s home state of Missouri, running Emerson Electric in St. Louis, and had been tapped to join the administration by Truman himself.

Inside this maelstrom, Forrestal bonded with perhaps the only man in Washington, D.C., who was even more certain that a Soviet attack was imminent: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. This relationship was not good for Forrestal’s teetering health. Hoover seethed with doom. Shortly after taking the top job at the Pentagon, the secretary of defense received a terrifying letter from the FBI director warning about “the smuggling into the United States of an atomic bomb, or parts thereof, which could be later assembled in this country.” As Tim Weiner wrote in Enemies: A History of the FBI, “Over the next decade [Hoover] issued a steady stream of alerts against the threat of terrorists and spies wielding atomic, biological, and chemical weapons against American cities, a nightmare that still haunts the nation’s leaders. Forrestal convened a secret group he called the War Council, comprising the uniformed and civilian chiefs of the American military, to respond to Hoover’s alarm.”

But the tortures of Forrestal were many. Some were self-inflicted. He fought Truman’s support of a new Jewish state in Palestine. As the Arab world reacted with vehement hostility to such a step, Forrestal reminded the president that in World War II, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force relied on cheap Arab oil; by the 1940s, U.S. oil production could no longer meet domestic demand. As part of a tenacious campaign opposing Israel’s creation, Forrestal would take his case to Brewster Jennings, the head of Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (later Mobil), telling the businessman he “was deeply concerned with the future supply of oil… not merely for the possible use in war but for the needs of peace and unless [the United States] had access to Middle East oil, American motorcar companies would have to design a four-cylinder engine motorcar within the next five years.” At the time, the six-cylinder engine was about to be replaced by the V-8, a muscular gas guzzler with marketable masculine appeal.

Truman fully grasped the connection between national security and warm relations with Arab countries, but as the president, he felt compelled—and was determined—to take a much wider and fuller view. Though it was good politics for Democrats to court the Jewish urban vote in the Northeast, there was also overwhelming national support for a Jewish homeland. Above all, the issue had a moral and humanitarian dimension for Truman. As the Arab states claimed it was wrong to make them pay for the crimes of Hitler, the horror of the Holocaust was for Truman sufficient justification to find a safe haven for Jewish refugees. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from their country has someplace to go back to,” he told Clark Clifford. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

Forrestal didn’t let up. He told Rhode Island senator J. Howard McGrath that “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point it could endanger our national security.” To Clifford, Forrestal said, “You just don’t understand. There are four hundred thousand Jews and forty million Arabs. Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it. Oil—that is the side we ought to be on.”

Within the Truman administration, Forrestal had plenty of company for his take on the Palestine question. Virtually all of Truman’s top foreign policy advisors, including Secretary of State George Marshall, thought it was a mistake to support a new Jewish state. Wearied by the view, Truman said the situation would be handled in the light of justice, not oil. The state of Israel, backed by the full support of the U.S. government, was proclaimed on May 14, 1948.

As the 1948 election approached, Forrestal secretly met with Republican Tom Dewey to explore the possibility of being retained in a Republican cabinet. Like much of official Washington, he was all but certain Truman wouldn’t be reelected. In the meantime, the increasingly lukewarm relationship between the president and his secretary of defense, leavened by rumors of Forrestal conspiring with Dewey, was perfect gossipy fodder for the highly opinionated, completely partisan, vaguely factual, and often libelous columns and radio broadcasts of Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson.

Winchell, who was Jewish and a vocal supporter of Israel, found Forrestal’s strident anti-Zionism unforgivable. The liberal Pearson classified the Pentagon chief as a Wall Street tool, a shill for the oil companies, a dangerous warmonger, and, by encouraging the Red Scare, complicit in the ongoing assault on civil rights. Pearson was reported to have told his protégé Jack Anderson that Forrestal was “the most dangerous man in America” and if not removed from office would “cause another world war.”

Though rivals, Winchell and Pearson joined forces in a withering and sustained effort to get Forrestal canned. Pearson raised the question of Forrestal’s loyalty to Truman by publishing an exposé of the preelection meetings between Forrestal and Republican contender Dewey. Both columnists reminded their readers and radio listeners that Forrestal had been called before the Senate in 1933 to explain a lucrative tax shelter, although there was nothing illegal about what he had done. More hurtful was how Winchell and Pearson twisted the story of a 1937 robbery, claiming that while his wife was being accosted by jewel thieves in front of their Beekman Place home in Manhattan, Forrestal had fled out the back door. The truth was, he had been asleep when the robbery occurred.

Others piled on. A guest on an NBC radio show claimed that the IG Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed because Forrestal owned stock in the company. It was a stinging charge. In 1943, Senator Homer Bone had put it simply: “Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben.” Moreover, as part of the Nuremberg trials, twenty-four IG Farben executives had been charged with “enslavement, plunder and murder” for using slave labor drawn from concentration camps to construct, at the cost of twenty-five thousand lives, a giant complex at Auschwitz, which supplied the German war machine with fuel and synthetic rubber. The company also industrialized its Zyklon B gas for the Nazi extermination program.

In early 1949, close friend Dwight Eisenhower described Forrestal as “looking badly.… He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.” Forrestal began battling insomnia, lost his appetite, dropped twenty pounds, looked drawn and aged. It was noticed at meetings how he unconsciously scratched a patch of psoriasis on his scalp until it bled. Forrestal began telling friends his phone was being tapped. He claimed Zionist agents were chasing him, a statement that had a basis in fact. During the very heated debate over Israel, Washington police had stopped a sedan following Forrestal’s official limousine. The two men in the car told the police they were photographers employed by a Zionist organization. They had been tailing Forrestal’s limo in the hopes of snapping a photo of him entering or leaving an Arab embassy.

Forrestal began calling friends at 2 a.m. In long conversations with Hoover, he brooded about subversion. Truman eventually found his secretary of defense incapable of making a decision, and on March 2, 1949, he asked for his resignation. At the time, a longtime friend and Princeton classmate who visited Forrestal at home found him babbling anxiously that his house was wiretapped, strangers were watching him from the street corner, and communists were after him.

Forrestal was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital on April 2, 1949. On April 9, during his Sunday radio broadcast, Pearson reported that Forrestal was experiencing “temporary insanity,” had made three suicide attempts, and been seen rushing into the street screaming, “The Russians are attacking!” These were all lies.

After Forrestal’s suicide, Time would accuse both Winchell and Pearson of “overstepping the bounds of accuracy and decency.” Westbrook Pegler would blame his fellow columnists for Forrestal’s death. The Navy doctor who treated Forrestal, Captain George Raines, concurred with Pegler. Dr. Raines did not find it coincidental that Forrestal had killed himself on a Sunday, the day both Winchell and Pearson had their national radio shows. In the New York Times, columnist Arthur Krock asked his readers to consider what part Winchell and Pearson had played in the “tragic climax” by attacking “Forrestal’s official record, his courage, his character, and his motives while he was Secretary of Defense and followed him to the sick room with every fragment of gossip that could nullify the treatment his doctors hoped would restore him.”

After Forrestal jumped from the hospital’s sixteenth floor, his body landed on a passageway. He died instantly. The news rocked Washington. “Suicide among high-ranking government figures was unknown,” David McCullough wrote. “As time went on, and fear of Communist conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal’s diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal, the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the administration, had in fact been driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by ‘secret Communists’ on Truman’s staff.”

In 1999, fifty years after the suicide, Alexander Wooley assessed Forrestal’s tragic demise in a piece for the Washington Post: “Why would a man about to kill himself copy an ancient Greek poem, but not complete it? Was there any connection between the words he copied and his last, desperate act?” Wooley made reference to speculation that the reason why Forrestal had completed only half of the word nightingale related to “the recruitment of members of former Ukrainian death squads, who had worked for the Nazis exterminating Jews and Red Army supporters.… The name of the group was Nachtigall, or Nightingale.… The secret program, which Forrestal almost undoubtedly helped bring about, failed, however.” One Forrestal biography suggested that a shock of guilt about the dead Nightingale operatives may have triggered suicide.

But Wooley offered an alternate theory: “Perhaps there is another, less strained connection between Sophocles’ verse and Forrestal’s tragic end. Perhaps the key was in the verse that immediately followed the one containing the word ‘nightingale.’” Wooley speculated that this might have been the verse Forrestal could not bring himself to copy:

Oh! when the pride of Graecia’s noblest race

Wanders, as now, in darkness and disgrace,

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.