Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 6
The Mendocracy Versus the
Citizenry
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Willcutts
Report in htm
For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not
come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. John
3:20
After having ignored the long-delayed publication of the
official proceedings of the Navy board of investigation into the violent death
of the first U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal (Willcutts Report),
the American opinion-molding industry has at last broken its five-year-long
silence. What we wrote in Part 5 early last year, “…historians,
journalists, and other authors have continued to write about Forrestal's death
as if there were no public Willcutts Report,
repeating important ‘facts’ from now-discredited secondary sources,” has become
obsolete. Some of the discredited “facts” are still there, but in his
book published later last year, Nicholas
Thompson in The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George
Kennan, and the History of the Cold War perpetuates the myth of
Forrestal’s suicide and explicitly acknowledges the Willcutts
Report as one of his sources.
One could have hardly found a more representative member of
the American establishment opinion-molding club to do the silence breaking than
Thompson. Here’s what they say about him on the web site for
his book:
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker, a
contributing editor at Bloomberg Television, and the author of “The Hawk and
the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.”
Prior to The New Yorker, Mr. Thompson was a senior editor
at Wired, a senior editor at Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington
Monthly. He has written about politics, technology, and the law for numerous
publications, and he currently writes regularly for the New York Times Book
Review. He is a frequent guest on CNN’s American Morning, NBC’s Today Show, and
Live with Regis and Kelly. He has also appeared multiple times on every other
major cable and broadcast news network. He is also currently a senior fellow at
the New America Foundation and an official panelist on CNN International’s “Connect
the World” with Becky Anderson.
Not surprisingly, his book has been heavily publicized and
widely distributed. I recently discovered the paperback version
prominently displayed at the Union Station branch of the national chain of B.
Dalton bookstores. The book’s web site lists favorable quotes from
reviews in The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The
Washington Post Book Review, The New York Times, The
New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek,
Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The National Review,
Booklist, Library Journal, The Daily Beast, Talking Points Memo Café, and
the major British weekly, The Economist.
One can even watch Stephen Colbert giving him a
book-promoting softball interview on his popular Comedy Channel show, The
Colbert Report. Not since James Carroll, with
his 2006 book on the Pentagon, has an author been given so great an opportunity
to spread untruths about the violent death of the leading U.S. opponent of the
creation of the state of Israel. The following is from pp. 88-89 (He has
endnotes in which the source is given for particular passages.
We show them in parentheses.):
Forrestal lasted six weeks in the hospital, until the night
of Saturday, May 21, 1949. According to a report long kept secret, he
spent most of the evening pacing. At 12:20, he got a cup of orange juice
and said he was going to bed; at 12:35, he got up to grab a cup of coffee; ten
minutes later, he was apparently asleep. At 1:30, he popped out of bed
and the corpsman on duty asked if he wanted a sleeping pill. Forrestal
said no, but the corpsman went to ask the doctor whether he could have one
anyway. When he returned, Forrestal was gone. (Admiral M.D. Willcutts, "Report on the Death of James
Forrestal," part 2, p. 176.)
Lower in the building, people heard a thud.
Forrestal's body, dressed in pajamas, was found facedown
[sic] on the asphalt and cinderblock ledge outside room 384. He had
plummeted thirteen floors, bouncing off other ledges as he fell. His
bathrobe sash was tied tight around his neck (ibid. part 1, p.
62); upstairs, a razor blade (ibid. p. 81) was found near his
slippers. He had tried to hang himself and then either jumped or
fallen out the window. At some point that evening he had copied out lines
from a translation of Sophocles' Ajax, where the Chorus
laments, "Better to die, and sleep/The never-waking sleep, than linger
on/And dare to live when the soul's life is gone."
In the first paragraph, the part about Forrestal pacing the
floor does come from the Willcutts Report. To
this writer’s knowledge, it had not been reported elsewhere in the mainstream
press or books. It can be found in the testimony of the orderly on duty
before midnight, Edward Price/Prise. The coffee and
orange juice drinking after midnight are also reported for the first time in
the Willcutts Report, but the exact times given here
can only be described as spurious. Navy nurse Regina M. L. Harty and
hospital apprentice Edwin Utz agree that Forrestal had coffee at around 1:00
am. He apparently had orange juice twice, once when Price/Prise was on duty and again shortly before he had the
coffee, but the orderly at that time, Robert Wayne Harrison, could not recall
the time. The news that Forrestal popped out of bed at 1:30 can’t be
found in anyone’s testimony, nor can the revelation that Harrison was absent
from Forrestal’s room because he had gone to inquire about a sleeping
pill. Harrison testified that at 1:45 he looked in on Forrestal, and he
was apparently sleeping in a darkened room. He said he was absent when
Forrestal disappeared from the room because he had gone down the hall to write
in the nurse’s log.
Thompson is most disingenuous in the beginning of that
second sentence, “According to a report long kept secret….” Kept
secret? Why would the government want to keep such a report secret?
He doesn’t even speculate. And how was the secrecy ended, why was it
ended, and when, exactly, was it ended? The reader must guess about all
of that.
It’s pretty clear that he does not want people to know that
the report was held back for 55 years and would most likely still be secret but
for the efforts of this
writer. I first announced the fact that the report was available to
the public in Part 2 of
this series, published in September of 2004. Simultaneously, the Seeley
Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University, which houses Forrestal’s
papers, posted a copy of the report that I had sent them to their web site.
And why did the Navy keep the report secret? In 2003
I drew the common-sense conclusion that it was because they had something to hide.
As it turned out, with the release of the report some months later, I was quite
right, in spades. That’s apparently something that Thompson doesn’t want
you to know, either.*
In his second paragraph, quoted above, the
description of the surface upon which Forrestal landed clearly comes from the Willcutts Report, except that Thompson has not read very
carefully. It is from the testimony of the autopsy doctor, Captain
William M. Silliphant, who once describes the surface
as “asphalt and cinder rock” and again as “asphalt and cinder-rocks,” not
“cinderblock,” as Thompson has it. The bouncing off several ledges
is original with Thompson, and it is preposterous on its face if you think
about it. The review board, without any testimony to support it, says at
one point that he first struck a ledge of the fourth floor. Thompson’s
mention of the discovered razor blade—also from Willcutts
Report testimony—is obviously strategic, meant to convey the impression that
Forrestal was accumulating a veritable arsenal of self-killing devices.
Also strategic is Thompson’s tired old account of the supposed morbid poem
transcription by Forrestal. From the first day that Forrestal’s death was
reported, that poem has been placed on center stage as
evidence of Forrestal’s suicidal intentions. In spite
of the manifest evidence of its lack of authenticity,
Thompson keeps it there.
Nurse Turner’s Crucial Testimony
As with his first paragraph, what’s really
important is what Thompson leaves out. To know about the razor
blade, he had to be familiar with the testimony to the Willcutts
review board of the nurse, Lieutenant Dorothy Turner. Her name had
appeared in contemporary newspapers only as the person who heard Forrestal land
on the third-floor roof. What the press did not tell us is that she had
rushed upstairs and was the first person to get a good look at Forrestal’s
lighted vacated room. Here is part of what she said:
So I went
up to tower sixteen and told Miss Harty there was a man’s body outside the
galley window and he wasn’t mine. We both went into his room and he wasn’t there and we noticed the broken glass on
the bed and looked down and noticed the razor blade and told him he was missing
[sic] and she said it was one forty-eight.
Broken glass on the bed!!?? How could anyone ignore
that fact as if it were insignificant? But Thompson is not alone; the
review board ignored it as well. They completely pass over the mention of
the broken glass, asking only about the razor blade that she had mentioned (and
slippers that she had not) in the recorded transcript:
Q. You said you saw
his slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?
A. The bed clothes
were turned back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and they
were right there as you get out of bed.
In her answer, Lt. Turner
drops another bombshell in the context of what the review board had been shown
up to that point. She is testifying on the third day of the
proceedings. On the first day, the board had gone to see Forrestal’s
hospital room. On the second day, it had heard the testimony and examined
the photographs of the vacated room. One can see from the photographs of
the room that there are no bed clothes on the bed, turned back or
otherwise.
No one on the board had a
thing to say about the inconsistency, nor does Thompson. Surely it must
have dawned upon at least one of the Navy doctors—all employees of the National
Naval Medical Center with no qualifications as criminal investigators—the
moment they laid eyes on that room that something was seriously amiss. It
bears no resemblance whatever to a room that has been lived in for almost six
weeks and hastily abandoned in the middle of the night, that is, to the room
that Lt. Turner saw.
As I note in Part 2 of
this series, the board must have their marching orders because, not only do
they know what not to ask Lt. Turner, they know what not to ask the
photographer, as well. In contrast to their questioning of the first
photographer, the one who photographed the body, they don’t ask when the room
photographs were taken. Had they done so, they would have had to have
asked him why there was a delay of several hours, as is evident by the bright
sun streaming in the windows. They also don’t ask the first photographer,
who showed up promptly, if he had also taken room photos, and if not, why not,
and if so, what they showed.
After Thompson makes a
complete muddle of an attempt to explain why there was a bathrobe sash tied
around Forrestal’s neck, he shows that he must have marching orders as well
with his reference to the famous poem transcription. From the Willcutts Report, he must know that the account by
Forrestal biographers Arnold Rogow and Townsend
Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley that the corpsman (Harrison) looked in on Forrestal
at 1:45 and saw him transcribing the poem is a complete fabrication.
Harrison testified that at that time the room was dark
and Forrestal was apparently sleeping. Furthermore, he said, the room was
dark the whole time that he was on duty and Forrestal did no reading or
writing. Thompson knows now that he can’t just parrot what the
“definitive” biographies have said, so he has the unseen writing occurring at
some time earlier in the evening. As others have done, he then quotes
from the particularly morbid last lines of the poem that occur well past the
purported transcribed lines.
The big problem with this
continued invocation of the transcription as though it amounted to some sort of
a suicide note is that, as I show in Part 3,
Forrestal didn’t do any transcribing of a Sophocles poem that evening or any
evening. The handwriting of
the transcription is clearly that of someone other than Forrestal.
Now one might argue that
since no one in the “mainstream” has picked up on it, Thompson might simply be
ignorant of the fact that the transcription is bogus, because he is unaware of
my web site. That is not very likely because the Wikipedia site for
Forrestal has linked to my handwriting samples for several years now, and one
would think that simple curiosity alone would have made him check out
Forrestal’s Wikipedia page. It might not have the last word on a subject,
but for most serious writers of non-fiction these days, Wikipedia is one of the
first stops to make.
Bad Psychology and Bad
References
There is further evidence
that Thompson has marching orders, that he is not his own man, and the evidence
involves that Forrestal Wikipedia page. To get to it we must quote
Thompson some more, going back to the bottom of page 87 when he first broaches
the subject of Forrestal’s supposed breakdown. Note that he makes it
entirely the result of the strains of fighting the Cold War:
In Kennan’s view, at
least, Forrestal ultimately went too far. He helped Kennan considerably
in setting up the Office of Policy Coordination. But reflecting
back decades later, Kennan would lament OPC’s growth and blame the
Pentagon for it. He wanted it small and elite; Forrestal and the Pentagon
wanted black propaganda offices franchised in embassies worldwide. “There
is no method, there is no way except the method of worry, of constant concern,
and of unceasing energy that will give us our security,” (Jeffrey Dorwart, Eberstadt
and Forrestal, p. 149) the defense secretary said in 1947.
The constant concern
eventually devoured Forrestal: by the late 1940s, he had begun a slow-motion
nervous breakdown. Isolated and profoundly alarmed, he saw demons
everywhere. Nitze’s sister once found him in the bushes near the Plaza
Hotel in New York. She asked what he was doing. Watching people, he
said. I am just watching people going about their business. (Paul Henry
Nitze, Tension between Opposites, p. 97)
In March 1949, the
president replaced Forrestal as secretary of defense. Soon, he had become
completely paranoid. Zionists were trailing him
and the Soviets had bugged beach umbrellas all over Miami. Early that
spring, he was committed to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland,
where the doctors began treating him with psychotherapy and insulin injections.
(Willcutts Report, part 1, p. 35) They
considered, but rejected, using electroconvulsive therapy. (ibid. p. 41)
In contemporary newspaper
accounts, through the 1992 book, Driven Patriot, The Life and Times of
James Forrestal, those making the suicide argument gave prominent
place to the pressures and press attacks that Forrestal had suffered on account
of his opposition to the creation of the state of Israel. With its 1999 article written
upon the 50th anniversary of Forrestal’s death, The
Washington Post began a trend of Soviet-style airbrushing of that out
of history. Thompson continues the trend; there’s no trace of the big
Israel dust-up in his account, making Forrestal’s legitimate concern that he
was being trailed and bugged by Zionist agents look all the more
loony.
Concerning Forrestal’s
supposed imaginary demons and paranoia, one may contrast Thompson’s spin on the
story showing Forrestal’s quite normal penchant for people-watching with these
words from p. 426 of Driven Patriot: “…colleagues at the
Pentagon, including members of his inner staff, failed to recognize [his
decline]. In retrospect they attribute their failure to Forrestal’s formidable
self-control, his brusque, impersonal method of dealing with staff, and the
simple fact that they saw him too frequently to note much change in his
condition or demeanor.”
Those
observations, which I note in Part 1, are
echoed by his closest aide, Marx Leva, who told his Truman Library oral history
interviewer the following:
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.
Note, furthermore that
Thompson has no reference for the fantastic claim that Forrestal said that
“Soviets had bugged beach umbrellas all over Miami.” Doubtless, he has
taken liberties with an account in Driven Patriot and
elsewhere of Forrestal’s conversation with Robert Lovett at Hobe
Sound, Florida. The Driven Patriot reference is Arnold Rogow’s biography of Forrestal, but Rogow
has no reference. A Department of Defense oral history interview of
Lovett has nothing about bugged beach umbrellas, only Forrestal telling Lovett
that “they’re really after me.” All the indications are that he was right.
The final sentence about
the medical treatment at Bethesda is meant to suggest that Forrestal badly
needed it. It comes from the testimony to the Willcutts
board of the lead doctor, Captain George Raines. Bear in mind that this
is the same man, as I observe in Part 2, who volunteered that the handwriting
of the transcribed poem looked like Forrestal’s. Note further that, as I
reveal in my letter to
historian Douglas Brinkley, Captain Stephen Smith, “second in rank and
authority to the psychiatrist in charge of the case believed throughout its
course that Forrestal was wrongly diagnosed and treated. But he also
thought that Forrestal was recovering despite the treatment…."
Now let’s look a little
more closely at Thompson’s Willcutts Report
references. The first one in the first paragraph cited above is “part 2,
p. 176.” The only public copy of the Willcutts
Report available when Thompson’s book came out in September of 2009 was the one
online at the site of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library
of Princeton University. It does not have a “part 1” and “part 2.”
Rather, it displays the report as “First Half” and “Second Half.” The
second half is simply a collection of unnumbered nurses’ records and various
exhibits. The body of the report itself is all in the library’s first
half. Scrolling to the bottom, one can see that it is only 61 pages in
length and that it does not have a “part 1” and a “part 2.” No regular
member of the public looking for Thompson’s citation would find it.
The same thing can be said
for all of his other references, that is, as of the
time that the Thompson book was published. The page numbers are not right
for the Willcutts Report, proper, as one sees it at
the Seeley Mudd site. They do work, however, if one converts the entire
file to html from the pdf file that one sees at the Seeley Mudd site.
Then the computer program generates its own page numbers, starting with the
various solicited endorsements included before the review board’s actual work
begins. Thus, when the Willcutts Report
is telling us on its page 1 what happened on the first day, Thompson’s copy is
already up to page 28. He apparently does not realize that he is using a
sort of insiders’ copy that has been generated for him by someone else. (Heaven
only knows how that first page reference came about.) Otherwise, he would
have made his references in accord with the version one sees at the library
site.
At this point things
really begin to get interesting. On May 14, 2008, an extremely eclectic
and copious contributor to Wikipedia who uses the signature “JDPhD” inserted
a section to the page on James Forrestal entitled “Psychiatric
Treatment.” The timing corresponds quite well to the period when
Thompson’s book would have been in preparation. The purpose is clearly
the same as Thompson’s, to make Forrestal look insane, and the reference is to
the page numbers for Captain Raines’s testimony as they would appear in an html
version. This “JDPhd,” like young Nicholas
Thompson (assuming that he is not Thompson, himself), obviously doesn’t realize
that he is referring people to a version of the Willcutts
Report to which he and some privileged few others might have access, but the
public does not.
Watching this malevolent
bumbling, I am reminded of conversations with
the late Bernard Yoh, a former intelligence operative for Nationalist Chinese
leader, Chiang Kai-shek: ”Yoh denied to me that he had ever worked for the CIA,
saying that he thought they were too stupid for him to have anything to do with
them….” Also coming to mind is the young Jeff
Redfern character, of “Red Rascal” fame, in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesburycomic strip. As a product of Yale University,
Trudeau should have some familiarity with the elite covert political
world.
Other Voices Weigh In
We know how the page
numbers work out when the entire Willcutts file is
converted to htm/html, because early in February
2010, the proprietor of the web site ARI
Watch put an htm
version up on his page. There you can see the same page
numbers as they appear on the Mudd Library version as well as the computer-generated
page numbers, which show up in faint print bracketed by italics. The site
is extremely valuable, not just because it makes things much easier to find in
the report, but because the ARI Watch proprietor, Mark Hunter, has an
introduction with his own analysis of the report.
To demonstrate the utility
of the htm version as a research tool, we might try
checking on the assertion by Thompson and a host of other journalists and
historians that Forrestal suffered from paranoia by using “edit/find” on the
computer’s toolbar. The words “paranoia” and “paranoid” come up only in
the editor’s commentary, not anywhere in the Willcutts
Report itself. The testifying doctors, who were questioned at much
greater length than the witnesses to the actual physical evidence, never used
either word or any word close to them in meaning.
Psychologist Arnold A. Rogow, in his very influential 1963 book, James
Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy, wrote “Raines
diagnosed Forrestal’s illness as involutional melancholia, a depressive
condition sometimes seen in persons who have reached middle age.” It
sounds very precise and clinical. He follows it up with a long discussion
explaining how that condition manifests itself. You can do your edit/find
on Part
1 of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” to read it.
But if you try searching either the rare term, “involutional,” or the more
common word, “melancholia,” on the Willcutts Report
itself, neither one comes up. All one will find are the various forms of
the poorly defined diagnosis, “depressed.” Dr. Raines never used that
impressive sounding mumbo jumbo expression when testifying before his fellow
doctors on the Willcutts review board.
With his introduction, Hunter
covers some of the same ground that I do with my Forrestal series, but even
when he does, he does so with fresh insights and a slightly different
perspective. His work and mine are more complementary than
repetitious. Some of his information or insights are completely new:
·
The Navy corpsman Edward Prise was not the only one
to have his name misspelled, apparently intentionally to conceal
identity. Through someone who first contacted me, whom I passed along to Hunter
for a telephone interview, we learn that a key witness who was among the
earliest to see Forrestal’s vacated room was known by her co-workers as “Margie
Hardy,” not “Regina M. L. Harty.” That the common name of “Hardy” would
be misunderstood as the unheard-of name of “Harty” by accident is very, very
hard to believe.**
·
The Willcutts Report has no mention of any other
patients on the floor, but neither does it say that he was the only patient on
the 16th floor. At any rate, none are called as witnesses
before the board. Mark notes that the use of one or more fake patients
would have been the ideal way to pull off Forrestal’s assassination.
·
The board established that broken glass was found on Forrestal’s bed after he
vacated it, and that it was not seen previously by Forrestal’s
attendant/guard. Although the guard was asked if he heard any unusual
noises in the kitchen through whose window Forrestal exited, he was never asked
if he heard any unusual sound, like glass being broken, emanating
from the bedroom.
·
It was never established how far Forrestal’s body lay from the building.
Hunter also references the
research work of a friend of mine, Hugh Turley:
Forrestal’s chauffeur was
a Navy enlisted man named John Spalding. Now living in Littlestown,
Pennsylvania, in 2008 at the age of 87 he revealed in a recorded interview (“Handwriting Tells Dark Tale?” by
Hugh Turley, Hyattsville Life & Times December 2008) how the Navy treated
him right after Forrestal’s death. He was called into the office of Rear
Admiral Monroe Kelly. “He had a big map and he said where do you want to
go for duty … You are going to leave tonight.” Mr. Spalding decided on
the base at Guantánamo, Cuba. (In 1949 Havana was a famous vacation spot, so
this is not as strange as it would be today.) Monroe Kelly and his aide
Lieutenant James A. Hooper made him sign a statement swearing that he would
never speak to anyone again about Forrestal. Also in
the interview Mr. Spalding said that Forrestal had never appeared depressed,
paranoid or in any way abnormal in his presence.
An Organized Crime Angle?
Other citizens have asked
probing questions about the Forrestal case and helped me improve my
understanding of what happened. This is part of an email exchange with
someone using the initials “AJ”:
Dave:
Great Article on Forrestal! Do you see the Nexus of
Forrestal to Operation Underworld and Murder Inc? Is it Possible
Meyer Lansky was behind the Death of Forrestal?
AJ
See Details on Murder Inc Canary that could not fly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9fPDezbOdM
Story Starts with Capone Syndicate (aka Bronfman-Lansky
Syndicate established by John Torrio setup by Rothschilds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g59y65aEW_I&feature=channel
Legacy of Murder Inc …The Canary that could not fly Abe (Is
the Forrestal situation a repeat of this?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0TRXnbCKHc&feature=related
Abe Kid Twist took a leap out of a bldg. Analysis states
Frank Costello paid off the cops to throw him out the window (Aka the Canary
that could not fly) Nov. 12, 1941
The Formation of the Syndicate 1929 Atlantic City
Conference here they setup Murder Inc
Under control of Meyer Lansky and Lucky with Albert
Anastasia as a Murder Inc Leader
… From Brooklyn there was Albert Anastasia
http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_194.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5BwpLL7gxU&feature=related
AJ
Dear AJ,
Thank you very much for your very informative email…the answers are a
conditional "yes" and a plain but unenthusiastic
"yes."
Concerning the first "yes," it is conditional upon the insertion of
the word "possible" in front of "Nexus," in the manner of
your second question.
Your reference for the connection between Harry Truman and the mob is "The
Meet, the Origins of the Mob and the Atlantic City Conference" by John
William Tuohy in the March 2002 AmericanMafia.com:
Next to Dalitz sat Lou Rothkopf
and Leo Berkowitz and Abe Bernstein, the leader of the Purple
gang out of Detroit. To his right, sat Johnny Lazia,
who had come as a representative of Tom Pendergast
and his political-criminal organization. The national syndicate would later use
the Pendergast contact to work its way into Harry
Truman's White House.
My reference is the
2001 book by Gus Russo, The Outfit, The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in
the Shaping of Modern America:
...Gus Russo describes the first national meeting of the
country’s major crime lords that took place at the Hotel President in Atlantic
City, New Jersey, May 13-16, 1929. Present were Albert Anastasia,
Dutch Schultz, Louis Lepke, Frank Costello, Lucky
Luciano, Longy Zwillner, Moe Dalitz,
Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and Al Capone.
“Of particular note was the presence of the notorious
Kansas City machine politician Tom Pendergast, the
sponsor of Harry Truman, future president of the United States.”
You may notice discrepancies between the two
accounts. Tuohy says the Atlantic City conference was in 1927.
Russo gives the impression that he knows what he is talking about because he
gives the exact dates of a meeting lasting several days, but in 1929.
Russo characterizes this as the first national meeting of the major mobsters,
so it's pretty clear that they're talking about the
same meeting.
I think your source is probably better than mine. Tuohy says that
Truman's mentor, Tom Pendergast, sent Johnny Lazia as his representative. Russo says that Pendergast himself was there. Now that I think of it,
that strikes me as highly implausible. I would think that a man like Pendergast would not have taken the chance that he might
have been photographed in such company.
I might suggest a better source than either for
establishing a good link between Truman and the Mob. That is the 1992
book, Double Cross, by Sam and Chuck Giancana. Here on pp.
161-162, is the recollection of the conversation of his younger brother, Chuck,
with Chicago mobster Sam "Mooney" Giancana (The co-author with Chuck
is not the mobster, himself, but his Godson of the same name.). The
conversation takes place on the eve of the 1948 presidential election, Chuck
speaks first:
"Isn't it for sure that Truman will get in?"
"Well, let's put it this way...Dewey won't win, even
if he does. Get my point?"
"Yeah." Chuck hesitated. "But
really what difference does it make? ...Like you said before, they're all
alike."
"Well, not this time. Luciano still hates Dewey
for puttin' him in jail in the first place....
Costello's worried that the self-righteous son of a bitch
has a short memory, probably doesn't even know how to conduct business.
We'd have to give Dewey a few lessons and I got a feelin'
he's a slow learner," Mooney said smiling. "But Truman, well,
he can bullshit all he wants about bein' a common
man--people eat that up--but the truth is, he grew up with our boys in Kansas
City."
"Really...I didn't know that. How come nobody talks about it?"
"Christ, because it's just like Chicago out
there. They had a mick mayor, Pendergast, on
the take big time...loved to bet on the ponies. And they got the Italians
for muscle and to make money with the rackets. So, fact is, Truman owes
everything he's got to us. Pendergast made him
a judge and then, with the Italian muscle behind him, got him to the
Senate. When the forty-four election came
up...Kelly here in Chicago got him on the ticket with Roosevelt. Shit, Chicago got Roosevelt and Truman nominated and
elected. We were good to Roosevelt; he was good to us. He died and
Truman's been our man in the White House ever since. It's smooth sailing
with him there."
"I thought he was a schoolteacher or somethin'.
He always seemed clean.... I know what you said before, but I guess I
didn't know he was really connected."
Mooney sighed. "Jesus, I guess you think General MacArthur was a
choirboy out there fightin' for America, too?
Like I always told you, 'Give me a guy who steals a little and I'll make
money.' "
He shook his head. "Well, there's connected, Chuck, and then there's
connected. We pull the strings...so, shit,
yeah...if they can be bought, they're connected."
Chuck took a drink and thought for a moment. "So
Dewey would just fuck things up...or at least make things more'--he searched
for the right word--"more uncertain?"
"Exactly. So now, think you'd like to place a bet? Truman or
Dewey? Take my advice and put your money on Truman?"
My point in demonstrating
the connection of Truman to organized crime is that it would have made him very
easy to blackmail, and, consequently, if powerful and ruthless people wanted
James Forrestal dead he would not have been able to
prevent it. Yours seems to be that the technique of throwing someone out
a window suggests the mob at work. I'm sorry, but I think one might just
as well say that the use of a gun suggests the mob at work. It is well
known within the clandestine communities of the world, with the United States
and the old Soviet Union being leaders in the field, that throwing someone from
a high place is one of the best ways to make a murder look like an accident or
a suicide. In the case of the United States, see here, here, and here on
my web site. Two deaths from falls connected to the Alger Hiss case that
were likely Communist murders, according to Cornell Simpson, were those of Laurence Duggan and
W. Marvin Smith, the Justice Department lawyer whose testimony before the House
Committee on the Un-American Activities gave the committee its first important
evidence of Hiss's perjury. I believe the Communists used the method on
the Czech leader, Jan
Masaryk, as well.
I would imagine that the Mob might have looked with favor upon Forrestal's
murder and could have lent an operative or two for the actual commission of the
deed, but I can't see any compelling reason for any of them to be the prime
mover. Your links and the excerpt from Double Cross, remind
me that they really hated Thomas Dewey, and Forrestal was known to have met
with Dewey in expectation that Dewey would defeat Truman in the upcoming
election, but that is hardly a reason for them to want to kill him.
That is not to say that I am not receptive to any convincing evidence
suggesting that organized crime wields much more power than is generally
believed. See, for instance, my review of the book, Sons and Brothers, and my
articles, "The
Real Monkey Business" and "Burdick, Mitchell on Hart,
Rice." Percy Crosby, the subject of my latest
article, also counted organized crime among his adversaries along with FDR and
his Communist supporters. On that point, be on the lookout for a new book
coming out on Crosby entitled Skippy vs. the Mob.
As for Meyer Lansky in particular being involved in
Forrestal's murder because of Lansky's support for Israel, I see that as a bit
of a stretch. Anyway, if the feds were never able to make anything stick
on the slippery Lansky, I certainly couldn't. I also think that the jury
is still out as to whether Lansky even played any significant role in assisting
Israel in comparison to any number of other rich and powerful Americans.
Dave
Through further reading, I
have learned that both sources are partly wrong about the Atlantic City
conclave. John William Tuohy is wrong about the date; it was 1929, not
1927. And as I suspected, my source, Gus Russo, is wrong about the attendance
at the meeting of Harry Truman’s mentor, Pendergast.
“Boss Tom Pendergast of Kansas City sent a surrogate,
John Lazia,” according to Lucky Luciano, who was also
there. Russo was on the money about the date, though:
The convention would be
held in Atlantic City, where Nucky Johnson ruled
supreme and the delegates could come and go as they pleased without attracting
attention or suspicion, and where Johnson could insure
that nothing would be lacking to cater to all their pleasures and tastes.
The only question was a
date, and that was easily resolved. Meyer Lansky was getting married
early in May 1929, and his friends concluded that Atlantic City would be an
ideal place for a honeymoon, so that pleasure could be mixed with business….
Then, in May of 1929,
Lansky married Anna Citron, a devout, old-fashioned Jewish girl whose father
was a moderately successful produce dealer in Hoboken, New Jersey (and who, as
a wedding present, put his new son-in-law on the payroll, thereby giving Lansky
a respectable front and an opportunity he would later
turn to his own end). In the second week of May they journeyed for their
honeymoon to Atlantic City.
-- Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of
Lucky Luciano, pp. 103-104
In the Kid Twist case, one
reads that his body was found some distance from the base of the building,
giving the lie to the official story that he had fallen while climbing down
sheets tied to a radiator. One is tempted to conclude that the Willcutts Report avoided the question of the exact body
location for similar reasons. However, there may be an outcropping on the
building like a bay
window at the fourth level that Forrestal glanced off before
landing on the third floor roof. If that is the
case, he would likely have been propelled some distance from the building, and
the precise location of the body would hardly tell us anything. I visited
the hospital in late October of this year in search of answers. The kitchen window that
Forrestal went out of is at the top inner corner of the right wing of the
building in this
picture. Unfortunately, trees obscure the roof of the third
level. Until we can return to the scene after all the leaves have fallen,
we won’t know if there is a bay window on the back that mirrors the one on the front.
Conclusion
In the final analysis,
this matter of the location of the body is a small issue, particularly in
comparison to all the powerful evidence indicating murder that has been
uncovered so far. The important thing is that there are citizens who are
still trying to figure out, in a systematic, sensible way, what happened that
night at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. They are also trying to get as much
information before the public as possible so that people can study the facts
for themselves and make up their minds for themselves. Their efforts may
be contrasted with those of the professional knowledge brokers, like those we
encountered in Part
5 who are running from the latest and best evidence, or
now like Nicholas Thompson, who has clearly bent the new evidence to a
propagandistic purpose.
David Martin
November 4, 2010
Addendum
After Nicholas Thompson’s mendacious little sally into the
official investigation of James Forrestal’s death, nothing seems to have
changed in the world of our court historians generally. In his even more
recent biography of George Kennan, George Kennan: An American Life, the
man often touted as America’s leading Cold War historian, Yale history
professor John Lewis Gaddis, writes that Forrestal “had a nervous breakdown and
committed suicide.” After a book-promoting speech of his at the Politics
and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, I asked him how he could write that, in light of the revelations of the Willcutts
Report on Forrestal’s death. He claimed ignorance of any such report, in spite of the fact that Thompson’s book is listed in his
bibliography. See my article about our exchange here.
David Martin
October 6, 2012
*The release of the report might have been a fluke. I
twice filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the report with the
National Naval Medical Center, following their procecures to
the letter. My request was, quite illegally, ignored both times.
The law requires a response of some kind within 20 business days, with the
possibility of a 10 day extension. I was
on the verge of filing a FOIA law suit when I happened
upon a Navy web site that allowed for online FOIA requests, which I made in a
matter of minutes. Within a couple of weeks I
received a letter from the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Office promising me
the report, and, indeed, it did arrive forthwith. The rest is history,
except that it’s not yet history to the historians and other major opinion
molders, the Thompson work notwithstanding.
**As we point out on page
xvi of the foreword to the second edition of The Assassination of James
Forrestal, this second supposed misnaming of a witness proved to be erroneous: “In Chapter Five, we have a section entitled,
‘Another Misnamed Witness.’ We have left it largely intact to show
how we can be led astray, adding only a footnote reminder that we were
mistaken. The section concludes, ‘Perhaps one day I will receive an
email from one of Margie Hardy’s offspring.’ In fact, I did, but the
message certainly surprised me. The son of Regina M.L. Harty emailed
to tell me that, in fact, that was her correct name and that she went by the
name of ‘Jeanie,’ and not ‘Margie,’ as my earlier informant had told
me. Apparently, she had not spoken to her son about her experience
with her famous patient, because he had nothing further to offer.
“The latest informant’s
story checks out; her married name was Regina Harty Thompson. At
Findagrave.com, we see that she was born on October 7, 1917, and she died on
September 6, 1979. She is buried at Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church Cemetery
in Taneytown, Maryland. Fortunately, the earlier misinformation is really quite minor in the overall scheme of things.” (This
section was added and the article’s links were refreshed on January 5, 2024.)
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