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  Praise for

  The Assassination of James Forrestal

  David Martin’s book The Assassination of James Forrestal focuses on the historic truths related to the systemic harassment and consequent death of James Forrestal in May, 1949, at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. It is a long-overdue, hugely important, work of “revisionist history.” The timeworn myths intended to support his “suicide” – which had originally been planted by such muckraking columnists as Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, then repeated by the authors of several biographies of Forrestal – have been systematically deconstructed by Martin (a.k.a. “DCDave).

  This profoundly important book describes in detail one of the earliest plots of the “Deep State” as it was constituted post-WWII: The plot to remove all impediments to the creation and successful launch of the nation of Israel, through silencing the most influential and prescient voice cautioning his country, and the world, about the long and possibly endless tail of retaliations, recriminations and retributions that lay ahead. The history of that land, still resonating with the repercussions he predicted, proves James V. Forrestal’s legendary wisdom.

  --Phillip F. Nelson, author of LBJ, the Mastermind of the JFK Assassination; LBJ, from Mastermind to “The Colossus;” Remember the Liberty; and Who Really Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?

  The Assassination

  of James Forrestal

  David Martin

  McCabe Publishing

  Hyattsville, Maryland

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the John Birch Society for permission to quote extensively from The Death of James Forrestal by Cornell Simpson, to Simon & Schuster, Inc., to quote from Truman, by David McCullough, and to Penguin Random House for the use of quotations from a number of publications. The cover photograph is used with permission of the U.S. Navy, Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

  Copyright © 2019 by David Martin.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  David Martin/McCabe Publishing

  www.DCDave.com

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  The Assassination of James Forrestal/ David Martin. —1st ed.

  ISBN 978-0-9673521-2-1

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Case for Assassination

  James Forrestal’s “Anti-Semitism”

  Who Was Cornell Simpson?

  The Cover-up Collapses

  Handwriting Drives Last Nail in Cover-Up Coffin

  Britain’s Forrestal

  James Carroll on Forrestal

  Earliest Letters to Historians

  Academic Ostriches

  Oliver Stone on Forrestal

  Spook Shrink Flubs Script

  The Mendocracy Versus the Citizenry

  Historians Unmoved

  Not Completely Ignored

  Deserted by the Church

  Conclusion

  To Alfred M. Lilienthal, the brave and principled man whose positive reaction to the first installment of "Who Killed James Forrestal?" in 2002 encouraged me to continue my quest for truth in the case and to P.A. Leonard, Deputy Director, (Claims, Investigations and Tort Litigation), of the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's office who sent me the Navy's official inquiry into Forrestal's death in 2004. That inquiry, which I dubbed the Willcutts Report after Admiral Morton D. Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Medical Center who appointed the review panel, had been kept secret for 55 years.

  Inconvenient Lives

  To our south they're "disappeared;"

  Up here they're "suicided."

  To achieve a similar end,

  A similar means is provided.

  James Vincent Forrestal, February 15, 1892, - May 22, 1949

  Main tower of Bethesda Naval Hospital, view from the back

  Main tower front view. Note bay window upper left, matched on the back but obscured by trees.

  Right wing of 16th floor of the hospital. Wall with two windows of Forrestal’s room is at the front of the building

  Forrestal’s vacated hospital room sometime May 22, 1949

  Forrestal’s hospital room, another angle

  Kitchen with open window from which Forrestal fell, sometime May 22, 1949

  Window in Forrestal’s room showing security screen

  Carpet in Forrestal’s room showing broken glass

  Actual Forrestal handwriting sample

  Actual Forrestal handwriting sample

  Actual Forrestal handwriting sample

  Poem transcription purportedly found in Forrestal’s vacated room

  President John F. Kennedy visiting Forrestal’s grave, Memorial Day, 1963

  Foreword

  Historic Assassination

  While exploring the national attic,

  I discovered something quite chilling:

  It seems that James V. Forrestal

  Was a victim of targeted killing.

  How did it happen that I came to be interested in the death of America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, I am often asked?It all began with another mysterious death of a high government official, one that occurred in 1993, a little more than 44 years after Forrestal’s plunge from a 16th floor window of the main tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. I am speaking of President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. What follows is a summary of the political odyssey that led me to become the lone figure to look seriously and honestly into Forrestal’s death since his fall from that window in the early hours of Sunday morning, May 22, 1949.

  I’ve heard it said that the politics of most men is set by the time they are twelve years old, and it is the politics of their father. That was very much true in my own case for the first fifty years or so of my life. My father, a small-town North Carolina school principal, was a liberal Democrat from a large, fairly prominent liberal-Democratic Party family. His oldest brother was the longtime editor of the left-leaning Winston-Salem Journal and another older brother, the chief lobbyist for Wachovia Bank in Raleigh, was the chairman of the state Democratic Party for most of the 1940s. His next older brother, also a school principal, served one term in the state legislature after his retirement, having been elected as a liberal Democrat in one of the few North Carolina counties that had voted Republican since the end of the Civil War.

  The dictum concerning one’s politics is certainly more likely to hold true, I believe, if one is college educated and one’s father happens to be of a liberal political persuasion, because, at the typical American college, one is likely to have such politics reinforced. I took only one course in American history in college, and that was on the country’s history in the 20th century. A man who was at least as big an admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as was my father taught it. That says a lot, considering the fact that my father had named my younger brother “Franklin D.” after the man.

  In 1964, I exercised my first opportunity to vote for president of the United States by casting my ballot for Lyndon Johnson, naturally. To vote for the archconservative Barry Goldwater would have been completely out of the question. I might note that, up to that point, the only president I had ever seen in the flesh was Harry Truman, who, as an ex-president by that time, addressed the attendees of the annual Nash County Harvest Festival in 1960, stumping for John F
. Kennedy in the election of that year. I felt completely in the spirit of the moment as people shouted, “Give ‘em hell, Harry, “from the open-air audience.

  From 1968 through 1992, when I voted for Bill Clinton, I dutifully voted for whomever the Democratic Party nominated for the presidency. Everything began to change for me, though, in 1993. I was working in Washington, D.C., and on July 20 Foster’s body was found lying in the back of a Civil War relic known as Fort Marcy Park, off the George Washington Parkway, which runs overlooking the Potomac River for a ways on the Virginia side of the river. I had lived in Fairfax County where the park is located since 1982 and had driven along that scenic stretch of road a number of times and had never even noticed it. The turnoff comes just when the drive becomes markedly less scenic, after two parking overlooks of the river and Washington, D.C., on the other side, and you lose the view of the river and beyond. At that point your mind tends to turn to whatever your next destination might be.

  How was it, I wondered, that Foster, a relative newcomer to Washington, would even know about Fort Marcy Park? If he were in such a bad state of mind as to take the extreme step of killing himself, why would he have even gone to work that day? In the first few days, everyone seemed puzzled as to what his motivation might have been, and yet, all the news organizations called it an “apparent suicide,” when, to me, there was hardly anything “apparent” about it. Another thing was noticeable in the news coverage. That is that nobody made any mention of the nearest federal facility to Fort Marcy Park, that is, the headquarters complex of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is hardly more than a mile away as the crow flies.

  Although I had not known Foster, he was just two years behind me at Davidson College and, at about the same height, we had matched up against one another in intramural basketball competition. That fact increased my interest in his death. In due time, I became something of a scholar on Foster’s death, which, in turn, made me a major critic of America’s news media.

  Repeatedly, I noticed, press reports referred to Foster as “the highest ranking federal official to commit suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.” Since it had become apparent to me that Foster had not actually committed suicide, in spite of the virtually unanimous efforts of the nation’s molders of public opinion to convince us that he had, my curiosity about what had actually happened to Forrestal was piqued.

  Then, while browsing at the local used bookstore, I happened to run across the biography of the noted conservative journalist, Walter Winchell.1 I discovered there that Winchell, who shared Forrestal’s strong anti-Communist philosophy, had turned into a virulent Forrestal opponent in the last year of Forrestal’s life. The author, Neal Gabler, surmised that that was because of Forrestal’s opposition to U.S. support for the creation of the state of Israel. Winchell, who was Jewish, was an ardent Zionist. I also learned from Gabler that probably the most prominent liberal journalist of the day, Drew Pearson, like Winchell, had also written a series of articles scurrilously attacking Forrestal in the weeks leading up to Forrestal’s forced resignation from the Harry Truman administration in March of 1949. The one big thing that Pearson, who was not Jewish, had in common with Winchell was that he was also a big Israel supporter.

  The good-liberal-versus-bad-conservative view of things that I had learned from my father didn’t work in this case. An important part of my early political education had been listening to the Sunday night radio programs by these two national newspaper columnists. We loved Pearson, and we hated Winchell. Something more powerful that we aren’t supposed to see was apparently at work here.

  At this point, my suspicion of foul play in Forrestal’s death rose to a new level. I was already aware that Jewish terrorists had freely used assassination as a weapon in pushing the Zionist agenda, although I did not yet know the degree to which they had done so. Two notable examples were the assassination of Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Moyne, in 1944 and Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator in Palestine, in 1948.

  The only thing I knew about Forrestal at that point was what Gabler had written about his Israel opposition and what I had read in David McCullough’s celebrated 1992 biography of President Harry Truman in which he gives a matter-of-fact account of how Forrestal more or less went out of his mind and jumped out of the window of a hospital where he was being treated for depression. It was time to take a closer look.

  __________

  1 Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, Vintage Books, 1994.

  Introduction

  Fear Factor

  The truth may be there to see

  But it won’t, like magic, appear.

  You must seek it diligently,

  And not be restrained by fear.

  James Vincent Forrestal was born on February 15, 1892, in the town of Matteawan, New York, on the Hudson River in Dutchess County between West Point and Poughkeepsie. In 1913, the town merged with adjacent Fishkill Landing and adopted the name, “Beacon,” after Beacon Mountain, the most notable landmark in the small urban area. His father, also named James, had emigrated from County Cork in Ireland to the town in 1857 at the age of nine, where he joined his mother, who had emigrated after her husband had died, and she had remarried. The new husband was named Patrick Kennedy, but the stepson kept his birth name of Forrestal.

  Forrestal was the youngest of three children, all sons. Until he left college and went off to work on Wall Street, he went by the name of Vince, to distinguish him from his father. His father had apprenticed in carpentry and was accomplished and enterprising enough to form his small construction company. His mother, born Mary Anne Toohey, was the daughter of Irish immigrants, was a schoolteacher, a devout Roman Catholic, and a strict disciplinarian at home. She may be given a good deal of the credit for young James’s notable self-discipline and his strong work ethic.

  Young James was an excellent student and an enthusiastic participant in athletics, playing baseball, basketball, and tennis in high school, probably gaining the greatest proficiency in tennis. Boxing was also very popular in the area at the time, but his mother forbade him to participate. Only later did he violate the prohibition while at college, sustaining the somewhat flattened nose that he wore proudly for the rest of his life.

  His mother fancied him to be ideal material for the priesthood, but his breadth of interests attracted him to a different sort of education than the seminary. While in high school he set his sights on Princeton University, but it took him a few years to reach that goal.

  After graduating at age 16, in 1908, he spent three years working for three area newspapers, the Matteawan Evening Journal, the Mount Vernon Argus, and the Poughkeepsie News Press. Journalism was in his blood, and he had expressed a desire to return to it upon leaving government, but it was never to be.

  He entered Dartmouth College in 1911 and then transferred to Princeton after his freshman year. He was a better than average student, but he distinguished himself more in his various extracurricular activities, particularly student journalism. Working first as a reporter for The Daily Princetonian, he ascended to its editorship at the end of his junior year. Like the reporting work he continued to do during summer vacations for the Matteawan Evening Journal, the editor’s job also helped his always-precarious financial situation because it was a paying job.

  In his senior year, his classmates voted him “Most Likely to Succeed.” With all he had going for him, it’s a bit of a mystery that he never graduated, leaving Princeton one credit short of the required number. There is speculation that it might have involved confusion over the credits that were transferred from Dartmouth.

  Upon leaving Princeton, he took a couple of odd jobs in the New York City area before landing in a position more suitable to his background and taste, as financial reporter for the New York World newspaper. It wasn’t long, though, before that job opened his eyes to the much greater career possibilities that he would have actually doing the so
rt of Wall Street work that he was reporting on. Recalling a contact he had made at Princeton, he interviewed with William A. Read and Company in 1916 and was promptly offered a job as bond salesman, which he accepted.

  Given the heavy responsibility of sales for upper New York State, he pitched in with the sort of total commitment that would mark his entire career, both in the private sector and in public service. He was known to stay on the job frequently until at least nine o’clock at night. He also traded heavily on the many contacts he had made during his Princeton years. His diligence, his enthusiasm, and his contacts paid off when he was made a partner in the firm in 1923, vice-president in 1926, and president of the company in 1937.

  The same year that Forrestal was made a partner, 1923, the firm’s name changed to Dillon, Read and Company after the new controlling owner, Clarence Dillon. Dillon had been born Clarence Lapowski in San Antonio, Texas, the son of a prosperous Jewish clothing merchant. His father, Samuel Lapowski, had sent him to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then to Harvard, changing the family name to Dillon after his wife’s family name when Clarence was in college. Exhibiting exceptional financial skill after joining William A. Read, Dillon had become a partner in 1916, the same year in which William A. Read died of a sudden illness.

  Dillon had recognized Forrestal’s talent and later took him under his wing as something of a protégé, but the younger man’s rapid ascent in the investment banking firm was interrupted in 1917 when President Woodrow Wilson took the country into the great war in Europe.