(Bethesda Naval Hospital before base consolidation with Walter Reed).
We talked about the insurrection of the Navy’s flag officers the other day. It was part of something larger, of course, and simultaneously smaller in contrast to the struggle of the war. Like you, the writers on the Patio have been thrilled since we realized that heart-arresting fact that we are living in one of those historic periods that will be unique enough to get a name.
We are not sure what that is at the moment, since we are still reeling with the consequences of the pandemic. We may wind up with a nickname about the plague. As is the way of this world, James V. Forrestal had one. Since he was the first Secretary of the new Department, he was known as the FID- the First in Defense. Some of us sailed on the boat that was named for him. It was appropriate, since it was a new thing for a new time. USS Forrestal was the first super-carrier, designed to replace the old Essex-class ships developed for the war. Forrestal was designed to handle the new jet aircraft. By sheer steel presence she was intended to win the new struggle against Josef Stalin’s implacable Soviet Union.
We called that one the Cold War since we spent trillions of dollars being prepared for something we did not want to happen. We were prepared well enough that it didn’t. Now we have one in progress that evokes the savagery of the First War in the Ukraine. Rising powers like Iran are seeing opportunity and stoking the resentments of the Palestinians in Gaza. That struggle has only been in progress since early October, but it touches the story of dozens of centuries.
We are interested in exploring the times that touched the grand one we were given by the Greatest Generation. The changes to the Navy were something resulting from technical and social change. Launching and recovering aircraft from a ship moving on the vast ocean was a remarkable thing, and was appropriately named for the first Secretary.
There have been rumors about the Secretary’s passing since his body was found on the roof of a three story building at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was clad only in the trouser-bottoms to his pyjamas, and he had apparently fallen from the window of his suite on the 16th floor of the main tower.
And there begins the tin-foil hat conspiracies of those times that run into ours. The SECDEF had told associates he had decided to resign, but was shattered when Truman abruptly asked for his resignation. His letter of resignation was tendered after Truman’s dismissal on March 28, 1949. On the day of his removal from office, he was reported to have gone into a strange daze and was flown on a Navy airplane to the estate of Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett down on Hobe Sound in Florida. Forrestal’s wife was vacationing there and their unification away from the tumult in a re-styled Pentagon.
During the southern retreat, William Menninger was called to examine Forrestal. He wa selected based on his renown as co-founder of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He was known as one of the leading analysts of clinical depression. The clinic he co-founded with his brother saw Forrestal and diagnosed hm as having “severe depression” of the type “seen in operational fatigue during the war.”
Forrestal went to the war he was directed to complete victoriously. That is something we are more familiar to us now as “Post Traumatic Stress Sydrome.” or PTSD.
The Menninger Clinic had treated successfully similar cases during World War II but Forrestal’s wife Josephine, his friend and associate Ferdinand Eberstadt, Dr. Menninger and Navy psychiatrist Dr. George Raines decided to send the former Secretary of Defense to the US Naval Hospital at Bethesda in Maryland. The concept was to keep Forrestal in seclusion in a place where his illness could not be readily ascertained.
He was checked into Bethesda five days later. The story now diverges into other streams. The decision to house him on an upper floor, instead of the first, was justified for similar. Forrestal’s mental
condition was officially announced as “nervous and physical exhaustion.” Captain Raines was assigned as attending physician. Throughout the hospitalization, columnist Drew Pearson made Forrestal a constant target of vicious personal attacks, joined by his protoge Jack Anderson and journalistic pioneer Walter Winchell.
The hospital admission seemed to put Forrestal on the road to recovery. He re-gained weight, putting on 12 pounds since admission to the hospital. However, in the early morning hours of May 22, his body was found on a third-floor roof below the 16th-floor kitchen across the hall from his room.
The official Navy review board, which completed hearings on May 31, but waited until October 11, 1949, to release only a brief summary of its findings. The announcement was reported on page 15 of the October 12 New York Times, and stated only that Forrestal had died from his fall from the window.
The story did not say what might have caused the fall, nor did it make any mention of a bathrobe sash cord that had first been reported as tied around his neck. There were unsubstantiated reports of paranoia about his involuntary commitment to the hospital, as well as suspicions about the detailed circumstances of his death. Those led to a series of conspiracy theories similar in number and veracity to the ones we have seen since 2020.
In those days, the Press in America served as our fact-checkers, unlike today. One of the strands of evidence is the Secretary’s last note, found in his room. A example of why people were jammering about Forrstal’s cause of death, the exact contents of Forrestal’s actual note, which some have alleged was an implied suicide note, were not released by the Navy until April 2004, 56 years after Forrestal’s fall.
There is some curious tradition in that as well. The folks at Langley just requested a body of the files on the Kennedy assassination to be retained as “classified” for another fifty years or so. Why it should be so is just another mystery, you know?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
ww.vicsocotra.com
Note: James V. Forrestal is buried in Section 30 Lot 674 Grid X-39 over at Arlington National Cemetery.