David Kaiser: The Road to Dallas

[Guest Tom Scully]

Since I think we have to apply the same process to separate fact from fiction when delving into any historical controversy, and because I discovered that David Kaiser is a member of this forum, I decided to post this here. I hope to attract a reaction from Mr. Kaiser and any other forum member who decides to offer an opinion.

It is relevant because it goes to the crux of what I suspect led up to the assassination of JFK. It has to do with the influence on the evolution of American foreign, defense, and intelligence operations policy from WWI to the present. It involves a small group of friends, including Trubee Davison, Robert Lovett, John McCloy the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Cord Meyer Jr. and his father.

Further, it involves David Kaiser's non-reaction to what is contained in the Willcutts Report, one of three major US Navy investigative reports of the last sixty years, the most recent of which is exposed for it's inconsistencies only this week.: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

(After 54 years, the US Navy refused to release, along with the Willcutts report, this

http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aid...s/exhibit2E.jpg

and several other photos which were part of the report. The Navy initially offered the false excuse that the photos no longer existed. The photo at the link above, when expanded via a mouse click, displays the never explained broker glass shards found on James Forrestals hospital room rug.)

http://www.dcdave.com/article4/040922.html

Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 2

.....The Key Missing Exhibits

Some much more important things than Forrestal’s bathrobe were missing from the exhibits, though. Have a look at the complete list, dear reader, and see if you notice what they are:....

Introduced on Page No. ....

...That’s right, there’s no autopsy report, a pretty serious omission. Defenders of the investigation might respond that the autopsy doctor, as we shall see, was questioned at length and asked many key questions, revealing that in his opinion Forrestal was not choked to death before being thrown out of the window, but these are no substitute for the autopsy report itself. One can only wonder why it was left out. Possibly germane to this omission is the fact that the author’s FOIA request for all materials connected with the Willcutts Report was not completely honored by the Navy JAG office. The first set of exhibits, the 10 photographs of the body as it lay on the third floor roof were held back, as were an unknown number of photographs taken of Forrestal’s external injuries taken just prior to the autopsy. The reason given was that “...the unauthorized release of this information would result in a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy with respect to Mr. Forrestal’s surviving family members (5 U.S.C.552 ((6), as amended).”

The JAG office informed me that I could challenge the ruling with a formal letter sent within 60 days, and I did so, on the basis that no family member who knew him and could be counted as a loved one or a “surviving family member” was still alive (He has one grandchild who was born many years after his death and is now only of college age.). On September 14, 2004, I finally received a response. Here is the key paragraph:

"Please be advised that these exhibits [1, 4, and 5] are missing from the original investigative report. Due to an administrative error you were informed on April 6, 2004, that these exhibits were withheld out of respect to Mr. Forrestal’s surviving family members."

It would appear to this humble observer that the Navy legal team’s initial error was tactical rather than administrative. .....

The middle Navy "report" is the autopsy file of JFK, challenged most recently and persuasively by Douglas Horne in his book, "Inside the ARRB."

The oldest of the three US Navy reports, suppressed by the US Navy and the Pentagon from 1950 to 2004, was brought to the attention of David kaiser by the man whose efforts brought it out, finally, into the public realm. Perhaps Kaiser's reaction to what is contained in it relates somehow to a conflict of interest owing to his professional relationship with the US Navy.:

http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080113.htm

Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 5

Press and historians close ranks, minds

....I have tried to stay alert to all such examples of the miswriting of this important chapter in America's history and to get the writers to set the record straight. Examples can be found here, here, and here. As you can see, I have been more successful in the former effort than in the latter. To date, not one of the authors has corrected a single misstatement, and, to my knowledge, no historian or journalist has written about Forrestal's death in light of the important new information. If any readers know of any post-2004 writings on Forrestal's death that have escaped my attention, I would appreciate their informing me.

Most recently, I discovered another instance of misreporting on events related to Forrestal's death, this one by a professor of history who specializes in the period surrounding World War II and teaches at the Naval War College. His name is David E. Kaiser, and he wrote favorably of Drew Pearson's lies about Forrestal on his blog more than a year after the release of the Willcutts Report, routinely describing Forrestal's death as a "suicide" in the process. Hoping that his intentions might not be all that bad and that he had simply been misguided, perhaps by his ideology or by lack of information, I wrote him as follows on December 13, 2007:

Dear Professor Kaiser,

I thought you would like to know that a couple of days ago I left a comment on your December 18, 2005 "History Unfolding" blog at http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2005/...those-days.html . The title of your article is "They were giants in those days," and you are referring primarily, and most appallingly as I see it, to the journalist, Drew Pearson. Here is my comment:

Your admiration for the smear specialist, Drew Pearson, is, in my opinion, completely misplaced. Nowhere are you more off the mark than in the following quote:

"During early 1949 Pearson had been writing that James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, was mentally unstable, and eventually he reported correctly that Forrestal had tried to commit suicide."

Pearson did, indeed, write scurrilous things about Forrestal, including that he consciously cowered in his New York apartment while his wife was assaulted outside it, which was not true. It is also not true that Forrestal had attempted suicide. The day after Forrestal's death from a fall from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Pearson reported that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts. That claim, according to the doctors who treated Forrestal at Bethesda, was also false.

Looking at Pearson's record, I tend to agree with what President Franklin Roosevelt wrote about him in a letter to General Patrick Hurley on August 30, 1943, "His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a pity that anyone anywhere believes anything that he writes."

You might regard my words as a bit harsh, but, all things considered, I think that I have been quite forbearing. You went on to say, after all, that Forrestal did commit suicide shortly after the purported attempt, and you wrote those words near the end of 2005. Here's what I had to say about the author, James Carroll, on my web site: "Anyone who would write about Forrestal’s death in 2006 and ignore completely the evidence contained in the Willcutts Report would have to be very irresponsible, indeed." See "James Carroll on James Forrestal." The Willcutts Report is the long suppressed official investigation of Forrestal's death, made public with a press release by the Seeley Mudd Library of Princeton University in the late summer of 2004 [sic. Writing from memory, I forgot that the library did not send out its press release until a couple of months after posting the report on its web site.]. One can readily see why the report had been kept secret. The information it contains thoroughly undermines the case for Forrestal's suicide.

Although you were writing at about the same time as Carroll, you are perhaps less at fault for getting your facts wrong. You were writing only a short article whose subject was mainly Drew Pearson. Carroll, in his book about the Pentagon, on the other hand, writes about Forrestal at considerable length. Your scholarly reputation is also a good deal higher than his, so I am proceeding upon the assumption that you have simply made an honest mistake. Carroll, on the other hand, is well beyond such consideration. I conclude in my article that Carroll is clearly a conscious spreader of lies:

"As those of us who care about truth and justice in this country have discovered more about the alarming facts surrounding Forrestal’s death, the molders of public opinion are working overtime to see that what the American public thinks it knows about the death is, in fact, false. The opinion molders have chosen the right man to spread the falsehoods."

With my following sentence, which concludes the essay, I might well have been writing about someone like you:

"How long will we have to wait for a recognized scholar, who is also honest, to take up the subject?"

When I was able to get through on C-Span to Forrestal biographer Douglas Brinkley and fault him for failing to mention that there was even such a thing as an official investigation of Forrestal's death, much less that it had been kept secret, he responded that he would consider correcting his omission if there were a paperback edition. See "Letters Concerning James Forrestal." That is the advantage of having a blog. You don't have to wait for such an opportunity.

Sincerely,

David Martin

Sadly, exactly one week later, Professor Kaiser revealed that he was not at all the sort of person I was looking for by responding peremptorily and dismissively--not to say insultingly--as follows:

>

> Mr. Martin,

>

> I appreciate your providing me with the link to the report on Forrestal’s death, of which I have now read quite a lot. I do not think, however, that there is much to be gained from our discussing the issue, since your interpretations are a bit too creative for me. Your email states that the report casts doubt on Forrestal’s suicide, but I can’t see that it did that in the slightest—the only doubt seemed to be about whether he purposely jumped out the window or was trying to hang himself. The doctors explain in great detail that he was depressed and very suicidal. The question of whether, and how many times, he might have actually attempted suicide before being hospitalized is left open; he claimed that he had, but the doctor who spoke at the greatest length doubted it. In any case that seems to have been a side issue for the inquiry. Pearson’s diary entries relied on conversations he had with other Hobe Sound residents. I don’t have the time to check every column he wrote on the subject. (The report does confirm something else—that there was no way that Forrestal could have read or heard about what Pearson had broadcast and written during his hospitalization.)

>

> It’s a free country and a free internet. I don’t see any reason to alter what I wrote.

>

> Sincerely yours,

>

> David Kaiser

I then responded on the same day, immediately upon receiving the email:

Dear Professor Kaiser,

May I take it, then, that with regard to whether or not Forrestal committed suicide, you consider of no consequence the revelations that:

1. the handwriting of the transcribed poem, which, for the press, served as his suicide note, does not resemble Forrestal's at all

2. that broken glass was on his bed and on the carpet at the foot of the bed

3. that Forrestal's room was not photographed until many hours after he was found dead and that when it was it did not resemble the room that the nurse who first got a good look at the vacated room described. The photos show a bed with nothing but a bare mattress and pillow on them, whereas Nurse Turner testified that, as one might expect, "The bed clothes were turned back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and [the slippers] were right there as you get out of bed." No slippers or any other sign that the room had been occupied are evident in the photographs, either.

4. that the influential biographer, Arnold Rogow, apparently fabricated the story that the guard saw Forrestal transcribing the morbid poem when he last looked in on him, because the guard testified that when he last looked in the room Forrestal was apparently sleeping and the lights had been off and Forrestal apparently did no reading or writing during the guard's time of duty which began at midnight

5. that the influential newspapers reporting on the death apparently fabricated the story that the transcription ended in the middle of the word "nightingale" or, depending on which article in The Washington Post you read, the transcription included the lines, “When Reason’s day sets rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die, and sleep the never-ending sleep than linger on, and dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.”

6. that the findings of the Willcutts Report were not issued until several months had passed and then, the findings did not include the conclusion that Forrestal had committed suicide

7. that photographs of Forrestal's body were first withheld from the FOIAed material on the grounds that they might disturb Forrestal's surviving loved ones, and when told that there were no surviving loved ones the Navy changed its story and claimed that they were lost

8. that the book from which Forrestal supposedly copied the damning poem does not appear in official evidence nor is the supposed discoverer of either the book or the transcription ever officially identified (Tom Scully comment: Identity of discoverer reported by WaPo in 2004 to be Ruth Gmeiner Frandsen.)

9. that the Willcutts Report was kept secret for 55 years, when its whole purpose was to clear the air and establish the facts publicly concerning the nature of Forrestal's death?

Surely, with respect to Drew Pearson's credibility, you don't believe, as you imply, that it is immaterial that Pearson wrote that Forrestal had made four suicide attempts, the last of which such attempts had occurred right there at Bethesda Naval Hospital, when those claims are contradicted by the Bethesda doctors and Pearson has no details or named sources for his claims?

I must say that I am amazed that it is I, in contrast to Pearson, that you regard as the "creative" one when it comes to interpreting the evidence surrounding Forrestal's death. What I have done is to analyze the evidence carefully, with a skeptical eye. Doing so, I certainly do not conclude as you do (see Part 2), that, "The doctors explain in great detail that he was depressed and very suicidal." Only Captain Raines, whose credibility is called into question by many other things he said, claimed that he was suicidal, and the second in command of the doctors, Captain Stephen Smith, appears to contradict him. That he does contradict him, even apparently with respect to the "depressed" diagnosis, is reinforced by the unpublished manuscript of the Time magazine writer, John Osborne, as I mention in my previously-referenced letter to Douglas Brinkley. Furthermore, there seems to be virtual unanimity among those who saw Forrestal near to the time of his death that he seemed to be quite normal by that time. That was the reason given for relaxing the guard and allowing access to belts, razor blades, etc., after all.

Finally, I am puzzled by your assertion, for what it is worth, "that there is no way that Forrestal could have read or heard about what Pearson had broadcast and written during his hospitalization." Could he not have heard about it from any number of visitors, particularly his wife, or from letters? This is from testimony by Captain Raines that I quote in Part 2:

"From the very first Mister Forrestal’s mail and other communications were handed to him unopened. He was allowed to see all of them on the theory no one can live in a vacuum and might just as well be exposed to whatever came along; that is the method of dealing with it; it would depend on how well he was or how sick he was. It was as simple as that. Actually he dealt quite well with almost everything."

In sum, based upon how you have handled the evidence up to now, it's possible that you may not actually see any reason to alter anything that you have written, but I surely do. As at least your figure of speech would have it, though, it's a free country.

Sincerely,

David Martin, Ph.D.

Three weeks have now gone by and it has become pretty clear that Professor Kaiser has headed for the tall grass and will not be further heard from, content, apparently, in the belief that power effectively trumps truth.

With the floor now all to myself, may I note a further error in Kaiser's admittedly incomplete reading of the Willcutts Report. With respect to the question of what caused Forrestal's death, he says, "...the only doubt seemed to be about whether he purposely jumped out the window or was trying to hang himself."

In fact, the question was never addressed in those terms. How could it have been? Surely no one suggested that Forrestal went to the trouble to tie a bathrobe belt tightly around his neck before jumping, freestyle and untethered, out the 16th floor window. What purpose, then, could the neck belt have possibly served? .....

A background post I wrote on the subject of the Navy's investigation of the death of James Forrestal contains this.:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=161072

In May, 1949, the newspapers immediately blared the message that "Forrestal's Death Was a Suicide", but it wasn't....the "Willcutts Review" into Forrestal's death at Bethesda Naval Hospital, was delayed in release:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=wil...user_hdate=1949

FORRESTAL DATA HELD UP; Report on His Death Promised but It Is Not...

- New York Times - Jul 19, 1949

... was admitted to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., on April 2, ... naval medical board was convened May 23 by Rear Admiral M6rton D. Willcutts, ...

Navy Personnel Absolved In Death Of Forrestal .

St. Petersburg Times - Google News Archive - Oct 12, 1949

He was admitted to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda. ... The five - man board was convened May 23 on orders Rear Admiral Morton D. Willcutts. then head of the ...

Only the above was released and no cause of Forrestal's death was determined. The actual review documents were then "buried" for the next 55 years, and released

under an FOIA request by David Martin of Virginia in 2004. There was no journalistic interest, at all...but the WaPo published this, documenting that, immediately after

Forrestal's death, the investigation area around his Bethesfas Naval Hospital room, was never secured:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

A Local Life: Ruth Gmeiner Frandsen

Hard Work, Serendipity Paid Off For Trailblazing Female Reporter

....While he and other journalists hollered for information outside the hospital, Gmeiner sweet-talked her way into the 16th-floor room of former secretary of defense James V. Forrestal and found, next to his bed, a book of poetry open to Sophocles' "Ajax," which includes the lines:

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.

Her soon-to-be husband made that the first paragraph in Gmeiner's story on Forrestal's suicide.

Edited January 19, 2010 by Tom Scully