Martin’s long-awaited “Assassination of Forrestal”: Definitive work on first SecDef’s 1949 murder

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with David Martin (DCDave.com), the award-winning writer and retired federal economist who reviewed both editions of Truth at Last, “Hillary Clinton and the Amelia Earhart Cover-up,” in August 2012, and  “Amelia Earhart Truth Versus the Establishment” in May 2016.  (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)

In summer 2017, Martin helped clear up the confused mess surrounding the media’s relationship to the bogus claims in the History Channel’s presentation of the 1930s-era Office of Naval Intelligence photo of the dock at Jaluit, in which Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were mistakenly identified, writing three pieces focusing on “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” the History Channel’s odious July 9, 2017 Earhart special — “Press Touts Dubious Earhart Photo,” “Earhart Photo Story Apparently Debunked,” and “ ‘Earhart Photo’ Debunker Debunked?”  

David Martin at the grave of James V. Forrestal at Arlington, Va.  No one has done more to prove that Forrestal was murdered by still unknown killers on May 22, 1949.  (Photo courtesy David Martin.)

In March 2018, Martin teamed with Hugh Turley to publish their groundbreaking book on the 1968 death of famed Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton, whose sudden demise in a Thailand hotel has been unanimously accepted as accidental electrocution by an electric fan.  The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation claims that a “careful examination of the official record, including crime scene photographs that the authors have found that the investigating police in Thailand never saw, and from reading the letters of witnesses, they have discovered that the accidental electrocution conclusion is totally false,” and leaves no doubt that Merton was murdered, likely by an element of the U.S. deep state — another cover-up, another sacred cow exposed, another important book to which the establishment media will never direct the public.

Now, at last, Martin has turned his lengthy, six-part 2003 disquisition, “Who Killed James Forrestal?” into his long-awaited The Assassination of James Forrestal, published on May 21, just one day short of the 70th anniversary of Forrestal’s murder. 

Forrestal’s shocking death in the early morning of May 22, 1949 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland was particularly disturbing to Thomas E. Devine, the late author of the 1987 classic, Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, who was certain that Forrestal was on Saipan in July 1944 when Amelia Earhart’s Electra was burned and later buried along with hundreds of tons of other war refuse below Aslito Airfield, which is now Saipan International Airport.

Whether the Navy Secretary was actually on Saipan or not in July 1944 — and we’re virtually certain he was not physically there, as I discuss at length in Truth at Last (pages 72-75) — Forrestal was very close to the top of the chain of command that ordered and executed the burning beyond recognition of the Earhart Electra on Saipan. 

Whether the first secretary of defense’s death was connected to his involvement in the Earhart case remains unknown, but his passing was a crushing blow to Devine’s hope that the truth would eventually be revealed.  “However James Forrestal met his death,” Devine wrote, “he took with him what he knew about Amelia Earhart’s plane, which he examined and ordered burned on Saipan in July 1944.”

Navy hospital officials were quick to label Forrestal’s death a suicide, but “many question the theory that Forrestal entered a sixteenth-floor diet pantry, tied one end of his bathrobe sash to a radiator, looped the other end around his neck, and stepped out the pantry window,” Devine wrote.  “Neither do skeptics believe that Forrestal deliberately leaped from the sixteenth-floor window to the third-floor bridge which connected the two wings of the hospital.  The skeptics are convinced that Forrestal was murdered.”

David Martin’s The Assassination of James Forrestal, published in May 2019, should be must reading for anyone interested in the history of this nation.

Devine was unaware of The Death of James Forrestal, a virtually unknown 1966 book by Cornell Simpson (a pseudonym) that presented a compelling case for Forrestal’s murder and was entirely ignored by the American media, and before Martin’s “Who Killed James Forrestal?” in 2003, the only previous work of any significance to shine light on Forrestal’s murder. 

Forced to resign by President Harry Truman in March 1949 after less than two years in office as the nation’s first secretary of defense, Forrestal was soon taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital to undergo treatment for operational fatigue, at the recommendation of noted psychiatrist Dr. William C. Menninger.  Ten days after his admission, Captain B.W. Hogan, the hospital’s commandant, reported that Forrestal was “underweight, had low blood pressure, a secondary anemia and a neuromuscular weakness characteristically found in cases of exhaustion . . . [but] the only psychiatric symptoms present are those associated with a state of excessive fatigue.”  Forrestal’s condition, Hogan said, was “directly the result of excessive work during the war and post-war years.”

Forrestal was held for seven weeks as a virtual prisoner in his sixteenth-floor room in the hospital’s tower.  He was allowed visits only from his wife, two sons, Truman, and Louis Johnson, his successor as defense secretary.  His attending physician, Dr. (Captain) George N. Raines, prohibited Forrestal from seeing four people he specifically wanted to see: his brother Henry; two priests, Monsignor Maurice S. Sheehy and Father Paul McNally, S.J.; and a friend whose name has never been disclosed.  Sheehy, a former Navy chaplain and close friend, made seven trips to the hospital from nearby Catholic University in Washington, and each time was barred without explanation from seeing Forrestal.  “His blood is on the hands of those who kept me from seeing him,” Sheehy wrote in the American Mercury after Forrestal’s death.

Henry Forrestal was finally allowed to see James after threatening to go public about his brother’s confinement and virtual isolation.  At the hospital, Henry said James was “acting and talking as sanely and intelligently as any man I’ve ever known.”  Johnson also found Forrestal “was like his old self and in good health” during an April 27 visit.  When Raines admitted that James was “fundamentally all right,” Henry made train reservations for Washington and notified Raines that he intended to take James out of the hospital May 22 to complete his convalescence in the country, “where he would not be cooped up in a room with nothing to do and nobody to talk to,” according to Simpson.  But at approximately 1:50 a.m. that very morning, James Forrestal was found dead.

At his Beacon, New York home, Henry told Simpson that James “positively did not kill himself.  He said his brother was the last person in the world who would have committed suicide. . . . James was having a good time planning the things he would do following his discharge.  Henry Forrestal recalled that Truman and Johnson agreed that his brother was in fine shape and that the hospital officials admitted that the patient would have been released soon.”  Monsignor Sheehy also “seriously suspected that Forrestal had been murdered.”

The Death of James Forrestal presented a compelling case for the murder of the staunch anti-Communist, likely at the hands of Soviet operatives and spies within Washington’s heavily infiltrated establishment, including the Truman White House.  “This outrageous treatment of the Forrestal case meshed perfectly into the standard Washington practice of concealing from the public Communist-connected scandals,” Simpson — whoever he was, and Martin has a very good idea — wrote.

Martin disagrees with Simpson’s verdict as to the killers’ identities and motivations, but I won’t spoil that aspect of The Assassination of James Forrestal by naming his most likely villains in this review.  He draws from the Willcutts Report, likely made public and declassified in 2004 as a result of his third Freedom of Information Act request;  key witness Edward Prise, the Navy hospital corpsman who was the last to admit seeing Forrestal alive; and many other sources to convincingly demonstrate the absurdity of the idea that Forrestal would throw himself out of a 16th floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital to a death he most certainly did not desire.

No soothsayer is required to foresee that The Assassination of James Forrestal, because of its very nature as the slayer of yet another establishment sacred cow, will be ignored or dismissed by our esteemed national opinion molding apparatus (NOMA, a term Martin has coined, which he says is comprised to “various degrees by the GAME: government, academia, media, and entertainment”) in the coming months and years.  Only the extent of the media blackout of this book, already under way, has yet to be determined.

Bethesda Naval Hospital, photo date unknown, but probably taken before Forrestal’s untimely death there in May 1949.  Note the old cars under and to the left of the tree at left.

The Assassination of James Forrestal begins with a poignant note of praise from Phillip F. Nelson, the eminent 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.?

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.

To read Philip Nelson’s review of The Assassination of James Forrestal from his blog, LBJ: Master of Deceit, please click here.

The findings of the still unknown Willcutts Report were presented in a brief summary released Oct. 11, 1949, stating Forrestal had died from his fall from the sixteenth story.  Nothing was said about what could have caused it, except to make it clear that the Navy was in no way responsible.  Suicide was not cited as a cause of death despite the original press reports and propaganda perpetuating the idea that the first secretary of defense killed himself, nor did the Willcutts Report, comprising hundreds of pages of witness interviews, conclude that Forrestal committed suicide.  

In Chapter 1 of The Assassination of James Forrestal, “The Case for Assassination,” Martin discusses the shortcomings of the well-known 1992, 587-page Forrestal biography, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley.  In concluding his “Secret Investigative Report” subsection, Martin tells us:

The willingness of the authorities to withstand the thoroughly justified charge of cover-up by not releasing the results of their investigation, including the transcripts of witness testimony, speaks volumes, as does the extraordinarily deceptive description of the case by the likes of such establishment figures as Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley.  Their account is replete with deceptions, but there is none greater than this withholding of the information that all the key witness testimony has been kept secret, along with the results of the investigation itself, and that the investigation did not conclude that Forrestal committed suicide.

. . . By leaving out the vital information that the official record of the case has been suppressed, Hoopes and Brinkley, cobbling together an account based on a hodgepodge of dubious sources, leave the reader with the impression that we know more about what happened than we really do.

James Vincent Forrestal, secretary of the Navy from May 1944 to September 1947, was mistakenly identified by Thomas E. Devine as the “the man in the white shirt,” who directed the destruction of Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E at Aslito Airfield on Saipan in July 1944.  Although he wasn’t present when the Electra was burned, Forrestal was in the chain of command that executed the destruct order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his suspicious death in March 1949 may have been directly related to his involvement in the Earhart case. (National Archives.)

“From their Wikipedia pages we learn that Hoopes, a former Under Secretary of the Air Force, among many government positions he held, was a member of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University and that Brinkley, who is a commentator on CNN, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” Martin writes in a Chapter 1 footnote.  “He was also the protégé of popular historian, Stephen E. Ambrose.  As establishment historians, Hoopes and Brinkley’s credentials are impeccable.”  Indeed, Hoopes, who died in 2004, and Brinkley, who continues to occasionally haunt cable news, were and are highly respected creatures of the establishment, and it is precisely therein that the problem lies.

Ironically — or coincidentally — I had my own experience with Hoopes, and it was anything but pleasant.  Early in my Earhart education, in September 1992, I wrote to Hoopes. a former undersecretary of defense under Forrestal from 1948 to 1949, and then an international affairs executive at the University of Maryland, College Park.  I described Thomas Devine’s work and asked Hoopes for his thoughts, naively figuring he must have known something, based on his close relationship to Forrestal.  Hoopes feigned interest initially, but lost the first information package I sent, and after receiving another, he flatly and rudely rejected Devine’s account, telling me our “correspondence should end” and threatening legal action should I use anything he wrote to me without his permission.  Nine years later, Hoopes ignored my request for permission to quote from his letter in the 2002 book I wrote with Devine, With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart.  A real sweetheart and a class act, was Mr. Hoopes.  

There’s far more in The Assassination of James Forrestal that will convince the reader that the universally accepted story that James V. Forrestal committed suicide is a blatant falsehood, thanks to David Martin’s singular perseverance in finding the truth.  Martin, who has a doctorate degree and is a historian of the first rank, is also a gifted poet whose singular epigraphs flavor the beginning of each of his chapters and lend added depth to his already captivating narrative.

For example, here’s the one from Chapter 1, “The Case for Assassination”:

Not for Human Consumption?

The water from the well of truth
Is to most folks undrinkable.
That is because of their distaste
For things they find unthinkable

Or another, from Chapter 13, “Historians Unmoved”:

Timorous Eunuchs

In the universities
You’ll find our finest minds.
The problem isn’t with their brains
Oh no, it’s with their spines.

The Assassination of James Forrestal is a 335-page masterpiece to which our feckless, corrupt media will not be directing the masses, a historical tour de force that only the scant few of our wise and enlightened will discover and enjoy.  It’s a steal at an inexpensive price that I strongly encourage all who care about our nation’s history to purchase and read.