The Case of James Forrestal

Introduction – Who Was James Forrestal and What Is the Willcutts Report?

Things to Look for while Reading the Report

The World Outside the Report

Material Missing in the FOIA Copy of the Report and/or the Report Itself

Obscured Witness I,  II

Missing Witnesses

Editorial Protocol

Introduction Continued

The Willcutts Report

Approvals and Statements

Endorsements

Proceedings

Conclusion

Appendix

Photographs of Bethesda Naval Hospital

Approximate Floor Plan of Forrestal’s Suite

James Forrestal was Secretary of the Navy during the last year of World War II. In September 1947, after consolidation of the Army and Navy, President Truman appointed him Secretary of Defense, the first person to hold that position. Forrestal later became outspoken in his criticism of certain policies of the Truman administration. We won’t go into the details or the smear campaign waged against him by Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and others. Near the end of March 1949 Truman demanded Forrestal’s resignation, a move Forrestal had anticipated.

Forrestal’s successor was sworn in the morning of March 28. Later the same day Truman presented Forrestal with the Distinguished Service medal. The next day the House Armed Services Committee held a ceremony lauding Forrestal’s military service, at which he gave a brief speech. Afterwards, the usual account is that Stuart Symington, Secretary of the Air Force, sought out Forrestal and talked with him on their ride back to the Pentagon. Marx Leva, Forrestal’s top aide, found Forrestal profoundly changed after this meeting, preoccupied and absent minded. He informed Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt who then persuaded Forrestal to go with him to a vacation spot at Hobe Sound, on the east coast of southern Florida, for a rest. That, to repeat, is the usual account, based on the testimony of Leva among others. But a news article has been discovered datelined the day of the medal presentation, that is, the previous day, which states that “Forrestal is flying tomorrow to Hobe Sound, Fla., for a long rest.” Obviously the trip had been planned, by someone or some group, all along. (See the article “James Forrestal’s ‘Breakdown’ ” under the David Martin link below.)

On March 31 Clifford Swanson, Surgeon General of the Navy, began proceedings to have Forrestal hospitalized if he so desired. Two days later Forrestal was flown from Hobe Sound back to Washington and admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital suffering from what the doctors described as exhaustion and depression due to overwork.

He was placed on the 16th floor of the central tower in a suite with a small kitchen. By all accounts after a few weeks rest he had recovered, yet he was not released. Seven and a half weeks later, on May 22 a few minutes before 2 a.m., he went out the kitchen window, landing on a roof 13 floors below with a bathrobe cord knotted around his neck.

A military board of investigation “for the purpose of inquiring into and reporting upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal” was convened on May 23 by Morton D. Willcutts, Rear Admiral of the Navy’s Medical Corps, with Captain A. A. Marsteller as senior ranking officer. The proceedings lasted five days. The resulting report, approved July 13, 1949, is now known as the Willcutts Report. The Navy never published the report in full and it remained filed away and forgotten until April 2004, when David Martin discovered it using a Freedom of Information Act request. A PDF photocopy is at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University.

The HTML rendition of the Willcutts Report presented here has several advantages over the photocopy. It is much easier to read, your browser can find desired text instantly, Google can better index it, and you can easily and accurately quote the report using copy-paste. The ability to search will be especially useful since the report is a mass of unorganized detail.

Even a cursory reading of the report reveals that books about Forrestal seriously misrepresent what happened the evening of May 21st 1949. David Martin, who has made a specialty of exposing the chicanery of what he calls court historians and journalists, analyzes this in detail in his series of articles cited above. Forrestal has been called crazy, yet you will search the report in vain for such words as delusion, persecution, anxiety, paranoia.

The report begins rather boringly with 27 pages of official approvals, statements and endorsements. The meat is the Proceedings section, a transcript of witness testimony starting on photocopy page 28. This section’s pages are numbered 1 to 61 in the report, which are pages 28 to 88 of the photocopy. Then follows an untitled review of the evidence, and lastly an appendix of exhibits (including the most revealing Nurse’s Notes). The first 27 pages of the report – numbered 1 to 27 in the photocopy – are not part of the report proper, though it’s usually convenient to refer to everything as simply “the report.”

It is provided below uninterrupted by comment (except for bracketed notes on textual lapses) but a few remarks must be made at the outset. Forrestal had long antagonized two groups known for assassinating their opponents: communists and zionists. Any investigation of his death worthy of the name would have considered the very real possibility he had been murdered, “suicided” as the expression goes, yet this possibility is never explicitly raised in the report. The board members and the witnesses they call all seem to take for granted that Forrestal killed himself. The questions asked focus on one issue: Was anyone in the Naval Medical Corps responsible? The report is far from the very thorough inquiry it claims to be.

When in the report you read about providing Forrestal “security” it always means protecting him from himself, never from an outside threat. That he might have needed the latter kind of protection apparently never occurred to the hospital administration.

Everyone in the Medical Corps who dealt with Forrestal before his death seems worried about getting charged with incompetence. Their worry is understandable since they were responsible for preventing patients in the neuropsychiatric ward from injuring themselves. If Forrestal had to die, better for their reputation had it not been by suicide. If Forrestal had to die an unnatural death, better had it been murder. Thus the investigative board’s failure to consider the possibility of murder, given that it was a possibility, is all the more puzzling. Their naïveté, if such it was, was not in the Medical Corps’ interest.

In spite of ignoring the murder angle, the board never states flat out that the death was suicide, either. Winfred Overholser’s statement (photocopy page 2) is his opinion of the report rather than part of the report itself. In particular, he says: “From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression.” This is a gratuitous remark since the report, despite it insinuating suicide, reaches no conclusion regarding the ultimate cause of Forrestal’s death. It simply does not address the question. Neither of its two “Finding of Facts” sections (page 22 and page 88) mentions suicide, and its untitled review of evidence (page 89) states only that the hospital psychologists considered him a potential suicide and that they took a calculated risk, and then abruptly – too abruptly – ends.

Reading the transcript of witnesses, some pompous, some naïve, many apprehensive they will be charged with negligence, the impression gradually builds of a silent presence lurking over the proceedings: the ghost of unasked questions.

The main thing to observe while reading the report is that besides being inconclusive regarding the cause of death the investigation was amazingly incomplete. The Medical Corps, its recorder and review board, again and again fail to consider obviously pertinent lines of inquiry. You can see the failure by considering the report alone, as if it were your only source of information about the case, and then you can see further omissions by examining other sources.

Here are some questions and observations that might occur to anyone while reading the report. You can click the small square buttons  (  )  to jump to an appropriate point in the Proceedings testimony. Click your browser’s back button, or press Backspace or Alt left-arrow , to return to where you were. (You can just ignore the small square buttons on first reading.)

 Why would a man, angry that a newspaper columnist he despised had called him crazy, then prove it by leaping out a 16th story window? 

 The psychiatrist George Raines emphasizes that Forrestal was a fast mover, that “he moved like lightning.” (To go outside the world of the report for a moment, photos of Forrestal while alive show a man who carried himself exceptionally well. Such people are graceful, efficient in their movement.) Then Raines takes the ability to move rapidly to mean acting on impulse. But agility is not carelessness or impetuosity, they are completely different attributes. Agility is a positive quality and doesn’t entail anything negative. 

 Even by April 9 Forrestal was doing well. The following is from the Nurse’s Notes of that evening, photocopy pages 47 and 48 (exhibit 3 items #57 and #58).   April 10, Hour 14:30 (original all in caps, some punctuation added here):  “Pt. woke up. Struck up conversation with corpsman by saying ‘Prise, you must begin to regard your patients as animals in a zoo after a while.’ When I told him I didn’t he smiled and said ‘That’s good.’ ”  Hour 16:00, after a visitor:  “... Pt. in very good mood.”

 On May 20th and again the 21st, the night Forrestal was to fall to his death an hour or two after midnight, a new man was assigned to the third shift watch.  Why didn’t the board call the earlier third shift watch, C. F. Stuthers , to testify so that he could be asked what he usually did and experienced on duty, and compare it with what his replacement did and experienced?

 What was the background of that replacement, Robert Wayne Harrison, who as it turns out had been assigned to the hospital only a week or so before steps were taken to admit Forrestal? 

 For that matter, what was the background of everyone at the hospital who could possibly have accessed Forrestal the night of May 21st?

 It is easy to get the impression from the report that there were no other patients on the 16th floor, that Forrestal had the whole floor all to himself. But surely such an unusual situation would have been explicitly stated in the report, and it isn’t. Who then were the other patients and when were they admitted? Not only were these patients worth questioning because one of them might have seen or heard something unusual, what better way for an assassin to gain access to the floor than as a fake patient?

 Common sense if not common or military law dictates that an unnatural death be presumed a potential homicide until proved otherwise. Why wasn’t at least one professional criminal investigator on the board of inquiry? An admiral may have executive ability and still be a fool when it comes to conducting a criminal investigation. The entertaining fraud Uri Geller fooled many a Ph.D. yet was quickly exposed by James Randi, a theatrical magician who knew the trickster business. When it came to investigating a homicide the board was no place for amateurs.

 That said, at times it seems that only duplicity could account for the board’s otherwise inexplicable lack of curiosity.

 Look at the photographs of Forrestal’s bedroom, exhibits 2H, 2J and 2K – especially 2K.  A man lived in that room for seven weeks, has just met a death as unexpected as it was violent, and his bedroom looks like something out of Hotel Beautiful. Forrestal’s suite should have been treated as a crime scene, yet obviously someone had cleaned up before this photographic record was made. Nurse Dorothy Turner, who saw the room minutes after Forrestal’s death, describes slippers on the floor and a bed whose sheets are turned back.  Who ordered the cleanup and why? The review board called one of at least two photographers as witness. He fails to say when he took his pictures and the board does not ask.  Judging from sunlight streaming through the windows in the report exhibit pictures, they were taken several hours into the day. Why weren’t pictures taken about the same time as those of Forrestal’s body, soon after his fall,  or if there were where are they?

 At one point the board asks nurse Dorothy Turner: “You said you saw [Forrestal’s] slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?” Yet in the proceedings as transcribed in the report she had not mentioned seeing slippers, indeed no one had mentioned any slippers before this. She answers the question as if nothing were wrong with it. 

 Before the question alluded to above, Dorothy Turner had said she saw broken glass on the bed right after Forrestal was missed.  The board ignores the broken glass, and fails to ask the obvious question: Were there signs of a struggle? For surely broken glass suggests this. In earlier testimony a photographer showed pictures of broken glass on the rug – taken he said about an hour after Forrestal’s death, though the picture put in the report may have been taken later – so the board members had had time to think about this evidence. 

 How long was the bathrobe cord found tied around Forrestal’s neck? (This information may be in exhibit 4, which is missing from the released report, but such an important detail should have been brought out in testimony as well.) What evidence was there, if any, that the cord had been tied to something else too, as insinuated by Raines?  We are told the cord was unbroken.  How could an intelligent man fail to securely tie a knot that many a six year old knows? What were the cord lengths to each side of the knot? The board gives short shrift to the most important piece of physical evidence in the case.

 The cord when found is described as not tied tight enough to prevent breathing.  There are two points the board fails to consider. One is that by the time the cord’s tightness was tested Forrestal had no pulse or muscle tone, and his body had lost a massive amount of blood from the eviscerating damage of a 13 story fall.  Doubtless all this had the effect of loosening the cord. The second point is that there is another vital process to consider besides breathing: blood flow to the brain. Preventing it requires much less force than choking. The “guillotine” blood choke used in hand-to-hand combat causes unconsciousness in a matter of seconds by compressing the carotid artery.

 Neither the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service, also known simply as the NIS, Naval Investigative Service) nor the FBI is mentioned in the report.

 The report insinuates, though no one actually says it outright, that Forrestal momentarily hung outside the window before falling to his death.  How far from the building wall was his body found? This important question is never asked.

 The name of Edward William Prise is consistently misspelled “Price” throughout the report though actually it is “Prise,” as can be seen from his signature in the Nurse’s Notes.

 When Harrison, the watch on duty the night of May 21st, is asked if he heard any unusual noises from the kitchen, he replies not only “No” he adds “I heard nothing.” When asked if he was close enough to hear any unusual noises, he replies not only “Yes” he adds “I definitely would have.” Yet an unusual noise needn’t be loud, and loud or not could be mistaken for a usual noise. His No and Yes are reasonable, his emphasis perhaps peculiar and unjustified. The saying comes to mind: he doth protest too much. 

 Brought out in later testimony is that the  Petri dish - cum - ashtray  in Forrestal’s bedroom was whole when Forrestal was last seen alive  and in shards immediately after his death. (To be precise, the dish/ashtray was gone and broken glass was on the bed.)    This shattering of glass was one noise both loud and unusual that Harrison must have heard if he was attentive and not hard of hearing. The board didn’t recall Harrison and ask him about noise from the bedroom as well as from the kitchen. Why did the board confine their question to the kitchen in the first place? What were the sounds, if any, from the bedroom?

 Why didn’t the board reexamine Price/Prise after his volunteered testimony about a book and writing, and ask him what he was talking about? 

 The board fails to ask Utz to clarify the contradiction between his (rather illiterate) testimony that he did not see Forrestal when asked to get orange juice for him, and his later testimony that he did.   (Utz doesn’t seem to be precise-minded and may have taken “see” to mean “have some sort of dealing with.”)

 The psychiatrist Raines refers to a handwritten copy of a poem Forrestal was supposed to have made.  The board doesn’t follow up on this, either during Raines’ testimony or later. A photostat of a handwritten poem appears in the appendix , yet the recorder never particularly introduces it in evidence. It isn’t listed in the exhibits contents.  However from Raines testimony you find that it was placed in the nursing record, an odd place for an ancient Greek poem, or any poem for that matter. The nursing record is exhibit 3.  Amazingly, no witness is called to determine the poem copy’s provenance or to corroborate Raines’ statement that the handwriting looks like Forrestal’s.  (In fact the handwriting is not Forrestal’s, see the next section below, “The World Outside the Report.”)

 Why is the book that is implied in Raines’ testimony  not among the exhibits? 

 One gets the impression that Forrestal’s admission to the hospital was voluntary but that there was an element of coercion to his extended stay. As the saying goes: “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” – and they certainly had Forrestal. This was during a period in America when psychiatrists wielded enormous power over someone they labeled “patient.” Just how voluntary was Forrestal’s stay?

 When a witness worries, between the lines, about being charged with negligence, it underlines the idea that Forrestal’s death was suicide. Some witnesses might have acted worried for that very reason, though doubtless for most witnesses the worry was sincere (even if to himself he thought it was murder). The same applies to a board member worrying about the Medical Corps being charged with negligence.

 Forrestal was in the hospital seven weeks and pretty much well for most of that time, yet nowhere does anyone mention him going much beyond his 16th floor suite – until he went out the window. Why isn’t how he was shut-up in the hospital tower addressed in the report? Was he taken down for a walk outside now and then? (The answer to the second question is No, see the next section.)

 Forrestal was restless, pacing the floor, the evening before his death.  The report insinuates – this is one of the most insinuatingist reports ever – that the restlessness was due to some dark psychic problem, that even then he was driving himself to self-destruction. But of course his restlessness could have been due to any number of things, and considering his normality, even cheerfulness, at the time,   - something else was far more likely – not least of which was that he was anticipating his release. (Again going outside the report, Forrestal’s brother was coming the next day to move him to more congenial surroundings in which to complete his convalescence. If Raines or other witnesses knew of this they didn’t mention it before the board, or if they did mention it it was left out of the report.)

 Who were Forrestal’s visitors, especially in the days before his death? Why were none of them called to describe what they and Forrestal had talked about, Forrestal’s mental attitude, his plans for the future?

 Forrestal didn’t belong in a hospital in the first place, at least not for an extended stay. He had no medical, organic problem.

 The mentality of the psychiatrist Raines is best illustrated by an old anecdote which is not really a joke. A man goes to a psychiatrist and tells him his problem. The psychiatrist pronounces: “You don’t love your mother.” The man replies: “But I do love my mother.” The psychiatrist, triumphantly: “Ah ha! You love your mother too much!” Everyone says Forrestal was doing well before he jumped / got shoved out the window. This is no problem for Raines, who glibly pontificates:  When the “patient” is almost cured that is the most dangerous time ! 

 Maybe even Raines didn’t believe it. He was in charge of Forrestal’s case yet he left town for a conference in Canada just days before Forrestal’s death. But the contradiction is nothing for a glib man. Raines says leaving was part of the treatment to wean Forrestal from his “dependence” on him.  A dependence not the least in evidence.

 Forrestal left no suicide note, but psychiatrist Raines has a ready line of argument. From the missing note and the assumption of suicide he deduces that Forrestal was “impulsive,” then uses that impulsiveness to explain the suicide. The board accepts this circular argument without comment.  On reexamination another day, Raines admits – not realizing that it is an admission:  “There was nothing in his previous history or behavior to indicate that there would be such an impulsive move ... .”   Again and again, the very fact that Forrestal showed no sign of being suicidal is used to insinuate that he committed suicide.

 Forrestal was wearing only his pajamas when found on the ledge/roof.  Nurse Dorothy Turner searched Forrestal’s room right after she realized the man she had seen outside might be Forrestal and she did not see a bathrobe.  Presumably it was in the closet (a shallow closet set in an exterior wall left of the bed) with the closet door closed, as in exhibit 2K,  but minus its sash/cord. Why would a man supposedly acting “impulsively” be so fastidious after acquiring the makings of a noose?

 Raymond W. Waggoner had no direct knowledge of the case whatever – all he knew was what he read in the newspapers and heard on the radio. Thus it was grossly improper for the board to allow Raines to read Waggoner’s letter as testimony and for the recorder to offer it in evidence. Yet there it went, to be reflected again in the news, like the squeal of a public address system when the microphone gets too near the loudspeaker. 

 All who saw Forrestal’s body before it was moved from the point of impact refer to the location, if they refer to it at all, as a ledge. When they mention a floor they say it is off the 3rd floor. Board members, however, when initiating discussion of the landing location always refer to a roof. No witness contradicts them. The roof is said to be that of a building two stories high adjoining the central building, and the ledge/roof is said to be level with the central building’s 3rd floor. The board in its two Finding of Facts refers to a ledge rather than a roof .   The pathologist testifies that Forrestal’s injuries were “apparently caused by a high fall on a hard surface which was covered with asphalt and cinder rock.”  which would indicate he landed on a roof. The one photographer who testified doesn’t say exactly where Forrestal’s body was located but does mention a ledge in a photograph and “Right below that ledge was a roof ... .” 

 On the first day of the Proceedings the board notes (deck is jargon for floor): “... the body landed on the roof of the second deck, on a level with the third deck, striking first a ledge of the fourth deck ... .” (emphasis added)  This is the only place in the report where it is said Forrestal hit something else before landing. No witness mentions this mid-drop strike, though nurse Turner mentions hearing a “double thud.” Does the fourth floor have a ledge?

 Here is a more complete quote of the board’s statement referred to above (again emphasis added): “... the body landed on the roof of the second deck, on a level with the third deck, striking first a ledge of the fourth deck on the northeast corner of building one ...” – that is, the central tower.  “Corner” is a bit ambiguous on first reading and without knowing the shape of the building. Going beyond the confines of the report for a moment, between the third (maybe fourth) and sixteenth floors the floor plan of the building is shaped like a (very fat) plus sign. Thus each quadrant of the building has one inward “corner” and two outward corners. (See the photographs at the bottom of this webpage, after the report.) The board must have meant the inward corner because they said “the” rather than “a” corner, and because in the time it took Forrestal to drop 13 floors – about 3 seconds – to reach the outward corner directly ahead his horizontal speed exiting the window would have to have been about 20 feet per second.

 The board asks psychiatrist Smith, in effect, what he thought of placing Forrestal on an upper floor where he might be in a position to fall or jump. His answer is, in effect, that it’s done all the time. This is patently disingenuous, as is the board’s failure to respond.  Since it was Raines who placed Forrestal on the 16th floor, why was a similar question not asked of him? (More on this in the next section below, “The World Outside the Report.”)

 Raines’ initial portrait of Forrestal is at times rather unattractive.  He may have asked Forrestal leading questions. Though Raines’ unreliability, even mendacity, as a witness is evident, still some of this portrait might be true to life. Keep in mind this is the late 1940s, the heyday of psychoanalysis, a certain kind of psychoanalysis now mercifully in disrepute. People were a little spoiled back then, and Forrestal may have imbibed the prevailing silliness: a self-absorption in nonsense that only the well-off can afford to indulge.

Those are some thoughts that might occur to you if all you knew about the case came from the Willcutts Report.

And both Raines and the board must have known what was going on in the world outside the hospital that made the poem especially significant.

The poem consisted of some verses from Sophocles’ play Ajax. Spoken by a Greek chorus, the sentiment is rather like Hamlet’s in his soliloquy on death. Right from the beginning the press played up this poem. A New York Times article featured it in an article on May 23. This was the day before Raines testified, so someone on the board or within the hospital must have talked about it. It was this poem, and the rumor either made up or repeated by unscrupulous journalists that Forrestal decided to kill himself while copying it, that more than anything else gave the notion of suicide semi-plausibility.

And the board let it pass as if it were a minor detail. This is the only place in the report where the poem gets mentioned.

There are two problems with the newspaper stories. First, there is no evidence Forrestal had been copying anything immediately before his death. There were no witnesses at the time. Corpsman Price/Prise went out of his way to say that he wasn’t sure that Forrestal wrote anything earlier that evening, and Harrison said he had not seen Forrestal reading while he was on watch after midnight. (The account by Arnold A. Rogow in his 1963 biography of Forrestal is a complete fabrication. Rogow invents the actions of Price/Prise, the number of copied lines of the poem and many other things.)

Note from James Forrestal to John O’Hara -click to enlarge-

Note from James Forrestal to Harry Truman -click to enlarge-

Willcutts Report poem transcription -click to enlarge-

Raines claimed this poem was written in Forrestal’s handwriting when obviously it isn’t. Either Raines is a complete fool – and there is some evidence for that – or this was not an honest mistake. No wonder the Navy didn’t release the report.

To repeat, the board never follows up on the poem. We are not told where it was found, who found it or anything about a book from which it might have been copied. Why did the board not make the poem a separate exhibit and investigate it thoroughly? Who was responsible for sticking it in the nursing record, of all places? Raines probably lied, but what of the board members? They could not have honestly omitted a systematic examination of the poem and its provenance, mere incompetence doesn’t cover it.

(Exhibit 3 is the nursing or clinical record. The Appendix contains many photostats for this exhibit and most have handwritten numbers at the bottom, in order. The first photostat is the only one containing a poem. It shows the title and the poem’s first 15 lines – or 7 ½ depending on how you count – except for the last word of the bottom line – or midline – where the corner is torn off. The photostat is obviously slightly truncated from the original, slightly assuming the original was 8 ½ by 11. The photostat is unnumbered but in the photostat after it, the items – there are two in the second photostat – are numbered 2 and 3. Evidently the one photostat of the poem shows all the board had of any poem though it would take three more lines to complete its last sentence.)

Note Raines’ remark that the poem is written on brown paper, as if that were as unusual as it sounds. Did Forrestal even have access to brown paper instead of white? Yet another item in the board’s capacious blind spot.

Note the poem copier’s clean, self-confident manner of writing. Yet we are to believe that seconds later, in an access of impulsivity, he will grab his bathrobe sash, go across the hall and through the kitchen, tie one end of the bathrobe sash to the kitchen radiator below the window – not too well – tie the other end about his neck with a jerk, and clamber over the window sill (measuring about two feet deep) expecting to hang outside by what’s left over. Because Drew Pearson said he was crazy?

Note the moldered look of the paper on which the poem is written. It is creased and ragged, the lower right corner torn off, as if it had been knocking about for quite awhile. Why wasn’t this lack of freshness remarked upon and inquired about?

The poem invites conjecture. The most telling fact is this:  Whoever copied the poem made no attempt whatever to imitate Forrestal’s handwriting.  This suggests the copy was made innocently, that it was never intended to be taken for Forrestal’s. It could have been made long before Forrestal even arrived at Bethesda.

If there was an anthology of poetry in Forrestal’s room containing “Chorus from Ajax” it probably would have come from a library. Someone else, another patient say, might have made a copy of the poem and left it in the book, quite awhile ago judging from the scruffy, knocked about look of it, and eventually it found its way into Forrestal’s room along with the book. Or the poem’s copier could have placed it in another book that Forrestal eventually got, which would explain the lack of any book in the exhibits since in that case Forrestal’s room would not have contained the original book. (Both conjectures assume the poem was found in Forrestal’s room as the report insinuates.)

But one needn’t determine the how or who of the poem to know that it played no rôle in Forrestal’s life, and only the dishonesty of Raines, the Willcutts board, and certain journalists and biographers have given it one in his death.

An honest attempt at biography is the book The Death of James Forrestal by “Cornell Simpson,” a penname, published in 1966 (unchanged, the author relates, from a manuscript written five years earlier). Simpson describes an interview with Forrestal’s brother Henry, at his home in Beacon, New York. Henry Forrestal said that the hospital refused to allow at least three of Forrestal’s close personal friends to visit and at first refused him as well. This gives the lie to the insufferable Raines insinuating that only cranks and gold diggers were refused admittance and saying outright that Forrestal’s friends gave Raines “nothing but the most complete cooperation.” From the book:

Simpson’s book was favorably reviewed by Medford Evans in American Opinion April 1967. Evans had been living in Washington D.C. at the time of Forrestal’s death. From his review:

The biography Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley (1992) is flawed by references to Rogow’s dishonest biography, but the book contains some valuable material. Note this item, which contradicts Smith’s testimony mentioned in the section above:

Forrestal’s chauffeur was a Navy enlisted man named John Spalding. 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. Another witness absent from the proceedings.

There’s much more about the world outside the Willcutts Report, including suspects and motivation, under the link “David Martin” near the top of this webpage.

The missing description of the cord is a major lapse since there is little description of it in the report. And if any of the missing photographs reveal the distance of Forrestal’s body from the building wall, that would provide information lacking in the report.

The exhibit photographs 2A through 2K by John Edward McClain were obviously taken several hours into daylight, yet presumably some photographs were taken earlier, say about the same time as Harley F. Cope photographed the body (between 3 and 3:15 a.m.). If so, these photographs are missing from the report.

Then there are two, possibly three or four, unacknowledged gaps in the text of the report. The transcript of Francis Whitney Westneat’s testimony is missing several lines involving what was found on Forrestal’s body (see the top of photocopy page 68). This lapse may be due to faulty photocopying by the Navy.

In the transcript of Dorothy Turner’s testimony, which also appears typographically sound, the board asks (emphasis added): “You said you saw his slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?” Yet there is no record of Dorothy Turner or anyone else mentioning slippers before this. She does, however, answer the question as if she had. Very likely there is a gap in the original report. See photocopy page 80, question 5.

The transcript of Edward William Price/Prise’s testimony, though it appears typographically sound, may be missing a part involving “writing” and an unnamed and possibly nonexistent “book,” both of which he referred to in the statement he volunteered after questioning. Even if this writing and book were common knowledge from discussion among hospital staff or reading newspaper reports outside the courtroom – and that does appear to be the case (see the section immediately above) – the board, one would think, would have asked him to be complete and specific for the official record. Thus there may be a gap in the original report. Another possibility is that the board’s failure to reexamine Price/Prise is part of the cover-up of the alleged suicide poem: if there is no book and no writing, the poem would have to be examined more closely. See photocopy page 75.

Finally, consider the last page, photocopy page 89, the review of evidence headed “Office of the Medical Officer in Command” and dated June 1, 1949. A page might be missing after it since it ends so abruptly and also one would expect it to be signed by Admiral Willcutts.

Undoubtedly these two were important, Harrison being the man on watch when Forrestal disappeared and Price/Prise the man on watch only two hours before. However, the board was investigating the suspicious death of a man entrusted to their care, a man who happened to be the former U. S. Secretary of Defense. His death was due to either suicide or murder, and you would expect its investigators to put an appropriate amount of effort into determining which.

One of the four uncalled corpsmen was W. R. Breon.  He attended to Forrestal once a day throughout his stay for a total of 52 shifts – over 410 hours give or take a few – more than any other corpsman. Surely he was worth questioning as to Forrestal’s moods and habits.

Another unmentioned corpsman was J. M. Kelley.  He worked 31 shifts during the first three fifths of Forrestal’s stay.

The non-witness C. F. Suthers worked 17 shifts near the end.  Though he was with Forrestal fewer hours than Breon, Price/Prise and Kelley he is the board’s most glaring omission. He had worked the regular third shift before Harrison replaced him only the day before Forrestal disappeared. Of all the corpsmen, Suthers would have been best able to testify about Forrestal’s moods and habits during those hours of the day.

The fourth man the board ignored was Iver P. Kipp, who worked three shifts near the beginning of Forrestal’s stay. Together Breon, Kelley and Kipp were the corpsmen on watch during Forrestal’s first days at Bethesda. They were in a position to tell the board, and have it preserved in the record, about his general health when he arrived.

Besides the four hospital corpsmen, none of Forrestal’s visitors were called to testify. For example, Admiral Swanson, head of the medical corps, visited 14 times times throughout Forrestal’s stay. According to Dr. Hightower’s testimony, question 14, Forrestal’s financial administrator and close friend Paul Strieffler visited Forrestal Saturday morning May 21, the day before he died. How did Forrestal strike Striefler at that time and did Forrestal mention any changes to his finances suggesting that he was, or was not, looking forward to a future?

Instead, the testimony as to Forrestal’s state of mind is limited to hospital personnel: the psychiatric doctors (strangers, even professional psychiatrists – perhaps and ironically especially psychiatrists – are less than trustworthy judges about this), Price/Prise and a man who had been with him only one shift and a fraction of the last, Harrison.

Finally, the board failed to interview any of the other patients who were on Forrestal’s floor at the time of his death.

Many of the missing witnesses, though none of the floor’s other patients, can be found buried in the (incomplete) handwritten Nurse’s Notes contained in the Report’s appendix of exhibits. Buried is no exaggeration. It takes a great deal of effort and perseverance to make sense of these notes in their original photocopy/photostat form.  They are now cleaned up in “The Nurse’s Notes” linked to in the Exhibits section.

Two terms used in a military board of inquiry may be unfamiliar to the reader: the “recorder” is the prosecutor, here beholden to the Medical Corps; the “reporter,” on the other hand, records the proceedings and testimony.

Tower eight, tower twelve, etc. indicate the floor of the single tower.

One final observation:  The less educated and lower ranked a witness the more perceptive and connected to reality they seem to be. When a glib head psychiatrist says, after the fact, that the period just before recovery, when a “patient” is almost completely well, is the most dangerous – it sounds manufactured to suit the occasion. When a nurse or corpsman says a man was friendly and cheerful, and there was nothing unusual about this – it sounds authentic.

One needn’t agree with everything James Forrestal did or believed during his career to care about his death and the veracity of his last associates. Involved is the possible assassination of someone who had been one of the highest ranking officials in Washington, and a subsequent cover-up – as argued above – which was, it could be argued, even worse. Only in a banana republic are such things treated lightly.

The proceedings of the board of investigation, the proceedings and findings of the board of investigation in revision, and the actions of the convening and reviewing authorities thereon in the attached case of the late Mr. James V. Forrestal, are approved.

Francis P. Mathews

I, Winfred Overholser, of Washington, D. C., being duly sworn, do hereby solemnly state as follows: I am a physician, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Boston University in 1916. During my entire professional career since that time I have specialized in the care and treatment of mental disorders. I served in the Neuropsychiatric Section of the Army in 1918-19, and in the Massachusetts State Hospital Service from 1917 to 1936. From June 1934 to December 1936 I was Commissioner of Mental Diseases for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since October 1937 I have been Superintendent of Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D. C., a large mental hospital operated by the Federal Government. From 1925 to 1934 I taught psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and since 1938 I have been Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine. I am a former President of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, the New England Society of Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association. I am also a member of the National Board of Medical Examiners. From 1940 to 1945 I was Chairman of the Committee on Neuropsychiatry of the National Research Council and Consultant to the Office of Scientific Research and Development. I am duly licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

I have read carefully the report of the very thorough inquiry conducted by a Board of Investigation convened at the United States Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, on May 23, 1949 to investigate and report upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal at that hospital on May 22, 1949.

From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression. It is my further opinion that the care

Subscribed and sworn at Washington, District of Columbia, this 19^th day of September, 1949, before me,

Roscoe S. Aull
Notary Public

My commission expires 9-14-54 .

The proceedings and finding, in revision, of the Board of Investigation in the foregoing case of the late Mr. James V. Forrestal, are approved.

1. Returned.

2. The Secretary of the Navy is of the opinion that the language in paragraph 2 of the Finding of Facts, dated July 11, 1949, made by the Naval Board of Investigation appointed to inquire into the suicide of the former Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, is ambiguous and ill advised in the following particulars:

(a) The first line of paragraph 2 under the “Finding of Facts” states, “that the late James V. Forrestal died on or about May 22, 1949.” The record indicates that Mr. Forrestal’s body was found at 1:50 a.m., and that he was pronounced dead at 1:55 a.m. This, taken in connection with the two words “or about” in the language quoted above, would indicate that the Board of Investigation could not determine whether Mr. Forrestal died before midnight or after midnight, and would at least imply that his whereabouts was not known during that period of time, with the possible deduction from such a statement that he may have jumped out of the window before midnight and that fact not have been known to the staff.

3. In view of the above it is recommended that the record be returned to the convening authority for submission to the Board for the purpose of further deliberation with a view of fixing the time of Mr. Forrestal’s death as definitely as possible. For instance, it could be stated he died about 1:50 a.m. on Sunday, May 22, 1949, or whatever would definitely and accurately reflect the fact as found by the Board.

Francis P. Mathews

Introduction – Who Was James Forrestal and What Is the Willcutts Report?
Things to Look for while Reading the Report
The World Outside the Report
Material Missing in the FOIA Copy of the Report and/or the Report Itself
Obscured Witness I,  II
Missing Witnesses
Editorial Protocol
Introduction Continued
The Willcutts Report

Approvals and Statements
Endorsements
Proceedings
Conclusion
Appendix

Photographs of Bethesda Naval Hospital
Approximate Floor Plan of Forrestal’s Suite

James Forrestal was Secretary of the Navy during the last year of World War II. In September 1947, after consolidation of the Army and Navy, President Truman appointed him Secretary of Defense, the first person to hold that position. Forrestal later became outspoken in his criticism of certain policies of the Truman administration. We won’t go into the details or the smear campaign waged against him by Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and others. Near the end of March 1949 Truman demanded Forrestal’s resignation, a move Forrestal had anticipated.

Forrestal’s successor was sworn in the morning of March 28. Later the same day Truman presented Forrestal with the Distinguished Service medal. The next day the House Armed Services Committee held a ceremony lauding Forrestal’s military service, at which he gave a brief speech. Afterwards, the usual account is that Stuart Symington, Secretary of the Air Force, sought out Forrestal and talked with him on their ride back to the Pentagon. Marx Leva, Forrestal’s top aide, found Forrestal profoundly changed after this meeting, preoccupied and absent minded. He informed Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt who then persuaded Forrestal to go with him to a vacation spot at Hobe Sound, on the east coast of southern Florida, for a rest. That, to repeat, is the usual account, based on the testimony of Leva among others. But a news article has been discovered datelined the day of the medal presentation, that is, the previous day, which states that “Forrestal is flying tomorrow to Hobe Sound, Fla., for a long rest.” Obviously the trip had been planned, by someone or some group, all along. (See the article “James Forrestal’s ‘Breakdown’ ” under the David Martin link below.)

On March 31 Clifford Swanson, Surgeon General of the Navy, began proceedings to have Forrestal hospitalized if he so desired. Two days later Forrestal was flown from Hobe Sound back to Washington and admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital suffering from what the doctors described as exhaustion and depression due to overwork.

He was placed on the 16th floor of the central tower in a suite with a small kitchen. By all accounts after a few weeks rest he had recovered, yet he was not released. Seven and a half weeks later, on May 22 a few minutes before 2 a.m., he went out the kitchen window, landing on a roof 13 floors below with a bathrobe cord knotted around his neck.

A military board of investigation “for the purpose of inquiring into and reporting upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal” was convened on May 23 by Morton D. Willcutts, Rear Admiral of the Navy’s Medical Corps, with Captain A. A. Marsteller as senior ranking officer. The proceedings lasted five days. The resulting report, approved July 13, 1949, is now known as the Willcutts Report. The Navy never published the report in full and it remained filed away and forgotten until April 2004, when David Martin discovered it using a Freedom of Information Act request. A PDF photocopy is at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University.

The HTML rendition of the Willcutts Report presented here has several advantages over the photocopy. It is much easier to read, your browser can find desired text instantly, Google can better index it, and you can easily and accurately quote the report using copy-paste. The ability to search will be especially useful since the report is a mass of unorganized detail.

Even a cursory reading of the report reveals that books about Forrestal seriously misrepresent what happened the evening of May 21st 1949. David Martin, who has made a specialty of exposing the chicanery of what he calls court historians and journalists, analyzes this in detail in his series of articles cited above. Forrestal has been called crazy, yet you will search the report in vain for such words as delusion, persecution, anxiety, paranoia.

The report begins rather boringly with 27 pages of official approvals, statements and endorsements. The meat is the Proceedings section, a transcript of witness testimony starting on photocopy page 28. This section’s pages are numbered 1 to 61 in the report, which are pages 28 to 88 of the photocopy. Then follows an untitled review of the evidence, and lastly an appendix of exhibits (including the most revealing Nurse’s Notes). The first 27 pages of the report – numbered 1 to 27 in the photocopy – are not part of the report proper, though it’s usually convenient to refer to everything as simply “the report.”

It is provided below uninterrupted by comment (except for bracketed notes on textual lapses) but a few remarks must be made at the outset. Forrestal had long antagonized two groups known for assassinating their opponents: communists and zionists. Any investigation of his death worthy of the name would have considered the very real possibility he had been murdered, “suicided” as the expression goes, yet this possibility is never explicitly raised in the report. The board members and the witnesses they call all seem to take for granted that Forrestal killed himself. The questions asked focus on one issue: Was anyone in the Naval Medical Corps responsible? The report is far from the very thorough inquiry it claims to be.

When in the report you read about providing Forrestal “security” it always means protecting him from himself, never from an outside threat. That he might have needed the latter kind of protection apparently never occurred to the hospital administration.

Everyone in the Medical Corps who dealt with Forrestal before his death seems worried about getting charged with incompetence. Their worry is understandable since they were responsible for preventing patients in the neuropsychiatric ward from injuring themselves. If Forrestal had to die, better for their reputation had it not been by suicide. If Forrestal had to die an unnatural death, better had it been murder. Thus the investigative board’s failure to consider the possibility of murder, given that it was a possibility, is all the more puzzling. Their naïveté, if such it was, was not in the Medical Corps’ interest.

In spite of ignoring the murder angle, the board never states flat out that the death was suicide, either. Winfred Overholser’s statement (photocopy page 2) is his opinion of the report rather than part of the report itself. In particular, he says: “From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression.” This is a gratuitous remark since the report, despite it insinuating suicide, reaches no conclusion regarding the ultimate cause of Forrestal’s death. It simply does not address the question. Neither of its two “Finding of Facts” sections (page 22 and page 88) mentions suicide, and its untitled review of evidence (page 89) states only that the hospital psychologists considered him a potential suicide and that they took a calculated risk, and then abruptly – too abruptly – ends.

Reading the transcript of witnesses, some pompous, some naïve, many apprehensive they will be charged with negligence, the impression gradually builds of a silent presence lurking over the proceedings: the ghost of unasked questions.

The main thing to observe while reading the report is that besides being inconclusive regarding the cause of death the investigation was amazingly incomplete. The Medical Corps, its recorder and review board, again and again fail to consider obviously pertinent lines of inquiry. You can see the failure by considering the report alone, as if it were your only source of information about the case, and then you can see further omissions by examining other sources.

Here are some questions and observations that might occur to anyone while reading the report. You can click the small square buttons  (  )  to jump to an appropriate point in the Proceedings testimony. Click your browser’s back button, or press Backspace or Alt left-arrow , to return to where you were. (You can just ignore the small square buttons on first reading.)

 Why would a man, angry that a newspaper columnist he despised had called him crazy, then prove it by leaping out a 16th story window? 

 The psychiatrist George Raines emphasizes that Forrestal was a fast mover, that “he moved like lightning.” (To go outside the world of the report for a moment, photos of Forrestal while alive show a man who carried himself exceptionally well. Such people are graceful, efficient in their movement.) Then Raines takes the ability to move rapidly to mean acting on impulse. But agility is not carelessness or impetuosity, they are completely different attributes. Agility is a positive quality and doesn’t entail anything negative. 

 Even by April 9 Forrestal was doing well. The following is from the Nurse’s Notes of that evening, photocopy pages 47 and 48 (exhibit 3 items #57 and #58).   April 10, Hour 14:30 (original all in caps, some punctuation added here):  “Pt. woke up. Struck up conversation with corpsman by saying ‘Prise, you must begin to regard your patients as animals in a zoo after a while.’ When I told him I didn’t he smiled and said ‘That’s good.’ ”  Hour 16:00, after a visitor:  “... Pt. in very good mood.”

 On May 20th and again the 21st, the night Forrestal was to fall to his death an hour or two after midnight, a new man was assigned to the third shift watch.  Why didn’t the board call the earlier third shift watch, C. F. Stuthers , to testify so that he could be asked what he usually did and experienced on duty, and compare it with what his replacement did and experienced?

 What was the background of that replacement, Robert Wayne Harrison, who as it turns out had been assigned to the hospital only a week or so before steps were taken to admit Forrestal? 

 For that matter, what was the background of everyone at the hospital who could possibly have accessed Forrestal the night of May 21st?

 It is easy to get the impression from the report that there were no other patients on the 16th floor, that Forrestal had the whole floor all to himself. But surely such an unusual situation would have been explicitly stated in the report, and it isn’t. Who then were the other patients and when were they admitted? Not only were these patients worth questioning because one of them might have seen or heard something unusual, what better way for an assassin to gain access to the floor than as a fake patient?

 Common sense if not common or military law dictates that an unnatural death be presumed a potential homicide until proved otherwise. Why wasn’t at least one professional criminal investigator on the board of inquiry? An admiral may have executive ability and still be a fool when it comes to conducting a criminal investigation. The entertaining fraud Uri Geller fooled many a Ph.D. yet was quickly exposed by James Randi, a theatrical magician who knew the trickster business. When it came to investigating a homicide the board was no place for amateurs.

 That said, at times it seems that only duplicity could account for the board’s otherwise inexplicable lack of curiosity.

 Look at the photographs of Forrestal’s bedroom, exhibits 2H, 2J and 2K – especially 2K.  A man lived in that room for seven weeks, has just met a death as unexpected as it was violent, and his bedroom looks like something out of Hotel Beautiful. Forrestal’s suite should have been treated as a crime scene, yet obviously someone had cleaned up before this photographic record was made. Nurse Dorothy Turner, who saw the room minutes after Forrestal’s death, describes slippers on the floor and a bed whose sheets are turned back.  Who ordered the cleanup and why? The review board called one of at least two photographers as witness. He fails to say when he took his pictures and the board does not ask.  Judging from sunlight streaming through the windows in the report exhibit pictures, they were taken several hours into the day. Why weren’t pictures taken about the same time as those of Forrestal’s body, soon after his fall,  or if there were where are they?

 At one point the board asks nurse Dorothy Turner: “You said you saw [Forrestal’s] slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?” Yet in the proceedings as transcribed in the report she had not mentioned seeing slippers, indeed no one had mentioned any slippers before this. She answers the question as if nothing were wrong with it. 

 Before the question alluded to above, Dorothy Turner had said she saw broken glass on the bed right after Forrestal was missed.  The board ignores the broken glass, and fails to ask the obvious question: Were there signs of a struggle? For surely broken glass suggests this. In earlier testimony a photographer showed pictures of broken glass on the rug – taken he said about an hour after Forrestal’s death, though the picture put in the report may have been taken later – so the board members had had time to think about this evidence. 

 How long was the bathrobe cord found tied around Forrestal’s neck? (This information may be in exhibit 4, which is missing from the released report, but such an important detail should have been brought out in testimony as well.) What evidence was there, if any, that the cord had been tied to something else too, as insinuated by Raines?  We are told the cord was unbroken.  How could an intelligent man fail to securely tie a knot that many a six year old knows? What were the cord lengths to each side of the knot? The board gives short shrift to the most important piece of physical evidence in the case.

 The cord when found is described as not tied tight enough to prevent breathing.  There are two points the board fails to consider. One is that by the time the cord’s tightness was tested Forrestal had no pulse or muscle tone, and his body had lost a massive amount of blood from the eviscerating damage of a 13 story fall.  Doubtless all this had the effect of loosening the cord. The second point is that there is another vital process to consider besides breathing: blood flow to the brain. Preventing it requires much less force than choking. The “guillotine” blood choke used in hand-to-hand combat causes unconsciousness in a matter of seconds by compressing the carotid artery.

 Neither the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service, also known simply as the NIS, Naval Investigative Service) nor the FBI is mentioned in the report.

 The report insinuates, though no one actually says it outright, that Forrestal momentarily hung outside the window before falling to his death.  How far from the building wall was his body found? This important question is never asked.

 The name of Edward William Prise is consistently misspelled “Price” throughout the report though actually it is “Prise,” as can be seen from his signature in the Nurse’s Notes.

 When Harrison, the watch on duty the night of May 21st, is asked if he heard any unusual noises from the kitchen, he replies not only “No” he adds “I heard nothing.” When asked if he was close enough to hear any unusual noises, he replies not only “Yes” he adds “I definitely would have.” Yet an unusual noise needn’t be loud, and loud or not could be mistaken for a usual noise. His No and Yes are reasonable, his emphasis perhaps peculiar and unjustified. The saying comes to mind: he doth protest too much. 

 Brought out in later testimony is that the  Petri dish - cum - ashtray  in Forrestal’s bedroom was whole when Forrestal was last seen alive  and in shards immediately after his death. (To be precise, the dish/ashtray was gone and broken glass was on the bed.)    This shattering of glass was one noise both loud and unusual that Harrison must have heard if he was attentive and not hard of hearing. The board didn’t recall Harrison and ask him about noise from the bedroom as well as from the kitchen. Why did the board confine their question to the kitchen in the first place? What were the sounds, if any, from the bedroom?

 Why didn’t the board reexamine Price/Prise after his volunteered testimony about a book and writing, and ask him what he was talking about? 

 The board fails to ask Utz to clarify the contradiction between his (rather illiterate) testimony that he did not see Forrestal when asked to get orange juice for him, and his later testimony that he did.   (Utz doesn’t seem to be precise-minded and may have taken “see” to mean “have some sort of dealing with.”)

 The psychiatrist Raines refers to a handwritten copy of a poem Forrestal was supposed to have made.  The board doesn’t follow up on this, either during Raines’ testimony or later. A photostat of a handwritten poem appears in the appendix , yet the recorder never particularly introduces it in evidence. It isn’t listed in the exhibits contents.  However from Raines testimony you find that it was placed in the nursing record, an odd place for an ancient Greek poem, or any poem for that matter. The nursing record is exhibit 3.  Amazingly, no witness is called to determine the poem copy’s provenance or to corroborate Raines’ statement that the handwriting looks like Forrestal’s.  (In fact the handwriting is not Forrestal’s, see the next section below, “The World Outside the Report.”)

 Why is the book that is implied in Raines’ testimony  not among the exhibits? 

 One gets the impression that Forrestal’s admission to the hospital was voluntary but that there was an element of coercion to his extended stay. As the saying goes: “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” – and they certainly had Forrestal. This was during a period in America when psychiatrists wielded enormous power over someone they labeled “patient.” Just how voluntary was Forrestal’s stay?

 When a witness worries, between the lines, about being charged with negligence, it underlines the idea that Forrestal’s death was suicide. Some witnesses might have acted worried for that very reason, though doubtless for most witnesses the worry was sincere (even if to himself he thought it was murder). The same applies to a board member worrying about the Medical Corps being charged with negligence.

 Forrestal was in the hospital seven weeks and pretty much well for most of that time, yet nowhere does anyone mention him going much beyond his 16th floor suite – until he went out the window. Why isn’t how he was shut-up in the hospital tower addressed in the report? Was he taken down for a walk outside now and then? (The answer to the second question is No, see the next section.)

 Forrestal was restless, pacing the floor, the evening before his death.  The report insinuates – this is one of the most insinuatingist reports ever – that the restlessness was due to some dark psychic problem, that even then he was driving himself to self-destruction. But of course his restlessness could have been due to any number of things, and considering his normality, even cheerfulness, at the time,   - something else was far more likely – not least of which was that he was anticipating his release. (Again going outside the report, Forrestal’s brother was coming the next day to move him to more congenial surroundings in which to complete his convalescence. If Raines or other witnesses knew of this they didn’t mention it before the board, or if they did mention it it was left out of the report.)

 Who were Forrestal’s visitors, especially in the days before his death? Why were none of them called to describe what they and Forrestal had talked about, Forrestal’s mental attitude, his plans for the future?

 Forrestal didn’t belong in a hospital in the first place, at least not for an extended stay. He had no medical, organic problem.

 The mentality of the psychiatrist Raines is best illustrated by an old anecdote which is not really a joke. A man goes to a psychiatrist and tells him his problem. The psychiatrist pronounces: “You don’t love your mother.” The man replies: “But I do love my mother.” The psychiatrist, triumphantly: “Ah ha! You love your mother too much!” Everyone says Forrestal was doing well before he jumped / got shoved out the window. This is no problem for Raines, who glibly pontificates:  When the “patient” is almost cured that is the most dangerous time ! 

 Maybe even Raines didn’t believe it. He was in charge of Forrestal’s case yet he left town for a conference in Canada just days before Forrestal’s death. But the contradiction is nothing for a glib man. Raines says leaving was part of the treatment to wean Forrestal from his “dependence” on him.  A dependence not the least in evidence.

 Forrestal left no suicide note, but psychiatrist Raines has a ready line of argument. From the missing note and the assumption of suicide he deduces that Forrestal was “impulsive,” then uses that impulsiveness to explain the suicide. The board accepts this circular argument without comment.  On reexamination another day, Raines admits – not realizing that it is an admission:  “There was nothing in his previous history or behavior to indicate that there would be such an impulsive move ... .”   Again and again, the very fact that Forrestal showed no sign of being suicidal is used to insinuate that he committed suicide.

 Forrestal was wearing only his pajamas when found on the ledge/roof.  Nurse Dorothy Turner searched Forrestal’s room right after she realized the man she had seen outside might be Forrestal and she did not see a bathrobe.  Presumably it was in the closet (a shallow closet set in an exterior wall left of the bed) with the closet door closed, as in exhibit 2K,  but minus its sash/cord. Why would a man supposedly acting “impulsively” be so fastidious after acquiring the makings of a noose?

 Raymond W. Waggoner had no direct knowledge of the case whatever – all he knew was what he read in the newspapers and heard on the radio. Thus it was grossly improper for the board to allow Raines to read Waggoner’s letter as testimony and for the recorder to offer it in evidence. Yet there it went, to be reflected again in the news, like the squeal of a public address system when the microphone gets too near the loudspeaker. 

 All who saw Forrestal’s body before it was moved from the point of impact refer to the location, if they refer to it at all, as a ledge. When they mention a floor they say it is off the 3rd floor. Board members, however, when initiating discussion of the landing location always refer to a roof. No witness contradicts them. The roof is said to be that of a building two stories high adjoining the central building, and the ledge/roof is said to be level with the central building’s 3rd floor. The board in its two Finding of Facts refers to a ledge rather than a roof .   The pathologist testifies that Forrestal’s injuries were “apparently caused by a high fall on a hard surface which was covered with asphalt and cinder rock.”  which would indicate he landed on a roof. The one photographer who testified doesn’t say exactly where Forrestal’s body was located but does mention a ledge in a photograph and “Right below that ledge was a roof ... .” 

 On the first day of the Proceedings the board notes (deck is jargon for floor): “... the body landed on the roof of the second deck, on a level with the third deck, striking first a ledge of the fourth deck ... .” (emphasis added)  This is the only place in the report where it is said Forrestal hit something else before landing. No witness mentions this mid-drop strike, though nurse Turner mentions hearing a “double thud.” Does the fourth floor have a ledge?

 Here is a more complete quote of the board’s statement referred to above (again emphasis added): “... the body landed on the roof of the second deck, on a level with the third deck, striking first a ledge of the fourth deck on the northeast corner of building one ...” – that is, the central tower.  “Corner” is a bit ambiguous on first reading and without knowing the shape of the building. Going beyond the confines of the report for a moment, between the third (maybe fourth) and sixteenth floors the floor plan of the building is shaped like a (very fat) plus sign. Thus each quadrant of the building has one inward “corner” and two outward corners. (See the photographs at the bottom of this webpage, after the report.) The board must have meant the inward corner because they said “the” rather than “a” corner, and because in the time it took Forrestal to drop 13 floors – about 3 seconds – to reach the outward corner directly ahead his horizontal speed exiting the window would have to have been about 20 feet per second.

 The board asks psychiatrist Smith, in effect, what he thought of placing Forrestal on an upper floor where he might be in a position to fall or jump. His answer is, in effect, that it’s done all the time. This is patently disingenuous, as is the board’s failure to respond.  Since it was Raines who placed Forrestal on the 16th floor, why was a similar question not asked of him? (More on this in the next section below, “The World Outside the Report.”)

 Raines’ initial portrait of Forrestal is at times rather unattractive.  He may have asked Forrestal leading questions. Though Raines’ unreliability, even mendacity, as a witness is evident, still some of this portrait might be true to life. Keep in mind this is the late 1940s, the heyday of psychoanalysis, a certain kind of psychoanalysis now mercifully in disrepute. People were a little spoiled back then, and Forrestal may have imbibed the prevailing silliness: a self-absorption in nonsense that only the well-off can afford to indulge.

Those are some thoughts that might occur to you if all you knew about the case came from the Willcutts Report.

And both Raines and the board must have known what was going on in the world outside the hospital that made the poem especially significant.

The poem consisted of some verses from Sophocles’ play Ajax. Spoken by a Greek chorus, the sentiment is rather like Hamlet’s in his soliloquy on death. Right from the beginning the press played up this poem. A New York Times article featured it in an article on May 23. This was the day before Raines testified, so someone on the board or within the hospital must have talked about it. It was this poem, and the rumor either made up or repeated by unscrupulous journalists that Forrestal decided to kill himself while copying it, that more than anything else gave the notion of suicide semi-plausibility.

And the board let it pass as if it were a minor detail. This is the only place in the report where the poem gets mentioned.

There are two problems with the newspaper stories. First, there is no evidence Forrestal had been copying anything immediately before his death. There were no witnesses at the time. Corpsman Price/Prise went out of his way to say that he wasn’t sure that Forrestal wrote anything earlier that evening, and Harrison said he had not seen Forrestal reading while he was on watch after midnight. (The account by Arnold A. Rogow in his 1963 biography of Forrestal is a complete fabrication. Rogow invents the actions of Price/Prise, the number of copied lines of the poem and many other things.)

Note from James Forrestal to John O’Hara -click to enlarge-

Note from James Forrestal to Harry Truman -click to enlarge-

Willcutts Report poem transcription -click to enlarge-

Raines claimed this poem was written in Forrestal’s handwriting when obviously it isn’t. Either Raines is a complete fool – and there is some evidence for that – or this was not an honest mistake. No wonder the Navy didn’t release the report.

To repeat, the board never follows up on the poem. We are not told where it was found, who found it or anything about a book from which it might have been copied. Why did the board not make the poem a separate exhibit and investigate it thoroughly? Who was responsible for sticking it in the nursing record, of all places? Raines probably lied, but what of the board members? They could not have honestly omitted a systematic examination of the poem and its provenance, mere incompetence doesn’t cover it.

(Exhibit 3 is the nursing or clinical record. The Appendix contains many photostats for this exhibit and most have handwritten numbers at the bottom, in order. The first photostat is the only one containing a poem. It shows the title and the poem’s first 15 lines – or 7 ½ depending on how you count – except for the last word of the bottom line – or midline – where the corner is torn off. The photostat is obviously slightly truncated from the original, slightly assuming the original was 8 ½ by 11. The photostat is unnumbered but in the photostat after it, the items – there are two in the second photostat – are numbered 2 and 3. Evidently the one photostat of the poem shows all the board had of any poem though it would take three more lines to complete its last sentence.)

Note Raines’ remark that the poem is written on brown paper, as if that were as unusual as it sounds. Did Forrestal even have access to brown paper instead of white? Yet another item in the board’s capacious blind spot.

Note the poem copier’s clean, self-confident manner of writing. Yet we are to believe that seconds later, in an access of impulsivity, he will grab his bathrobe sash, go across the hall and through the kitchen, tie one end of the bathrobe sash to the kitchen radiator below the window – not too well – tie the other end about his neck with a jerk, and clamber over the window sill (measuring about two feet deep) expecting to hang outside by what’s left over. Because Drew Pearson said he was crazy?

Note the moldered look of the paper on which the poem is written. It is creased and ragged, the lower right corner torn off, as if it had been knocking about for quite awhile. Why wasn’t this lack of freshness remarked upon and inquired about?

The poem invites conjecture. The most telling fact is this:  Whoever copied the poem made no attempt whatever to imitate Forrestal’s handwriting.  This suggests the copy was made innocently, that it was never intended to be taken for Forrestal’s. It could have been made long before Forrestal even arrived at Bethesda.

If there was an anthology of poetry in Forrestal’s room containing “Chorus from Ajax” it probably would have come from a library. Someone else, another patient say, might have made a copy of the poem and left it in the book, quite awhile ago judging from the scruffy, knocked about look of it, and eventually it found its way into Forrestal’s room along with the book. Or the poem’s copier could have placed it in another book that Forrestal eventually got, which would explain the lack of any book in the exhibits since in that case Forrestal’s room would not have contained the original book. (Both conjectures assume the poem was found in Forrestal’s room as the report insinuates.)

But one needn’t determine the how or who of the poem to know that it played no rôle in Forrestal’s life, and only the dishonesty of Raines, the Willcutts board, and certain journalists and biographers have given it one in his death.

An honest attempt at biography is the book The Death of James Forrestal by “Cornell Simpson,” a penname, published in 1966 (unchanged, the author relates, from a manuscript written five years earlier). Simpson describes an interview with Forrestal’s brother Henry, at his home in Beacon, New York. Henry Forrestal said that the hospital refused to allow at least three of Forrestal’s close personal friends to visit and at first refused him as well. This gives the lie to the insufferable Raines insinuating that only cranks and gold diggers were refused admittance and saying outright that Forrestal’s friends gave Raines “nothing but the most complete cooperation.” From the book:

Simpson’s book was favorably reviewed by Medford Evans in American Opinion April 1967. Evans had been living in Washington D.C. at the time of Forrestal’s death. From his review:

The biography Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley (1992) is flawed by references to Rogow’s dishonest biography, but the book contains some valuable material. Note this item, which contradicts Smith’s testimony mentioned in the section above:

Forrestal’s chauffeur was a Navy enlisted man named John Spalding. 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. Another witness absent from the proceedings.

There’s much more about the world outside the Willcutts Report, including suspects and motivation, under the link “David Martin” near the top of this webpage.

The missing description of the cord is a major lapse since there is little description of it in the report. And if any of the missing photographs reveal the distance of Forrestal’s body from the building wall, that would provide information lacking in the report.

The exhibit photographs 2A through 2K by John Edward McClain were obviously taken several hours into daylight, yet presumably some photographs were taken earlier, say about the same time as Harley F. Cope photographed the body (between 3 and 3:15 a.m.). If so, these photographs are missing from the report.

Then there are two, possibly three or four, unacknowledged gaps in the text of the report. The transcript of Francis Whitney Westneat’s testimony is missing several lines involving what was found on Forrestal’s body (see the top of photocopy page 68). This lapse may be due to faulty photocopying by the Navy.

In the transcript of Dorothy Turner’s testimony, which also appears typographically sound, the board asks (emphasis added): “You said you saw his slippers and a razor blade beside them; where did you see them?” Yet there is no record of Dorothy Turner or anyone else mentioning slippers before this. She does, however, answer the question as if she had. Very likely there is a gap in the original report. See photocopy page 80, question 5.

The transcript of Edward William Price/Prise’s testimony, though it appears typographically sound, may be missing a part involving “writing” and an unnamed and possibly nonexistent “book,” both of which he referred to in the statement he volunteered after questioning. Even if this writing and book were common knowledge from discussion among hospital staff or reading newspaper reports outside the courtroom – and that does appear to be the case (see the section immediately above) – the board, one would think, would have asked him to be complete and specific for the official record. Thus there may be a gap in the original report. Another possibility is that the board’s failure to reexamine Price/Prise is part of the cover-up of the alleged suicide poem: if there is no book and no writing, the poem would have to be examined more closely. See photocopy page 75.

Finally, consider the last page, photocopy page 89, the review of evidence headed “Office of the Medical Officer in Command” and dated June 1, 1949. A page might be missing after it since it ends so abruptly and also one would expect it to be signed by Admiral Willcutts.

Undoubtedly these two were important, Harrison being the man on watch when Forrestal disappeared and Price/Prise the man on watch only two hours before. However, the board was investigating the suspicious death of a man entrusted to their care, a man who happened to be the former U. S. Secretary of Defense. His death was due to either suicide or murder, and you would expect its investigators to put an appropriate amount of effort into determining which.

One of the four uncalled corpsmen was W. R. Breon.  He attended to Forrestal once a day throughout his stay for a total of 52 shifts – over 410 hours give or take a few – more than any other corpsman. Surely he was worth questioning as to Forrestal’s moods and habits.

Another unmentioned corpsman was J. M. Kelley.  He worked 31 shifts during the first three fifths of Forrestal’s stay.

The non-witness C. F. Suthers worked 17 shifts near the end.  Though he was with Forrestal fewer hours than Breon, Price/Prise and Kelley he is the board’s most glaring omission. He had worked the regular third shift before Harrison replaced him only the day before Forrestal disappeared. Of all the corpsmen, Suthers would have been best able to testify about Forrestal’s moods and habits during those hours of the day.

The fourth man the board ignored was Iver P. Kipp, who worked three shifts near the beginning of Forrestal’s stay. Together Breon, Kelley and Kipp were the corpsmen on watch during Forrestal’s first days at Bethesda. They were in a position to tell the board, and have it preserved in the record, about his general health when he arrived.

Besides the four hospital corpsmen, none of Forrestal’s visitors were called to testify. For example, Admiral Swanson, head of the medical corps, visited 14 times times throughout Forrestal’s stay. According to Dr. Hightower’s testimony, question 14, Forrestal’s financial administrator and close friend Paul Strieffler visited Forrestal Saturday morning May 21, the day before he died. How did Forrestal strike Striefler at that time and did Forrestal mention any changes to his finances suggesting that he was, or was not, looking forward to a future?

Instead, the testimony as to Forrestal’s state of mind is limited to hospital personnel: the psychiatric doctors (strangers, even professional psychiatrists – perhaps and ironically especially psychiatrists – are less than trustworthy judges about this), Price/Prise and a man who had been with him only one shift and a fraction of the last, Harrison.

Finally, the board failed to interview any of the other patients who were on Forrestal’s floor at the time of his death.

Many of the missing witnesses, though none of the floor’s other patients, can be found buried in the (incomplete) handwritten Nurse’s Notes contained in the Report’s appendix of exhibits. Buried is no exaggeration. It takes a great deal of effort and perseverance to make sense of these notes in their original photocopy/photostat form.  They are now cleaned up in “The Nurse’s Notes” linked to in the Exhibits section.

Two terms used in a military board of inquiry may be unfamiliar to the reader: the “recorder” is the prosecutor, here beholden to the Medical Corps; the “reporter,” on the other hand, records the proceedings and testimony.

Tower eight, tower twelve, etc. indicate the floor of the single tower.

One final observation:  The less educated and lower ranked a witness the more perceptive and connected to reality they seem to be. When a glib head psychiatrist says, after the fact, that the period just before recovery, when a “patient” is almost completely well, is the most dangerous – it sounds manufactured to suit the occasion. When a nurse or corpsman says a man was friendly and cheerful, and there was nothing unusual about this – it sounds authentic.

One needn’t agree with everything James Forrestal did or believed during his career to care about his death and the veracity of his last associates. Involved is the possible assassination of someone who had been one of the highest ranking officials in Washington, and a subsequent cover-up – as argued above – which was, it could be argued, even worse. Only in a banana republic are such things treated lightly.

The proceedings of the board of investigation, the proceedings and findings of the board of investigation in revision, and the actions of the convening and reviewing authorities thereon in the attached case of the late Mr. James V. Forrestal, are approved.

Francis P. Mathews

I, Winfred Overholser, of Washington, D. C., being duly sworn, do hereby solemnly state as follows: I am a physician, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Boston University in 1916. During my entire professional career since that time I have specialized in the care and treatment of mental disorders. I served in the Neuropsychiatric Section of the Army in 1918-19, and in the Massachusetts State Hospital Service from 1917 to 1936. From June 1934 to December 1936 I was Commissioner of Mental Diseases for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since October 1937 I have been Superintendent of Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D. C., a large mental hospital operated by the Federal Government. From 1925 to 1934 I taught psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and since 1938 I have been Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine. I am a former President of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, the New England Society of Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association. I am also a member of the National Board of Medical Examiners. From 1940 to 1945 I was Chairman of the Committee on Neuropsychiatry of the National Research Council and Consultant to the Office of Scientific Research and Development. I am duly licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

I have read carefully the report of the very thorough inquiry conducted by a Board of Investigation convened at the United States Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, on May 23, 1949 to investigate and report upon the circumstances attending the death of Mr. James V. Forrestal at that hospital on May 22, 1949.

From a study of the report, it is my opinion that Mr. James V. Forrestal came to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression. It is my further opinion that the care

Subscribed and sworn at Washington, District of Columbia, this 19^th day of September, 1949, before me,

Roscoe S. Aull
Notary Public

My commission expires 9-14-54 .

The proceedings and finding, in revision, of the Board of Investigation in the foregoing case of the late Mr. James V. Forrestal, are approved.

1. Returned.