James Forrestal and Joe McCarthy
In the middle of the 20th century
the two most important anti-Communists in the United States government were
Secretary of the Navy and later Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, and
Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But they had a great deal more in
common than that. The following passage is from pages 147-148 of the 1966
book, The Death of James Forrestal, written anonymously by someone using
the pen name, Cornell Simpson: *
There were extraordinary parallels
in the lives and deaths of McCarthy and Forrestal—two Irish-Catholic Americans
who both rose by their bootstraps to high office in Washington, D.C., and who
successively spearheaded the fight against the worldwide Communist
conspiracy. Each man was the victim of smear attacks that rose to a pitch
of vituperation and vileness previously unmatched in this century. Each
man was pathologically hated by every left-winger and subversive in
America. Each man died at a most “convenient” and strategic time.
And each death beyond doubt altered the course of history.
Appropriately, it was Forrestal who
personally alerted freshman Senator McCarthy to the Communist menace and “named
names” to him of key persons in our federal government who were consistently
shaping our policies and programs to benefit Soviet Russia. It was
Forrestal who thus directly inspired McCarthy’s subsequent exposés of Communist
influence and subversion in the federal government.
After Forrestal met his violent end,
McCarthy moved up to the front lines. And when McCarthy began publicly
exposing Communists in the State Department, the Communist party at once openly
proclaimed in the Daily Worker and elsewhere that McCarthy was now the
Communists’ main enemy. The Daily Worker also called on all
Communists and left-wing elements to unite in and give top priority to the
fight against “McCarthyism.”
For years, McCarthy continued his
important work of investigating and unmasking individual Communists infiltrated
into department after department of our federal government—and of exposing and
opposing many of the executive department’s foreign and domestic policies.
He also wrote two well-documented anti-Communist books. He had two more
such books in the works when he died.
Meanwhile, the Communists and their
legions of left-wing camp followers (in government, in all the nation’s
propaganda media, and also in the big foundations, on college campuses, in
pulpits, in labor unions, etc.)—with the eager cooperation of the White House
itself, under both President Truman and President Eisenhower—conducted a
merciless campaign to smear McCarthy; to attack his techniques; to protect and
“whitewash” the Communists he exposed; to conceal his true achievements from
the public; to impede his vital investigations; then to totally halt his
exposures of Communism, oust him from office and destroy him personally.
The smear campaign against McCarthy
closely resembled the one conducted against Forrestal—but the campaign against
McCarthy was even more vicious and was far more prolonged. In addition,
the Communists and their left-wing cohorts spent many millions of dollars in
unsuccessful attempts to defeat McCarthy at the polls, to have him recalled, to
have him removed as chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee,
and to discredit him by staging the rigged “Army-McCarthy hearings” and the
loaded “censure movement” in the Senate.
Nevertheless, despite all the
heavy-handed left-wing pressure and all the poisonous anti-McCarthy propaganda
carried in the nation’s press—and although McCarthy had no organized following
at all—in a single week thirteen million Americans all over the nation
signed petitions to the U.S. Senate in support of McCarthy! No other
public figure ever has received such a spontaneous demonstration of approval
from the American people.
The Communists and their camp
followers succeeded in impeding McCarthy’s crucial investigations of Communist
subversion of the U.S. government—but they were totally unable to defeat him in
spirit, or at the polls.
Senator McCarthy died May 2, 1957,
at the age of forty-seven [sic], ostensibly of
natural causes. He had been hospitalized with hepatitis, a disease that
normally has a low fatality rate. His death was unexpected and sudden,
occurring about an hour after he had taken a turn for the worse on the fourth
day after he entered the hospital.
Like Jim Forrestal, Joe McCarthy
walked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital as its most controversial patient and
as the one man in America most hated by the Communists. And, like
Forrestal, he left in a hearse, as a man whose valiant fight against Communism
was ended forever.
In places, Simpson paints with too
broad a brush. McCarthy might well have been “pathologically hated” by
virtually every “left-winger and subversive in America,” but Simpson is simply
wrong when he says that about Forrestal. Forrestal was never a
controversial figure with the general public. He worked very effectively
behind the scenes to stop the spread of world Communism when, among other
things, as Navy Secretary he gave currency to the “long
telegram” of State Department Soviet specialist, George Kennan and
promoted Kennan’s career. His efforts were so effective that biographers
Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley (Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of
James Forrestal) have dubbed him the “godfather of [Communist] containment.” He was
certainly recognized as perhaps their leading enemy by the Soviet leaders and
informed Communists within the United States, but that was never translated
into hatred from rank and file U.S. leftists. He was the subject
of a vituperative and vile smear campaign similar to what McCarthy faced—and
continues to face posthumously—but it did not arise from his
anti-Communism. The impetus for it was entirely his principled position
in opposition to the creation of the new state of Israel, that is to say, his
anti-Zionism.
The smear campaign against Forrestal
was not and has not been widespread, as it was and has been against
McCarthy. It was the work, primarily, of popular syndicated columnists
Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. Another leader in the assault on Forrestal,
whom he painted as a mere tool of U.S. oil interests, was the California
lawyer, Catholic, and Zionist, Bartley Crum. Hoopes and Brinkley describe
a speech Crum gave about Forrestal in March of 1948 as “emotional and
demagogic” and “a thing of gross distortions and falsehoods, readily recognized
as such by participants and observers on the Washington scene, but far more
plausible to the partisan audience in the Cleveland auditorium where it was
delivered and to the readers of The Jewish Outlook in which it was later
printed.” Though Crum was a leftist and his anti-Forrestal themes were
picked up by leftist Progressive Party candidate for president, Henry Wallace,
the attacks were based mainly upon Forrestal’s anti-Zionism, not his
anti-Communism. Winchell’s participation in the scurrilous campaign is
most telling. Winchell was an ardent anti-Communist, but an even more
ardent Zionist.
Bringing things up to the current
day, the differences in Forrestal’s and McCarthy’s reputations have probably
increased. Forrestal has an aircraft carrier, a federal building, and a
college campus named for him; McCarthy is memorialized primarily by the
scurrilous term of opprobrium, “McCarthyism.” The 1992 biography by
Hoopes and Brinkley, previously referred to, paints a well-nigh heroic portrait
of the man, and it was widely acclaimed by mainstream press and academia,
alike. The 2005 movie, Good
Night and Good Luck, on the other hand, very well encapsulates
the complete villainy with which McCarthy continues to be painted by mainstream
opinion molders.
What little vilification of
Forrestal persists is decidedly on the fringes, from the modern-day version of
Bartley Crum, defrocked and excommunicated priest and dubious leftist writer, James Carroll, and the
most hard-core Zionists led by the authors of The Secret War Against the Jews.
Mark Aarons and John
Loftus. Carroll is practically alone in depicting Forrestal as the
father of the modern American warfare state while the latter writers are fairly
isolated in their attempt to characterize Forrestal’s position against the
creation of the state of Israel as being motivated by his personal
anti-Semitism, whatever that term might mean.
McCarthy, Forrestal, and the Jews
The “anti-Semitism” charge against
both men goes Simpson one better and suggests another point of convergence
between them. They have both been treated as almost mortal enemies by
organized Jewry. Medford Evans, in his 1970 book, The Assassination of
Joe McCarthy, addresses the issue directly (pp. 261-265):
Fanatical Zionists would begin with
a no doubt insuperable hostility toward McCarthy, if for no other reason than
that he was in some sense a protégé of and successor to the late James
Forrestal, whose position on Palestine in the late 1940’s was anything but
satisfactory to the Zionists. It is doubtful, however, whether McCarthy
even knew what Forrestal’s position on Palestine was, though he was perfectly clear
as to the position of the first Secretary of Defense on Communism and Soviet
Russia. The main reason for widespread Jewish hostility toward McCarthy
was the misplaced respect for the professional intelligentsia which is all too
common among Jews, and which culminates in acceptance of the canonicity of the New
York Times. [See why this is dangerous by reading “The New York Times and Joseph
Stalin.” - ed.]
---
McCarthy, for his part, was never in
the slightest degree anti-Semitic. When hack writers for the
Anti-Defamation League joined in the denunciation of McCarthy and his Jewish
staff members, the Senator took it for granted that no matter how much the ADL
might wish to make the Jewish community an indivisible and segregated
intellectual monolith (perfectly controlled by the ADL), yet guilt is not
collective, and other Jews are not to blame for the aberrations of an [Israel?] [Benjamin?] Epstein,
a [Arnold] Forster,
or other literary demagogues. Insofar as McCarthy did think of Jews as a
class, he was clearly sympathetic toward them for the same reason that other
Christians are—because they were persecuted and reviled and decimated by the
Hitler regime—and by the Stalin regime [emphasis in original].
---
McCarthy was completely apart from
the anti-Semitic movement in this country. He might have become a member
of The John Birch Society had he lived longer (the Jew Alfred Kohlberg did),
for he agreed with the Birch position that the conspiracy threatening the world
in our time is Communism. He did not agree with the anti-Semitic position
that the conspiracy is basically Jewish and only uses Communism as a
front. Since Joe McCarthy, though highly intelligent, was not a
professional intellectual, it is likely that he never considered whether
through the centuries there has been a tradition of destructive conspiracy of
which Communism is a contemporary manifestation. He did become thoroughly
aware that there is in our time a Communist conspiracy, that it is operationally
inseparable from the Soviet Union and the various Communist parties throughout
the world, and that it proposes the destruction of the United States of
America, Western civilization, and the Christian religion. The Jewish
religion, too, for that matter, which is why McCarthy would never have
identified Communism with Jewry, why he would have assumed that Jews and
Christians—certainly American Jews and American Christians—should be united in
opposition to the Communist threat.
From what we know of Forrestal,
everything that Evans says about McCarthy’s attitude toward Jews and Communism
would have applied equally well to him. Nevertheless, among certain
powerful circles within American Jewry, both Forrestal’s and McCarthy’s
sympathy and respect was completely unrequited.
One reason in McCarthy’s case might be that a disproportionate number of
Communists and subversives in his crosshairs—and in the Communist party—just
happened to be Jews. But here Evans continues:
I have a Jewish friend (which, I
suppose, means to the ADL that I am anti-Semitic) in an Eastern city, whose
acquaintance I made in the spring of 1954 when he flew from the East Coast to
Abilene, Texas, for no other purpose than to have a conversation with the
author of The Secret War for the A-Bomb. I met him at the airport,
we talked for three hours, and he caught a plane back East. He was
greatly interested in what I had written about Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and
others in the atomic energy project, but the main thing that was on his mind was
the lemming-like proclivity of his own people toward anti-McCarthyism. I
am sure he did everything he could to reverse it. I trust him, and I
believe he trusted me—which is why I shall not give his name.
There is more irony in the
implacable enmity of American self-appointed Jewish leadership toward McCarthy
and Forrestal when one considers some of their closest associates and shapers
of their thought. If anyone influenced McCarthy more than Forrestal in
making him aware of ongoing Communist subversion within the U.S. government,
and particularly its influence on U.S. policy that led to the takeover of China
by the Communists in 1949, it was the Jewish New York businessman, the
aforementioned Alfred Kohlberg. Again, quoting Evans:
McCarthy was not the first person to
attack the Institute
of Pacific Relations, not the first person to attack Owen Lattimore.
Both had been attacked years earlier by Alfred Kohlberg, the Asia expert who
was McCarthy’s mentor in this whole matter. Professor Kenneth Colegrove
wrote early in 1952 that the Hearings of the McCarran Committee regarding the
Institute of Pacific Relations, which were then still in process, had already
vindicated McCarthy. Of course, those Hearings, and the report based on
them, also vindicated Kohlberg. It was Kohlberg who had been McCarthy’s
mentor in the matter of Lattimore. [ pp. 142-143]
As can hardly be overemphasized, one
of the key figures in the career of Joe McCarthy was Alfred Kohlberg, the New
York importer of Irish-linen handkerchiefs from China (where the ornamental
work was done). Kohlberg was one of the most intensely patriotic
Americans—without being fanatical about patriotism or any other subject—of whom
I know. [ p. 265]
Alfred Kohlberg and his wife Ida
were among the last close personal friends to see McCarthy alive and in good
spirits. It was just a week before he was to make his last trip to
Bethesda that the Kohlbergs called on him at his
Washington home. Mrs. Kohlberg (as we noted in Chapter One) thought the
Senator looked well. And he might have been. If all his friends had
been as loyal as Kohlberg, he might have stayed that way. [ p. 267]
It is also a well-known fact that
McCarthy’s chosen chief counsel for his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations was the aggressive Jewish New York attorney, Roy Cohn, and the
latter’s top assistant was G. David Schine, the son
of a wealthy Jewish hotelier. (Also on that
staff initially was the young lawyer, Robert F. Kennedy, another prominent
Irish Catholic whose life would be cut short mysteriously. Robert chose
McCarthy to be godfather to his daughter, Kathleen. ** McCarthy was close
to the entire Kennedy family, including the father, Joe, which might be a
reason for Jewish enmity toward him that Medford Evans did not consider.
Joe Kennedy was often blunt in his expressions of distaste for Jews.)
For his part, Forrestal made his
fortune and his professional reputation working for the Jewish-owned New York
investment banking house, Dillon, Read & Co. After he went to work in
the Roosevelt government he became quite close to the
powerful financier and adviser to presidents, Bernard Baruch. In one of
his most intrepid actions as Secretary of the Navy he worked closely with the
Jewish Rear Admiral Ellis M.
Zacharias in an attempt, contrary to the wishes of his superiors, to obtain
the surrender of the Japanese before the Soviet Union could get into the
Pacific War. They were motivated, among other reasons, by their mutual
anti-Communism. As Secretary of Defense, his closest associate was his
chosen executive assistant, Marx Leva. In the interview alluded to here, at which the author
was present, Forrestal’s Navy driver, John Spalding, noted that one of the
people he called upon when he visited New York was a prominent rabbi.
Unfortunately, Spalding, who was 87 years old at the time of the interview, was
unable to recall the rabbi’s name. Even the generally unfriendly Jewish
writer, Arnold Rogow, in James Forrestal, A Study
of Personality, Politics and Policy, has the following passage:
In the spring of 1949 Forrestal also
had evidence that he was not persona non grata to all Jews and Jewish
organizations. Although he declined to be present, he was invited in
February to attend a celebration at one of Washington’s Reformed Jewish
Temples. When his resignation was announced in March, he received a
letter commending him for his past services and expressing regret from Myer
Dorfman, National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Many persons of
Jewish extraction, during his stay at Bethesda, wired or wrote him expressing
their hopes for an early recovery, and several added that his anti-Zionist
position had by no means concealed or confused his great service to the country
as our first Secretary of Defense.
Had Rogow
been honest about Forrestal throughout his book, it really would have gone
without saying that Forrestal “was not persona non grata to all Jews and
Jewish organizations.” ***
Forrestal’s Influence on McCarthy in
Life and in Death
In the popular histories, McCarthy
is often described as a particularly cynical fellow, even for a politician, who
didn’t really know or care that much about Communist infiltration of the
government and its resulting distortion of U.S. foreign policy. Rather,
it is said, he was just looking around for an issue that would help him get
re-elected in 1952, and he stumbled upon “red-baiting.” This notion is
given the lie by the respect and admiration that he elicited from the
undeniably sincere and knowledgeable anti-Communist crusader, Kohlberg.
And before Kohlberg, there was the Forrestal connection. The following is
from page 7 of McCarthy’s book, The Fight for America:
Upon my return to the United States
[from serving in the Marines in the Pacific in WW II - ed.] I discovered that
our wise long-time foreign policy was being scuttled—scuttled without the
approval of either of America’s two great political parties. At that
time, I frankly had no idea that traitors were responsible. In my
campaign for the United States Senate in 1946, I referred to the State
Department planners as “starry eyed planners, drifting from crisis to crisis,
like a group of blind men leading blind men through a labyrinth of their own
creation.” I then thought that we were losing to international Communism
merely because of abysmal incompetence. At that time
I had not even heard the names of many of those whom I was to later expose and
force out of policy-making jobs.
Many of them I heard discussed for
the first time by a man who was later to be hounded to his death by the
Communists. I arrived in Washington in December,
1946, about two weeks before being sworn in as senator. Three days later
my administrative assistant and I received an invitation to have lunch with Jim
Forrestal.
I have often wondered how the
extremely busy Secretary of the Navy discovered that a freshman Senator had
arrived in town and why he took so much time out to discuss the problems which
were so deeply disturbing him. More than an equal number of times I have
thanked God that he did.
Before meeting Jim
Forrestal I thought we were losing to international Communism because of
incompetence and stupidity on the part of our planners. I mentioned that
to Forrestal. I shall forever remember his answer. He said,
“McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were
merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake
in our favor.” This phrase stuck me so forcefully that I have often used
it since.
When he spoke of “our planners,” it
is unlikely that Forrestal confined himself to the now known Communist agents
within the government. Here’s Cornell Simpson again, on pp. 53-54 and p.
86:
Forrestal was under no illusion,
either, about the Soviet’s former powerful friend in the United States,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the man who had originally unlocked America’s door to
swarms of Soviet secret agents. On September 18, 1947, when James F.
Byrnes had mentioned Stalin’s liking for FDR, Forrestal entered in his diary
(p. 318) his reply:
… he [Stalin] had good reason for
liking FDR because he got out of him the Yalta Agreement, anything he asked for
during the war, and finally an opportunity to push Communist propaganda in the
United States and throughout the world.
---
When asked by this writer if those
individuals Forrestal had named as Communists or pro-Communists had included
[General George C.] Marshall, and if so whether this had inspired his own
devastating, thoroughly documented attack on Marshall from the Senate floor
(published as the book America’s Retreat from Victory, Devin-Adair,
1952), Senator McCarthy replied, “The answer to both questions is yes.
Forrestal told me he was convinced that General Marshall was one of the key
figures in the United States in advancing Communist objectives.”
Forrestal might well have affected
McCarthy more in death than he did in life. The following passage is from
the previously cited Evans book, pp. 113-114. In the first sentence he is
referring to the early revelations Forrestal made to McCarthy:
These and other confidential
disclosures greatly impressed McCarthy, but what eventually galvanized him into
action was what happened to Forrestal. “The Communists hounded Forrestal
to his death,” McCarthy said. “They killed him just as definitely as if
they had thrown him from that sixteenth-story window in Bethesda Naval
Hospital. On May 22, 1949 word flashed around the world that the smashed
and broken body of Jim Forrestal was found beside Bethesda Naval
Hospital. We know there was a celebration in the Communist headquarters
in New York that night.”
There are men who go away from
danger and men who go toward it. McCarthy continued:
“While I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by
the news of Forrestal’s murder. But I was affected much more deeply
when I heard of the Communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal’s
murder. [Italics added by Evans] On that night, I dedicated part of this
fight to Jim Forrestal. That night I said, ‘Jim Forrestal, wherever you
are, I promise their victory will turn to ashes and dust.’ I hope I can
keep that promise.
“Thus I
started the public phase of my fight against Communists, knowing full well
exactly how they operate….”
Unfortunately, Evans
uncharacteristically lacks a citation for his McCarthy quote. I say “unfortunately”
because, virtually in one breath, McCarthy says that the Communists hounded
Forrestal to his death and that Forrestal was murdered. Perhaps Evans is
quoting something he said, rather than something he wrote, in which case he
might not have been using the word “murder” in a literal sense, and it should
have been enclosed in quotes. In The Fight for America (pp.
185-186) McCarthy writes, “They [the Communists] killed him just as surely as
though they had physically thrown him out of that 16th-story window at Bethesda
Naval Hospital from which he hurdled to a death that was such a victory for
Communism.”
It does appear then that, like
virtually everyone else in public life, McCarthy believed the early official
story—amplified by the press—that Forrestal had committed suicide. That
he would not have believed (unlike
Evans) that Forrestal could actually have been murdered right there in
Bethesda Naval Hospital is completely consistent with what Evans wrote about
him early in his book (page ix of the conspectus):
The media impressed upon the public
mind the image of a man overly suspicious; the fact was that Joe McCarthy was
not suspicious enough. He had an ineradicable streak of buoyant optimism
and an inexhaustible fund of indiscriminate geniality that made it impossible
for him to realize the intensity with which his enemies hated him. And
the other face of this coin was that he was too modest to realize how seriously
he was endangering the program of those whose determined ambition was total and
universal power.
Forty-one years after Evans penned
those lines about McCarthy, another writer who, like Cornell Simpson, uses a
pen name, “Mark Hunter” wrote a striking echo of those observations. His
subject is James Forrestal. The following quote is from his summary of
the Nurse’s
Notes that accompanied the witness testimony that made up the main body of
the official investigation of Forrestal’s death at Bethesda, the so-called Willcutts Report:
Though a process of pernicious
selective quotation from the Nurse’s Notes could make Forrestal look bad, a
complete and honest reading shows a man concerned about his personal appearance,
curious about his surroundings and the world outside, proud of his family,
helpful to the corpsmen, interested in their careers and ambitions, at first
patient – as in “enduring” – yet into the second month anxious to escape, by
the seventh week apparently wondering what the hell was going on. In short he acted as any reasonable man would have acted
finding himself in a similar situation.
Forrestal failed to realize what he
was up against. Paranoid? He should have been more
suspicious, much more.
Forrestal apparently had no choice
in the matter, but if McCarthy had had any suspicion at all as to what really happened to Forrestal
at Bethesda, surely he would never have allowed himself to be treated there.
McCarthy’s Death at Bethesda
Senator McCarthy was admitted to
Bethesda Naval Hospital on Sunday, April 28, 1957. His sudden illness
apparently came as a surprise to his closest friends and colleagues. His
wife reportedly said that he had gone to the hospital for treatment of a knee,
but the newspapers on Monday said that he was being treated for “acute
hepatitis” and had been placed in an oxygen tent. On Tuesday they
reported that he had been taken out of the tent, that he had improved and was
resting comfortably, but that his condition was still serious. At some
point, though, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse and he died on
Thursday, May 2. The official medical report—discussed in detail
later—left serious questions as to the precise cause of death, but, incredibly,
no autopsy was performed.
But here is all it says about
his death, as of the date of this article, on his extensive Wikipedia page:
McCarthy died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2,
1957, at the age of 48. The official cause of his death was listed as acute hepatitis, an
inflammation of the liver. It was hinted in the press that he died of
alcoholism, an estimation that is accepted by contemporary biographers.
The statement is completely
accurate, as far as it goes. According to Evans, one prominent press
organ doing the hinting was Time magazine, which paraphrased the death
cause as “cirrhosis of the liver.” In a parallel with the Forrestal
death, another prominent member of the press who went the extra mile to
convince us that McCarthy, in effect, killed himself was the very influential
Drew Pearson. In the wake of Forrestal’s death, Pearson falsely reported
that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts. Here is what the
medical doctor Emanuel M. Josephson has to say about the columnist’s
allegations about McCarthy on page 169 of his 1964 book, The Truth about
Rockefeller:
Drew Pearson falsely alleged in his
syndicated column that the hepatitis had been caused by alcoholism. In so
doing, he cast a serious reflection on the reputations of the Bethesda Hospital
physicians. For they would be poor specimens of the profession if they
could not recognize cirrhosis resulting from the vitamin B deficiency caused by
alcohol, and treat it accordingly. Sen.
McCarthy’s associates vouch for the fact that he had not been able to take
liquor because of his illness for many months prior to his development of the
hepatitis. Whatever poison precipitated his death, they attest that it
was not alcohol. The obvious purpose of the Pearson column was to draw a
“red herring” across the conspirators’ trail.
Whatever one might feel about
Josephson’s conclusions or the reliability of his sources regarding McCarthy’s
drinking habits, or his writing of “prior to” when he apparently means to say
“after,” his medical science is apparently right on the money. “Cirrhosis
is a consequence of chronic liver disease characterized by replacement of liver tissue by fibrosis, scar tissue and
regenerative nodules (lumps that occur as a result of a
process in which damaged tissue is regenerated), leading to loss of liver
function,” as it is described in Wikipedia.
The doctors at Bethesda said that
McCarthy died of one thing; certain influential press organs said that he died
from something else, and the historians have come down on the side of the
press. We are reminded that in the case of the Forrestal death, a
Bethesda Hospital review board convened to look into the case concluded simply
that he had died from his fall from a 16th floor window of the hospital.
It said nothing about what might have caused the fall. That did not stop
the Forrestal biographers from concluding that he had committed suicide, which
we now know is almost certainly not true.
We also now know from the Forrestal
case that in such matters the press and popular biographers and historians are
wholly unreliable. They cannot be depended upon to report the truth, even
when it is put in front of their faces. See Part 5 of this writer’s
“Who Killed James Forrestal?” subtitled “Press and historians close ranks,
minds” if you have any doubt of this assertion. As for McCarthy,
their veracity is likely to be even more suspect when one considers what they
have written about him generally. If the two books on McCarthy by the Evanses, father and son, are true it is really no
exaggeration to say that the others are nothing but a pack of liars. The
book by the son, M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted
by History, the Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against
America’s Enemies was published in 2007 and might well be regarded as
the last word on McCarthy’s political career. (The younger Evans, unlike his
father, appears not to doubt that McCarthy died of natural causes, but, also
unlike his father, he doesn’t bother to address the question directly.
For a sample of the book, see this writer’s “M. Stanton Evans on Good
Night and Good Luck.” For a good summary of what he later
published in the book, see his 2003 article, “McCarthyism: Waging the
Cold War in America.”)
Untrustworthy though they may be,
the standard biographers can be informative to one who reads critically and
skeptically. One such writer is Thomas C. Reeves, whose 1982 book, The
Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, runs to 819 pages. The following two
paragraphs from page 671 would seem to nail it that McCarthy drank himself to
death, whatever the medical report said. Here, as Reeves describes him,
is the senator, on his home turf of Wisconsin a scant month before his final
admission into the Bethesda Hospital:
The chief librarian of the Milwaukee
Journal was shocked to observe McCarthy at a meeting of the Wauwatosa
school board. A friend had brought the senator to the meeting unannounced
to give a speech. Joe stumbled in a cloak room, became hopelessly
entangled in coats, and had to be rescued. He was so drunk and sick he
could barely speak. The librarian described the incident to Journal
editors, who immediately assigned reporter Ed Bayley the task of writing
McCarthy’s obituary.
Back in Washington, Joe ambled into
the office of the Secretary of the Senate where two colleagues were having a
drink. He filled a drinking glass to the brim with liquor and downed the
contents in several uninterrupted gulps. He told his astonished observers
that he had been to Bethesda Naval Hospital several times to “dry out” and that
on the last occasion his doctor had said he would die if he had one more
drop. He then proceeded to refill the glass and drink it dry.
Reeves’ sources are in end
notes. The source for the first paragraph is given as “Bayley interview,
July 7, 1977.” That is some 20 years after the supposed incident took
place, and everyone involved is affiliated with the Milwaukee Journal.
Concerning that newspaper, consider the following passage from p. 453 of the
recent Evans biography of McCarthy:
On the anti-McCarthy side were
ranged some of the most powerful media institutions, journalists, and
broadcasters of the epoch. These included the Time-Life empire, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, provincial newspapers such as the Milwaukee
Journal and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, elite broadcaster [Edward R.]
Murrow of CBS and like-minded radio/TV personalities, columnists Joseph and
Stewart Alsop, Drew Pearson, Marquis Childs, and Walter Lippmann—to name only
the most famous.
Since the source is an interview and
not a contemporary newspaper account, we are being asked to believe that this
enemy newspaper protected McCarthy at the time and did not report the
embarrassing episode. Had they reported it, Reeves surely would have used
the newspaper account as his source.
And what about that extraordinary
scene “Back in Washington?” For that one, the end note says simply, “Confidential
source.”
Reeves is more believable when he
reports facts that corroborate, even amplify upon, points made by critics Evans
[père] and Dr. Josephson, also on page 671:
Hospital officials listed the cause
of death as “acute hepatic failure,” and the death certificate read “hepatitis,
acute, cause unknown.” The doctors acknowledged that McCarthy had
suffered from the illness for several weeks and declared that the inflammation
of the liver was a “noninfectious type”—meaning that it was not caused by a
viral infection. They would not elaborate further. Time
magazine reported unequivocally that Joe died of cirrhosis of the liver.
The long end note in this case is
particularly revealing:
Ibid. [Milwaukee Journal,
May 3, 1957]; “The Passing of McCarthy,” Time, p. 28. The fatality
rate of hepatitis was only about 5 to 10 percent. Moreover, Joe did not
respond to the normal treatments for the ailment. New York Times,
May 3, 1957. For undocumented and highly questionable allegations that
Joe was violent while in the hospital, see Drew Pearson in Wisconsin CIO
News, May 10, 1957, and Cook, The Nightmare Decade, pp.
539-40. Copies of the death certificate
are on file at the county register of deeds office in Appleton. McCarthy’s
hospital records are unavailable to scholars. Q.E. Crews, Jr., to the
author, September 28, 1977.
I have added the emphasis at the
end. What Reeves has described here is, on its face, a very puzzling
medical mystery. He has gone beyond Wikipedia—even beyond Evans in his Assassination
book—in telling us that the death certificate said that the cause of the acute
hepatitis was unknown. He has also told us—as does Evans—that the doctors
had said that it was not infectious. A look at the medical records may or
may not help us solve the mystery, but that look, we are told without any
reason given, is not to be permitted. In a poem I wrote out of
frustration at not being able, initially, to get a copy of the long-secret inquiry into
Forrestal’s death I concluded that “usually when someone keeps something hidden
it's because he has something to hide.”
Consider, if you will, what the
doctors are telling us. “Hepatitis” is not so much a diagnosis of a fatal
illness as it is a description of a symptom. It means simply that the
liver has become inflamed. They don’t know what caused it to become so
inflamed, but when they tell us that it was “not infectious” we know that it
was not one of the A-E
hepatitis viruses that was directly responsible for his death. When
the New York Times says he “did not respond to the normal treatments for
the ailment” they are talking nonsense. The doctors didn’t know what the
ailment was, so there were no “normal treatments” indicated.
Medford Evans seems to be unaware of
Emanuel Josephson’s earlier writing, but the two men have drawn the same
inference from what the Bethesda doctors have told us, with Josephson more
definite in his conclusion (pp. 167-168):
To understand the medical
significance of these facts, one must bear in mind that hepatitis may develop
as a manifestation of either an infection or of poisoning. Since the
Hospital made it quite clear in its press release that the cause of the
hepatitis and death was not infectious, the inference to be drawn from the
death certificate is obvious. THE CAUSE OF McCARTHY’S
DEATH WAS, IN EFFECT, CERTIFIED AS POISON, BY THE BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL,
WHERE HE HAD BEEN UNDER TREATMENT (See frontispiece)
[all capitals in the original and in all subsequent Josephson quotes - ed.]
And here is Evans on pp. 2-3:
McCarthy was not a heavy
drinker. But given a history of infectious hepatitis, a man can damage
his liver and ultimately endanger his life even by moderate social
drinking. Apparently McCarthy did have
infectious hepatitis at some time in the early 1950’s, and certainly he was a
moderate social drinker. No question, this was an imprudent combination;
but there is considerable question that a man as robust as McCarthy would have
died of it as abruptly as he did die of whatever killed him.
Interestingly enough, a Bethesda
spokesman was quoted as stating that McCarthy had not had the infectious
type of hepatitis, but an acute form of the disease. What an “acute” form
means is not perfectly clear, but it could mean toxic hepatitis. A man
with a history of infectious hepatitis could indeed succumb abruptly to toxic
hepatitis, a deadly affair in any case. Toxic hepatitis is caused, as
the name indicates, by any one of several poisons, including chloroform,
mercury, and snake venom, but most conveniently, perhaps, by carbon
tetrachloride, the common dry-cleaning solvent. As little as a hundred
parts of carbon tetrachloride in a million parts of air is said to be
dangerous—for anybody. A scarcely noticeable or quickly dissipated
concentration might well be fatal to a man already suffering from a liver
complaint.
Evans goes on to describe how easy
it would have been to expose McCarthy to the cleaning solvent and to cover
one’s tracks. That is his obvious choice for the murder weapon, as it
were, but that is only his speculation.
Perhaps his speculation is too lurid
and is unwarranted. Googling “toxic
hepatitis” we find that the very first toxin listed that could cause it is
alcohol. But then there is that troubling, “cause unknown” following
“hepatitis, acute” on the death certificate. In the case of a young
fraternity pledge who has imbibed too much alcohol in a venue far from any
medical assistance, identification of the fatal toxin is a simple matter.
McCarthy, on the other hand, was in a very controlled medical environment and
his condition was reported by the newspapers to have improved after the first
day in the hospital and then taken a sudden, unexpected turn for the
worse. What might have caused the fatal turn in these controlled circumstances?
Dr. Josephson [continuing on page
168] goes to the heart of the matter:
The obvious question raised by
McCarthy’s death certificate is: “WHAT IS THE POISON THAT CAUSED THE DEATH?”
The laws of the land dictate that
the deaths due to unknown causes must be investigated by postmortem
examinations to eliminate the possibility of murder. Such postmortems are
compulsory and routine. There may be no interference with them by
anyone. And no consent is required of the surviving members of the family.
Burial of the corpses without postmortems is a felony under both local and
Federal laws.
No move was made by the conspirators
to comply with the law and determine by postmortem what caused McCarthy’s
death. A number of McCarthy’s associates and intimates, including his
hometown friend, Mr. Engel who acted on behalf of his family, approached this
author with the request that he attempt to induce the authorities involved to
order that an autopsy be done on the corpse to determine the UNKNOWN CAUSE of his
death and to eliminate the possibility of murder as the cause of death.
This author requested compliance
with the law, by phone, of all the officials in the various parts of the
country who were involved, including: officials of the Bethesda Naval Hospital;
officials of Montgomery County, Maryland, where the hospital is located;
officials of the District of Columbia; Federal officials; officials of the
State of Wisconsin; and officials of Appleton, Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home
town. These efforts to secure compliance with the law met with no
success. Each official “passed the buck”. The excuse that they
offered for their violation or disregard of the law was:
“MRS. McCARTHY
OBJECTS TO AN AUTOPSY.” None of them explained why it was that the wishes
of any McCarthy, including his recently acquired wife, superseded the criminal
laws of the land. It did not seem to matter to the responsible officials
that their failure to comply with the law put them in the position of being
accomplices after the fact in a felony, in a possible murder. Obviously
extremely powerful influence bore on the matter.
Accomplices to a felony though they
may ultimately be, the higher authorities at Bethesda Naval Hospital seem not
to be the most eager participants in cover-ups. They told us that
Forrestal had died from a fall of unknown cause and they told us that McCarthy
had died, in effect, from some unknown toxin. It was the press and the
court historians who told us that Forrestal caused his own fatal 13-floor
plummet and that the unknown poison that killed McCarthy was just plain old
self-administered alcohol.
Was McCarthy on His Last Legs?
If biographers like Reeves are to be
believed, not only had McCarthy become, at 48 years old but still senator, a
stumbling, mumbling drunk, but he also gave the clear appearance of a sickly,
defeated man with one foot in the grave. This is his account from March
1957, continuing into that previously referred to April trip to
Wisconsin. Reeves gives his source, in each case, as his interview of the
person describing McCarthy (pp. 670-671):
The senator soon traveled alone to
Milwaukee to appear on a television quiz program. He arrived at the
airport without an overcoat—to face ten-degree weather. He seemed
listless and detached, and at dinner he merely toyed with his food. At
one point in the evening he looked wearily at the ceiling and said to his host,
businessman Raymond Dittmore, “Raymond, I’ve lived a
million years.” Later that night he made it clear to Dittmore
that he was ready to die.
The next day Dittmore
drove him to Racine, where he was to give a speech on behalf of Lowell McNeill,
a friend and avid partisan. McNeill went to the senator’s hotel room at
4:00 P.M. to extend his greetings. Joe answered the door wearing nothing
but jockey shorts. Throughout the 45-minute conversation that followed,
he drank from a bottle of cheap brandy. At dinner he ate nothing.
Afterward, he returned to the brandy.
McCarthy returned to Wisconsin in
April. Steve Swedish encountered him in Milwaukee in a hallway at the
Pfister Hotel. He appeared ill and seemed to stagger slightly. He
soon told of being persecuted constantly by Communists over the telephone,
“They’re murdering me,” he cried.
Mark Catlin of Appleton saw Joe at
about the same time in Milwaukee. Joe’s skin had a yellowish hue, the
obvious sign of jaundice and liver damage. “He looked horrible,” Catlin
said later.
A page earlier Reeves gives us a
contrary assessment of McCarthy’s health and habits from his wife, Jean, but he
presents it as the words of a woman in denial, telling us something that we are
not to believe:
She would not admit to anyone but a
few intimates that Joe was in mortal peril. “Joe’s in marvelous shape,”
Jean told reporters in Milwaukee, “except for his knee injury—lost 32 pounds
since the beginning of Lent and feels wonderful.” (For the rest of her
life—twenty-three years—she would staunchly deny that Joe ever had a drinking
problem.)
Neither in the subsequent text nor
in his note does Reeves tell us who those “intimates” were to whom we are to
believe she told the “real truth.” Furthermore, looking at the matter
from a coldly medical perspective, we must remind ourselves that none of this
has a lot to do with a cause of death listed as “hepatitis, acute, cause
unknown” which got better and then suddenly worse in the hospital.
Reeves may be contrasted with
Medford Evans, who has the testimony, albeit from the book by Roy Cohn, of very
nearly the last friends to see McCarthy before he went into the hospital, the Kohlbergs:
Alfred Kohlberg and his wife Ida
were among the last to see Joe McCarthy alive and in good health. They
visited the McCarthys in the redone row house on 3rd
Street, N.E., the morning of Easter Sunday, April 21, 1957, just one week
before the Senator “became violently ill” and was taken to Bethesda Naval
Hospital. Mrs. Kohlberg (Alfred Kohlberg died in 1960, long before Roy
Cohn decided to write a book about his famous former boss) is cited by Cohn to
the effect that McCarthy was vigorous enough to insist on driving the whole
party to a luncheon engagement at the home of Washington correspondent
Constantine Brown, and in good enough spirits to entertain his company,
“smiling and chatting amiably.” Cohn directly quotes Mrs. Kohlberg as
saying of McCarthy: “I thought he looked well,
except for some difficulty with his foot. He had trouble getting his shoe
on.” In 1955 and ten years earlier, during World War II, McCarthy had
suffered leg injuries. His entire career had been pursued with, but
without reference to, certain difficulties with his feet. Thus, Mrs.
Kohlberg’s impression that “he looked well” was not subject to material
qualification. And this was just a week before the fatal trip to
Bethesda. (pp. 6-7)
McCarthy’s illness seemed surprising
and sudden to other people, as well. Conservative writer William A.
Rusher, who had regularly been in personal touch with McCarthy through late
January “but by May 2, he ‘had been out of touch for some weeks…and had no
inkling of how seriously ill he was, so…was profoundly shocked.’ ”(Evans, p. 5) Upon his Sunday admission
to the hospital the New York Times reported, “An aide in the Senator’s
office said the Senator had not complained of being ill last week.” (Evans, p.
9) Then, when McCarthy died on Thursday, May 2,
the Times wrote that “Washington was shocked by the Senator’s sudden
death.” The Times in that article also pronounced it “mysterious”
that “Mrs. McCarthy reportedly said the Senator was hospitalized for a knee
injury, but then the hospital said ‘hepatitis’.” (Evans, p. 10)
Summing up, Medford Evans would no
doubt agree with Thomas C. Reeves that McCarthy needed to be warned in the
spring of 1957 that he was in “mortal peril,” but it was not because of his
drinking habits. “It was charged,” wrote Evans, “that he smeared innocent
people, but the wrath he incurred stemmed not from accusations he made against
any who may have been innocent, but from his zeroing in on persons who were
undoubtedly guilty …” (p. viii). Evans believed that wrath to be easily
homicidal, but the mortal peril didn’t really become acute until McCarthy
entered Bethesda Naval Hospital:
A number of my Rightwing friends,
hearing that I was going to write a book about Senator McCarthy asked me,
somewhat eagerly I thought, “Are you going to prove that they murdered him?”
Now I cannot prove anything like
that. Not at this late date, not so far from the scene. But even
then, even on the scene, you don’t think a nice clean smell like carbon
tetrachloride would have been very noticeable in a hospital, do you—whether or
not it was mixed with oxygen?
I will say this. I believe they
would have murdered him if they could have. And it does look as
though they could have. The technical possibilities at which I have
glanced in these pages are merely speculative shapes in a broad scene.
The overview is, quite simply, that if they got Forrestal and covered up the
facts about Kennedy, there at Bethesda, they could have got McCarthy too.
(Emphasis in original)
We don’t have to endorse Evans’s
conclusion, but from what we now know about the Forrestal death, and from all I
have read about the JFK autopsy, there is really no “if” to it in either
case.
David
Martin
September
28, 2011
*
See the latest information on the question of “Simpson’s” identity at “News from the Mail Bag.”
**
Update 12/6/2019: In his 2018 book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My
Family, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells us that Evans, my source for this
information, actually was simply furthering popular misinformation. In fact, writes Kennedy, Kathleen’s godfather
was the family friend, Fr. Dan Walsh.
*** We are not aware of any
connection they might have had to them, but two very important anti-Soviet Jews
who might have influenced both Forrestal and McCarthy were Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky
and journalist Isaac
Don Levine. Read about Krivitsky in the
previously cited “The New
York Times and Joseph Stalin” and Levine in “FDR Winked at Soviet Espionage.”
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