The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1157: The Life of American Hero James Forrestal w/ Philo's Miscellany

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

70 MinutesPG-13Philo's Miscellany has a YouTube channel in which he reviews rare books.Philo's joins Pete to talk about the life, and tragic end, of our first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal.Philo's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Farage. If you want to support this show and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freeman Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now if you support me through Substack or Patreon. You have access to an RSS feed that you can plug into any pod catcher, including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there. If you support me through Subscrib Star, Gumroad, or on my website directly, I will send you a link where you can download the file, and you can listen to it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support everyone gives me. It keeps the show going.

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Phyllos is back for another profile of a, well, let's say this time the person will, might be a little more likable. How are you doing, Phyllis? I'm doing very well, Pete. Thank you. All right. Who you got for us today? The man is named James Forrestall.

You probably haven't heard of him. Most people haven't. He was this country's first secretary of defense. If you have heard of him, it's because he died under very suspicious circumstances. But more importantly, the official narrative about him, which is a suicide, is often credited to his overwork and his extreme sense of duty. But I don't believe that to be the case. However, it's important not just to look at this man through the circumstances of his death going backwards. We want to look at his entire life to understand how his end happened and also to make sense of it.

All right. Well, yeah, I think most people may have heard a conspiracy podcast here or there talking about his demise and how it may have been connected with. a certain program, but I think the, there's a more likely, there's a more likely scenario that played out there. So where do you want to go? Where do you want to go from here? So I want to start out from the jump and say that this man, unlike Bernard Baruch, who we discussed earlier, this man is a bona fide hero. What he did during World War I and World War II, I think whether it was a murder or a suicide. I think this man gave his life for his country. And I think that we are just going to start right at the beginning. And by the time we get to May 22, 1949, you'll have a

pretty good idea of who he is. So I'm going to start with a few of my sources that I used for this. The first is the Forrestall Diaries that were published in 1951 by his personal aid, who worked for him during World War II. There's also a book called The Death of James Forrestall, which came out in the early 2000s, which alleges that he was murdered. And there's an additional book that came out. It's called the assassination of James Forrestall. And that one came out in the late 1950s, and it was put out by a publishing company called Western Isles, which was the publishing arm of the John Birch Society. So people had suspicions about the nature of his passing very early on shortly after his death. But I'm going to start with his life. So James Forrestall was born in 1892 to an Irish Catholic family.

At the time, this was not the most powerful demographic in the United States. But regardless of his middle class life, he entered Dartmouth. on his own merit in 1911, and he transferred in 1912 to Princeton. He was voted most likely to succeed by a wide margin in his senior year at Princeton, and he was on the student council and was chairman of the Princeton, and he left Princeton one credit short of graduation. It's never really explained in any of the sources why he decided to leave Princeton, and I'm not going to speculate, but he did not,

counter failure after leaving Princeton. He took a job with the Tobacco Products Corporation selling cigarettes. And then in 1916, he entered the investment banking house of William A. Reed and Company, which later became Dylan Reed and Company, where he made his business career. And one thing that I'd like to stress from the outset here is that every endeavor that he sets his mind to, he achieves tremendous success. This is a very smart, motivated, and disciplined man. So in 1917, the United States is drawn into World War I and Forrestall, despite his intelligence and his Princeton credentials, even though he doesn't have a degree, he chooses to enlist as a basic seaman in the U.S. Navy. He then transfers due to his own merit to the aviation

branch, which was in its infancy in World War I, recall from the episodes that Stormy put out that the first Yale unit and other American gentry were in the process of founding naval aviation at this time. And at the time, they were drawing the best and the brightest of their generation in this country to be a part of these units. So this was not something that a regular Joe Schmo could get into. Since there was not much infrastructure and training for naval aviation in the U.S. at the time. He was trained in Canada with the Royal Flying Corps, and he was passed as a ensign, I believe, naval aviator number 154 in the Navy, and he returned to the United States

to receive his commission. Now, the Navy got wind of his accomplishment here and his motivation and decided that due to his business credentials, he was best suited at the Office of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C. And so he worked at a desk job and made first lieutenant by the armistice at the end of World War I. So this guy did not see any combat in World War I, but very, very smart. And this country took tremendous advantage of his talents.

So after the war, he goes back to Dillon Reed and Company and has a meteoric rise. He makes partner in 1923 and was a vice president just three years later by 1926. And then by 1938, at the age of 46, he becomes the president of Dylan Reed and company. And that's an incredible rise. Throughout his life and business career, he was known for helping numerous young men through college without them knowing of his financial assistance for them. And he gave away a tremendous amount of his wealth during his lifetime, but he never made this information public or capitalized on it in any way, either politically or in the media. So very hardworking makes it to the top of this company. And he could have just stayed on Wall Street for the rest of his life.

He'd done his service in World War I. There was really not a bigger obligation that was necessitated of him. There was no external pressure on him. But the more that I read about the man, the clear it became that he had a very, he had a very strong moral compass and he had a great deal of honor. In June 1940, FDR personally extended him an invitation to join the administration. Because in 1940 of May, FDR called for the rearmament and war production to resume. at a tremendously accelerated pace. Sorry, I'm using tremendously too much.

This required a big cooperation of large industrial and financial interests. So Forrestall was named one of the Secret Six Special Administrative Assistance to FDR. They were expected to have complete loyalty. And in his diaries, he describes it as a passion for anonymity. On August of 1940, he was named the first Undersecretary of the Navy. So to clarify this, similar to Bernard Baruch, the interplay here between the industrial activity during wartime and also the nature of the military warrants an explanation here. So as this role, he is the connecting point between the military demand and the civilian production for the Navy. By 1945, the Navy had added 1,200 major combatant ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.

Between 1941 and 1945, we doubled the number of submarines, cruisers, and destroyers. In total, the size of the Navy increased six times its pre-war numbers. So he's managing this enormous administrative task by managing production, inventory. He's cutting through the red tape of existing Navy bureaucracies, and he's expanding the shipbuilding industry. And if that was all he had done, that would have been great. But he doesn't stop there. He's not a desk jockey for this time around in World War II. And this is what I think sets him apart as a hero.

In 1941, he flies personally to London to deal with the British about the lend-lease system. In 1942, after the Battle of Guadalcanal, he went to the South Pacific. In 1944, the active secretary of the Navy dies, and so he is promoted upward to be the Secretary of the Navy. A very powerful position. At this time and in this capacity in 1944, he goes to the Coagelina Atoll to observe the Pacific offensive, and this I think is the most spectacular part. On February 23rd, 1945, he goes to the active, Battle of Iwojima, and he lands during the amphibious assault operation with the Marines

to expect the Japanese pillboxes and fortifications. He doesn't land with the first wave. He lands about five or six hours after the initial landing. But if you know about the Battle of Iwojima, it was the bloodiest in Marine Corps history, and he went up the beach with them, watching them throw grenades into these pillboxes and inspect the fortifications and the damage to understand their needs. And he watches the Marines raise the flag at Mount Suribachi. In that famous photograph that you see of the Marine Corps of the flag being hoisted, that's actually the second flag, which is photographed. The first flag that was raised was given to Mr. Forrestall by the Marines there. So I just want to help that paint a picture

of the kind of man that he was and the way that he worked for this country purely selflessly to both procure resources and also to understand the warfare in which he's fighting. To compare it to the earlier episode with Mr. Baruch, I mean, Baruch goes after all the fighting's done, right? He goes after the war is basically over.

And he walks around with the general staff and then gets back on a plane and goes home. but Mr. Forrestall takes a different route, and he's there with the Marines that are enlisted on the ground as a veteran himself. And so I think that's a very powerful thing. And to make it analogous to modern times, I can't imagine our current Secretary of Defense doing something like this. Do we even know who that is? I don't know. I mean, for two months, I don't think he knew who he was.

Yeah, apparently it's such an important position now that you can disappear for, you know, a couple months at a time. And, you know, I mean, like a, like a congresswoman did recently where they found her in an Alzheimer's facility where she had been for six months or something like that. We got a good system going here. We should definitely do everything we can to preserve it. I'm sure that she was actively voting and commenting on all the issues and that it wasn't her staff running the voting tallies or committees or anything important like that. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure this is all fine.

It makes, I hate to get emotional, but when you compare the caliber of man that, you know, walked the beach on Iwo Jima to our current bureaucrats, I mean, it's, it's endlessly frustrating to see something like this. And when you kind of watch Forrest All's downfall, it really starts to explain how we went from one type of man to the other. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you.

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you know, generally what would be considered a politician. Yeah. That says something about the, probably the, the regard the command held him in.

Exactly. And there was no, I mean, even at the time, there was not an expectation that that's something that he would do. But,

you know, the man never shirked duty throughout his entire life. I want to pivot now. And that's kind of a general biography. You can get all this stuff on Wikipedia. That's not the remarkable part. The information that I'm going to relay is mostly political and refers to kind of the state of international relations, the power players politically.

And all of this material, the source that I'm using is his diary. And a lot of this will kind of sync up very nicely with the material you've previously talked about with World War II and Thomas. and the Marshall Plan, the Morgenthau plan, there's a lot that kind of becomes clear here. On August 25th of 1944, right? At this point, Forrestall is back in the United States. Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the Treasury, he walked in with FDR to a cabinet meeting, and he said that he was very unhappy with an Army report stating how to allocate food to the Germans after the conclusion of the war.

Secretary Morgenthau stated that the Germans should have a subsistence level of food. As he put it, soup kitchens would be ample to sustain life, that otherwise they should be stripped clean. Secretary Forrestall objected to this because Secretary Morgenthau received this report from one Colonel Bernstein without going through proper army channels. Secretary of State Cordell Hull did not go to the Quebec conference, and he was frustrated that Morgenthau did as Secretary of Treasury, especially with the Morgenthau plan. Hull was reportedly so angry with this plan that he threatened to resign when Morgenthau's plan was chosen by FDR. Secretary of War, John McCloy, stated that the Morgenthau plan called for the, quote,

conscious destruction of the economy in Germany and the encouragement of a state of impoverishment and disorder. So, I mean, Forrestal was very frustrated with this, and you're beginning to see a split in the cabinet of how things are going to go after the war and how Germany is going to be treated. I have no doubt that Forrestal viewed Germany and Japan as adversaries, like most other men of his generation, but there is a humanity about this. I don't think that he wanted Germany destitute. He realized that it was a big problem because, as I'll get into, he is beginning to really perceive the Soviet Union as a threat.

And I can prove this because on September 2nd, 1944, Forrestal wrote a letter to his friend Palmer Hoyt, quote, I find that whenever any American suggest we act in accordance with the needs of our own security, he is apt to be called a god-damned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe, referring to Joseph Stalin, suggests that he needs all the Baltic provinces, half of Poland, all of Bessarabia, and access to the Mediterranean, all hands agree that he is a fine, frank, candid, and generally delightful fellow who is very easy to deal with because he's so explicit in what he wants.

And then... This sounds familiar. This sounds familiar in the modern day, where if you're America first, America first is fine, as long as it's not really America first, it's America and our greatest ally. And if you say anything bad about our greatest ally, then you start hearing how great they are, how we couldn't survive without them. One thing that becomes very clear to me as I was doing research for both Forrestall's life and Burroughs life is that throughout the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, there was a very specific program coming from the executive. And if you weren't with it, you were destroyed.

That was very clear. And more evidence of this split between Forrestall and other members of the cabinet occurs on November 23, 1944. Forrestall talked with Harry Hopkins. If you've been listening to the Pete Quinoa show, you know who Harry Hopkins is. He oversaw the lent lease arrangement. Forrestall said that the United States should have a civilian side joint chiefs of staff because at the time, The British were resisting the American position during Adolf Burrell, the Assistant Secretary of State, his trip to the air conference for British rights. While simultaneously, the United States was having Morgenthau give the British billions of dollars in lend lease.

So to make that more concise, Forrestal was extremely concerned that at the conclusion of the war as they're starting to divvy up the structure of power and money, for after the war, that the United States is giving Britain tons and tons of money while not acquiescing to the U.S. position on certain airspace rights. And this is very important because, you know, there has to be kind of a quid pro quo that occurs here in diplomacy. And it's not, you can't just take the U.S.'s money and screw it. But again, if you're listening to this, this is a pattern that occurs again and again. March 4, 1944, he writes in his diary, specifications for a presidential candidate.

This is a little bit lighter, so a little levity here. His first specification was looks, the second was height, the third was legal or political background, the fourth was desire for the job, and the fifth was political experience. So these are ranked ordered. On March 13th, 1944, he goes to the Yalta Conference. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, this is his direct quote,

seems to be going through some sort of a menopause. He talks with great eloquence in meetings, but did not follow up in subsequent sessions where substantive matters were dealt with, the same bigger. Continuing on, in April of 1945, FDR dies and Forrestall writes something down very curious in his diary.

When Mr. Truman, President Truman is sworn in, his only active omission was a failure to raise his right hand when he was repeating the oath with his left hand on the Bible. The chief justice had to indicate to him that he should raise his hand. Under the circumstances, it gave dignity and firmness. So there's a lot going on in his diaries where you have to read in between the lines. And the more that I learned about Mr. Truman, the more I have an increasing disdain for him. He cleaned out Roosevelt's cabinet, even very qualified man. And after his reelection, he brought in a lot of his Missouri friends and eventually forced out Forrestall. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

On May 1st, 1945, he writes in his diary, How far and how thoroughly do we want to beat Japan? In other words, do we want to Morgenthau those islands? Do we want to destroy the whole industrial potential? And there's a few other times where he uses Morgenthau as a verb to mean render a country economically wasted. I want to get a little bit into, the communist stuff because at this time is starting to become more and more important in his

diaries. On May 28, 1945, Forrestall contacts J. Edgar Hoover to go after one Lieutenant Andrew Roth, who was furnishing 1,700 classified documents to the communist newspaper Amaragia, and he was also a member of the Communist Party. He advocated for his arrest. Additionally, something else that he did was order an inquiry into incompetence among the general staff during the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And he felt that the general staff after the investigation was concluded and a verdict was rendered were actually let off too easy. You have to consider his position as Secretary of the Navy that, you know, regardless of

it being a surprise attack, a significant amount of U.S. forward-station ships in the Pacific were destroyed at this time. And so Forrestal believed there should have been more accountability for this at the staff level. So very anti-communist, very competent man. In July of 1945, although not officially a part of the Potsdam Declaration, he flew privately to Germany with a young future president John F. Kennedy, who is the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Great Britain. The war wraps up.

Truman is president. This is where I'm going to start to veer out of the diaries a little bit because the John Birch Society stuff about four. And also other inquiries into his life begin to bring more attention to Forrestal's anti-communist activities. So in December of 1946, Senator Joseph McCarthy first came to Washington. And according to sources in his book, McCarthyism, the Fight for America in 1952, Navy Secretary Forrestall personally opened McCarthy's eyes to the mass infiltration of communists

into our government, but also named names. Let's see here. When asked directly by an anonymous Birch Society guy who was talking with McCarthy in the early 50s, 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. And as a international relations side note, James Forrestall was also the sponsor of George Kennan's Long Telegram and Mr. X article.

If you know anything about international relations and kind of the history of the early Cold War, these were the gold standard in setting the U.S. policy. towards the Soviet Union and represented a significant shift in the country becoming more anti-communist after World War II. So I didn't know that James Forrestal was behind the sponsorship of Kennan's work, but the more I dig into it, the more I can confirm of it. I want to talk now, I want to shift a little bit to Israel, because this is what did them in as much as I can say. Let's see Do you have any questions up until this point? I know I've been going a while.

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Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunbeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa, savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining,

relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Farage. No, no, this is where it starts to get interesting. All right. From his diary, December 1st, 1947. I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists' pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine.

I also remarked that the New York Times editorial of Saturday morning point up those misgivings when it said. Many of us have long had doubts concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on the basis of religion. I said I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country, meaning the United States. December 3rd, 1947. So now, just as a date, as a chronology reference point, Israel, the state was established on May 14th, 1948. So we're leading into the run-up for how that decision transpired.

December 3rd, 1947, two administrative assistance to the president were chiefly responsible for the decision, the decision being whether to recognize the state of Israel upon its creation. Both had told President Truman that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favoring the Zionist position on Palestine and that they had insisted that unless the president anticipate this movement, New York State would be lost to the Democrats. I asked James Burns, the former Truman of Secretary of State, who had resigned in January 19, 47, what he thought of the possibility of getting Republican leaders to agree with the Democrats to have the Palestine question placed on a non-political basis. He wasn't particularly optimistic about the success of this effort because of the fact that

Rabbi Silver was one of Taft's closest associates, the senator. Senator Taft followed Silver on the Palestine Haifa question. I said, I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular block of special interests might make to the party funds. So we're starting to see how much the Zionist lobbying effort to politicians was beginning to pay off on both the Republican and the Democratic side. Now, I should add that Forrestal's interests were anti-communist, and I couldn't find anything

in his diaries, all 1,500 pages of it that were anti-Semitic in any way. There was never anything negative he ever said about Jews, despite whatever BS was contrived about him after his life. His interest was geopolitical. Here's a demonstration of this. January 6, 1948. He ate breakfast with Mr. B. Brewster Jennings, president of Sokony Vacuum of New York. This company later became mobile oil company and was known today as ExxonMobil. Mr. Jennings noted that multiple oil companies had stopped oil production in Saudi Arabia because of the disturbed condition in Palestine and the indications of its continuance. I express it as my opinion that unless we had access to Middle East oil,

American motor car companies would have to design a four-cylinder motor car sometime within the next five years. that's a significant downgrade. Most car engines in the United States, if not all, at the time, were V8s with some V6s. V4, like four cylinder engines were really not used except in like motorcycles, boats, farm machinery. This is not something that was used in cars at the time. So he was very concerned that like the skyrocketing oil prices and the problems here would cause significant geopolitical risk to the United States. States. A month goes by February 3, 1948. He meets with FDR Jr., who came in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish state in Palestine. FDR Jr. says to Secretary Forrestall that we should support the United Nations decision and in general a broad across-the-board statement of the Zionist position. I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States.

The same day in 1948, he goes to have lunch with Bernard Baruch, who, if you haven't heard it yet, I recommend you check out the earlier episode about him. Baruch took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter, and it was already identified to agree that it was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine. Baruch said he himself did not approve of the Zionist's actions, but in the next breath said the Democratic Party could only lose by trying to get our government's policy reversed and said it was a most inequitable thing to let the British arm the Arabs and for us not to

furnish similar equipment to the Jews. Then later this afternoon, okay, the Israel thing is very much on his mind, he goes to meet with Winthrop Aldrich, the chairman of Chase National Bank. Mr. Aldrick said that he was very sympathetic to Forrestall. However, it would be best for him to leave the decision to Secretary of State, George Marshall, and John Foster Dulles. On May 14, 1948, the United States recognizes Israel. At this point in the diaries, Mr. Forrestall's assistant notes that the president and White House staff had taken Palestine out of the hands of the State Department

just as they had taken the military budget out of the hands of the Defense Department. At the National Security Council meeting that day, this is now a later point, he doesn't let the Israel thing go once the country is created. He's very concerned about it. At the National Security Council meeting on October 21, 1948, Forrestall spoke with apparent asperity of another disconnection in our policy meeting. Mr. Forrestall referred to the State Department request for 4 to 6,000 troops to be used as guard forces in Jerusalem in implementation of the Bernadot plan for Palestine. Mr. Forstall said that actually our Palestine policy had been made for squalid political purposes.

He hoped that someday he would be able to make his position on this issue clear. And at this point, I want to bring up something. when Mr. Forrestal was checked in for mental health reasons into a clinic and eventually the events occurred that led to his death, he ordered his assessment to retain copy of 15 handwritten diaries at the White House in the storage because he wanted to keep them safe upon his release after treatment.

So I want to just say that statement again. He hoped that some, day, he would be able to make his position on this issue clear. And let's see here. At this point, he's so anti-Zionist that he's starting to get negative press attention, a lot of it from a fellow called Drew Pearson and primarily a gossip colonist named Walter Winschell. And their objective seemed to really go beyond getting him out of the government. They really wanted to destroy his reputation. Forrestal was thinking about making plans to leave

because Truman was re-elected in November in 1948, and Truman got rid of most of the FDR carryovers, and Forrestal was not getting along well with the Missouri cronies that Truman had put in his cabinet and in high political offices. Forrestall met with President Truman, and he agreed that he would leave the government on May 1st of 1949. But unbeknownst to Forrestall on March 4th, 1949, Truman made the abrupt announcement that Forrestall was going to be replaced by a West Virginia lawyer named Lewis Johnson, the man who had been Truman's main fundraiser during the campaign, and also

a person for whom Forrestall had very little respect. There was also additional opposition from a guy named David Niles within the cabinet. He was another one of the few people that was carried over from Roosevelt to Truman, and he disliked forestall intensely. One thing that's interesting about Niles as a cabinet-level official was that according to Venona papers, he worked with the NKVD to smuggle people from Mexico to the United States. and he also worked with Harry Hopkins, and he was also the longest serving White House aid.

Very interesting, right, the forces that are starting to move against Forrestall. This is all documented. And so I want to, I was mentioned, Pearson, the Drew Pearson, not the old wide receiver, but the American columnist,

Quaker, Walter Winchell, Russian Jewish immigrant parents. Yep, all of them. All of them. I was astonished when I was reading this in the account. And I want to, and now we're going to get to like a very, this is going to be dark. And to make it YouTube friendly, just stop me if I say anything that I shouldn't for whatever terms. I don't care about YouTube anymore. They do monetize me. They go fuck themselves. Fair enough. All right. So we now get to a very pivotal question. and this is the reason that people know of Secretary Forrestall. I think it is a tragedy that he is known for how he died. And the life that he lived and the work that he put in for this country, I want to just advance the mainstream theory of how he died.

And then I'll go into what I think is the true reason that he died. because I want to differentiate between possibility and probability. It is possible that he kills himself in 1949. The man was, sorry, I have to think about how I do this. 1949 comes around. He's been pushed out of government. He had tirelessly worked for five years straight, regularly working 15-hour days, and in this entire time frame, he takes one three-day vacation. So it is possible that he worked himself into a state of total exhaustion and depression, and that all of the people around him, all these new cabinet people are destroying his reputation and they are harassing him. They're writing negative press about him. And all of his effort was being shit on by people who really should have appreciated what he had done for this country. And this was not a easy task to be named

as the first Secretary of Defense to walk us through as a country the first years of the Cold War. And I doubt anyone else put in his position would do anywhere near as good a job as he would. But I think that no matter how you look at it, even if his death was a suicide, it is an abject tragedy and a stain on this country for a hero to die in this way. But I don't think that it was a suicide. And I'm going to go into the evidence for why that is. So he voluntarily checks himself into mental health treatment. And I don't, I've never been to a psych ward. But you, when you're in a mental health hospital, I guess in the late 40s,

people have visitation rights. Some people can visit you. Some people can't. The determination of how that's made is done at the hospital. And they can turn away people for whatever reason and admit people. as they see fit. Now, you would think that if you're in a mental health hospital, you know, if you're in a psych ward, whatever you want to call it, for treatment, you want people to visit you that help you and care about you and will bolster you up.

And that people that you don't like are people that aggravate you, stay the fuck away. And the opposite happened. And this is where it gets fascinating. So who was denied visitation to see Mr. Forrestall when he's receiving treatment? Well, two Catholic priests were denied seeing him. And do you know who wasn't denied visitation? His Secretary of Defense successor, who he hated Louis Johnson, his aide, Forrestal's aide, who compiled his diaries, had described him as an overly ambitious troublemaker. Forrestall had told the aide that Johnson was incompetent and felt degraded at the very idea of being replaced by such a man.

Other visitors, who he was not on good terms with, include President Truman himself and one congressman, Lyndon Bain Johnson. LBJ was known in 1949, even at this time, as being very pro-Zionist. right so all of these Zionist people are meeting with Forrestall after having pushed the man out by the way LBJ was also close with Drew would Drew Pearson

yep and but don't take don't take my word for it on May 23rd 1949 the Washington Post wrote an article headlined after he died because they're they are scum excuse me delusions of persecution, acute anxiety, and depression marked Forrestal's illness.

Quote from the article, his fear of reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by some columnists on what they said was his opposition to partition of Palestine under a UN mandate. In his last year's defense secretary, he received great numbers of abusive and threatening letters. And I'm going to go into the details here. and, you know, I will leave you to make up your mind, whether it's a murder or a suicide. At 1.50 a.m. on Sunday, May 22, 1949, James Forrestall died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. At the time, Forrestall was under more liberty of movement and less supervision.

In the last, I'm sorry, I already said that, James' brother, Henry Forrestall, states that either the communist, or the Jews did him in. And I want to go through some material facts about the night of his murder or suicide. And I want to add that there are multiple books that have been written on this, and that if you look them up, you will see very convincing evidence. The guard that was, you know, a guard was on duty to watch him, check in on him every 15 minutes. The guard was new, only having been on duty for a few months, replacing the year. usual guard who was supposedly AWOL on a drunken bender. There was a central witness in the case

who was named in the book, but I'm leaving him anonymous. His daughter sent the author of the book on the assassination of James Forrestall. This email in 2017, I started reading your article on the Forrestall death. I got to the part about X's story being irrelevant. He was my father, and I can tell you he lived in fear of something happening because of information he knew about the case. even up to a year prior to my father's death, he had called me and was in fear that he was going to be questioned again about the issue. It might have been irrelevant to you, but it was not irrelevant to my family. It was always a shadow in our lives. So he dies on May 22, 1949.

I believe there's sort of a cover up here. What makes me suggest that? Well, you see the day before, James' brother Henry calls the hospital. to arrange picking up James Forrestall. You see, he's recovered by this point, and he's getting released the next day. And he dies on the same day that his brother has a train ticket booked to come and pick him up from the hospital. It's probably not something you're going to find in the Wikipedia article. I'm sorry, just it's tremendously, it's upsetting.

You know, they denied the man priests to come and visit him and made him. forced him to meet with people that he didn't like when he was in a tremendously weakened state. Yeah, the denial of, the denial of, uh, of clergy is, uh, I mean, that's just straight up evil. Yeah. Um, Dr. Raines, the attending physician stated that Mr. Forrestall had never made a suicidal gesture or a suicidal attempt. Um, Forrestall was confirmed to sleep at 1.30 a.m. by the attending guard, and when the guard checked again, was also asleep at 145 a.m. So we mean to understand the nature of his suicide that he wakes up between 145 and 150, goes outside of his room, goes downstairs, ties his bathrobe code, cord around his neck,

and this is unbelievable. The manner in which they describe him dying, he tries to hand. hang himself by his bathroom cord around his neck, tied to the radiator, while jumping out of a 16th story window. Now, I want to pose something to you, which is, I think you would either hang yourself or you would jump out of the 16th story window. It doesn't make a lot of sense that you would try to do both and that you would be able to do it within five minutes of waking up, confirmed by the witness statement. and that, you know, the day of your release from the hospital. These are very strange details that do not add up. And I can't say it with certainty because we're never going to know for certain.

But one other fact that I'll add here, at the height of the Palestine controversy, his limo was followed to and from his office by a blue sedan. containing two men. When the police were notified in the sedan apprehended, it was discovered that the two men were photographers employed by a Zionist organization. They explained to the police that they had hoped to obtain photographs of the limousine's occupant, entering or leaving an Arab embassy, in order to demonstrate that the official involved was in close contact with Arab representatives. There's one other piece of evidence that I want to go over here. I'm not sure if this is something you can share or not. The handwriting samples. I can describe. I have those. I'll download them real quick from where you sends them to me and I'll share them. Yeah, for sure.

But for the audience that could be listening to this, there are two handwriting samples that are confirmed of his. One is from a Western Union telegram, which represents a short script or something that you do over a very brief period of time. And the second is a handwritten letter to President Truman on a secretary of the Navy letterhead signed by him. These are two documents which are confirmed with his signature. And then the other thing that is included below is a poem transcription purportedly found in his vacated room. Now, I'm not an expert on handwriting, but I would argue logically that if you look with even an untrained eye,

between the telegram and the letter and the purported suicide note that it is not the same person writing this. For those listening, the script, the capital letters are different. That's, okay, so what you're seeing now, that is his, that is his handwriting on the Navy letterhead. It's straight. The letters are neat. The font is consistent. And if you change it to perhaps the note or the other one, Change it to the other one real quick.

Okay. This is like a short form telegram. Okay. This is something he's writing really quickly. So you know, you can see it. It's the same person writing it signed by him, confirmed by him. And now change it to the suicide note. Now look at that and tell me that that's the same person.

Right. You can see that the font is tilted to the right and that the capital letters don't match. and that I And as I said earlier when you look at his actual confirmed handwriting it's sloppier than this

it's well it's it's much different than this this seems more compact this seems more it's just different handwriting and also you would think at a time when you're writing your suicide note

you may not have the best penmanship and this is like pristine. Yeah. You know, so the handwriting, I mean, this is what suffices as a suicide note. I mean, I find it unbelievable that a man who left 15 handwritten diaries at the White House for safekeeping upon his reliefs. All he would ever leave as a suicide note would be one transcribed poem from a book he's reading. You know, when was it written?

you know, was it written at night in the five minutes before he jumps out the window? Was it left there? You know, why would a man who had planned so far ahead on being released? You know, this is what he, this is his goodbye. You know, a man who was our Secretary of Defense for five years and Secretary of the Navy. That's his explanation. You know, it's none of it adds up. The details are very, very strange.

And let's see. What other points here are there to draw? Let's see. Okay, we covered his passing. Big stuff. The Wikipedia article, most everything you read in it is BS. I would recommend looking at the sources, the death of James Forrestall and the assassination. of James Forrestall.

These are two different books. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of evidence because these are sourced from the FOIA requests that went to the U.S. government. And the actual witness testimony, the inquiry, all of the actual evidence is sourced within it. So nothing that I'm saying is conjecture. This is all demonstrated in the paperwork. that comes out from the federal government. And another thing I'd like to add is that right at the top of the Wikipedia article, it says that he was administered barbiturates,

and that, you know, the subtext there is that this perhaps altered his mental state to make him suicidal or that he was under some kind of heavy influence of drugs. That is not the case. It is confirmed that when he went to bed, the night before his suicide, he did not take any, um, any barbiturates. He was, he refused them. The aid, the medical aide who was working there, uh,

offered them to him and he declined and he said he can sleep without him. And, uh, you know, so most stuff that you're going to encounter in the Wikipedia article about him is, uh, is not true. Well, that's quite a lot, man. That's, um, hearing stories like this, you know, I immediately, I start looking at big picture stuff, and it's like, okay, so he was, he was one of,

I forget who the other person was, who told Truman do not recognize the state of Israel, do not recognize. And I forget who the other one was, but they relented, and he's stuck. And, you know, something I said earlier, you know, our greatest ally, Does anybody want to ask the question of whether things, the United States, the culture, the country, the government has gotten better or worse since 1948? I mean, I've heard politicians say since October 7th of 2023 that the United States can't exist without the state of Israel. I'm I don't first of all what kind of what world are you living in if you're saying that it's pure propaganda do you even believe it do you do you believe it or are you just is it something

you are just blatantly lying and you know you're lying is it something you've convinced yourself of and honestly if people If American heroes, and many American heroes have suffered even death because this state exists and it has so much power and basically occupies ours, how do people not see this? How do people continue to defend it? And I guess the only yeah, I mean, and I'm talking about even kind of people who who have the power or the resources to do it.

Do they know? And they just, they're scared that they're going to end up in a mental institution, you know, in a hospital somewhere and they're going to take their own life, quote unquote. Yeah. And if you, I mean, there's a few interesting aspects. of this that stand out to me. The biggest aspect is I think this is the first one. I mean, and what we consider, how do I even put this? Preventable deaths? I mean, yes, the man, oh gosh, how do I even go about this? He was opposed to the creation of Israel, but he was out of the

picture. He was no longer the Secretary of Defense. He had resigned from the cabinet. He wanted to just he was talking to his brother about this, that he just wanted to go, go home, and he wanted to work for a local newspaper. And they're, you know, after five years in this incredibly high stress position, you know, this is not someone who would want to advance a political agenda. He was on, his political fortunes were toast as early as 1946. And I think the real tragedy is that his fate was sealed. More so than, okay, let's get this guy out of the picture and, you know, then we'll achieve some kind of goal that we can't enact with this person in power. That's not what happened. This was, I don't even know what to call it, because it's not revenge because he was a minority position on the cabinet, which was pro-Zionist.

And it wasn't political because Democrats and Republicans had unified whether Truman or Dewey to agree on this issue. There, there was no reason for this man to die, even from like a realpolitik, completely evil, pragmatic or rational. line of thinking. There was no, there was no reason. And if it wasn't murder, then this man committing suicide is still an immense tragedy. I guess that doesn't, I'm just kind of, I'm rambling a little bit here. But, well, I mean, if he committed, even if, even if he did commit suicide, he did it for a reason. He did it because he was driven to it. Absolutely.

Yeah. And why? Why when you're already basically out of the spotlight? I mean, it's just revenge. I mean, it's just, it's just, I don't even know if it's revenge. I think it's just, we can do it. Is it is we have the power to do it and fuck you. Yeah, and they did have the power to do it.

at the Vernona papers and all the people in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who worked with the communists. In this country, it was framed that the communists had no power and the evil McCarthyites came in and persecuted people. But the actual history is the polar inverse of that fact. you know, a man who, I mean, this man, again, there's nothing anti-Semitic. He had no animosity here. He was simply looking out for the interests, the security, and the energy interests of the United States. And it wasn't enough that he was humiliated by being made to resign early than he would have liked after giving everything for his country. when he was in mental health treatment, people that he hated were showing up.

And they probably weren't remorseful about their actions and having driven him to that point. And they probably weren't, you know, there to make nice. And it is an evil action to refuse somebody, their priests and to put them in a room with their enemy. when they're in a psych ward. I mean, you know, and, you know, what is the value of one good man? You know, this starting, he had, he had every opportunity throughout his, I just want to, like, recap his life real quick. He had every opportunity to say no. He didn't have to, he didn't have to leave the business world to join the Navy.

And even in the Navy, he didn't have to take the risk of joining the Navy. Aviation Branch, which was a dangerous job to fly planes in 1917. He didn't have to give up that pilots commission to go work as a bureaucrat in D.C. Or go back to business life. He could have refused FDR in 1940 to assist this country in its rearmament and war production. He also could have turned down after the heart attack, his promotion to be Secretary of Navy, and he could have turned down the post-war change from Secretary of Navy to Secretary of Defense. At any point, he could have just said no.

He could have just taken the money and the power and the influence and just gone home. But throughout his life, he gave money to poor men who could not afford college. And he argued in favor of an enemy that was defeated in warfare for the humanitarian aid. and he was anti-communist because he loved this country. And he, at every turn, especially in the Truman years, he was needlessly persecuted, and his opinions were ignored, and his efforts to tell the truth were suppressed. and it kind of defies belief.

And the man was not a nameless bureaucrat, although even if he was a humble and simple man, it would be still equally a tragedy. The man was our Secretary of Defense, the first one, a man who was asked to pioneer, a political position, and do a job competently, a man who never took vacations, and a man who really gave every part of himself for this country.

To see, you know, this being his legacy, and for years afterwards, he was, you know, derided as, I don't even know. I couldn't bring myself to read through most of, there are a lot of sources out there from the time. that were kind of forgotten about that would portray him in a very negative light when he was Secretary of Defense that after his death were kind of you know, you can't really find the microfilms anymore for research and the other stuff.

And, you know, he left 2,800 pages of his diaries at the White House so that people would know. And even though the addition that we got was heavily edited, it shows a man who just, every single day when to work for this country. And I I think it's

what a tragedy. What a tragedy for this man to be treated in this way. And when you compare it to a man like Baruch, who made it past his 80th birthday on 17,000 acres and profited millions and millions of dollars from this country's wartime efforts. and Forrestal dies alone.

And, you know, the day he was supposed to be released from the hospital. I just, yeah, I don't know much else to say. I wish there was a, I mean, I do want to, there has to be some kind of positive, because what a negative note to end on or to like wrap things, or to steadily wrap things up on. I think the positive to be drawn from this is that the Trump administration needs to make an effort to find these men who will give everything and to make sure that their efforts are used as productively and efficiently as this country used the talent of James Forrestall. and when it comes down to it, when these men that are going to step up and fill these positions and do this job at like tremendous reputational risk to themselves and their families, the administration needs to go to the mat for them in a way that I found very few people went to the mat for Mr. Forrestall. And that I think is the central lesson and why I got interested in him.

I first heard about him. Stormy mentioned that Forrestall was a hero and that got me very intrigued. And I think that there are going to be heroes in this country. There have been in the interim period between World War II and now. And then in the Trump administration, there's going to be heroes. and when they do difficult things, there has to be people that support them because there's going to be the same types of people out there

that destroyed Forrestall's reputation that undermined him and that whether either by suicide or murder eventually drove him to suicide. There has to be people out there that will say no to Muckrager's and to support people in the Trump administration. Because it is an equally difficult task that we face ahead of us now to rearm and to industrialize

and to onshore manufacturing. And we're going to need people as talented as forestall to do it. The man, to reiterate, grew the Navy six times over in four years. Okay, built 100 aircraft carriers and arranged for that. you know, could the U.S. build one aircraft carrier today in four years? You know, it's not very clear. Yeah. Not the way things are structured nowadays.

It's just, but there's too much, you know, you have to have this amount of diversity here and there and everything. And there are men out there. there are Americans out there who can do these things and do them well they're either being you know attacked fed fed prescription drugs liberally even if they don't need them or they're just being replaced by um no Frankenstein head shaped street shitters from india yeah now we could views with a few more Irish Catholics in this administration. Yeah. All right.

I'm going to, let's wrap this up here because it just, it gets depressing. The more you think about it, but yeah, you have to, these men, men like him are out there.

They just, you would think they'd be smart enough to be like, I don't want anything to do with that government, or if I haven't have anything to do with that government, I'm going to use it as a way to enrich myself because they're fucking dangerous. And, you know, if I had some way to have government contracts so that I can enrich myself and, you know,

basically make myself bulletproof through that kind of wealth, I would. And maybe some of those men have been doing that for about 30 or 40 years. And, you know, the smartest men out there just don't really want anything to do with it. yeah yeah absolutely um all right what you got anything uh no nothing for me all right well uh i'll link to your youtube channel again that hopefully uh one of these days you'll uh get back to reading forgotten books on yes sir and um and uh yeah thank you and we'll talk about something um i want to maybe talk about doing one more of these,

but I want to think of the person to do it on something that can follow through on this thread that you started to pull here. Absolutely. All right. Thanks, follows. Appreciate it. Thank you, Pete.