Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
episodes early and ad free, head on over to Freemanbeyond
the Wall dot 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 podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll
be able to listen to the episodes through there. If
you support me through subscribe, star gum Road 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. It allows
me to basically put out an episode every day now,
and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate.
I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two
even three a day, and yeah, can't do it without you,
So thank you for the support. Head on over to
Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com, forward slash support and
do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to the Pekanona Show. Filos is back for another
profile of a well let's say this time the person
will might be a little more likable. How you doing follows?
Speaker 2: I'm doing very well, Pete.
Speaker 1: Thank you all right? Who you got for us today?
Speaker 2: The man is named James Forrest Stall. 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.
Speaker 1: Be the case.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: 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 is a more likely
it's a more likely scenario that played out there. So
where do you want to go? Where do you want
to go from here?
Speaker 2: 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 One and World War Two. 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
twenty second, nineteen forty nine, 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 Forestall Diaries that were published in
nineteen fifty one by his personal aid who worked for
him during World War Two. There's also a book called
The Death of James Forestall, which came out in the
early two thousands, which alleges that he was murdered. And
there's an additional book that came out. It's called The
Assassination of James Forestall, and that one came out in
the late nineteen fifties, 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 eighteen ninety two 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 nineteen eleven and he transferred in nineteen
twelve 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 Princetonian. 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 encounter failure. After
leaving Princeton, he took a job with the Tobacco Products
Corporation selling cigarettes, and then in nineteen sixteen he entered
the investment banking house of William A. Reid and Company,
which later became Dylan Reading 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 deman. So in nineteen seventeen,
the United States has drawn into World War One 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 US Navy. He then transfers,
due to his own merit, to the aviation branch, which
was in its infancy in World War One. 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 Schmoe
could get into since there was not much infrastructure and
training for naval aviation in the US 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 one hundred and fifty four 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, DC,
and so he worked at a desk job and made
first lieutenant by the armistice at the end of World
War One. So this guy did not see any combat
in World War One, but very very smart, and this
country took tremendous advantage of his talents. So after the
war he goes back to Dylan Reading Company and has
a meteoric rise. He makes partner in nineteen twenty three
and was a vice president just three years later. By
nineteen twenty six, and then by nineteen thirty eight, at
the age of forty six, he becomes the president of
Dylan Reading 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 they 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 hard working
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 One.
There was really not a bigger obligation that was necessitated
of him, you know, 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 nineteen forty, FDR personally extended
him an invitation to join the administration because in nineteen
forty 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 Assistants to FDR that
were expected to have complete loyalty, and in his diaries
he describes it as a passion for anonymity. On August
of nineteen forty, he was named the first nd Secretary
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 nineteen forty five, the Navy had added twelve hundred
major combatant ships, including ninety nine aircraft carriers. Between nineteen
forty one and nineteen forty five, 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 man 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 Two, and this is
what I think sets him apart as a hero. In
nineteen forty one, he flies personally to London to deal
with the British about the lend lease system in nineteen
forty two, after the Bottle Battle of Guadalcanal, he went
to the South Pacific. In nineteen forty four, the active
Secretary of the Navy dies and so he is promoted
upward to be the Secretary of the Navy, very powerful position.
Speaker 1: At this time.
Speaker 2: And in this capacity, in nineteen forty four, he goes
to the kuwajial In Atoll to observe the Pacific offensive,
and this I think is the most spectacular part. On
February twenty third, nineteen forty five, he goes to the
active Battle of Ewajima 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 Jima, it
was the bloodiest in Marine Corps history. And he went
up the beach with them, watching them throw grenades into
these pill boxes 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 mister 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 resource and also to understand
the warfare in which he's fighting.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: To compare it to the earlier episode with mister 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 mister 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 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.
Speaker 1: So do we even know who that is? I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean for two months, I don't think he knew
who he was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I 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 a
in an Alzheimer's facility where she had been for six
months or something like that. We we got a good
system going here. We should definitely do everything we can
to preserve it.
Speaker 2: 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, walk to the beach
on you Rejima to our current bureaucrats, I mean, it's
it's endlessly frustrating to see something like this, and when
you kind of watch Forrestall's downfall, it really starts to
explain how we went from one type of man to
the other.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i mean, you're you know, if you're if
you're raising a flag and then you take it down
and you're you know, you would expect it to go
to commanding officer or something like that. But no, when
to know, somebody went to you know, generally what would
be considered a politician. Yeah, that says something about the
probably the the regard the command held him.
Speaker 2: 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 two
and Thomas and the Marshall Plan, the Morgenthal Plan. There's
a lot that kind of becomes clear here. On August
twenty fifth of nineteen forty four, right at this point,
Forrestall's back in the United States. Henry Morgenthal, 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 Forestall objected to this because Secretary morgenthal
received this report from one Colonel Bernstein without going through
proper army channels. Secretary of State Cordel 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 Morgenthu'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 Forrestall 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's going to be treated. I have no doubt that
Forrest All 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 second, nineteen forty four, Forrestall wrote a
letter to his friend Palmer Hoyt quote, I find that
whenever any American suggests we act in accordance with the
needs of our own security, he is apt to be
called a goddamned 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.
Speaker 1: And then this 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 what great, how
great they are. We couldn't survive without them.
Speaker 2: One thing that becomes very clear to me as I
was doing research for both Forestall's life and Bruf's 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 Forestall and other
members of the cabinet occurs. On November twenty third, nineteen
forty four, Forestall talked with Harry Hopkins. If you've been
listening to the Peak Winona show, you know who Harry
Hopkins is. He oversaw the lend 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 Adolph Burrell, the Assistant Secretary
of State, his trip to the Air Conference for British rights. Well, simultaneously,
the United States was having Morgenthau give the British billions
of dollars in lend lease, so to make that more concise.
Forrestall was extremely concerned that at the conclusion of the war,
as they're starting to divvy up the structure of power
in money after the war, that the United States is
giving Britain tons and tons of money well not acquiescing
to the US 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 that it's not you can't just take the US's
money and screw it. But again, if you're listening to this,
this is a pattern that occurs again and again. March fourth,
nineteen forty four, he writes in his diary specifications for
a presidential candidate. This is a little bit lighter. It's
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 thirteenth,
nineteen forty four, he goes to the Alta Conference Prime
Minister Winston Churchhill. This is his direct quote. Seems to
be going through some sort of a menopause. He talks
with great eloquence and meetings, but did not follow up
in some quincessions where substantive matters were dealt with the
same vigor. Continuing on. In April of nineteen forty five,
Fdr dies and Forrest I'll writes something down very curious
in his diary when mister 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 mister 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 forestall
but I'm getting ahead of myself here. On May one,
nineteen forty five, he writes in his diary, how far
and how thoroughly do we want to beat Japan? In
other words, do we want to morgan thau those islands?
Do we want to destroy the whole industrial potential? And
there's a few other times where he uses morgan thou
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 it's starting to become more and
more important.
Speaker 1: In his diaries.
Speaker 2: On May twenty eighth, nineteen forty five, forest All contacts JD.
Gerhover to go after one Lieutenant Andrew Roth, who was
furnishing seventeen hundred classified documents to the communist newspaper I'm Easia,
and he was also a member of the Communist Party.
He advocated for his arrest. Additionally, something else that he
did was ordered an inquiry into incompetence among the General
staff during the December seventh attack on Pearl Harbor in
nineteen forty one, and he felt that the general staff,
after the investigation was concluded and avertict 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
US forward station ships in the Pacific were destroyed at
this time, and so Forrest All believed there should have
been more accountability for this at the staff level. So
very anti communist, very competent man. In July of nineteen
forty five, 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 as 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 Forrestall and also other
inquiries into his life began to bring more attention to
Forrestall's anti communist activities. So in December of nineteen forty six,
Senator Joseph McCarthy first came to Washington, and, according to
sources in his book McCarthyism, The Fight for America. In
nineteen fifty two, Navy Secretary Forestall personally opened McCarthy's eyes
to the mass infiltration of communists into our govern government,
but also named names. Let's see here. When asked directly
by a anonymous Birch Society guy who was talking with McCarthy
in the early fifties, Senator McCarthy replied, the answer to
both questions is yes. Forestall told me he was convinced
that General Marshall was one of the key figures in
the United States in advancing communist objectives. And as an
international relations side note, James Forrestall was also the sponsor
of George Kennan's Long Telegram and Mister X article. If
you know anything about international relations and kind of their
history of the early World War, these were the gold
standard in setting the US policy towards the Soviet Union
and represented a significant shift in the country becoming more
anti communist after World War Two. So I didn't know
that James Forrestall 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 him.
Speaker 1: Men.
Speaker 2: Inasmuch as I can say, let's see do you have
any questions up until this point, I know I've been
going a while.
Speaker 1: No, no, this is where it starts to get interesting,
all right.
Speaker 2: From his diary December one, nineteen forty seven, I remarked
that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep
misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionist's 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's 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 first future security of
this country, meaning the United States. December third, nineteen forty seven.
So now, just as a date as a chronology reference point,
Israel the state was established on May fourteenth, nineteen forty eight,
So we're leading into the run up for how that
decision transpired. December third, nineteen forty seven. Two administrative assistants
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 the 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, Truman of
Secretary of State, who had resigned in January nineteen forty seven,
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 hypha 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 Forest Stahl's interests were anti Communists,
and I couldn't find anything in his diaries, all fifteen
hundred 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 sixth,
nineteen forty eight, he ate breakfast with mister B. Brewster Jennings,
president of Socony Vacuum of New York. This company later
became Mobile Oil Company and was known today as Exon Mobile.
Mister 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 nificant downgrade. Most car engines in the United States,
if not all, at the time, were V eights, with
some V six's. V four. 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. A month goes by February third,
nineteen forty eight, he meets with FDR Junior, who came
in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish state and Palestine.
FDR Junior says to Secretary Forrestall that we should support
the United Nations decision and in general abroad 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 nineteen forty eight, he goes to have lunchist Bernard Baruch,
who 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 I was already identified to agree that it was
not in my own interests. With opposition to the United
Nations policy on palesign, 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 Winthromp Aldrich,
the chairman of Chase National Bank. Mister Aldrich 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 fourteenth,
nineteen forty eight, the United States recognizes Israel. At this
point in the diaries, mister 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 meet 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 twenty first, nineteen forty eight, Forrestall spoke with apparent
asperity of another disconnection in our policy meeting. Mister Forstall
referred to the State Department request for four to six
thousand troops to be used as guard forces in Jerusalem,
an implementation of the Bernadotte Plan for Palestine. Mister Forrestall
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
mister Forrestall 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
fifteen handwritten diaries at the White House in 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 someday 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. Forrestall was thinking about making plans to
leave because Truman was reelected in November nineteen forty eight,
and Truman got rid of most of the FDR carryovers,
and Forrestall was not getting along well with the Missouri
cronies that Truman had put in his cabinet and in
high political offices. Forestall met with President Truman and he
agreed that he would leave the government on May first
of nineteen forty nine, But unbeknownst to Forrestall, on March fourth,
nineteen forty nine, 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 Forestall, and
this is all documented, and so I want.
Speaker 1: To Pearson Drew Pearson, not the wide old wide receiver,
but the American columnist, quaker Walter Winschel, Russian Jewish immigrant parents.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't care about I don't care about
YouTube anymore. They demonetize me, they go fucked themselves.
Speaker 2: Fair enough, all right, So we now get to a
very pivotal question. And this is the reason that people
know of Secretary Forrest all I think it is 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 of how he died, and then
I'll go into what I think is the true reason
that he died, because I want a differentry between possibility
and probability. Right, it is possible that he kills himself
in nineteen forty nine, the man was, so I have
to think about how I do this. Nineteen forty nine
comes around, He's been pushed out of government. He had
tirelessly worked for five years straight, regularly working fifteen hour days,
and in this entire timeframe he takes one three day vacation.
So it is possible that he worked himself into a
state state of total exhaustion and depressing, and that all
of the people around him, all these new cabinets people
are destroying his reputation and they are harassing him, they
are 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 an 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.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: I don't I've never been to a psych word. But
when you're in a mental health hospital, I guess in
the late forties, 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.
Speaker 1: They see fit.
Speaker 2: Now you would think that if you're in a mental
health hospital, you know, if you're not a psych word
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 or 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
mister Forrestall when he's receiving treatment. Well, two Catholic priests
were denied seeing him. And you know who wasn't denied
visitation His Secretary of Defense successor who he hated, Lewis Johnson,
his aide. Forrestall's aide who compiled his diaries had described
him as an overly ambitious troublemaker. Forrestall had told the
aid that Johnson was incompetent and felt degraded at the
very idea of being replaced by.
Speaker 1: Such a man.
Speaker 2: Other visitors who he was not on good terms with
include President Truman himself and one Congressman Lyndon Bain Johnson.
LBJ was known in nineteen forty nine, even at this
time as being very pro Zionist. Right, So all of
these Zionist people are meeting with Forestall after having pushed
the man by.
Speaker 1: The way, LBJ was also so close with Drew Pearson yep.
Speaker 2: And but don't take don't take my word for it.
On May twenty third, nineteen forty nine, the Washington Post
write article headlined after he died because they're they are scum.
Excuse me. Delusions of persecution, acute anxiety and depression marked
Forrestall's illness. Quote from the article. His fear of reprisals
from prosionists 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 I'm going to go into the details here
and uh, you know, I will leave you to make
up your mind whether it's a murder or a suicide.
At one f am on Sunday, May twenty second, nineteen
forty nine, 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 sorry,
I already said that James's brother, Henry Forrestall, states that
either the Communists 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 fifteen minutes. The guard was new, only
having been on duty for a few months, replacing the
usual guard who was supposedly a wall 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 Forestall this email in twenty seventeen. I started
reading your article on the forest All 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 twenty second,
nineteen forty nine. I believe there's sort of a cover
up here. What makes me suggest that, Well, you see,
the day before James's 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the denial of the denial of clergy is I mean,
that's just straight up evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, doctor Rains. The attending physician stated that mister Forrestall
had never made a suicidal gesture or a suicidal attempt.
Forrestall was confirmed asleep at one thirty am by the
attending guard, and when the guard checked again, was also
asleep at one forty five am. So we mean to
understand the nature of his suicide that he wakes up
between one forty five and one fifty, 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 hang himself, buy
his bathroom cord around his neck, tied to the radiator,
while jumping out of a sixteenth 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 sixteenth 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.
Speaker 1: But one other.
Speaker 2: Fact that I'll add here at the height of the
Palace on controversy, his limo was followed to and from
his office by a blue sedan containing two men. When
the police were notified in the Sudan 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 limousines 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.
Speaker 1: I'll I'll download them real quick from where you send
them to me, and I'll share them.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: One, change it to the other one real quick.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is like a short form telegram. Okay, this
is something he's writing really quickly, so you know very
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.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You can see that the vaunt is tilted to the right,
and that the capital letters don't match, and that.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this, 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 fifteen
handwritten diaries at the White House for safe keeping upon
his reliefs, all he would ever leave is a suicide
note would be one transcribed poem from a book he's reading.
You know when was it written?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Was it written at night? In the five minutes before
he jumps out the window? Was it left there?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: 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? Is we covered? Is passing.
Speaker 1: To do big stuff?
Speaker 2: 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 Foyer requests that
went to the US 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 UH 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 barbituates 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 any barbituates. He was he refused them. The aid,
the medical aid who was working there, offered them to
him and he declined and he said he can sleep
without him. And you know, so most stuff that you're
going to encounter in the Wikipedia article about him is
it's not true.
Speaker 1: Well that's quite a lot. Then that's hearing stories like this.
You know, I immediately I start looking at big picture
of stuff, and it's like, okay, so he was he
was one of I forget who the other person was.
Who 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 nineteen forty eight. I mean,
I've heard politicians say since October seventh of twenty twenty
three 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, h how do
how do people not see this. How do people how
do people continue to offend it? And I guess, 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, and in a hospital somewhere,
and you know, they're going to take their own life
quote unquote yeah, and if you.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a few interesting aspects of this to
stand out to me. The the biggest aspect is I
think this is the first one. I mean in what
we consider Uh, 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'd 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 there, you know, after five years in this incredibly
high stressed 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 nineteen forty six.
And I think the real tragedy is that his fate.
Speaker 1: Was sealed.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: This was.
Speaker 2: 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 prosionist, and it wasn't political because Democrats
and Republicans had unified whether Truman or Dewey to agree
on this issue. There ah, sorry, there was no reason
for this man to die, even from like a real politique,
completely evil, pragmatic or rational line of thinking.
Speaker 1: There was no.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: 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 it's just we can do it. Is it is,
we have the power to do it, and fuck you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they did have the power to do it.
Looking at the Venona papers and all the people in
the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who worked with the communists.
You know, 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 antisemitic. 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 word. I mean,
you know, and you know what is the value of
one good man? You know this starting he had every
opportunity throughout his I just want to like recap his
life real quick. He had every opportunity.
Speaker 1: To say no.
Speaker 2: 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
aviation branch, which was a dangerous job to fly planes
in nineteen seventeen. You know, he didn't have to give
up that pilot's commission to go work as a bureaucrat
in DC or go back to business life. He could
have refused FDR in nineteen forty to assist this country
and 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.
Speaker 1: And he.
Speaker 2: 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 a 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, deride it is.
Speaker 1: I don't even know.
Speaker 2: 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 twenty eight hundred 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 went to
work for this country. And I I think it's ah, man,
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 eightieth birthday on seventeen thousand acres and profited millions
and millions of dollars from this country's wartime efforts and
forrestall dies alone, and you know, the day he was
supposed to be released from the hospital, I just it. 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 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 mister Forrestall, and that I think
is the central lesson and why I got interested in him.
I first heard about him Stormy mentioned that Forestall 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
Two 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 muck breakers 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 forced All to do it. The man,
to reiterate, grew the Navy six times over in four years, okay,
built one hundred aircraft carriers and arranged for that. You know,
could the US build one aircraft carrier today in four years?
You know, it's not very clear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the way 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 a mayors
out there who can do these things and do them well.
They're either being attacked, fed fed prescription drugs liberally even
if they don't need them, or they're just being replaced
by Frankenstein head shaped street shitters from India.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now we could use with a few more Irish
Catholics in this administration.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 basically
make myself bulletproof through that kind of wealth, I would,
And maybe some of those men have been doing that
for about thirty or forty years, and you know, the
smartest men out there. I just don't really want anything
to do with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, all right, but yeah, anything, no nothing
from me.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I'll link to your YouTube channel again
that hopefully one of these days you'll get back to
reading forgotten books on yes, sir, and yeah, thank you,
and we'll talk about something I want to h m hmm,
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, uh, this thread
that you you started to pull here. Absolutely all right,
thanks follows, appreciate it. Thank you, Pete H.