Patriot's Reward

The distinguished patient in the 16th-floor suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the edge of Washington had spent a quiet day. He had chatted easily with three visitors and had spent a good deal of time reading. He was improving. The awful little indignities which, had attended his early days in the hospital had ceased--he was allowed to have a razor and attendants no longer removed cords and metal instruments from his presence.

In the hours after his dinner he took full advantage of his convalescent privileges. He sat up late over his books. At 1:45 in the morning a hospital corpsman --who stood a quiet guard outside his door--looked in and offered him a sedative. He refused it. The orderly went into an adjoining room to report. Quickly, the patient crossed the hall and walked into a darkened kitchen--its windows were not protected by the heavy screens which barred the windows in his suite.

A few seconds later, wiry, tight-lipped James Vincent Forrestal, 57, wartime Secretary of the Navy and the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, jumped out into the darkness. Attendants--summoned by a night nurse who had heard a terrible thudding sound outside her window--found his broken body lying amid a heap of mops on a projecting third-floor roof.

The Crackup. As the news went out, in the grey watches of the morning, stunned officials and friends shared a common reaction--it was as if Jim Forrestal had not committed suicide at all, but had simply been crushed by the strain and by the savage gossip. Few men had stood up, so long and so resolutely, against them.

Both Forrestal's nature and his varied and brilliant careers had been studies in subtle contradiction. He was a poised, lean-flanked man with a gift for gaining authority, and a passion for shunning its use. He was a Wall Street moneyman with an intellectual's mind, a public servant with a deep desire for obscurity, a bookworm who loved physical combat (his nose was flattened during a boxing workout in 1929) and a sophisticate with an enormous devotion to his country.

The son of a poor Irish contractor, he worked his way through college (a year at Dartmouth, three at Princeton) and through the Navy in World War I, and then buckled down to work in Wall Street. He was soon a millionaire--he made $864,000 in 1929 alone. In 1938, he became president of Dillon, Read & Co. But he was restless--when Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to become one of his executive assistants "with a passion for anonymity," he sold his interest in the firm and hurried to Washington.

By Wall Street standards, he had been a liberal; by Washington standards, he was a conservative. His relations with the impassioned experimenters of the New Deal were often marked by a mutual horror and mistrust. "When Henry Wallace gets that global stare," he once said, "I'm really frightened." He refused to take part in Democratic Party affairs. But F.D.R. found him a precision tool--a man with a cutting edge, energy, knowledge, independent judgment. Forrestal became Under Secretary of the Navy; after Frank Knox's death he became Secretary.

He refused to be dominated by admirals, but he made no attempt to usurp their jealously held prerogatives. He simply did his job, better, perhaps, than any service Secretary in history. He drove himself with a kind of quiet intensity. Year after year he worked seven days a week, from early morning until late at night. His vacations were risky expeditions under fire on the battlefronts.

The Target. After the peace, he became the central figure in the vicious interservice feuding. It was he who urged and brought about a compromise federation; merger went through, largely because of the tacit understanding that Forrestal would be appointed to run it. Then, as Secretary of Defense, he found that his own authority under the compromise was not enough to bring order and direction from the bitter wrangling.

He became--perhaps inevitably--the target of widespread and vicious attacks. His enemies were many: disgruntled officers, liberals, professional politicians (who resented his refusal to take part in the Truman campaign), the Communists, gossip columnists. Both Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell (who raged during the Palestine dispute because Forrestal advocated friendship with the Arabs to protect U.S. Middle East oil supplies) sniped at him mercilessly.

At times he seemed listless and tired.

He lost weight. But he took the goading silently and performed the duties of his office until the day eight weeks ago when he finally retired. Five days later he was in the hospital--he had collapsed, mentally and physically.

As time passed, he seemed to recover.

But he could not shake the fear that he might never recover completely. After his death, attendants found evidence of the lonely struggle of his wounded mind: a book, opened to Sophocles' "Chorus from Ajax," lay beside his bed. He had been reading:

Oh! When the pride of Graecia's noblest race,

Wanders, as now, in darkness and disgrace,

When Reason's day

Sets rayless--joyless--quenched in cold decay

Better to die, and sleep

The never-waking sleep, than linger on,

And dare to live, when the soul's life is gone . . .

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