The Driven Man

JAMES FORRESTAL by Arnold A. Rogow. 397 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

At a congressional ceremony on March 29, 1949, James Forrestal, retiring as the first Secretary of Defense, received a silver bowl and many plaudits: "A long and brilliant career . . . outstanding talents . . . one of the best analytical minds." A few hours after the ceremony, one of Forrestal's aides found him back at a spare office in the Pentagon, sitting in a rigid position, staring at the bare wall opposite. When the worried aide tried to talk to him, Forrestal said only: "You are a loyal fellow." When Forrestal went home, he seemed bewildered by the fact that he no longer had an official limousine. Alarmed at his condition, friends bundled him off for a Florida vacation, but Forrestal's mind was elsewhere. He kept repeating that he was a failure. He said that the Communists were out to get him and insisted on searching closets. Walking on the beach, he pointed to sockets for beach umbrellas and warned that they were wired. Finally, Forrestal was committed to Bethesda Naval Hospital for psychiatric care. Early on the morning of May 22, he hurled himself from a 16th-floor window to his death. He was the first Cabinet officer in U.S. history to take his own life.

Ever since Forrestal's death, people have wondered why such a splendid career came to such a squalid end. For James Forrestal was an outstanding public servant, a key figure in the crucial postwar years. He was indeed a man of parts, but whose parts did not seem to mesh. He was, on the one hand, tough and commanding; on the other, sensitive and guilt-ridden. Now Arnold Rogow, a political science professor at Stanford, has skillfully pieced the parts together in a first biography of Forrestal.

Talk of Wall Street. Forrestal enjoyed the same rags-to-riches tag that has been pinned on other famous Americans. As is usually the case, writes Rogow, the tag was untrue. Forrestal's father, an Irish immigrant, had built up a prosperous construction business in the town of Matteawan, north of New York City, and was a bigwig in local Democratic politics. It was not poverty but sickness that shaped the young Forrestal. Frail from birth, Forrestal took the Teddy Roosevelt cure. He went in for strenuous exercise, especially boxing. In one bout his nose was broken, giving him his characteristic tough-guy look. Forrestal was also tormented by his Roman Catholic religion, writes Rogow. He drifted away from the church, even though his strong-willed mother wanted him to become a priest. Instead, Forrestal went to Princeton. But six weeks before graduation, he left, presumably because he had flunked a required English course and did not want to repeat it.

Thanks to his Princeton contacts, Forrestal landed a job as a salesman with the New York investment banking firm of Dillon, Read. Intense, hard-driving and a glutton for work, he became head of the sales force in three years, eventually company president. On the way up, he engineered deals that were the talk of Wall Street. But one of them furnished his enemies with ammunition to use against him in later years. Forrestal set up a bogus Canadian corporation in order to avoid paying some $100,000 in taxes--not an illegal act, writes Rogow, but not a very ethical one, either.

Working seven days a week, including Christmas, Forrestal had little social life. He prided himself on being able to attend a cocktail party, greet the hostess, down a martini, exchange a few pleasantries and take his leave--all in eight minutes. At 34, Forrestal married a New York socialite and Vogue editor, Josephine Ogden, whose friends were all cafe society. They had two sons, but before long the couple were leading separate lives. Forrestal, who avoided emotional attachments all his life, hardly even spoke to his boys until they were ready to enter college.

Battling Uncle Joe. In 1940, as war grew closer, President Roosevelt looked around for friendly businessmen to serve in his Administration. Forrestal was interviewed by Harry Hopkins and recruited. He was appointed to the newly created post of Under Secretary of the Navy and soon made his rather vaguely defined job a hub of the defense establishment. In 1944 Forrestal became Secretary of the Navy.

In the Navy Department, Forrestal began his personal war on Communism. Russian secretiveness and arrogance had aroused his suspicions. He put his staff to work investigating Communist infiltration in the U.S., collected reams of writings on Communism, encouraged George Kennan, charge d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, to write his celebrated "Mr. X" article, which laid the basis for the policy of containment. In 1946 Forrestal persuaded Truman to send warships to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of strength, thus paving the way for U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey. By 1947 Forrestal--with the help of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe--had converted the Cabinet to a militant anti-Communist stand. But it had not been easy going. "Whenever any American suggests that we act in accordance with the needs of our own security," he wrote to a friend in exasperation, "he is apt to be called a goddamned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe suggests that he needs 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 is so explicit in what he wants."

After the war, the battle over unification of the armed forces was joined and Forrestal jumped right in. President Truman and the Secretary of War were in favor of a strong defense chief; Forrestal was not. He felt the defense establishment was too big to be bossed by any one man; at most, the Defense Secretary should "coordinate." Eventually, Forrestal wore his opposition down, and the 1947 bill creating the Defense Department was largely his. Ironically, Forrestal was appointed to the job he considered too big. "This office will probably be the greatest cemetery for dead cats in history," he grumbled in words that were eerily prophetic. "I shall probably need the combined attention of Fulton Sheen and the entire psychiatric profession by the end of another year."

Hint of Violence. Forrestal soon reached an impasse. He thought Truman's military budget too skimpy to stop Communist aggression (the Korean war proved him right). He did his best to slice up the budget among the services, but the service secretaries sabotaged his efforts by going over his head to Congress and the press. Better-read than any other Cabinet member and able to quote from Bagehot, Marx and Kant, Forrestal irritated Truman by constantly giving him advice and recommending appointments. "He was a Cabinet Francis Bacon who took the whole political world for his province," writes Rogow. He especially angered Truman by arguing long and hard against the creation of the state of Israel because he thought the U.S. oil supply in the Middle East would be jeopardized.

As the 1948 elections approached, there was talk of putting Forrestal on the Democratic ticket. Forrestal had both political ambitions and political glamour. "He has the bearing given to goodhearted gangsters in the movies," Jonathan Daniels wrote. "There is the suggestion of the possibility of violence and the surface of perfectly contained restraint." But Forrestal was convinced Truman would lose in 1948; he stayed out of politics and refused to campaign for the party. In fact, he met a few times with Dewey, giving rise to the rumor that he was making a deal with the Republicans to stay on as Defense Secretary. Three months after Truman was inaugurated, Forrestal was dismissed.

Better to Die. In those months, Forrestal began to show signs of his illness. He had trouble making decisions, and his subordinates often bypassed him. Contributing to Forrestal's depression was a barrage of vilification from the left-wing press. Forrestal, it was said, had ordered that I. G. Farben not be bombed because he owned stock in the company; Forrestal was an "anti-Semite" and a "front man" for U.S. oil companies. Columnists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell spread the phony story that Forrestal had panicked and run away when his wife was held up by a gunman. The night Forrestal jumped to his death, he left a book open to a passage from Sophocles' Ajax: Better to die, and sleep The never-waking sleep, than linger on And dare to live when the soul's life is gone.

After writing his solid, careful biography, Rogow attempts some amateur psychoanalysis that does not seem warranted by his own facts. "The reality of Forrestal's personality," he writes, "was not essential toughness but essential weakness." Rogow lists some of the troubles that he thinks eventually crippled Forrestal: his "early psychic deprivation"; his tightly repressed emotions; his compulsive working habits and compulsive play. He suggests that Forrestal, whose feelings toward his father were ambivalent, later transferred these feelings to Harry Truman. Rogow even goes on to suggest what is now fashionable in psychoanalytical and sociological circles: that the cold war is a product of inner anxieties and that Forrestal's own anxieties--his need to show he was tough--contributed to it.

The fact is that toughness was exactly what was needed in dealing with the Soviets after World War II. If Forrestal's personality helped shape that toughness and the successful policies of the time, the U.S. can be grateful.

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