Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (55 page)

And if that was the threat Ben-Gurion made or had made for him, I can imagine Truman asking Marshall a question something like this: “Is he (Ben-Gurion) bluffing or would the son of a bitch actually do it—throw in his lot with the Soviets?” And I think Marshall’s answer would have been something like: “We had better proceed on the assumption that he’s not bluffing.”

If Ben-Gurion did play or had played for him the ultimate blackmail card—the threat that the Jewish state would look to the Soviet Union as its friend and superpower ally, it may well have been that, in the last hours of the long struggle to determine who would make U.S. policy for Palestine, Truman and Marshall were not on opposite sides. I mean it is possible in the last hours that Marshall said to Truman something like this: “The absolute priority is preventing the Zionist state from throwing its lot in with the Soviet Union. If that means the U.S. must be the first to recognise a unilaterally declared Jewish state, do it.”

The saddest truth of all is that there was one great and good man of principle who worked to have the Palestine problem taken out U.S. domestic politics before it was too late for all concerned. That man was James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defence.

The understanding this book seeks to promote would not be complete without some knowledge of Forrestal’s efforts to persuade both the Democrats and the Republicans at leadership level to take the Palestine problem out of U.S. domestic politics. Out of the pork-barrel that impaired and corrupted the judgement all who dipped into it.

My decision to put the Forrestal story into a chapter of its own means that, to some extent, we will be going over the same ground covered in this chapter, but from an insider’s uniquely informed perspective and thus with remarkable and, I think, chilling insight into the way American politics worked and still works.

As we shall now see, Forrestal was not allowed to succeed. Whether his despair at his failure, together with the harassment he endured at the hands of the Zionists for having tried, contributed to the depression that led him to suicide is a fair question. It also has to be said that further questions have been raised as to whether his death was suicide.These are questions with only speculative answers, but that is not a good enough reason for not addressing them, especially in the light of the events of 11 September 2001 and all they symbolised as blowback from years of pro-Zionist American policy in the Middle East.

In the unexpurgated story of the making of the Arab–Israeli conflict the significance of James Vincent Forrestal can be summarised in two short statements.

One: He was the man with executive responsibility in the Truman administration who dared to draw the line in the proverbial sand and say that the best interests of America, the Free World and Jews everywhere dictated that Zionism should not be allowed to determine U.S. policy for the Middle East.

Two: If there was one man above all others most likely to succeed in getting the Palestine problem lifted out of the pork-barrel of partisan American domestic politics, that one man was Forrestal.

We know from his diaries that he had President Truman’s green light for his initiative to try to do so. (An important fact to keep in mind).

Because they contain the most incontrovertible evidence that there was a very serious attempt to take the Palestine problem out of U.S. domestic politics, some brief background on the diaries as published after Forrestal’s death is necessary.

Their editor in book form was Walter Millis. After Forrestal’s suicide
The New York Herald Tribune
acquired the rights to publication from his estate. That newspaper then appointed Millis, its assistant chief editorial writer, to turn the material into a book which was published under the title
The Forrestal Diaries
. In the Preface to it Millis wrote:

On leaving office Forrestal, already seriously ill, went for recuperation to Hobe Sound, Florida. From there he sent instructions that the diary, together with a few detached documents, should be deposited at the White House. This was an unusual request. One can only infer that it reflected his awareness of the confidential nature of much of this material and his desire to insure it, under any eventualities, against irresponsible publication.

Even casual examination of the diary notes makes it evident that they were not dictated with textual publication in mind. They were probably set down, among other reasons, as material for the book which Forrestal at one time or another thought of writing, in which he would exercise his own judgement as to inclusions, omissions or explanations. He was not to enjoy this opportunity. By sending the papers to the White House he left them safeguarded in responsible hands: he had scrupulously discharged his own obligation to prevent improper or careless disclosure.
¹

The diaries were nothing less than an insider’s summary account of the agony of decision-making at the time the United States, in part because of the unravelling of the British Empire, was coming face-to-face with the awesome responsibilities of being the leader of what was called the Free World. Many of the entries were made immediately after Forrestal returned from meetings of the Cabinet, various committees of his Defence Department and the National Security Council.

Millis also noted that Forrestal’s diaries recorded “many confidential statements given in haste or without thought of the possible public effect.” That the statements Forrestal quotes, including his own, are of the un-spun kind is one of the reasons why his diaries, even in their edited form for publication, are of such value to seekers of the truth.
²

As the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, Forrestal’s main professional concern was Soviet power given the vacuum left in Europe and the Far East by the defeat of Germany and Japan and uncertainty about Moscow’s intentions.

As a leading and very successful investment banker he understood: (1) that the U.S. would have to generate the wealth to fund the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of war-devastated Western Europe; and (2) that in the wealth creation process to put capitalism back on its feet in Western Europe and Britain, the uninterrupted and escalating flow of Arab oil at the cheapest possible price was the most critical factor. And that in a word, OIL, was the prime source of Forrestal’s interest as Secretary of Defence in the Palestine problem and how it should be handled by the administration he served.

The buck ultimately stopped with President Truman but the executive responsibility for keeping Arab oil flowing, in the context of seeing to it that the U.S. could protect its own interests and had the capability of keeping the Free World free, was Forrestal’s, in association with Marshall and Lovett at the State Department.

And that was the context in which Forrestal (and Marshall and Lovett) regarded the creation of a Jewish state in the face of Arab and wider Muslim opposition as a threat to the U.S. national interest and, in the even bigger picture, America’s ability to perform in accordance with its global responsibilities and obligations.

That Forrestal’s strategic view was shared by Marshall, the other leading American public servant of the time with unquestionable integrity, made it all the more remarkable that, when the crunch came, President Truman chose to surrender to Zionism, with consequences that are still with us today and are becoming more and more menacing.

As it happened Forrestal was not President Truman’s first choice as America’s first Secretary of Defense. (In the summer of 1947 America’s separate armed services were to be reorganised and coordinated, hence the new Cabinet post of Secretary of Defense). The President’s first choice had been Judge Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War in the old system. But, as the President told Forrestal when he offered him the job, Bob Patterson “wouldn’t take it.”
³
He was, the President said, “so hard put to it for money that he felt he was unable to stay longer in government.” Forrestal, on the other hand, was wealthy by his own efforts.

It was on 26 July 1947 that President Truman invited Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy, to take on the burden Judge Patterson could not afford to carry. That was five weeks before the General Assembly’s Special Committee (UNSCOP) came forward with the majority recommendation for the partition of Palestine.

On that July day President Truman had time to kill. He was waiting for the bill from Congress, approved and expected at any moment, that authorised the reorganisation and coordination of the military; and he was anxious to get away to be with his dying mother. So the two men made big small talk. Forrestal asked: “How do you account for Hitler’s decision to make war in 1939 when he actually had in his hands all the cards necessary to dominate Europe?”

Truman answered: “The man simply became drunk with power. He made two great mistakes. One was the decision to attack Poland. The other was the failure to invade England after the fall of France.”

The fact that Forrestal was not Truman’s first choice as the first U.S. Secretary of Defence was in no way a reflection on his experience and his formidable abilities and qualities. In public service and before that private enterprise, his record of achievement to this point was most impressive, even by the standards of America’s best and brightest.

To understand why Secretary of Defence Forrestal was the one most likely to succeed in getting the Palestine problem taken out of U.S. domestic politics, we must know the man and where he was coming from.

Of Irish descent, James Vincent Forrestal was born in 1892 in what was then Matteawan and became a part of Beacon, a Hudson River town, in the state of New York. That made him 55 when his appointment as the first U.S. Secretary of Defence was confirmed by Congress.

Forrestal’s father, also James, had come from Ireland as a boy in the 1850s. Just nine years old he had crossed the ocean alone to join his mother who had emigrated earlier to prepare a place of survival. This James the first took up carpentry and by 1875 had established what was to grow into a substantial contracting and construction business. He married Mary Toohey and James Vincent was the first of their three sons.

James the elder became very active in local Democratic Party politics and was cultivated by Franklin Roosevelt when he was running for the Senate. The Roosevelts and the Forrestals became good friends.

But party politics were not for “Vince” Forrestal as he was then called. When he graduated from Matteawan High School in 1908 at the age of 16, his ambition was to make himself a career in newspaper journalism. Three years of local journalism taught him that he needed a college education if he was to advance in his career. He entered Dartmouth and then transferred to Princeton. In his senior year there he was voted by his class as the one “most likely to succeed”. And he was to be remembered for his generosity in giving unpublicised financial help to students in need.

It was at Princeton that Forrestal declared himself to be “without political affiliation.”

Forrestal was not excited by academic study and went to work for the Tobacco Products Corporation, selling cigarettes. In 1916, at the age of 24, he joined the investment banking house of William A. Read & Co., which became Dillon, Read & Co. And then there was no stopping him. He quickly established himself as one of the most able men on Wall Street and his rise to the top was inexorable: 1923—partner in the firm; 1926—vice president; 1938—president.

By those who worked with him and for him at Dillon, Read & Co., Forrestal was to be remembered not only for his success but also his energy and his scrupulous fairness, in particular his refusal to take credit that belonged to his subordinates. (At Princeton he was described by his friends as a
rara avis
—a rare bird. His friends were right).

In 1938, as president of Dillon, Read & Co., Forrestal had wealth, the power that came with it, and position. What more could a 46-year-old man want? A seat in the Senate and after that, perhaps, a run for the presidency? No thanks. Party politics was not for Forrestal. It was a game he could have played and funded without having to put himself in hock to any vested interest, but playing it would have required him to sacrifice too many of his principles on the altar of political expediency.

In June 1940, with World War II underway and America again neutral, many on Wall Street were stunned by the news that Forrestal had resigned from Dillon, Read & Co. in order to enter Roosevelt’s New Deal administration and serve as a special administrative assistant to the President.

The astonishment in the financial community was due in large part to the fact that many of its leading lights had been hostile to President Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. New Deal was the phrase coined to describe President Roosevelt’s policies and legislation to rescue America from the great depression. Essentially it was a programme of action by the Federal government to reduce unemployment, to equalize wealth and opportunity, to control banking and credit, and to protect small-scale industry, agriculture and labour against the measures thought necessary by large- scale business and banking for survival in a time of little economic activity. At a point the Supreme Court had ruled that many of the measures were unconstitutional. The financial community had perceived them to be not in its interest and the President to be something of an anti-capitalist. In that context Forrestal’s decision to serve in the administration of the New Deal President was a great shock.