10
My call to Chief Baughman set several things in motion. Within half an hour, at Morris House, Eberstadt heard by phone from Louis Johnson, Forrestal’s successor, expressing grave concern about Forrestal’s condition.
The President was providing an Air Force Constellation, Eberstadt was told, to facilitate the former secretary’s much-needed vacation; and by early evening Forrestal had arrived in Florida, where a formidable circle of friends-including banker (and former Under Secretary of State) Robert Lovett, Douglas Dillon of Dillon, Read amp; Company and playwright Philip Barry-took him under their wing.
Jo Forrestal was staying at the Jupiter Island Club, but Forrestal was soon in a private home where he was attended day and night by Eberstadt and others, including Dr. William Menninger of Topeka’s Menninger Clinic. The presence of Menninger, the country’s preeminent psychiatrist, was Eberstadt’s doing.
Ironically, Menninger had been invited to the Pentagon just months before, to aid in a Forrestal-directed study of combat fatigue; Forrestal and Menninger had spent a morning together, discussing the subject, at which time Menninger apparently noticed nothing of a similar (or any) malady in the behavior of the Secretary of Defense.
Nonetheless (Eberstadt told me on the phone), this brief contact and casual acquaintanceship had made Forrestal willing to at least talk with Menninger.
But, at the same time, the government sent down their own man, Captain George N. Raines, chief psychiatrist at the Bethesda naval hospital. This may have reflected President Truman’s natural humanistic concern for a great public servant in a time of dire need; or it may have indicated the administration’s desire to contain the incident and handle the manner in which the press and public learned that a crazy man, until a day or so ago, had been their Secretary of Defense, holding his fingers to the nation’s atomic pulse.
I had intended to return to Chicago that same evening Forrestal made his Florida trip; but the Secret Service “requested” that I stay in Washington for “debriefing,” and at both Treasury and Justice I was questioned by Baughman himself, and Frank Wilson, and several other agents whose names I did not know (and which were not offered to me). This exercise in repetitiousness took three days, and the government was kind enough to pick up my hotel check for my extended stay-one of the rare times my tax dollars came back to me.
I was frank about what I’d witnessed regarding former Secretary of Defense Forrestal’s mental breakdown, and filled them in on my own meager investigation, from the maid leaking to Anderson to the unproductive sweep of Forrestal’s home for bugs; but none of my dealings with Pearson came up, specifically no mention of Roswell or Majestic Twelve. Had they asked me, I would have been forthcoming (because if they asked, that would indicate knowledge on their part, possibly stemming from surveillance of myself and/or Pearson); but they didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell.
Friday afternoon marked the final stop of my debriefing tour, which took me tooling through the suburban slumber of white cottages and brick bungalows that was Bethesda, and beyond into the flat, green countryside of Maryland. Just when I thought I’d misunderstood the directions, easing the rental Ford up over a little rise in U.S. Route 240, a nineteen-story white tower rose out of nowhere like an art moderne apparition; it was as if the Empire State Building had sprouted in a pasture.
The National Naval Medical Center sprawled over some 265 acres, the central tower flanked by L-shaped four-floor wings, a complex at once utilitarian and starkly beautiful, modern and timeless, its structural steel faced with white-quartz-aggregate concrete panels, dark spandrels between windows creating an effect of massive square columns.
On the periphery of the endless parking lot were many squat temporary buildings, so this facility-which had seemed so vast during the war-was already experiencing growing pains. The bustling lobby was lined with three colors of marble, and the corridors were a soothingly cool terra-cotta; the naval nature of the place was evident by not only the gob and jarhead patients, but the sailor-style attire of nurses and attendants, and the uniformed doctors.
While Bethesda-a site supposedly chosen by Roosevelt himself, because biblically Bethesda had been “the pool of healing”-was primarily a naval hospital, medical and dental schools were also a part of the complex. So was the Naval Medical Research Institute, a separate building I was directed to, where I was to meet with Dr. Joseph Bernstein, Chief of Psychiatric Research.
Not a military man himself (not all the doctors at Bethesda were, particularly in the research area), Bernstein had a compact, linebacker’s frame wrapped in a white smock jacket; his blue tie bore a Star of David tie tack. Perhaps fifty, he had short-cropped blond hair going white, though the difference was negligible, and he had eyes so light blue they were almost gray, and eyebrows so light they disappeared. This gave him an eerily albino cast, that his handsome features-Roman nose, dazzling smile, and square jaw-did not quite dispel.
Standing behind his desk in a small, spartan third-floor office, he offered a hand for me to shake, which I did. Firm but not showy.
“I appreciate your willingness to speak with me,” he said, in friendly but clipped manner, with an understated middle-European accent. “I take it you’re Jewish, Mr. Heller?”
“Sort of.”
Dr. Bernstein settled into his chair as I took the one opposite him. “And what does that mean, ‘sort of’?”
I explained, and he said, “I have never been religious, either, but I hope one day to go to Palestine, myself.”
“Oh?”
He folded his hands on his desk, prayerfully, on a manila file folder; they were large, thick-fingered hands and I was glad he wasn’t a surgeon. “Most of my relatives died in concentration camps, Mr. Heller. I was fortunate to leave Germany in the late twenties, and establish a practice in Zurich.”
“Yeah, well, that’s sure shrink country, isn’t it?”
That stopped him for a moment, but then he laughed, once-politely, I thought.
He raised an invisible eyebrow. “You have a rough-hewn wit, Mr. Heller.”
“That’s one way to describe it, I guess. All right if I ask you something?”
“Certainly.”
“Why the nickel tour through your background, Doc? No offense, but I don’t give a flying, rough-hewn fuck. Uncle Sam has bounced me from here to there, for three days, asking me questions, and now I have to spend the afternoon at a head clinic. Not my favorite tourist spot.”
His smile was small and casual, but his eyes were studying me; he unfolded his hands and picked up the manila folder. “Would that be because you were once a patient at such a facility yourself?”
“Not here. I was across town at St. Elizabeth’s, or do you know that? Is that my file?”
Everybody had a fucking file on me.
He tossed the folder to one side of his tidy desk. “You had amnesia induced by combat fatigue. You recovered your identity, through hypnosis therapy, but your condition was deemed serious enough not to return you to combat. You were discharged on a Section Eight.”
“Now we know both our life stories. Is there anything else, Doc?”
His expression turned somber. “I shared my background with you because I understand that you are Mr. Forrestal’s friend.”
“He’s my client. We’re friendly enough, but it’s a business relationship.”
He gestured with an open hand. “I wanted to be frank about my background, and my … support for the new state of Israel … because if you were to learn that background from someone else, you might assume I’d been less than forthcoming in an area sensitive to this patient’s case. You are the first representative of the Forrestal family that I’ve spoken to-”
“I don’t represent the Forrestal family. I work for them, or I did. I’ve completed the assignment, and plan to submit my bill. Please tell me insanity isn’t grounds for nonpayment.”