In 1944 he’d became Secretary of the Navy, and, following Roosevelt’s death, President Truman appointed the highly regarded Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense, despite Forrestal having fought against the creation of such a position, in the belief that the Army, Navy and Air Force should each be their own boss. After Truman’s unexpected victory over Republican Tom Dewey last November, Forrestal alone among Roosevelt’s holdover cabinet members seemed likely to stay on for the peacetime duration.
Or anyway, that’s what most of the pundits had been saying, with a few key exceptions, specifically a guy who knew less about politics than I did-Walter Winchell-and, more significantly, Drew Pearson, the most powerful left-leaning muckraking columnist in the country.
In his various syndicated columns and on his national radio show, Pearson for over a year had been accusing Forrestal on a near-daily basis of everything from being a personal coward (by failing to stand up for his wife in a holdup, supposedly) and a Nazi sympathizer (because Dillon, Read amp; Company had done business with Germany in the twenties).
But from a political standpoint, most damning was Pearson’s claim that Forrestal had secretly made a pact with Tom Dewey to continue as Secretary of Defense under a new administration that, obviously, never came to be.
James Forrestal’s resignation had been made public on March 3, and that this action was taken at the request of President Truman was no military secret. Louis Johnson, a key Truman fund-raiser, would take over Forrestal’s position two days from now, in a patronage tradition that was easy for a Chicagoan like me to grasp.
All of which added up to, I was golfing with the most famous lame duck in the United States.
Soon to be a wet one: the sky exploded over us while we were approaching the tenth tee, and Forrestal-the golf bag slung over his shoulder damn near as big as he was-waved for me to follow him back to the white-stone porticoed clubhouse. He’d moved fast, and so had I, lugging my rented clubs, hugging a tree line, skirting the tennis courts; we got drenched just the same. A colored attendant provided us with towels, but we looked like wet dogs seated in the clubhouse bar.
Save for the bartender, we were alone, which was one small consolation, anyway. Forrestal ordered a whiskey sour and a glass of water but I needed coffee, to help me stop shivering.
We sat at a small corner table by windows that provided a front-row seat on the rolling black clouds and white lightning streaks and sheeting rain turning the gentle hills of the golf course into a hellish surreal landscape. Forrestal, hair flattened wetly, sat back in his chair as if he were behind his big executive desk at the Pentagon, calmly sipping his whiskey sour. He looked like the elder of an elf clan, and a wizened one at that. He probably only had ten or twelve years on my forty-three, but looked much older.
“Nate,” he said quietly, “they’re after me.”
I tried to detect humor in his medium-pitched, husky voice, and could find none; no twinkle in the blue-gray eyes, either.
“Well, uh, Jim,” I said, and smiled just a little, “it seems to me ‘they’ already got you. You are out of a job.”
“You can lose a job and get another,” he said, and the slash of a mouth twitched in a non-smile. “But a man only has one life.”
Thunder rattled the earth, and the windows; cheap melodramatic underscoring, Mother Nature imitating a radio sound-effects artist.
“Have there been threats?”
He nodded, once. “Telephone calls to my unlisted number at home. Cut-and-paste letters.”
I gestured with an open hand. “But someone in your position always hears from cranks.”
Now he leaned forward conspiratorially, whispering, “Didn’t you wonder why I wanted to meet you here?”
“Hell no.” I waved to the rain-streaked window and the squall beyond. “Beautiful golfing weather like this?”
He dipped the fingertips of his right hand into his water glass, as if it were a fingerbowl, and then raised the fingers to his lips, moistening them gently.
Then he said, “My phones are tapped. Electronic bugs all through my house.”
This wasn’t making sense to me; I sat forward. “Why bring me in from Chicago? Why don’t you call some of your friends in from the FBI or intelligence or something, and do a sweep?”
“That’s who probably planted them.”
I sat back. “Oh.”
He began to shake his head, slowly, his eyes glazed. “We won the war, Nate, but we’re going to lose the peace.”
“What are you talking about, Jim?”
“I’m talking about Communists in government.”
“Communists. In our government.”
He nodded gravely.
“And that’s who’s ‘after’ you.”
His eyes flared. “If I knew who wanted me dead, why would I hire you?”
“Who else could it be, Jim? Besides the Communists.”
His whiskey sour glass was empty. He lighted up his trademark pipe, having to work a little to get it going. I was about to repeat the question when he said, “That prick Pearson, for one.”
Lowering his pipe, which was in his left hand, he again dipped the fingertips of his right hand in his water glass and remoistened his lips.
“The S.O.B. made me out a coward, Nate.” He was trembling; I’d never seen Forrestal tremble before, and I couldn’t tell if it was anxiety or rage. “Told a pack of damn lies that made me out a yellow weakling who ran from danger when his wife was threatened! I wasn’t even there, when that robbery occurred….”
“Jim … Pearson’s a newspaperman. All he’s after are stories.”
Forrestal’s hand was clenching the bowl of the pipe as if it were a hand grenade he was preparing to lob. “Pearson is not a mere newspaperman. He’s a crusader-a misguided one-and a pawn of the Communists. Hell, he may be a damn Russian agent; certainly it’s no great stretch of the imagination to see him on Stalin’s payroll.”
“Maybe so. But you’re still out of office.”
His eyes narrowed and the thin line of his mouth almost curled into a faint smile. “… In four years I might assume another one.”
“Under another president, you mean?”
An eyebrow arched. “I mean as president.”
It seemed to me, despite my political disinterest, that I had read something about the Republican party courting Forrestal; but looking at this gray-skinned, sunken-eyed shell of his former self, a man seeing Communists under his bed and the FBI in his pantry, I found it difficult to picture his face on a Forrestal in ’52 campaign button. In with Jim! I didn’t think so.
The real irony, of course, the aspect of this that was truly odd and even creepy, was the extent to which this circumstance mirrored that “private” job I’d done for Forrestal in 1940. The parallel was so glaring, so disturbing, I couldn’t seem to find a way to bring it up, to point it out to Forrestal….
In the aftermath of that earlier investigation, Forrestal had told me he’d taken the troubled Jo to see a New York psychiatrist, that she’d been hospitalized with a diagnosis of clinical schizophrenia. Shock treatment had been part of the therapy, and I hated to hear that, because I didn’t believe in that snake-pit shit. I even felt a little guilty about telling her I’d seen a shrink myself; the story about my father killing himself with my gun was true, of course, and I still carried guilt for it. But I’d never lost a night’s sleep and wouldn’t have seen a psychiatrist if voices were telling me to paint myself blue and dance naked in Marshall Field’s window.