My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “And you’re telling me about it? In the cocktail lounge at the Ambassador Hotel?”
“I’m not going to tell you in detail. But the material Major Marcel recovered was debris from a fallen balloon.”
“Weather balloon, yeah. Hell, like Daffy Duck says, ‘That’s no military secret.’ The government’s been peddling that sliced baloney since two hours after the saucer story broke.”
Wilson shook his head, no; his expression grave, his voice hushed. “This isn’t a weather balloon … it’s not one balloon at all, but a train of as many as twenty-three balloons, a massive affair designed to climb to high altitudes, for intelligence-gathering purposes.”
“Okay,” I said, as if accepting all that. “If the Atomic Energy Commission is involved, then I can probably guess the kind of intelligence-gathering you’re talking about.”
“You probably can. As for some of the descriptions you no doubt heard, of the strange debris, this balloon train included a very sophisticated new aluminum material, with rubberized backing.”
“Which accounts for the tales of crumple-proof metal from outer space. What about these so-called hieroglyphics people say they saw?”
“That’s a funny story.” And Wilson smiled, having cued himself. “Apparently the radar reflectors were contracted from a toy company, who used some tape they had on hand for reinforcement purposes-with flowers, diamonds, circles, other childish designs … ‘hieroglyphics.’ As for the unbreakable ‘beams,’ they were balsa wood treated with a special-formula glue.”
I sipped my beer. “That is a funny story, Frank. Almost as funny as trained Army Air Force personnel mistaking that stuff for a crashed flying saucer.”
His eyebrows climbed his endless forehead and then made the long trip back down. “That I can’t explain, other than that some of these materials were sophisticated, and differed greatly from the run-of-the-mill balloons that would have commonly come down in the Southwest, which those Air Force people would have immediately recognized…. And that’s all I can say, Nate-other than, as a friend, to ask you to try, to the best of your ability, to quash Pearson’s interest in the Roswell story. It might draw … unwanted attention.”
The implication, of course, was Soviet attention; and my assumption was that these balloons were gathering the data that, oddly enough, Major Marcel at SAC was lately interpreting and collating, regarding whether or not the Russians were engaging in the testing of atomic weapons.
I went along with this, though I’ve always wondered whether straight-arrow Frank Wilson had knowingly passed disinformation along to me. The only way that train of weather balloons might have been involved in the Roswell crash was if that experimental aircraft codesigned by Germans and Japanese had collided with it-which I supposed was a possibility.
Nonetheless, as Wilson had requested, I did dissuade Pearson from pursuing the Roswell tale, informing him that I believed the accounts were riddled with disinformation, and that Majestic Twelve, while it might well exist, did not seem to have been formed to investigate saucers from outer space.
“Was somebody trying to make a sap of me?” Pearson asked over the phone, the afternoon after Forrestal’s funeral.
“That may be the intent, or possibly just a happy by-product of concealing the real purpose of Majic-12.”
“Which is just one of the many secrets-and sins-Forrestal took to the grave with him.”
The bitterness in Pearson’s tone didn’t surprise me; he had taken terrible blows to his reputation-and to his list of subscribing newspapers-by the blame others in the press were heaping on him; it was widely implied that Pearson, via his hounding, had “murdered” Forrestal. The New York Times pilloried Pearson for overstepping “the bounds of accuracy and decency,” the Washington Post spoke of the columnist’s “below the belt blows”-and this in Pearson’s home paper. (Many years later, Jack Anderson-who would take over the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column and distinguish himself as Pearson’s successor-would say with regret, “Our hand was surely in this tragedy.”)
“Tell me, Drew,” I asked him, just curious, “do you feel you bear any blame at all for Jim Forrestal’s demise?”
“It was the Navy’s fault-if they’d taken proper precautions, he’d be alive today.”
“There’s some truth in that,” I admitted. “But I thought maybe you could at least scrape up a little pity for the poor bastard.”
“Sorry, no. This was a man who spent all his life thinking about only himself, trying to fulfill his great ambition to be President of the United States. Anyway, is a public official immune from criticism or investigation, for fear his health might be impaired by the process?”
“You know, Drew-I know why you hated him so much, if you’re interested.”
“I didn’t hate him! … Why?”
“He reminded you of you.”
“That’s a despicable thing to say. You know better than most people what that man was capable of, to see that his point of view prevailed.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You two’re the original ends-justify-the-means twins. There’s only one thing Forrestal has over you, Drew, just one little thing …”
“And what would that be?”
“He had the decency to go out a high window.”
Well, I didn’t get any jobs from Pearson for a while, after that. But we did reconcile, when in later years he mellowed some, as his power dwindled. He accomplished many good things with his muckraking style, including paving the way for modern investigative journalism. One of his many positive accomplishments was to follow up my lead on our government’s collaboration with Nazis, exposing the likes of Luftwaffe Major General Walter Schreiber-who had been involved with medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates-forcing the Nazi general to flee from our shores in 1952. Toward the end of Pearson’s life, when he was receiving accolades for his long, illustrious career, the Forrestal case was dredged up and he suffered another round of criticism, dying of a heart attack in 1969.
James Forrestal’s legacy was probably more lasting than Pearson’s. The headquarters of the Defense Department bears his name; 1954 marked the christening of the USS Forrestal, the nation’s largest cant-deck aircraft carrier; and in 1975, Princeton University designated its corporate research park the Princeton Forrestal Center. More significant was the role of this paranoid schizophrenic as an architect of the Cold War-based largely on false, inflated data from an East-Bloc-countries-based Nazi spy network with whom our government was now collaborating-and in inspiring Senator Joe McCarthy to seek out the largely nonexistent Communists supposedly riddling our government. McCarthy himself, in 1952, credited Forrestal as the one who had alerted him to the “existence of traitors in high government positions.”
I liked Jim Forrestal, and as was the case with Pearson, the guy was a dedicated servant of the public who did a lot of good, particularly toward the winning of the Second World War; but there would have perhaps been better things to bequeath the nation he loved and served than Nazi collaboration, the Cold War and McCarthyism.
Caught up in the pressures of McCarthyism, his popularity eroded, Harry Truman left office largely unheralded, though with his position in history secure as the first (and at this writing only) U.S. president to use the atomic bomb in war; historians rate him a good to great president, a perception that had long since become evident by his death in 1972.
Teddy Kollek-who had fled to Canada from U.S. prosecution in April of 1949-was elected Mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, a position he held for twenty-eight years; much of the face of modern Jerusalem, it has been said, is his doing. His efforts toward tolerance for minority groups in his city, including Arabs, alienated some of his constituents, and his last two mayoral campaigns failed, despite efforts by such Hollywood supporters as his old friend Frank Sinatra. In 1991 he established the Jerusalem Foundation to help further aesthetic and cultural development of his beloved city.