(And the related question: was LBJ mysteriously involved in that one too?)
My review of David Martin’s new book has been posted on Amazon, although it may not be displayed there for a few days pending their review and approval. (Mr. Martin used the first and third paragraphs of it for a blurb on the back cover):
I had previously cited Mr. Martin’s original research on Forrestal’s death (posted on his DCDave website) when I wrote a piece about it in LBJ: From Mastermind to The Colossus (see pp. 222-234). Within the following paragraphs I’ve excerpted and reedited a summary of how Lyndon Johnson had insinuated himself into a high-level Deep State plot to “neutralize” James Forrestal:
“Finally, there was one other visitor also named Johnson at the hospital
just before his death, a person who, like many others who knew this man,
Forrestal despised. Forrestal would have considered Lyndon B. Johnson
as someone who was uniquely unfamiliar with the complex nuances and
potential long-term violent ramifications pertaining to the creation of an
Israeli nation. Yet, according to the Townsend Hoopes/David Brinkley book
Driven Patriot previously cited, Forrestal’s good friend Marx Leva stated that
the newly “elected” Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson had “managed to gain
entrance to the suite ‘against Forrestal’s wishes.’”
"Lyndon Johnson, at that time, was a man of far lesser stature than
Forrestal; he had just moved from the House to the Senate in one of the
most controversial, widely known, transparently fraudulent elections in US
history. It would have been extraordinarily presumptuous of him to bull his
way into Secretary Forrestal’s hospital room when his visit was frankly not
wanted. But such fastidious attention to sensing another person’s feelings was
not something Johnson excelled in, or probably could have even attempted to
do.
"A likely reason why Forrestal would have considered Johnson a member
of the enemy camp, albeit a low-level one, was Johnson’s great partisanship
toward the fledgling state of Israel. As a congressman, Johnson had already
responded to the entreaties of Abe Fortas, for whom he now felt deeply
indebted. Forrestal’s attitude toward Lyndon Johnson, Drew Pearson and
Walter Winchell was probably indicated in an article in the Washington Post
a day after his death, Monday, May 23, 1949, headlined, “Delusions of
Persecution, Acute Anxiety, Depression Marked Forrestal’s Illness” which
summarized his attitude thusly:
His fear of reprisals from pro-Zionists was said to stem from attacks by
some columnists on what they said was his opposition to partition of
Palestine under a UN mandate. In his last year as Defense Secretary,
he received great numbers of abusive and threatening letters.
[ . . . ]
There are many parallels between the fates of [Leland] Olds and Forrestal, but the
key difference is that Olds was merely driven out of office, destroyed financially,
publicly humiliated, his friendships ruined. While the same thing also happened
to Forrestal, it didn’t stop there. For some reason, someone evidently decided
that his voice should be silenced forever, not just neutralized by the vicious
gossip and innuendo that ended his career. That distinction suggests that he was
feared by some very powerful people. The clearly weakened state of mental acuity
being experienced by Forrestal at the time of Johnson’s visit, regardless of the
fact that his condition had, until that point, been improving, would make him
particularly vulnerable to a man of Johnson’s legendary, overpowering mania
and manipulative ability. Merely being an involuntarily committed patient in a
mental hospital would have been traumatically damaging to the psyche of a man
who had once been one of the three or four most powerful men in Washington,
DC. That he was then put “nose to nose” against the highly skilled man-eater
Lyndon Johnson would have certainly caused him to wither, if not completely
collapse. Recall Bobby Kennedy’s description of Johnson: “. [He] .had this ability
to eat people up, even people who are considered rather strong figures. . . He’s
mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” Richard Goodwin’s pithy
recollection of another of Robert Kennedy’s comments about Johnson is equally
pertinent here: “He is the most formidable human being I’ve ever met.”
"Whoever else was managing or overseeing this operation must have
smiled and smirked when he dreamed up the plan for putting Lyndon Johnson
into the same hospital room as James Forrestal, possibly for the purpose of
using Johnson’s psychic skills to plant seeds of destruction into the mind
of the unprepared and weakened Forrestal. Admittedly, this is mere speculation,
however it does have the momentum of multiple Johnsonian patterns of behavior
and the weight of Bobby Kennedy’s cryptic descriptions of him. Under those
circumstances, it is easy to picture the hapless, recovering Forrestal wishing for
the company of a more normal form of man-eater, like a lion or tiger.
"The mystery is compounded by the fact that none of Forrestal’s closest
professional associates—men whom he would have loved to have seen—such
as Monsignor Maurice S. Sheehy, and other friends who were usually at his side
before he had become hospitalized; for inexplicable reasons, they were not
permitted to visit him. The overall context of how Forrestal was then being
“managed” raises profound issues about not only the questionable circumstances
of his supposed “suicide” but begs the question of what else had been done, other
than the unleashing of syndicated newspaper columnists Drew Pearson
and Walter Winchell to mercilessly attack him, provoking James Forrestal’s
apparent nervous breakdown, which was allegedly so serious as to require
his forced hospitalization on the sixteenth floor (in a seventeen story tower)
within a military hospital in which the standard policy was to keep “mental
patients” confined only to the first or second story.
"The first US ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, writing in
1951, described the attacks on Forrestal as “unjustifiable,” “persistent and
venomous” and “among the ugliest example of the willingness of politicians
and publicists to use the vilest means—in the name of patriotism—to destroy
self-sacrificing and devoted public servants.” This stunning description of
the treatment of Forrestal is eerily similar to the words used by many to
describe Lyndon Johnson’s treatment of Leland Olds in the reconfirmation
hearing being held concurrently for his reappointment as the head of the
Federal Power Commission. When these words are juxtaposed to the fact
that both events overlapped in 1949, the confluence is unmistakable: As the
series of attacks on Forrestal, starting in 1948 and ending shortly after his
death on May 22, 1949, were at their peak in March and April, Johnson
had just been named to chair the subcommittee which he would use for
his assault on Olds. HIs attack plan was being cast simultaneously with the
vilification of Forrestal, and it would be “executed” in the weeks following
Forrestal’s mysterious death. That the ambassador’s choice of words regarding
Forrestal’s treatment evoke exactly what others said about the ugliness of
Johnson’s “venomous” and “vile” attacks against Leland Olds at virtually the
same time speaks volumes about the non-random nature of the synchronicity
relating to a number of otherwise inexplicable events in Washington, DC, and a
few other cities in America and abroad, circa 1950–1969.
"Understanding the brutal ruthlessness and brazenly outrageous conduct
of Lyndon B. Johnson in how he “handled” both Leland Olds and James
Forrestal, and in having done so simultaneously, provides the foundational
underpinning that is essential to comprehending the real character of the
man, something that won’t be found in most other biographies of him.
"There are many parallels with Forrestal’s death in 1949 and other
unsolved murders in the 1950s and early 60s: Dr. Frank Olson’s plunge
from the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City on
November 28, 1953—after having been surreptitiously given a dosage of
LSD by colleagues from the CIA--and the death of Grant Stockdale, a
friend of JFK’s who had become involved, and knew too much about, the
corruption swirling around Bobby Baker’s and Lyndon Johnson’s swindles
and scams, when he died ten days after JFK’s assassination, falling thirteen
floors from a window of the Dupont Building in Miami.
The patterns and parallels noted above do not conclusively prove that Lyndon Johnson had an active role in the assassination of James Forrestal. However, if the aphorism “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” — to say nothing about the factual truths revealed in these excerpts — has any meaning, it can at least be said that many imprisoned people have been put there through less circumstantial evidence than that compiled against the sum of the accusations leveled against Lyndon B. Johnson.
For a more detailed review of The Assassination of James Forrestal see this link to the website of Mike Campbell. As it will become apparent, Campbell’s blog / website contains links to still another continuing “mystery” — what really happened to Amelia Earhart.
Mr. Campbell is the author of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last (2016), his second book about the cover-up put in place by, or with the acquiescence of, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to hide evidence of what really happened to Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. The term “mystery” applies to most people – those who haven’t read the book — but to those who have, an epiphanous moment occurs by the last chapter. Campbell’s book uniquely combines and summarizes the previous works of numerous researchers and comes closer to a final resolution to this case than ever before. To avoid “spoilers” I will quote only an intriguing single sentence in the first paragraph of the Introduction to his book: “No missing-persons case in history has been as misreported and misunderstood, and the truth about the lost fliers’ cruel fates continues to elude more than 99 percent of an incurious and uncaring public.”
Readers of Campbell’s book will find many more parallels with my own books’ discoveries relating to the use of the mainstream media to hide the numerous cover-ups related to Lyndon Johnson’s misdeeds. For the sake of brevity, I will limit this point to what I’ve written regarding Time magazine’s use of multiple deceptions in two major articles (four total pages) on January 26, 1976 to reinforce the government’s deceitful “official” account of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. (see p. 111 of Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?) The same magazine did exactly the same thing in 1966 in a vicious attack on Fred Goerner’s book The Search for Amelia Earhart as an (obviously successful) attempt to quash any effort to present factual evidence about this case which does not conform with the government’s official version.
There is less need for such attack articles now that contradictory books are simply ignored by all MSM-controlled media, which ensures that they are not reviewed or otherwise publicized. As a case-in-point, while my own first book was (obviously, inadvertently) reviewed by three literary journals used by buyers from libraries and book stores, in 2011, that came to a close after someone [I have reason to believe Bill Moyers, possibly?] added my name to the secret list of “banned authors”. If there is any doubt that “conspiracy theories” (implicitly meaning any attempt to rebut even the most ludicrous examples of governmental pronouncements) are among the government’s top worries, one need only read the 30-page document co-authored in 2008 by Obama czar Cass Sunstein titled with that term (See here). Among the five action items proposed in this document to deal with conspiracy theories (p. 14), the two most radical were that the government might “ban conspiracy theorizing” and could “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.”
One must conclude that somewhere in the Orwellian, dystopian bureaucracy of Washington there exists a sub-department filled with many specialists trained in the methodologies used for the creation and sustenance of official lies and the maintenance of mythologies. Either that or–even more likely–that is merely one task implicitly and automatically added to every government bureaucrat’s skill set.
LBJ: Master of Deceit 