The Pentagon: A History (48 page)

Forrestal had his own doubts. “This office will probably be the biggest cemetery for dead cats in history,” he wrote to his friend, playwright Robert Sherwood, shortly before moving into the Pentagon.

Forrestal quickly set about trying to prove himself wrong.

When the soul’s life is gone

Forrestal brought forty-five employees from the Navy Department, most of them secretaries, clerks, and the like—a tiny drop in the ocean that was the Pentagon. That was the way Forrestal wanted it. The legislation he had framed left him with no deputy and just three special assistants. Large staffs, he believed, “begin to gather the attribute of God to themselves very fast.”

It was immediately clear that Forrestal had greatly underestimated the job; he was trying to manage the new defense entity—representing roughly one-third of the U.S. budget, and thus by far the largest government agency—with a staff equivalent to that of a midsized law firm. Undaunted by the challenge, Forrestal threw himself into the work, but he and his staff were quickly overwhelmed by technical and administrative chores they had not anticipated. Leaving the office one Sunday night at 10:30 after working his staff seven straight days, Forrestal bade farewell without a trace of irony: “Well, have a nice weekend.” The long hours could not disguise that his young aides, though smart and dedicated, lacked the experience and standing to challenge senior generals and admirals.

Forrestal lacked authority too. The secretary of defense was little more than a coordinator; real power remained with the individual services and
their
secretaries. Forrestal had an idyllic vision of running the Pentagon by consensus, seeing his role in relation to the three service secretaries as first among equals. Instead, he found deadlock. With Truman demanding a pared-down defense budget, the services turned on one another, bitterly fighting for a larger share of the shrinking pie. The Navy and Air Force squabbled over everything, especially control of aviation. The Joint Chiefs of Staff—which lacked a chairman, at the Navy’s insistence—were similarly paralyzed. Forrestal would consult the chiefs on issues but get divided replies or sometimes no replies at all.

Even getting the Navy to move into the Pentagon was a challenge, as in the past. Truman proved to be the strongest champion in adopting a new role for the building; the president told Forrestal that he wanted the Army, Air Force, and Navy headquarters at the Pentagon. But to opponents of unification, the Pentagon was the symbol of their threatened independence. Nimitz, then chief of naval operations, was not eager to move into the Pentagon, and the admirals dragged their feet, arguing that the move would be cumbersome and that putting all the service commanders in one building would leave “all our eggs in one basket,” as one Navy official complained.

Forrestal saw the Navy’s absence as a drag on unification and insisted the service make the move. “This action will undoubtedly facilitate my own work and will make possible a greater degree of day-to-day contact among personnel of the three services,” Forrestal reported to Truman on February 28, 1948. After months of negotiations, Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan and Admiral Louis E. Denfield, Nimitz’s successor, finally moved into the Pentagon in August 1948, along with the rest of the Navy high command and 2,500 workers. To free up 300,000 square feet of office space, the Army kicked out a like number of its workers from the Pentagon and sent them to the Navy building in Washington. Like the Air Force high command, the Navy secretary and military chiefs were given offices on the fourth floor of the E Ring, while the Army headquarters stayed on the third floor, a general arrangement that would last a half-century.

Of all the military services, only the Marine Corps held out, stoutly asserting its independence by maintaining its headquarters in the Navy Annex atop Arlington Ridge, overlooking the Pentagon a half-mile away. A Marine officer kept an artillery sight at his window and every morning worked out firing problems using the Pentagon as a target. “I’ve got the whole place zeroed in,” he told a visitor. “With a battery of 155s, I could level the place to the ground in two days.” The Corps would successfully stay out of the Pentagon for another half-century, until 1996, when General Charles Krulak, the Marine Corps commandant, decided the self-imposed exile had isolated the Marines from the rest of the armed services.

Getting the Navy into the Pentagon was one of the few concessions Forrestal would receive from the service. He turned to old Navy colleagues, but to his shock found that not only would they not help, they worked actively to sabotage unification. Forrestal found himself treated as a pariah by the Navy, and he came to see the Army as the only service making a genuine effort at unification. Forrestal confided to Eisenhower, who was serving as his adviser, that while “in the army there are many that I trust,” there were only two or three admirals in whom he still had confidence. “It must have cost him a lot to come to such a conclusion,” Eisenhower noted in his diary.

As Forrestal’s frustration grew, he realized that his brand of unification was a failure and that the system needed to be changed. In the summer of 1948 he approached Clifford: “Clark, I was wrong. I cannot make this work. No one can make it work.” Forrestal subsequently told Truman much the same, and, with the president’s approval, he went to work framing changes to strengthen the office.

Clifford later called Forrestal’s transformation the most “dramatic metamorphosis” he saw in forty-five years in Washington. “To put it simply, he realized that he had been wrong, and publicly admitted it. It was a brave but enormously costly decision for him, alienating many of his closest friends in the Navy, and it added enormously to the strain under which he was already working.”

By the latter part of 1948, Forrestal was exhausted and behaving in ways that, in retrospect, would be seen as signs of mental illness. His aides knew he was having difficulty concentrating and was unable to make even simple decisions. Sitting behind Forrestal at a Cabinet meeting, Clifford watched with alarm as the secretary constantly scratched at a raw spot on the back of his head. “He had opened an open sore there, and yet still couldn’t stay away from it,” Clifford recalled. “It was a nervous manifestation that I found very disquieting, and you could sense something was going on within the man.” Every time Clifford saw Forrestal, the sore was larger.

Forrestal’s anxiety was compounded by uncertainty over his status with the White House. In the months following Truman’s stunning upset victory in the 1948 presidential election, the president had grown frustrated with Forrestal’s increasing indecisiveness and odd behavior and came to the conclusion that he should replace his secretary of defense. Moreover, Truman had a most important benefactor he needed to satisfy: Louis Johnson, the chief fundraiser for his presidential campaign.

Shortly before his inauguration in January 1949, Truman informed Forrestal that he intended to replace him with Johnson. Forrestal went into a confused denial; while at times he expressed eagerness to leave office, in his frantic, debilitated mental state, he became convinced that he needed to stay at the Pentagon to unravel the mess he had helped create. With Forrestal making no real motion to leave office and his behavior becoming more eccentric, Truman summoned him to the White House on March 1 and asked for his resignation “at once.” The dismissal seemed to throw Forrestal over the edge. He had nothing but contempt for Johnson. “It just galled him to think that an office he had created to be above and beyond politics would become a spoil of the 1948 campaign,” Najeeb Halaby, then a young Forrestal aide, later said.

The ceremony to swear in Johnson was set for March 28 at the Pentagon. That morning, Eisenhower, laid up in bed with severe stomach cramps, got an urgent call from Forrestal. “Ike, I simply can’t turn over this job to Louie Johnson,” Forrestal said. “He knows nothing about the problems involved and things will go to pot. I’ll have to go to the President and withdraw my resignation immediately.”

Eisenhower later recounted, “I replied with all my strength, urging him not to do anything so foolish.”

Johnson was sworn in as the new secretary of defense before an audience of eleven thousand packed into the Pentagon courtyard; the ceremony, complete with marching bands and a thundering Air Force flyover, was so grandiose it was dubbed an inauguration. At the White House shortly afterward, Forrestal was led away speechless when Truman pinned the Distinguished Service Medal on his lapel. Forrestal was accorded further honors at a special House Armed Services Committee meeting held the next day. Afterwards, Forrestal went back to the Pentagon and retreated to a small office that had been set aside for his use in answering correspondence. His aide Marx Leva found him a little later, still wearing his hat, sitting entirely rigid, staring at a blank wall. Leva asked if there was anything he could do. “Yes,” Forrestal replied. “Call for my car. I want to go home.” Forrestal had no car—the secretary’s official limousine had passed on to Johnson. Leva “ran like hell” and found another official car to take Forrestal to his Georgetown home. The first secretary of defense, leaving the Pentagon for the last time, was bundled into the commandeered car and driven away.

Alarmed friends arranged for an Air Force plane to take him that evening to Florida, where his wife, Josephine, and his old friend Bob Lovett, assistant secretary of war for air under Stimson, were vacationing. Lovett met him at the airfield and was shocked at Forrestal’s haggard appearance. His sunken eyes darted about and his mouth was so tightly drawn that his lips had disappeared. Lovett tried to be jovial, suggesting they play some golf. Forrestal stared at his friend with a desperate look in his eyes. “Bob, they’re after me,” he replied. Walking the beach in subsequent days, Forrestal became convinced that metal sockets in the sand for holding beach umbrellas had been wired to monitor his conversations. The Kremlin had marked him for liquidation, he said. After at least one suicide attempt, Forrestal was admitted to the Bethesda naval hospital on April 2. Despite his suicidal tendencies, Forrestal was put in a VIP suite on the sixteenth floor, where he could be more easily isolated from the press.

Forrestal was diagnosed as suffering from severe reactive depression, not unlike combat fatigue, caused by intense pressures that had overwhelmed his mind and nervous system. Forrestal told a Navy psychiatrist he had failed at the Pentagon; instead of “banging heads together” as he should have, Forrestal blamed himself for naively believing the military services would bow to the common good to work together.

On the night of May 21, Forrestal stayed up late reading. A Navy corpsman stationed outside his room looked in on Forrestal around 1:45
A.M.
and found him writing on sheets of hospital paper, copying a poem from a red leatherbound anthology of world poetry. About 3
A.M.,
while the corpsman was on an errand—possibly sent by Forrestal himself—the former defense secretary left his room and slipped across the corridor to a kitchen. Forrestal removed the unsecured screen from the window and tied one end of his bathrobe sash around a radiator below the window and the other end around his neck. He climbed out the window and was perhaps suspended for a few moments before the sash slipped off the radiator. The soaring granite tower conceived by Franklin Roosevelt and built by John McShain nearly a decade earlier proved to be a more than adequate platform for Forrestal to end his life. His broken body was discovered on the roof of a third-floor passageway connecting to another wing of the hospital.

On the bedside table in Forrestal’s room, his book was found open to the poem he had been copying, “The Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles. It included these lines:

When Reason’s day

Sets rayless—joyless—quenched in cold decay,

Better to die, and sleep

The never-waking sleep, than linger on

And dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone

I want that office

It had not been an auspicious start. Nor did it not soon get better.

Big, bluff, backslapping Louis Johnson, a savvy and nakedly ambitious West Virginian, was the virtual antithesis of the introverted Forrestal. Johnson had served as assistant secretary of war under Harry Woodring, working assiduously to undermine him. When the president replaced Woodring in 1940, Johnson had fully expected Roosevelt to name him to the job. Instead, FDR chose Henry Stimson. Nine years later, Johnson viewed his arrival at the Pentagon as sweet vindication, and, many suspected, a springboard to the presidency.

Moving into Forrestal’s office on the Mall side, Johnson found the accommodations not grand enough for his taste. Brigadier General Louis H. Renfrow, a bumptious Truman crony from Missouri serving as Johnson’s assistant, covetously eyed the suites above the River entrance occupied by the secretary of the army and the chief of staff, with the private elevator, dining room, and larger offices. Things were going to change. “I want that office,” Johnson declared. Forrestal’s “postage stamp”–sized desk was also deemed inadequate. The biggest desk in the Pentagon sat in an office set aside for General Pershing, but never occupied by the World War I commander before he died in 1948. The desk, a nineteenth-century, nine-by-five-foot solid walnut antique, had been used for years by Black Jack in the old State, War and Navy Building. Johnson claimed it.

Renfrow informed Army Secretary Kenneth Royall, who was planning to resign, that he was being “dispossessed” of his office a little early. Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, a five-star general and one of the greatest of American soldiers, was likewise evicted. In April, movers packed up Royall and Bradley’s offices, including the Victorian grandfather clock and enormous globe on a carved wooden pedestal that Marshall had used. In came the Pershing desk and Johnson’s belongings, including a television set and a Buddha statuette with a bulging tummy, its hands upflung and roaring with silent mirth.