Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (56 page)

By inviting one of the financial community’s most successful sons to serve in his administration, Roosevelt was demonstrating his skill as a politician
par excellence
.

In May 1940, fully aware that the popular mood in his country was opposed to America’s participation in the war, Roosevelt knew it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would have to become involved: and he called for a major effort of rearmament and war production. (If he had not done so, Germany and Japan might well have been the victors of World War II). But like President Wilson before him in World War I, Roosevelt also knew that the necessary rearmament and war production effort would not succeed without the wholehearted co-operation of the large industrial and financial interests. In Roosevelt’s case they were the interests which had been in conflict with his New Deal programme. It followed that to get their wholehearted co-operation Roosevelt needed to broaden the base of his administration, to have in it, at his side, people who could assist him to mobilise all the necessary financial and industrial resources for war.

Forrestal was an obvious candidate. He had never taken any part in politics but he was from a Democratic background: and he had taken a more liberal view than others in the financial community of the reforms which the New Deal had imposed on Wall Street. Could Forrestal be persuaded to put the national interest before self-interest and commit himself to a spell of public service?

As it happened, Forrestal did not have to be persuaded and events were to explain why. He was first and foremost a patriot in the best sense of the term. In public service he was to demonstrate a deep sense of duty which permitted no compromise for the sake of political manoeuvre or personal prestige with what he felt as an overriding obligation to the interests of the United States. And that was why, in a time to come, he would seek to have the Palestine problem taken out of U.S. domestic politics, in order to prevent Zionism becoming a threat to American interests in a region of the world as vital to them as the Middle East.

Forrestal was, in fact, one of six special administrative assistants appointed to serve President Roosevelt. They were known to insiders as the “secret six” and they were to serve, as Roosevelt himself put it, with complete loyalty and “a passion for anonymity.”

As part of his effort to broaden the base of his administration, President Roosevelt also appointed two eminent Republicans to the Cabinet. One was Frank Knox who became Secretary of the Navy. Some weeks later Forrestal woke up to find himself undersecretary of the Navy and facing the most daunting challenge—preparing the peacetime Navy to meet the enormous demands of global war.

Forrestal was not a complete stranger to the military. When America entered World War I he took temporary leave of Dillon, Read & Co. and, then aged 25, enlisted as a seaman in the Navy. Quite quickly he transferred to the aviation branch, but because the training facilities were still in a rudimentary state, he was sent to Canada to train with the Royal Flying Corps. There he was passed as Naval Aviator Number 154, and then returned to the U.S. to receive his ensign’s commission. But he did not see action. He was posted to the office of Naval Operations in Washington. There he may have learned something of Zionism’s contribution to bringing America into World War I and the role played by Baruch, President Wilson’s Mr. Mobilisation.

When Forrestal became undersecretary of the Navy on 22 August, his office was a completely new one. It was without staff, tradition and general acceptance by the Navy. Under Forrestal, and in large part because of his own very great abilities, it became the controlling centre of the whole industrial and procurement side of the Navy’s vast wartime effort.

As Millis put it, there was, obviously, no one man who came anywhere near to “building” the wartime Navy. That was a gigantic co- operative achievement. But Forrestal was the one man more responsible than any other for “buying” it. He was “the major link connecting the military demand to the civilian productive system and, in turn, connecting the civilian economy to the military uses of its products.”

Though Baruch did not serve in Roosevelt’s administration, he played as an adviser to Roosevelt a very significant background role in the mobilisation for World War II; and almost certainly Forrestal would have benefited from Baruch’s experience and advice. (As we shall see, Baruch’s role in the determination of Forrestal’s fate was the critical one).

Through it all Forrestal as perceived by others was grim-faced, tight- lipped and pugnacious. (He boxed to keep himself fit and had a flattened nose to show for it). He did not suffer fools gladly and was at times abrupt. But he was, apparently, a great deal more subtle and sensitive than many supposed. He was not any kind of dictator. He preferred to ask questions, to understand and adjust rather than rush to conclusions and issue orders. The secret, he once said, was in knowing that nine-tenths of administration lay in “the removal of human frictions.” Forrestal proved himself to be the master of that art.

On 28 April 1944, Secretary Knox died suddenly of a heart attack. Nobody had to think about who his successor should be. Forrestal was sworn in as Secretary of the Navy on 19 May.

Despite his preoccupation with naval administration, Forrestal never lost sight of its ultimate purpose or of the fighting men. He refused to be isolated from the action and at Iwo Jima he was the first Secretary of the Navy to land under fire in the midst of a still undecided amphibious operation.

It was at Iwo Jima that Forrestal spoke of his “tremendous admiration and reverence for the guy who walks up beaches and takes enemy positions with a rifle and grenades or his bare hands.”
⁴
A politician (I mean a party political animal) might have been playing to the gallery. Forrestal, I imagine, was not.

When he succeeded Knox as Secretary of the Navy, Forrestal continued to say he was nothing more than an investment banker and that his Washington address was “temporary.” The implication was that he was expecting to return to Wall Street when the reorganisation and unification of the armed services was approved by Congress in principle. But it was not only fate in the shape of Patterson’s desire for a greater income than the government could provide that determined otherwise. As Millis noted, “High office and, what was more important to Forrestal, its high and heavy responsibilities to the American people, had claimed him.”
⁵

It was no less a figure than General (and future President) Eisenhower who said that Forrestal had “inborn honesty” as well as “a very great desire to serve his country well.” Eisenhower served for a period as Forrestal’s full-time principal military adviser, an experience that qualified him to speak with authority and insight about the quality of the first U.S. Secretary of Defence.

The greatest gift Forrestal brought to the Pentagon was his ability and will to think constantly ahead, to anticipate the circumstances in which future decisions would have to be made. Such a man was bound to be concerned to the point of alarm about where Zionism, if it was allowed to have its way, might take the Middle East and the U.S.

When his appointment as America’s first Secretary of Defence was announced he received many letters of congratulations from old friends. His reply to one included the following: “Thanks for your note and good wishes. I shall certainly need the latter—and probably the combined attention of Fulton Sheen and the entire psychiatric profession by the end of another year!”
⁶

A premonition of how his life might end? Probably not. Most likely is that Forrestal was joking to make a point but, as we shall see, he was to need psychiatric help when despair turned to clinical depression.

In terms of the integrity needed for the task of taking the Palestine problem out of U.S. domestic politics, Forrestal was matched by Secretary of State Marshall; but as the man with the executive responsibility for preparing the U.S. to play the leading role in containing and if necessary fighting the Soviet Union, Forrestal had more influence than Marshall with the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties. By influence I really mean that his position and responsibilities, his experience and his integrity were such that you had to be a complete fool, or a Zionist stooge, if you did not consider seriously what he said.

On 2 May 1947 Forrestal had lunch with Senator Owen Brewster, chairman of the Joint Congressional Aviation Policy Board. After it the Secretary of Defence made this diary note:

I said that Middle East oil was going to be necessary for this country not merely in wartime but in peacetime, because if we are going to make the contribution that it seems we have to make to the rest of the world in manufactured goods [to put capitalism back on its feet] we shall probably need very greatly increased supplies of fuel. Brewster said that… Europe in the next ten years may shift from a coal to an oil economy, and therefore whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe. He expressed considerable misgivings about the capacity of American forces to keep Russia out of Arabia if they decided to move there.
⁷

At this moment in history, when Zionism was seeking to have U.S. policy for the Middle East committed to serving its interest no matter the consequences for all other parties with interests of their own, the fate of the nations of war-devastated Western Europe and virtually bankrupt Britain was in the balance. Without the massive American assistance they were to receive under the Marshall Aid Plan, reconstruction (dependent to a great extent on the continuing and escalating flow of cheap Arab oil) would be delayed and painfully slow. In that event there would be the danger of widespread discontent leading, probably, to civil unrest and the creation of an unstable economic, political and social situation that communism’s strategists in Moscow, through their fellow travellers in Western Europe and Britain, could and would exploit. (If the worst had happened, and if the U.S. Departments of State and Defence had not advocated a policy designed to prevent it happening—a policy that included not surrendering to Zionism—Marshall and Forrestal would have been charged, rightly, with gross incompetence and the most massive dereliction of duty to the U.S. to the “Free World” of Western terminology).

At a cabinet meeting on 7 November, three weeks before the vote in the General Assembly on the partition plan, Marshall presented the State Department’s review of the international situation.

Top of the list of U.S. concerns was the Soviet Union and its intentions. There was reason to believe, the State Department assessment said, that the advance of communism in Europe had been stemmed. The Soviets did not appear to want to risk confrontation there. But that could easily change if the Soviet economy turned down or Soviet leaders perceived themselves to be in trouble politically. The Middle East? It, the State Department review said, was “a tinder box”.
⁸
Marshall’s view was that a fire started there might never be put out.

After that cabinet meeting Forrestal made the following note about one of his own contributions:

I repeated my suggestion, made several times previously, that a serious attempt be made to lift the Palestine problem out of American partisan politics. I said there had been general acceptance of the fact that domestic politics ceased at the Atlantic Ocean, and that no question was more charged with danger to our security than this particular one.
⁹

Forrestal was, in fact, already proceeding with his campaign to take Palestine out of American partisan politics. The day before he had an unsatisfactory meeting on that subject with Rhode Island’s Senator J. Howard McGrath—National Chairman of the Democratic Party and therefore the man whose support Forrestal most needed on the Democratic side of the fence.

It was not Forrestal’s way to be anything less than straightforward. He said to McGrath: “No group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”
¹⁰

McGrath was not encouraging. His reply, Forrestal noted, was that there were “two or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question.”
¹¹

Forrestal retorted: “I would rather lose those states in a national election than run the risks that might develop in our handling of the Palestine question.”
¹²

The U.S. Secretary of Defence was depressed by McGrarh’s position but decided to have another go at him. On 26 November, three days before the partition vote, they had lunch together. At the start of it Forrestal produced his own hors d’oeuvre in the shape of a secret report on Palestine prepared by the CIA. And he read parts of it to the senator.

But McGrath had a secret of his own to reveal. The fact was, he said, that “Jewish sources were responsible for a substantial part of the contributions to the Democratic National Committee.”
¹³
Many of the contributions were made “with a distinct idea on the part of the givers that they will have an opportunity to express their views and have them seriously considered on such questions as the present Palestine question.” And there was more. There was a feeling among the Jews “that the United States was not doing what it should to solicit votes in the General Assembly in favour of the partition of Palestine.”

Forrestal interrupted McGrath’s flow to say that was “precisely what the State Department wants to avoid.” The U.S., he added, had gone a very long way indeed in supporting partition but “proselytising for votes and support will add to the already serious alienation of Arab goodwill.” (As we have seen, President Truman had given an instruction that nobody in his administration should express a preference for or against partition).