My guess is not many Americans know that in 1947 our first Secretary Of Defense believed a Jewish state in the Middle East was a bad idea for the United States, let alone that he met his death falling from a 16th story window.

But James Forrestal should be of interest to anyone who is repulsed by the ruthless timidity of the Democratic Party, excited by the possibilities of the Democratic Socialists, and eager to push back on the fictional narrative of Israel as our eternally indispensable ally.

Fortunately, no matter how mislaid and dust-covered, history is always shouting at us, always desperate to start a conversation. So it was with a genuine sense of amazement that, after spending 4 bucks at a used book sale, I let James Forrestal talk to me.

Who was James Forrestal?

Like the new American nation of 1776, the new American empire of 1945 also had its Founding Fathers of bankers, diplomats and lawyers. Forrestal, a Princeton grad, bond salesman and ardent capitalist, toiled beside the Harrimans, Kennans, Bohlens, Lovetts, Achesons and McCloys to invent a conqueror’s foreign policy. These were men who lunched and drafted white papers and sent cables as they transformed the United States military from one which trained with broom handles prior to 1941 into an atomic superpower.

One of my favorite books about World War II is Winston Churchill’s “The Hinge Of Fate”. The entire thing is about logistics. How the Allies’ superior ability to move men and material around the globe enabled them to defeat the Nazis.

That was Forrestal – an efficient administrator who spent his days trying to figure things out. As a special assistant to FDR he oversaw industrial mobilization and procurement during the war, then, as Secretary of the Navy under Truman, he oversaw demobilization after it.

Yet nothing came calmingly. Where Dean Acheson was pleased enough with himself to magisterially title his memoir “Present at the Creation”, Forrestal analytically scribbled a diary. It combined gnawing unsureness about the future with extraordinary prescience about the problems contained in what these wise men were creating.

Some of the diary is charmingly dated. For Forrestal, the difficulty of government work was that it “not only has to be well done, but the public has to be convinced that it is being well done.” Today’s Democratic leadership, having managed to streamline that process into appearing-to-govern-by-saying-words-at-realities, would chortle at such sincerity.

Then too, much of the diary is personally annoying. I have always believed that the Pentagon does not exist to promote freedom – it exists to protect monied interests from the consequences of their avarice. Forrestal, on the other hand, wasn’t merely a cold warrior, he was cryogenic.

A passionate foe of Henry Wallace and ever fearful of the Soviet menace, Forrestal was more than willing to champion Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s immortal and perpetually followed advice to Harry Truman on how to acquire defense appropriations: “The only way you are going to get what you want is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.” And, truth be told, there are entries in the Forestall Diaries which certainly scare the hell out of me.

For instance, years after Hiroshima, no one in the evolving security structure of the United States, including Secretary Of Defense Forrestal, seems to have had any conception of the destructive power of the atomic bomb. The bomb itself was just another optional weapon to quell geopolitical disturbances, and individual branches of the service wanted control of their own nuclear arsenals.

The situation produced a Forrestal diary note which is positively Hegsethian in its casual derangement:

27 October 1948 General Notes on the Question Navel Air – Air Force

5. I do not believe that air power alone can win a war any more than an Army or naval power can win a war, and I do not believe in the theory that an atomic offensive will extinguish in a week the will to fight.

By now, you might be asking yourself why I’m asking you to read what James Forrestall has to say when I myself disagree with much of it?

Simple. It’s because when he pushes back against Zionists and Israel, Forrestal is both a kindred spirit and an honest breath of never-mentioned air.

On Israel these days, only certain people are required to explain their positions by jumping through inquisitory hoops: Platner in Maine. El-Sayed in Michigan. Mamdani-backed candidates. Any voters horrified enough by the butchery in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank to vote accordingly.

Meanwhile, all the wrong people are under no such obligation. Frauds who portray the Diaspora as a Dantean level of hell profit handsomely while going unchallenged: Deborah Lipstadt, a dingbat whose racist ravings somehow qualified her to be Joe Biden’s Antisemitism Czar. Mark Levin, the “Lord Haw-Haw of Fox News”, and an out-and-out propagandist for a foreign country who does not even pretend to aspire to dual loyalty. Bill Maher, a duplicitously hectoring prick who somehow managed to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on the extraordinary grounds of never having uttered a challenging satirical thought.

For these people, Palestine and Palestinians do not exist. But they did for Forestall. And his diary reminds us of a time when they existed for many. In fact, views on Zionism and Israel’s founding, for which Democratic Socialists are attacked today, were held by members of the cabinet during Israel’s founding!

I’ll let the diary speak.

1 December 1947

Cabinet Lunch

…Lovett reported on the result of the United Nations action on Palestine over the weekend. He said he had never in his life been subject to as much pressure as he had been in the three days beginning Thursday morning and ending Saturday night.

[Herbert Bayard] Swope, Robert Nathan, were among those who had importuned him…The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which has a concession in Liberia, reported that it had been telephoned to and asked to transmit a message to their representative in Liberia directing him to bring pressure on the Liberian government to vote in favor of partition.

The zeal and activity of the Jews had almost resulted in defeating the objectives they were after. I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists’ pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine, and I also remarked that the New York Times editorial of Sunday morning pointed up those misgivings when it said, “Many of us have long had doubts concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on a basis of religious faith.” I said I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country.

Here, talking with the former Secretary Of State, he discusses Israel in terms of the money and political considerations which prevented a one state solution. His closing sentence would work in any DSA campaign today.

3 December 1947

Lunch–Mr. Byrnes

Lunch today with Jimmy Byrnes. We talked Palestine. Byrnes recalled the fact that he had disassociated himself from his decision of a year ago to turn down the Grady report which recommended a federated state for Palestine or a single Arabian state. He said the decision on the part of the President to reject this recommendation and to criticize the British for their conduct of Palestinian affairs had placed Bevin and Attlee in a most difficult position: He said that Niles {David K. Niles, administrative assistant to the President] and Sam Rosenman were chiefly responsible for the President’s decision; that both had told the President that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favoring the Zionist position on Palestine, and that they had insisted that unless the President anticipated this movement New York State would be lost to the Democrats.

I asked Byrnes what he thought of the possibility of getting Republican leaders to agree with the Democrats to have the Palestine question placed on a nonpolitical basis. He wasn’t particularly optimistic about the success of this effort because of the fact that Rabbi Silver was one of Taft’s close associates and because Taft followed Silver on the Palestine-Haifa question. I said I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular bloc of special interests might make to the party funds.

3 February 1948

Meeting-Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.

Visit today from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. who came in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish state in Palestine, that we should support the United Nations “decision,” and in general a broad, across the board statement of the Zionist position.

I pointed out that the United Nations had as yet taken no “decision,” that it was only a recommendation of the General Assembly, that any implementation of this “decision” by the United States would probably result in the need for a partial mobilization, and that I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto scandal. He professed ignorance on this latter point and returned to his general ex-position of the case of the Zionists.

He made no threats but made it very clear that the zealots in this cause had the conviction of trying to upset the government policy on Palestine. I replied that I had no power to make policy but that I would be derelict in my duty if I did not point out what I thought would be the consequences of any particular policy which would endanger the security of this country. I said that I was merely directing my efforts to lifting the question out of politics, that is, to have the two parties agree they would not compete for votes on this issue. He said this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans gain by such an agreement.

I said I was forced to repeat to him what I had said to Senator McGrath in response to the latter’s observation that our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California – that I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States.

In the end, his lack of calm caught up with Forrestal. Five weeks after resigning as Defense Secretary, while undergoing psychiatric observation, he took his own life by jumping from a 16th floor window at the National Naval Medical Center. His New York Times obituary is here and worth reading in its entirety as both a story of personal anguish and a far more honest account of political realities than would ever be published today: “He was widely denounced by persons who felt that he favored the Arabs over the Jews, and Mr. Forrestal was said to be particularly distressed by a statement that “he cared more for oil than he did for the Jews.” Mr. Forrestal also felt he was being deserted by his former friends in business as well as unjustly attacked by so-called liberals who misunderstood his role on the Palestine question.”

As anyone who ever opposed the official narrative on Israel can tell you, there’s a price to be paid for your efforts. Forestall paid his in full. Having read the Diaries, the last line of the obituary is poignant – showing Forrestal still trying to figure things out: “On the window sill from which Mr. Forrestal jumped were marks suggesting he might have changed his mind and tried to climb back into the window.”

Fortunately, James Forrestal left something more than marks on a window sill. He left this nation a diary containing indispensable advice on how a decent political party should decide what it stands for.