Forrestal, James V. (1892–1949), investment banker, undersecretary of the navy (1940–44), secretary of the navy (1944–47), and the nation's first secretary of defense (1947–49).Forrestal was the youngest of three sons born to Irish immigrant parents in Beacon, New York. He attended Princeton University in the class of 1915, served as editor of the
Daily Princetonian, and was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” and “The Man Nobody Knows.”
After a short stint as a naval aviator in World War I, he joined the Wall Street firm of William Read & Co. (later Dillon, Read) as a bond salesman. He was elected to the partnership in 1923, became one of the “golden boys” of investment banking during the Roaring Twenties, and was made president of the firm in 1940. He married Josephine Ogden, an editor of
Vogue magazine, in 1926.
Called to Washington by President
Franklin Roosevelt to help convert the U.S. economy to war production, Forrestal was named undersecretary of the navy (August 1940) with full authority in the area of procurement—for the design, construction, and delivery of ships to the fighting forces. Over the next three years he was the principal architect of the navy's vast World War II expansion from 1,099 to 50,759 vessels, and from 160,997 to 3,383,196 officers and men. The creation of that largest, most powerful fleet in the world was a precondition of victory.
Forrestal became secretary of the navy (in April 1944). He organized a comprehensive information effort to make the magnitude and complexity of the Pacific War—including the significance of particular naval battles and acts of heroism—more understandable to the American people. He toured the battlefronts in both the European and Pacific theaters, and went ashore at Iwo Jima on D‐Day+2, “exposing himself to the dangers of warfare as no other United States official of his rank did in World War II.” In August 1945, when the Japanese government expressed a readiness to surrender provided it did not “prejudice the prerogatives” of the emperor
Hirohito, President
Harry S. Truman's advisers were divided on the question whether this met the U.S. requirement for “unconditional surrender.” Forrestal convinced Truman to accept the Japanese condition, but to call it “unconditional surrender” and arrange to subordinate the emperor to the U.S. Supreme Allied Commander.
Forrestal was one of the first high officials to see in the Soviet Union an ideological, political, and military threat to U.S. security and to democratic societies everywhere. He played a large, influential role in government efforts to restore a shattered postwar world, confront the new Soviet challenge, and create or restructure those agencies (
National Security Council,
Central Intelligence Agency,
Department of Defense,
Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabinet secretariat) required to handle the new, unprecedented responsibilities of the
Cold War in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He commissioned a Soviet expert,
George F. Kennan, to write the paper that became the famous
Mr. X article, setting forth the “containment” doctrine that formed the definitive guideline for U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War.
As navy secretary, Forrestal strongly resisted President Truman's postwar plan to integrate the army, navy, and air force under a single secretary of defense. Truman's plan became law, but Forrestal succeeded in obtaining amendments that severely limited the power and authority of the new secretary: he would be essentially a presiding chairman of the board, with only “general authority” to assign military roles and missions and develop a single budget for the armed forces. The secretaries of army, navy, and air force would continue to administer their own separate departments.
When Truman's first choice for the new post declined it ( Robert Patterson, the outgoing Secretary of War), the president turned to Forrestal, who fatefully accepted. Almost immediately he found that the secretary of defense lacked adequate authority and staff to control an organization riven by bitter rivalries that were aggravated by a combination of expanding military technologies and sharply limited postwar military budgets. At the same time, the armed forces were charged with protecting the nation in a disordered postwar world, marked by widespread physical destruction and a dangerous new challenge from Stalinist Russia. Belatedly aware that his earlier concept had been deeply flawed, Forrestal nevertheless struggled to manage an almost unworkable organization. In the process he drove himself to exhaustion, and began a tragic descent into paranoia and self‐destruction. Truman asked for his resignation in March 1949. Forrestal was hospitalized for “reactive depression”—essentially the condition of combat fatigue seen frequently during World War II. On 22 May, he committed suicide by jumping from a sixteenth‐floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Bibliography
Arnold A. Rogow , James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Polity, 1963.
Townsend Hoopes and and Douglas Brinkley , Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, 1992.
Townsend Hoopes
