Forrestal is most likely suffering from a depressive condition common to middle-aged men: involutional melancholia. In such cases, the mental faculties become less acute, there’s a tendency to bemoan past mistakes, a feeling takes hold that the future holds no promise. Doubt, indecision, fear, anxiety manifest themselves. And there are physical effects, also: the internal secretion glands begin malfunctioning, resulting in a general overall lowering of bodily health.”
“Maybe you do know your stuff.”
“Maybe I do.” His eyes narrowed, his brow tensed, which caused his eyebrows to show up better. “I do know your friend … your client … will not survive long without hospitalization and around-the-clock care. The reports from Florida are disturbing, to say the least.”
“I know.”
I’d spoken to Eberstadt again, yesterday, and heard a harrowing tale of suicide attempts and constant supervision. In the early-morning hours, not long after Forrestal arrived, a fire engine had gone by, its siren wailing, sending the former Secretary of Defense bolting from his bed, running in his night-shirt into the street, screaming, “The Russians are attacking! The Russians are attacking!”
Dr. Bernstein stood, a cue for me to do the same, which I did.
He said, “I can assure you, Mr. Heller, that both Captain Raines and I will do everything in our power to see that Mr. Forrestal’s stay at Bethesda is as short as possible.”
“Didn’t mean to give you a hard time, Doc,” I said, and handed him my business card. “I’ll be back in my Chicago office tomorrow morning, if there’s anything you need.”
“Thank you, Mr. Heller.” He ushered me to the door, and smiled almost shyly. “And if I’m not being too personal, as one rather nonreligious Jew to another, I hope one day you will come to embrace your Jewish side, as I have.”
“Yeah, well I plan to start with a pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich in about half an hour.”
From my room at the Ambassador, I made one more call to Florida, again talking to Eberstadt.
Eberstadt said that he and Dr. Menninger were against the Bethesda decision, but had been overruled.
“Who by?” I asked.
“Jo Forrestal and President Truman.”
“What? How the hell-?”
“Jo is adamant about protecting James’ reputation from the ‘stigma of mental illness,’ which she felt would be inevitable if he was admitted to such a famous psychiatric clinic as Dr. Menninger’s. She talked it over with Truman, on the phone, and he agreed with her and put the Bethesda plan in motion.”
“And you think it’s a mistake.”
“Hundreds of cases of operational fatigue have been successfully treated at Topeka. But what can you do? She’s his wife.”
“And he’s our president.”
“Don’t blame me,” Eberstadt said, “I voted for Dewey.”
That night I returned to Chicago, and the next day Forrestal was admitted to Bethesda. (When his plane landed, he had refused to disembark until the airport had been cleared of “all Air Force men and Jews,” a request that was not fulfilled.) On April 11, the newspapers finally reported the former Secretary of Defense was under treatment at the naval hospital for “nervous and physical exhaustion.” In covering the explosive story, the press showed restraint, for the most part.
With the exception of Drew Pearson, who made a feast of the news, distorting Forrestal’s behavior in Hobe Sound into hourly suicide attempts and constant raving about the Reds. Forrestal was a “madman” who’d had access to atomic bombs, and Pearson wondered in his column and on his radio broadcast just how gravely the secretary’s insanity had jeopardized national security.
It was typical Pearson: bombastic, overstated, cruel …
… and a damn good question.
11
Southeastern New Mexico, this part of it anyway, was not what I had expected. I was beginning my trip to Roswell with a detour, heading up Highway 70 in yet another rental Ford (a green one), but cutting over at Alamogordo, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes out of El Paso, to take Highway 82 with a village called Cloudcroft as my destination. I was in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains, and on the winding eighteen-mile drive, past roadside produce stands peddling apples and cider, I climbed five thousand ear-popping feet, scenic overlooks frequently presenting themselves, views of sprawling desert dotted with sagebrush, yucca and cacti from a forest thick with pine, blue spruce and aspen; it was like seeing Mexico from Canada. From certain overlooks, the glittering white sands that gave White Sands its name were in amazing evidence, as if snow had fallen in the desert.
The more typical drive to Alamogordo-at one point crossing through a plateau-bounded basin-had been hot and dry, my cotton knit yellow-and-brown T-shirt and brown tropical worsted slacks sticking to me like flypaper (the T-shirt a Navajo pattern purchased at Sears in Chicago, to help me fit in out here in the wide open spaces). The brim of my straw fedora was snugged down, but the sun hadn’t bothered me-I wasn’t even wearing the sunglasses I’d brought along, enjoying the endless skies, which were a clear, rich, unthreatening blue, the occasional clouds looking unreal, like an artist’s bold brush-strokes. The lack of glare, however, didn’t keep that dry heat from turning the Ford into an oven, even with the windows down.
Now, up in these mountains, I found myself rolling the windows up; it was getting chilly, the shadows of evening creeping in like friendly marauders. I had to slip my tan notch-lapel sportjacket on when I pulled over by the road to watch the setting sun paint the desert more colors than an Indian blanket-a gaudy one, at that.
It had taken Drew Pearson almost a month to decide to send me to Roswell looking for flying saucers. I’d been back in Chicago, running the A-1, with both Washington and Outer Space filed under Bullshit in the back of my mind. My agency was doing fine; after a postwar lull, divorces were on the upswing again and personnel investigation was holding steady, while our retail credit work for suburban financial institutions remained the backbone of the business.
“I figured when I didn’t hear from you,” I told Pearson, “you were taking a pass on the little-green-men mission.”
“I received a document relating to that matter.”
“Could you be a little more vague, Drew? I almost understood you.”
“I can’t be specific on the telephone, you know that!”
“I thought you were calling from a pay phone.”
Which was Pearson’s usual habit.
“I am. But I suspect every pay phone in Washington is tapped.”
“Say, I understand there’s a nice room open next to Forrestal in Bethesda, if you want that paranoia of yours looked at.”
“I’m fortunate you don’t charge per witticism, Nathan.”
“What you pay is already pretty funny. So what got you off the dime?”
“… I’ve received a document that appears to be a briefing to the President on the formation of that …
“You mean, Majestic Twelve.”
“… Yes. Nathan, please … a little discretion.”
“See, Drew, once you mention receiving a briefing document for the President, this whole discretion thing kinda goes out the window.”
Pearson sighed, but when he continued, he dropped the coyness if not his imperious manner: “I have all twelve names, now, and they’re all credible-people like Admiral Hillenkoetter and General Twining, commanding general at Wright Field.”
Hillenkoetter was head of the CIA, and Wright Field was significant because that was where Marcel had said
