Nonetheless, as Wilson had requested, I did dissuade Pearson from pursuing the Roswell tale, informing him that I believed the accounts were riddled with disinformation, and that Majestic Twelve, while it might well exist, did not seem to have been formed to investigate saucers from outer space.
“Was somebody trying to make a sap of me?” Pearson asked over the phone, the afternoon after Forrestal’s funeral.
“That may be the intent, or possibly just a happy by-product of concealing the real purpose of Majic-12.”
“Which is just one of the many secrets-and sins-Forrestal took to the grave with him.”
The bitterness in Pearson’s tone didn’t surprise me; he had taken terrible blows to his reputation-and to his list of subscribing newspapers-by the blame others in the press were heaping on him; it was widely implied that Pearson, via his hounding, had “murdered” Forrestal. The
“Tell me, Drew,” I asked him, just curious, “do you feel you bear any blame at all for Jim Forrestal’s demise?”
“It was the Navy’s fault-if they’d taken proper precautions, he’d be alive today.”
“There’s some truth in that,” I admitted. “But I thought maybe you could at least scrape up a little pity for the poor bastard.”
“Sorry, no. This was a man who spent all his life thinking about only himself, trying to fulfill his great ambition to be President of the United States. Anyway, is a public official immune from criticism or investigation, for fear his health might be impaired by the process?”
“You know, Drew-I know why you hated him so much, if you’re interested.”
“I didn’t hate him! … Why?”
“He reminded you of you.”
“That’s a despicable thing to say. You know better than most people what that man was capable of, to see that his point of view prevailed.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You two’re the original ends-justify-the-means twins. There’s only one thing Forrestal has over you, Drew, just one little thing …”
“And what would that be?”
“He had the decency to go out a high window.”
Well, I didn’t get any jobs from Pearson for a while, after that. But we did reconcile, when in later years he mellowed some, as his power dwindled. He accomplished many good things with his muckraking style, including paving the way for modern investigative journalism. One of his many positive accomplishments was to follow up my lead on our government’s collaboration with Nazis, exposing the likes of Luftwaffe Major General Walter Schreiber- who had been involved with medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates-forcing the Nazi general to flee from our shores in 1952. Toward the end of Pearson’s life, when he was receiving accolades for his long, illustrious career, the Forrestal case was dredged up and he suffered another round of criticism, dying of a heart attack in 1969.
James Forrestal’s legacy was probably more lasting than Pearson’s. The headquarters of the Defense Department bears his name; 1954 marked the christening of the
I liked Jim Forrestal, and as was the case with Pearson, the guy was a dedicated servant of the public who did a lot of good, particularly toward the winning of the Second World War; but there would have perhaps been better things to bequeath the nation he loved and served than Nazi collaboration, the Cold War and McCarthyism.
Caught up in the pressures of McCarthyism, his popularity eroded, Harry Truman left office largely unheralded, though with his position in history secure as the first (and at this writing only) U.S. president to use the atomic bomb in war; historians rate him a good to great president, a perception that had long since become evident by his death in 1972.
Teddy Kollek-who had fled to Canada from U.S. prosecution in April of 1949-was elected Mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, a position he held for twenty-eight years; much of the face of modern Jerusalem, it has been said, is his doing. His efforts toward tolerance for minority groups in his city, including Arabs, alienated some of his constituents, and his last two mayoral campaigns failed, despite efforts by such Hollywood supporters as his old friend Frank Sinatra. In 1991 he established the Jerusalem Foundation to help further aesthetic and cultural development of his beloved city.
Jo Forrestal was in and out of clinics for the rest of her life, for alcoholism and mental problems. In the first years after her husband’s passing, she traveled constantly, and lived for a time in France, Ireland and Jamaica, finally landing in Newport, Rhode Island, selling Morris House in 1951. She also maintained an apartment on Park Avenue in New York, and backed several theatrical productions in Newport as well as writing a play of her own,
The Forrestals’ son Michael distinguished himself with service in the Kennedy White House, returning to law practice after the assassination; his life was devoted to improving understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. Unmarried, he died of an aneurysm in January 1989, at sixty-one; he was chairing a committee of the governing board of Lincoln Center, at the time. Brother Peter worked for his father’s old firm, Dillon, Read, then for Ferdinand Eberstadt’s company (Eberstadt died in 1969, leaving a personal estate of fifty million). Peter shared his mother’s love of and skill with horses, but also shared her love for, and lack of skill with, alcohol. He died at fifty- two of an abdominal hemorrhage due to heavy drinking, leaving behind a bride of a year, pregnant with a daughter he never knew.
Many of those I met on the Forrestal/Roswell job are gone-including two class acts of law enforcement, Frank J. Wilson and Hughie Baughman-and others I never saw again and couldn’t tell you what became of them, like the two medical corpsmen, Prise and Harrison, and the doctor who tore his sleeve, Deen.
But Roswell … that was another story.
For many years, the incident at Roswell-despite the historical significance of the Air Force issuing a press release announcing the recovery of a flying saucer-rarely received even a mention in the voluminous UFO literature of the late forties and on through the seventies.
But in 1978, Stanton Friedman-a nuclear physicist with an interest in UFOs-followed up a lead that led him to Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel, retired, who had spent his post-military years running a television repair shop in Houma, Louisiana. Marcel told Friedman the same story he’d told me back in 1949-a story he had apparently told no one since-and a Roswell floodgate opened.
A cottage industry of books by Friedman and others blossomed, with scads of television documentaries, in which Marcel and other witnesses-like Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Frank Joyce and Frank Kaufmann-came forward, becoming celebrities in UFO circles, even television stars, with the many appearances they made. Marcel’s son, a physician and pilot, with memories of the samples of strange “saucer” debris his father had brought home in ’47, joined in with his own recollections, taking over as family TV spokesman after his father’s death in 1986. These were solid citizens, clearly not kooks, and their reminiscences carried weight.
Some potential Roswell witnesses, however, received their fifteen minutes of fame posthumously.
Mac Brazel died in 1963, though relatives and neighbors told his story to researchers and on camera. His son Bill Brazel reported his father had been held by the Air Force for eight days in the base “guesthouse.”
Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard remained tight-lipped on the subject of Roswell, in public at least, though friends reported he’d said, when asked about the supposed saucer, “I’ll tell you this, what I saw I’d never seen before.” Shortly after the incident, he was promoted to general and, at the time of his death in 1966, was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
