Man Awarded Ph. D. for
Trashing Martin, Forrestal
To comment on this
article go to B’Man’s Revolt.
In
its pursuit of excellence in academic endeavors, Howard Payne University
employs as its faculty individuals who exemplify a commitment to Christian
ideals and who are dedicated to the search for and dissemination of truth. – from the catalog of Howard Payne University.
Ask you what
provocation I have had?
The
strong antipathy of good to bad.
–
Alexander Pope
His name is Matthew A. McNiece. He is now the chairman of the Department
of History, Political Science, and Geography at Howard Payne University in
Brownwood, Texas. His doctoral
dissertation is entitled “Un-Americans”
and “Anti-Communists,”: The Rhetorical Battle to
Define Twentieth-Century America.
It was submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the AddRan
College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Texas Christian University in
December of 2008 and approved, permitting the then 29-year-old McNiece to proudly introduce himself
ever after as “Doctor Matthew McNiece.”
His Dissertation Adviser was Mark T. Gilderhus, Professor and LBJ Chair of History. The other members of the committee
putting their stamp of approval upon the document were Stephen E. Woodworth,
Professor of History, Peter Worthing, Associate
Professor of History, Todd M. Kerstetter, Associate
Professor of History, and Brad E. Lucas, Assistant Professor and Associate
Chair of English.
What McNiece Says I Said
Cutting straight to the chase, here’s what Dr. McNiece has to say about me concerning my inquiries into
the violent death in May 1949 of America’s first secretary of defense, James V.
Forrestal:
Perhaps the
World Wide Web‘s most dogged proponent of an alternative Forrestal narrative is
“DC Dave” David Martin (www.dcdave.com). Self-styled as a poet, economist, and
political commentator, Martin self-publishes various articles on the
illegitimacy of the “official” story. His website exemplifies the complexity of
conspiracy mythmaking, as all new evidence is collaborated into existing webs
of information which point to a more sensational explanation for Forrestal‘s
death. Martin successfully petitioned the U.S. Navy, via the Freedom of
Information Act, to release the Willcutts Report in
2004. Instead of using its findings as the Navy did, to exonerate those in
command of Forrestal‘s care of significant wrongdoing leading to his death,
Martin pulls a variety of quotes to suggest that Forrestal‘s doctors did not
consider him “insane.” Even so, rather than using them to perpetuate the
“surprise” element of Forrestal‘s suicide, Martin deploys these statements in a
contradictory way. While the doctors were presumably wrong in detaining
Forrestal for hospitalization in the first place, here their judgment appears
as infallible–if the doctors did not think Forrestal would commit
suicide, surely he did not and was instead murdered. Similarly, Martin points
to contemporary press accounts of “scuffs” or “scuff marks” on either the
building‘s exterior or the sill of the kitchen window as signs of a struggle,
like the “broken glass” that was reported in Forrestal‘s room but removed by
the time a picture– included in the Willcutts
Report–of the scene was taken a few hours later. Yet, nothing in the room
or in the kitchen bore signs of a failed hanging, leaving unexplained the
knotted sash around Forrestal‘s neck, so tightly tied that it had to be cut to
be removed from the corpse. Here, the conspiracist‘s
question is, if so tightly tied around the neck, how could it slip from its
mooring in the kitchen without disturbing something? While Occam‘s Razor suggests attributing these seeming inconsistencies to
innocent mistakes in the rush to publish the first facts of Forrestal‘s death,
or of the tragic misdiagnosis of Forrestal by fallible medical professionals,
Martin coalesces them to prove there is, as the old conspiracist‘s
bromide maintains, “more to the story.”
Yes, it’s
all one paragraph, and it contains one reference, a footnote at the end
directing the reader simply to http://www.dcdave.com, my home page.
I know what
you’re thinking, “That is some really bad writing.” Indeed it is, but I have had the
misfortune of having seen it many times before in the early years of my career
when I taught economics in college.
It is actually fairly typical of the work of the students who were
destined to fall into the lower half of the class when final grades were handed
out. A student demonstrating such a
writing capability in an economics class might work really hard, reading
everything put before him and doing all his assignments, but the writing would
give him away and let him down.
As they say
in Spanish, “Si falta
la palabra, falta la
idea.” It’s not a literal
translation, but here it fits best to render it in English as “Poor writing
betrays poor thinking.”
Almost
as bad as the lack of clarity in his writing is his improper use of showy
words. He might be in the right ballpark
meaning-wise with “collaborated” and “coalesces,” but they aren’t transitive
verbs and one can’t use them that way just because he wants to. You’d think that at least the English
professor on his committee wouldn’t have let it pass. Concerning “bromide” and “Occam’s Razor,”
I gather only that they are things that, for safety’s sake, should be kept away
from him in the manner of the childproofing of a house.
Yes, the
writing is bad, but from reading this passage and the rest of his Chapter 4, appallingly titled
with an allusion to the sound Forrestal’s body made at the end of his fatal
fall, “’Things that Go Bump in the Night’: The Social Construction of an
Anticommunist Hero,” I have a hard time deciding which is worse, his writing,
his reasoning, his scholarship, or his character.
What I
Really Said
Concerning
the scholarship, for starters, what he represents as my case for suspicion
concerning the belt or sash around Forrestal’s neck, and then shoots down, is
not my case at all. Cornell Simpson
said something about reported scuffmarks on the window ledge in his book, The Death of James Forrestal, but I considered
it of such small consequence that I left it out of my analysis. McNiece even
puts the terms “scuffs” and “scuff marks” in quotes as though those were my precise
words, but you may search Parts 1 and 2 of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” or my entire web site and
you won’t find them anywhere.
Here is what
I do have to say about the matter in Part 1, before I obtained the Willcutts Report:
And to this
day no one in authority has told us what that sash was doing there. Might that
be because the attempted hanging scenario is not just nonsensical, but it is
impossible? If Forrestal was bent on killing himself,
wouldn’t he have simply dived out the window, particularly when the attendant
was likely to return at any minute? After the sash had been wrapped and tied
tightly around his neck, was there enough of it left over for it to also have
been tied at one time around the radiator beneath the window? Were there any
indications from the creases in the sash that an attempt had been made to tie
it around something at one end? How likely is it, anyway, that Navy veteran
Forrestal would have been so incompetent at tying a knot that it would have
come undone? Most importantly, how do we know that skilled assassins, working
for people with ample motives to silence this astute and outspoken patriot
(more about those people later) did not use the sash to throttle and subdue
Forrestal before pitching him out the window?
In Part 2, devoted primarily to an analysis of the Willcutts Report, I have a short section on the subject
entitled “The Suspicious Cord”:
The
general approach of the review board from the beginning seems to be to take it
as a given that Forrestal took his own life and that it is their job to come up
with some explanation as to how he was able to get away with it. The exception to that rule is in their
treatment of the bathrobe cord that was tied around Forrestal’s neck. They certainly knew that this had to
look very, very suspicious, that someone might have used it to throttle
Forrestal in his bed and then throw him out of the window. If Forrestal was bound to kill himself,
was he so addled that he did not realize that throwing himself
out a 16th floor window, by itself, would do the job?
The
first person to testify about it was Hospitalman
William Eliades:
When
the doctor shone the light you could see one end was tied around his neck and
other end extended over toward the left part of his head. It was not broken in any way and didn’t
seem to be tied on to anything. I
looked to see whether he had tried to hang himself and see whether a piece of
cord had broken off. It was all in
one piece except it was tied around his neck.
Eliades and several succeeding witnesses are asked how
tight the cord was, and the consensus seems to be that it was tight, but not
all that tight. One of the doctors
who saw the body when the cord was still on is asked if he saw any signs of
asphyxia, and he responded in the negative. Finally, Captain William M. Silliphant, the autopsy doctor, is called upon to lay to rest all speculation that Forrestal was first choked
to death and then thrown out of the window:
Q. Was there any evidence of strangulation
or asphyxia by strangulation?
A. There was absolutely no evidence
external or internal of any strangulation or asphyxia.
That
still leaves open the possibility that Forrestal was subdued and quieted by use
of the cord and then thrown out of the window. If both carotid arteries taking blood to
the brain are blocked, unconsciousness can occur within ten seconds. Maybe this is what happened in
Forrestal’s case, with insufficient bodily evidence remaining for the autopsy
doctor to notice. There is also the
possibility that Captain Silliphant was not telling
the truth. Those of us familiar
with the performance of the autopsy doctor in the aforementioned Foster case,
and in the John F. Kennedy case by Navy doctors in that same Bethesda Naval Hospital, are not inclined to believe autopsy doctors
implicitly.
It
would have helped if someone had gone to the trouble to determine if there was
enough cord left over after “one end” was tied around Forrestal’s neck for the
other end to have been tied to the radiator below the window for the man to
hang himself out the window. And if
an attempt had been made to so attach it, the cord might have left telltale
creases where the failed knot had been.
This avenue of inquiry, needless to say, was not explored.
In 2011, well
after McNiece had written his dissertation, I would
discover an April 1967 review of Simpson’s book by
Medford Evans. Beginning with the
review’s second paragraph, he provides perhaps the most common-sense
explanation that has yet been given as to why the story of the aborted
self-hanging made no sense:
I was living
in metropolitan Washington at the time of the defenestration of
Forrestal. I remember being convinced immediately that he had not committed
suicide—which was the official story—but had been murdered.
My reason was simple, but for myself, conclusive. The first report I
read, in the Washington Post, said that Forrestal’s body had been found
on the hospital roof below the open sixteenth-story window of the tower, clad
in pajamas and robe, with the bathrobe cord knotted about his neck. The
theory was, said the Post, that he had hanged himself out the window,
and then the cord had slipped from the radiator or whatever it was tied to inside
the window.
I didn’t
believe it. I believe that men hang themselves, or that they jump out
sixteenth-story windows. But I don’t believe that they hang themselves
out sixteenth-story windows.
On the other
hand, it is no trouble at all to imagine a murderer in orderly’s habit
garroting a man with his own bathrobe cord, then heaving him out the
window—perhaps with semi-maniacal haste and strength on hearing or
thinking he heard approaching footsteps.
McNiece is right that I talk
about signs of a struggle. How
could he miss it when it’s the first section heading in Part 2? But I talk about it entirely with
respect to the broken glass in Forrestal’s room, not with respect to the scene
in and around the kitchen window through which he left the hospital. He is wrong to say that it had been
removed by the time photographs were taken. The glass on the bed had been removed,
as had the bedclothes and who knows what else, but the broken glass on the
carpet at the foot of the bed had not.
See the first of the crime scene photographs.
Concerning McNiece’s poor reasoning, one need not be
versed in the Forrestal case or in my writings about it to readily detect the
flaws in McNiece’s argument concerning my supposed
contradictory deployment of statements in the Willcutts
Report by the doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the first place, he seems to believe
that the doctors were somehow responsible for Forrestal’s commitment. While the lead doctor, Captain George
Raines, might have assumed some responsibility for it, I present evidence in
Part 1 that the White House was behind it.
President Truman’s secretary Matthew Connelly says flat out that it was
the White House’s decision.
Furthermore, I show in Part 1 that the decision to put Forrestal on the
16th floor came from the White House and it was over the objection
of the doctors. I do not write of the doctors as if they were of one mind,
either. Captain Raines consistently
paints Forrestal’s condition in the worst light. His second in command, Captain Stephen
Smith, paints it in the best light.
The weight of the opinion of the other doctors about Forrestal’s mental
and emotional condition leans rather clearly in Smith’s direction, in my
opinion.
I never
discuss the condition in terms of whether he was “sane” or “insane.” Those are McNiece’s
inventions. Once again, do the
search. You won’t find those words
or even their synonyms or near synonyms in my articles.
McNiece also needs to know that
it is not necessarily contradictory to use the same person’s testimony as
authoritative in one instance and not authoritative in another. When Captain Raines volunteered to the Willcutts Review Board that the handwriting in the transcription
of a morbid poem looked like Forrestal’s handwriting his words carry no
authority. What would he know about
handwriting analysis and how familiar would he have been with Forrestal’s
handwriting, anyway? What that
statement suggests is that he is bending over backward to support the official
story.
When Raines
also tells us that Forrestal talked of contemplating suicide, in light of what
he has volunteered about the handwriting, we should be skeptical of that as
well (not to mention the fact that the handwriting actually looks nothing like Forrestal’s). Captain Raines is a military man and it
looks very much like he has been tasked with selling the suicide story.
Precisely
because of that fact, when Raines flatly denies that Forrestal had attempted
suicide four times before entering Bethesda Naval Hospital and that Forrestal
had run out into the night screaming that “the Russians are coming” as
influential columnist Drew Pearson wrote, his words carry particularly heavy
weight. When a witness for the
prosecution gives testimony that supports the case for the defense it should be
taken especially seriously.
It’s really
quite remarkable how many things McNiece could get
wrong in one short passage. But as
they say in the infomercials, “Wait, there’s more.”
He is quite
right to say that the Navy used the Willcutts Report
to exonerate those responsible for Forrestal’s care of any wrongdoing. Did anyone expect anything different
from the Navy’s in-house inquiry?
He gives readers the impression, though, that
this is something new, learned only after the report was released in 2004. In fact, they gave us those conclusions
in 1949, albeit almost six months after having completed their work.
With his
implied endorsement of what little the Navy had told us way back in 1949, McNiece would have us believe that there was nothing of any
real importance in the full report in 2004. He reinforces that impression with the incoherent
mishmash that he falsely represents as a summary of my analysis.
He is wrong,
as well, to miss the fact that the review board—in what it released in
1949 and in the full report released in 2004—did not conclude that
Forrestal committed suicide. It
concluded only that the fall caused his death. It has nothing to say as to what might
have caused his fall. In a very
real sense, then, when I dispute the conclusion that Forrestal committed
suicide I am not challenging the official story. It is the conclusion of the opinion
molding community in the press, academia, and elsewhere in the United States;
it is not the Navy’s official conclusion.
McNiece is able to suggest
that, in contrast to the Navy, I used the Willcutts
Report in an abusive and irresponsible way only by misrepresenting my work so
completely that it would not be wrong to say that he simply lied about it. Even with his demonstrably limited
intellectual capacity, he had to know better.
McNiece submitted his
dissertation in December of 2008.
In January of 2008, I published Part 5 of “Who Killed James Forrestal,”
which contains a telling exchange between Professor David Kaiser of the Navy
War College and me. One can read
the entire exchange in the article, which is subtitled, “Press and historians close ranks, minds,” on my web site. My response to Kaiser lists the most
important things in the Willcutts Report that
undermine the suicide conclusion.
First we
have part of Professor Kaiser’s response to my email objecting, among other
things, to his writing as a matter of fact that Forrestal had committed
suicide, in light of what we now know after the release of the Willcutts Report:
Your email
states that the [Willcutts] report casts doubt on
Forrestal’s suicide, but I can’t see that it did that in the
slightest—the only doubt seemed to be about whether he purposely jumped
out the window or was trying to hang himself.
Here is the
key part of my response to him:
May I take
it, then, that with regard to whether or not Forrestal committed suicide, you
consider of no consequence the revelations that:
1. the handwriting of the transcribed poem, which, for the
press, served as his suicide note, does not resemble Forrestal's at all
2. that broken glass was on his bed and on the carpet at the
foot of the bed
3. that Forrestal's room was not photographed until many hours
after he was found dead and that when it was it did not resemble the room that
the nurse who first got a good look at the vacated room described. The photos
show a bed with nothing but a bare mattress and pillow on them, whereas Nurse
Turner testified that, as one might expect, "The bed clothes were turned
back and towards the middle of the bed and I looked down and [the slippers]
were right there as you get out of bed." No slippers or any other sign
that the room had been occupied are evident in the photographs, either.
4. that the influential biographer, Arnold Rogow,
apparently fabricated the story that the guard saw Forrestal transcribing the
morbid poem when he last looked in on him, because the guard testified that
when he last looked in the room Forrestal was apparently sleeping and the
lights had been off and Forrestal apparently did no reading or writing during
the guard's time of duty which began at midnight
5. that the influential newspapers reporting on the death
apparently fabricated the story that the transcription ended in the middle of
the word "nightingale" or, depending on which article in The Washington Post you read, the
transcription included the lines, “When Reason’s day sets
rayless–joyless–quenched in cold decay, better to die, and sleep
the never-ending sleep than linger on, and dare to live, when the soul’s life
is gone.”
6. that the findings of the Willcutts
Report were not issued until several months had passed and then, the findings
did not include the conclusion that Forrestal had committed suicide
7. that photographs of Forrestal's body were first withheld
from the FOIAed material on the grounds that they
might disturb Forrestal's surviving loved ones, and when told that there were
no surviving loved ones the Navy changed its story and claimed that they were
lost
8. that the book from which Forrestal supposedly copied the
damning poem does not appear in official evidence nor is the supposed
discoverer of either the book or the transcription ever officially
identified
9. that the Willcutts Report was kept
secret for 55 years, when its whole purpose was to clear the air and establish
the facts publicly concerning the nature of Forrestal's death?
It’s been
more than six years and Kaiser has not responded to the questions, so it is
pretty clear at this point that he is not going to respond. He’s smart enough to see that there’s
nothing he could say if he remains determined to defend the suicide story.
McNiece’s Crucial
Character Problem
This brings
us back to young Dr. McNiece. It’s not a sin to be intellectually
challenged. It’s nature. As surely as the sun rises in the east,
the normal curve of the distribution of abilities within the human population
determines that there must be those who are down on the left (lower) end when
it comes to intellect. It is the
dishonesty, showing his lack of character, that is most troubling. We see both those glaring shortcomings on
display in the last and only other time he mentions my work, kind of like the
grand finale of a fireworks display:
Ironically,
even [Evan] Hause‘s opera on Forrestal‘s
defenestration
would raise the ire of conspiracist Dave Martin.
Titled “Nightingale,” Hause‘s opera recalls the
long-standing belief that Forrestal copied lines from Sophocles‘ “Chorus from
Ajax” in a sort of substitute suicide note. Hoopes
and Brinkley suggest that Forrestal stopped after writing the word
“nightingale,” which perhaps sparked recognition of a similarly named secret
military program dealing with amnesty for the WWII Ukrainian death squads and
for which Forrestal bore responsibility as Secretary of Defense. While Martin‘s conspiracy theory long
centered around apparent inconsistencies between the copied text of the poem and
other, confirmed samples of Forrestal‘s handwriting, columnist Hugh Turley
added in December 2007 that the stanza stopped well short of the lines
referencing a nightingale. Here again one sees the social construction of
conspiracy mythology that replaces confirmed knowledge in an environment of
anticommunist hysteria and ambiguous public awareness–even the Washington
Post,
as Martin and Turley both chide, continued reporting the “nightingale”
connection as recently as on the fiftieth anniversary of Forrestal‘s death.
The usual McNiece failings in writing,
reasoning, and scholarship are so evident here to any minimally educated reader
that, in the interests of brevity, we shall skip over those and go straight to
the honesty problem. That should
have been evident to the members of his committee had they bothered to look at
his footnote. They didn’t even need
to read what was in the footnote’s referenced material. The references are two: once again to my
home page, and to Turley’s Hyattsville
Life and Times article that bears the title, “Handwriting Tells Dark Tale?”
The title by itself tells you that Turley’s article stresses the fact,
as I do, that the handwriting in the poem transcription that the press and the
historians have sold us as a sort of surrogate suicide note bears not the
slightest resemblance to Forrestal’s handwriting. Common sense says that if someone planted
the suicide note, they are the ones who killed him and Forrestal did not kill
himself. Yet, insofar as I can
decipher his prose, McNiece characterizes what we are
doing by pointing this rather disturbing fact out as replacing “confirmed
knowledge” with “anticommunist hysteria.”
McNiece must have been confident that
his committee would let all this shoddy work pass because, having played the
academic game so successfully for so long, he knew that as long as he appealed
to their prejudices he was in the clear.
Similarly, he could also be sure that he could get by with his fib when
he introduced the author of Who Killed
James Forrestal: “For
Cornell Simpson, a lay historian who allegedly began his investigation into the
conspiracy surrounding Forrestal‘s death in the mid-1950s, Forrestal exists as
a hero of the pulp fiction genre, a dime-store spy novel‘s protagonist too
powerful and too righteous to be undone by natural or straightforward causes.”
In fact, McNiece doesn’t know the first thing about Simpson’s
background. “Cornell Simpson” is
anonymous. It’s a pen name. I’m pretty sure that there are people
still alive who know who “Simpson” (or maybe even the group of people who wrote
his book) is, or was, but they’re not saying. For all McNiece
knows “Simpson” could have been an Ivy League history professor afraid to put
his real name on the book, or maybe he was Carroll Quigley. (Do universities—Christian
or otherwise—revoke doctoral degrees for conscious lying in a
dissertation?)
When he
called “Simpson” a “lay historian,” he knew no more about him than he knew
about me when he called me a “self-styled economist,” although by studying my
web site carefully he could have traced a good bit of my professional career. Even more easily, he could have emailed
me and I would have told him all about myself.
Forrestal
Central to the McNiece Thesis
Since I have
faulted McNiece for mischaracterization of the work
of others, I have a particular obligation not to be guilty of the same
offense. Is the provocative title
of this piece a conscious distortion?
At this point I shall beg the indulgence of the reader once again by
presenting McNiece’s abstract of his magnum opus:
Manichaeism
imbues both the history and the historiography of domestic American
anticommunism. Within the latter, two major schools dominate.
One identifies anticommunism as little more than an anti-intellectual
anti-liberalism directed by conservatives against various social and political
dissenters. The other rejects this view as dangerous revisionism that obscures
the very real threat posed to the United States by the agents of (especially
Soviet) communism. This study proposes a new understanding of domestic American
anticommunism as a rhetorical battle to define the parameters of legitimacy and
authenticity within the twentieth-century United States. In this view, neither
of the main branches of the historiography fully guides the historian. Instead,
tools from the field of rhetoric studies aid more traditional historical
inquiry in illuminating the multivariate ways in which social and political
forces deployed the construct of anticommunism as a tool for legitimation or delegitimation. Various chapters explore the interactions
of political liberalism and conservativism with
mainstream definitions of anticommunism, as well as the social construction of
a national identity or a hero mythology within a peculiarly American
anticommunist environment. Ultimately, domestic American anticommunism may be
seen as a fundamentally conservative force for defining authenticity, and in a
Manichean way, illegitimacy. For the better part of a century, anticommunism
helped delineate “us” from “them” in U.S. social and partisan politics.
Did you
catch that “hero mythology” jibe?
That’s all about Forrestal and his death. It is very important to McNiece’s thesis, as one can gather only from the few
passages I have quoted, that the notion that Forrestal was any sort of hero or
admirable historical figure be shot down as simply a “myth,” created by nutty
anti-Communists and “conspiracy theorists,” whoever those latter people might
be. Not only must McNiece trash Forrestal to support his central thesis that
the “anticommunists” are a bunch of villainous crazies but he must also trash
one of Forrestal’s strongest advocates, that being the current writer.
In case the
short excerpts up to now were not enough, check out McNiece’s
third paragraph in Chapter 4:
For
some, his death represents the classic fulfillment of a soldier‘s call to duty,
no different than a heroic death on the field of battle. For others,
Forrestal‘s legacy resembles that of a protagonist in a classic Greek tragedy,
wherein the hero‘s greatest strength ultimately becomes his fatal flaw. For
still others, an insidious enemy–figuratively, or, more conspiratorially,
literally–felled Forrestal by a stab-in-the-back. This Forrestal is a
sort of pulp spy novel‘s hero, too strong to have been undone by any natural
force or straightforward challenge. These archetypes remain consistent whether
one believes that Forrestal took his own life, as is the unanimous scholarly
opinion, or was the victim of some sort of murderous conspiracy. Indeed, even the most reputed account of
Forrestal’s life and the circumstances surrounding his death, the biography by
Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, reluctantly admits that “Forrestal’s death fostered several enduring
suppositions.” Yet the veracity of
these theories is in some ways less important than exploring why and how they
developed—and remain—as cultural artifacts of America’s peculiar
anticommunist Cold War culture.
Speaking
of Manicheanism, I believe that readers have now been
sufficiently exposed to what passes for thinking, McNiece-style,
to agree that I am being more accurate and fairer to him than he has been to me
if I sum up his thesis simply as “Us, good; them, bad, and the facts be damned.” The “us” are the credentialed history
“scholars” who cling to that supposed “unanimous opinion” in the face of the
newest evidence that, to their everlasting discredit, they preferred not to
look for, and the “them” are assorted “anticommunists” and “conspiracy
theorists.” As for Hoopes and Brinkley having supplied “the most reputed
account…of the circumstances surrounding [Forrestal’s] death” I refer readers
to my letter to Brinkley, which was available
online when McNiece was writing his dissertation.
Let us nail
our charge down with another McNiece quote from
Chapter 4:
Nevertheless,
a slight literary twist deploys Forrestal instead as the hero protagonist of a
pulp spy novel. Just as the circumstances and public knowledge about his death
allowed for the legacy‘s manipulation into the construct of a heroic soldier,
Forrestal‘s demise may be reinterpreted in light of the burgeoning
anticommunist hysteria that bred all manner of conspiracy
theories–culminating most recognizably in [Senator Joe] McCarthy‘s
unverified claim of widespread communist infiltration of the federal
government. (He really does like that “pulp” label. ed.)
He is able
to make his wave-of-the-hand statement that Senator McCarthy’s claims about
communists in the government were unverified by ignoring completely McCarthy’s
most prominent living defender, M. Stanton Evans. Neither Evans nor his 2007 book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe
McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies appear in McNiece’s bibliography. Similarly, in his fact-free-zone of a
treatise, a search of his document fails to turn up the names of either Alger
Hiss or Whittaker Chambers.
Not Just McNiece
Near the end
of Chapter 4, McNiece treats us with this passage:
While this
exploration demonstrates the social construction of an archetypal anticommunist
hero through the various eulogies of James V. Forrestal, responsible
scholarship must emphasize that the scholarly interpretation of Forrestal‘s
death faces no substantive threat to its credibility. The simplest, best
evidenced, and most rational explanation remains that Forrestal suffered a
mental break-down and committed suicide on May 22,
1949.
Indeed, had
I been blessed with no more candlepower than McNiece
has exhibited I might be content to let other people do my thinking for me,
too.
The rot that
I have revealed with respect to the Forrestal case goes far beyond the academic
bush leagues of Texas. This is from
an article I published in late 2011:
America's
foremost scholar on the history of the Cold War, Yale University history
professor John Lewis Gaddis, in response to a question by this writer
last night, claimed that he knew nothing about the release of the official
investigation of the death of James Forrestal (the Willcutts Report). According to Wikipedia, "Gaddis is best known for his critical
analysis of the strategies of containment
employed by United States presidents from Harry S. Truman to Ronald Reagan..."
---
Gaddis
responded that, indeed, he knew nothing of this official investigation and its
belated release. In stating that Forrestal had committed suicide, he
said, he was simply repeating the "prevailing opinion" on the matter.
The article
has this telling addendum:
I
have now had a chance to look at Gaddis’s new book and have found there some
more information that sheds additional light on his answer to my
question. Included in his bibliography, as one would expect, is the 2009
book by Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze,
George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. In Part 6 of my
series, “Who Killed James Forrestal,” I show that Thompson
writes at some length, though in a very dishonest way, about the findings of
the Willcutts Report, the one about which Gaddis
claims ignorance. There are therefore three possibilities with respect to
Gaddis’s claim of ignorance of that report, (1) Gaddis has read the book but
forgot about that section, (2) he included the book in his bibliography without
having read all of it, or (3) he was not telling the truth when he said that he
had never heard of the Willcutts Report.
Neither possibility gives one much confidence in Gaddis as a historian.
McNiece, too, is safely, and sadly, reflecting
the “prevailing opinion” within the cozy community of American academic
historians. At this point a quote from the late, great journalist Joseph Sobran is in order:
When the word “extremist” is routinely applied to
dissenting views and “out of the mainstream” is used as a dismissal, it’s safe
to say that the pressure to conform has become very intense. Why else would
these vacuous charges have any force? The recent revolt against “political
correctness” is an encouraging sign that many people have had enough.
---
Education...has become a form of mass production,
to be supervised by the state for the good of the state.
...the natural result is a
population that sets great store by conformity to the mass. In public
controversies, most people are chiefly concerned to play it safe. Before they
take any position, they ask themselves not “Is it true?” but “What will happen
to me if I say this?”
So, yes, McNiece has well reflected what these days passes for
“responsible scholarship” with respect to Forrestal’s death. But it is not based upon evidence; it is
based on cowardice.
David
Martin
July
7, 2014
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