The Forrestal Diaries

James Forrestal, Walter Millis

• Editorial: Lucknow Books
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786256935
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

James Vincent Forrestal (1892-1949) was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense. These fascinating diaries begin in 1944 shortly after James Forrestal became Secretary of the Navy, and end with his resignation in March 1949 as America's first Secretary of Defense. Blunt and forceful, Forrestal reveals the American strategy that he helped shape with verve. Expertly edited by seasoned historian Walter Millis, the American high command as is seen in a rare light as the Second World War finishes and the Cold War begins and gathers pace.

CHAPTER I—THE END OF THE ROOSEVELT ADMINISTRATION

I

4 July 1944

Reconversion

“Under Secretary Bard, Admiral Robinson and I lunched today with Senator Harry Truman. We endeavored to persuade him of the unwisdom of permitting resumption of civilian production, which at the moment is the big issue between Charles Wilson and Donald Nelson, Wilson reflecting the views of the Services as against any broad-scale resumption, whereas Nelson is pressing for it. I told Senator Truman I thought it was extremely dangerous, not merely from the standpoint of the effect on production itself, but from the indirect psychological results that would flow—namely, the assumption that the war was in the bag. He did not disagree violently but said he could not go along with our view because he was confronted almost daily with evidences of closing down of plants because of contract cancellations or cutbacks. He mentioned specifically some ordnance plants in Missouri, particularly in St. Louis, where ten to twelve thousand people had been released from their jobs, which he said would mean they would migrate elsewhere. Our rejoinder was that while this was undesirable, as between that danger and the danger of creation of an attitude of complacency about the war, there could be no question in our minds about which was the greater. When he left I had the impression that we had not made any great headway with our argument.”

It is curious how much is foreshadowed in this, James Forrestal’s initial entry in the voluminous collection of notes, memoranda, copies of important documents, reports of Cabinet and other high-level meetings, which he was to accumulate from this time onward as his private “diary.” This first entry happens to record a meeting with the man under whom, as neither could then know, Forrestal was to serve throughout most of the rest of his career; the relationships between them were to form one of the major themes of the record thus begun. Beneath the specific topic raised at that luncheon discussion there lay issues—greater and reaching far deeper than either could have fully appreciated at the time—which in one form or another were to consume the thoughts and energies of both through all the difficult years ahead. And the attitudes which each brought to this discussion were strikingly prophetic of the attitudes which each would tend to maintain through many future problems and crises, as the basic issues themselves grew only wider and plainer, more complex and more urgent.

There is even a touch of symbolism in the date—July 4, 1944, the national holiday—suggesting, as it were, the fundamental quality of Forrestal’s patriotism, the intensity with which he identified himself with the nation he served, the passionate earnestness with which he sensed the vast problems confronting it or sought, with an intellectual restlessness rare among hard-driven practical administrators, to find valid answers for them.

In July 1944 the end of the Second World War was at least in sight. Eisenhower had landed in Normandy the month before and made good his lodgment; the Russians were rolling strongly westward; the Pacific offensives, started on a shoe-string two years earlier on Guadalcanal and in Papua, were accumulating a massive power; at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, the new world capital, the delegates were about to sit down to design a new world order to be established upon the victory which now seemed ultimately certain. A vast amount of blood was yet to be shed; a vast amount of effort was yet to be expended. But one era of colossal peril, suffering and exertion was drawing toward its close; another era, with its own problems and possibly its own perils as well, was glimmering upon the horizon.

Latent in the argument between Wilson and Nelson, and equally in the fate of Senator Truman’s twelve thousand St. Louis munitions workers, was the whole basic issue of “balance” between the nation’s military commitments and its civil resources and economy, the issue which in many guises was to dominate the post-war years. What are the requirements of defense, the limits of the military obligation? What are the legitimate claims of “normal” social and economic life? Forrestal that day took the simple and direct view. The war was yet to be won and the winning of it was paramount to every other consideration. There was no greater danger than “complacency.” Truman, with the politician’s training, was noncommittal and left Forrestal feeling that he had made “no great headway.”

Forrestal was to battle on many later occasions against “complacency”; and in some far more critical differences than this he was to find in the end that he had made “no great headway” against the Truman position. Much of the subsequent story revolves around this conflict in the emphasis with which the two men were to approach their common problems. But this is not to imply that there was any basic antipathy between them. After Truman’s accession to the presidency Forrestal was to remain consistent in his attitude of loyal respect for the Chief Executive, while as Democrats of the more conservative persuasion the two actually had much in common. There is a second entry on this same meeting:

4 July 1944

Vice Presidency

“...[Truman] said to me that he was being urged to accept the nomination for vice president but that he proposed to resist. I told him that it was his duty to take it in view of the fact that the alternative would be Henry Wallace. This alternative he regarded with the same misgivings as myself but still felt he did not want to take the nomination, saying that he was happy in the Senate and felt that he was able to exercise as much influence in government as he wished.”

Actually Forrestal himself was already acutely aware that the simple answer would not always be adequate. In war the military commitment is total, and to strike the “balance” against civil life and resources presents no great difficulty. But peace was approaching; and peace, whatever its shape, would still require the maintenance of sufficient defenses. He was worried, as his letters repeatedly show, over “the dangerous assumptions that because we have finished one war we shan’t have another.” {2} But what would be sufficient? What would have to be defended, and why and how? Such questions inevitably, in an intelligent mind, give rise to others. Even to speak of defense is to raise the problem of power, of world-power relationships and of the uses which other nations and one’s own may be expected to make of their military strength.

Earlier in the year, while he was still Under Secretary of the Navy, Forrestal had initiated a project that clearly suggests the bent of his mind and the depth of his interests. This was a course on “The Foundations of National Power” to be introduced into the Navy’s V-12 educational program, resting on “the proposition that, in order to understand the world position and responsibilities of our own country, it is necessary to know as much as possible concerning the strengths, aims and policies of other countries....The nature and distribution of political power among nations are matters of basic importance in any discussion of international relations or American foreign policy.”{3} The course had been undertaken experimentally at Princeton, and Forrestal was to participate in a conference discussion of the subject to be held there in September. One of his notes for his talk runs: “Our problem—to achieve accommodation between the power we now possess, our reluctance to use it positively, the realistic necessity for such use, and our national ideals.”

In one shape or another this was to Forrestal the fundamental problem, and it was never far from his mind throughout the rest of his career. But many other questions inevitably flowed from it. How is power to be made effective? How big and what kind of military establishment was required, and how could it best be organized so that it would in fact meet the complex responsibilities entrusted to it? To raise these questions, moreover, was only to find still others underneath. Forrestal was keenly aware that the military establishment was but one arm of policy and of government, merely a specialized aspect of the national life and economy as a whole.

On the one hand, its responsibilities in the post-war world would be largely determined by the kind of peace that was made, and Forrestal took a serious and on one or two occasions perhaps decisive interest in the activities of the diplomatists and peacemakers. On the other hand, the success with which the military fulfilled their missions must depend in the long run upon the adequacy and competence of the civil government, to which they were subordinate, and upon the workings of politics and public opinion. Forrestal was keenly sensitive to public opinion—at times perhaps oversensitive. He followed it closely, was always in touch with newspapermen and commentators, filled his files with articles and clippings that seemed significant to him and paid considerable attention to the Navy’s and later to the Defense Department’s public relations. He was much interested in the structure of civil government (of which, of course, as a civilian officer he was himself an important part), in the inefficiencies of many of its organizational arrangements and in the abilities and idiosyncrasies of the administrators and politicians who staffed it. And since he was ultimately dependent for every activity of the military departments upon Congress he could never be unaware of the legislative branch, of the personalities through whom he there had to work or of the tides of political change and economic interest which they reflected.

As Secretary of the Navy in mid-1944, Forrestal stood close to the crossing point at which all these questions of national policy and diplomacy, military organization, political and economic tendencies, came together. Three years later, as Secretary of Defense, he was to find himself at the very center. He never found final answers for all the issues which his position and his responsibilities forced upon his sensitive mind; neither, however, has anyone else. What makes Forrestal a unique figure in the high levels of war and post-war government was his restless sense that answers were needed, and his constant efforts, while carrying tremendous burdens of intensely practical administrative work, to reach closer to them. It may be that he was destroyed in the end by this division between the practical and the reflective man, by a sense of responsibility so large and so imperious that no amount of concrete achievement could satisfy it. However that may be, no one can properly understand the papers he left behind him without realizing that this complexity of attitude and purpose runs deeply through them or without a general grasp of what it was that he was about.

The earliest entries in the diary, together with his letters at the time, well illustrate the range and variety of his interests. Under the heading “Mandated Islands: State Department paper of 22 June 1944,” he made an entry on July 7: “I talked with Mr. Stettinius [Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., then Under Secretary of State] today and asked him if this was a serious document and if he understood that the President was committed to it (I added that it seems to me a sine qua non of any post-war arrangements that there should be no debate as to who ran the Mandated Islands—that is, the islands formerly owned by Japan in the Central Pacific).” The Navy’s immediate interest in the islands lay, of course, in their vital importance as future strategic bases, and Forrestal was to wage a persistent campaign throughout the next year to insure that American control over these base sites should not be incontinently surrendered.

But this specific issue only focused his attention upon the larger importance of the peacemaking in general. An office memorandum asked: “What is the general purpose of the agenda of the Conference at Dumbarton Oaks? Who are the Navy representatives and how thoroughly are we prepared?”{4} It is only an example of many similar memoranda showing his alertness to the significance of what the designers of the new world were doing. Issues of post-war internal reorganization were at the same time becoming very active. Forrestal himself was impressed with the necessity for a permanent system of compulsory military service; he hoped, he wrote to Haydn S. Pearson on August 27, that the latter would continue his “efforts in the direction of a compulsory service bill. The memory of the people of this country is very short.” He was at the same time skeptical of the rapidly rising agitation for a single unified military department. Admittedly he approached this matter originally from a strongly Navy viewpoint; it was never, however, a narrowly Navy viewpoint. He was to modify his own attitudes more than once; but because he always tried to get to the bottom of the issues before him, the later shifts in his position (if they can really be called so) reflected an underlying consistency of principle which he was formulating as early as mid-1944. The strongest pressures for a single military service came from the Army Air Force and from those who believed with it that “air power” had become the major decisive element in warfare. “I agree,” he wrote to H. Calvin Cook on July 14, “that we would be unprepared indeed if we did not possess a land-based force of strategic bombers. The Navy does not oppose this sort of strategic air force”—although it did insist on keeping its own tactical air arm—but “I believe, for some time to come, control of the land, sea and air will be interdependent, and that no one instrument will suffice for all these purposes.” And on August 80 he was writing to Representative Carl Vinson, Democrat, of Georgia, then chairman of ...