tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post113491434367185207..comments2024-03-19T11:28:58.168-04:00Comments on History Unfolding: They were giants in those daysDavid Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-55790399847778878742010-02-04T02:44:56.612-05:002010-02-04T02:44:56.612-05:00An easy-to-read HTML version of the Willcutts Repo...An easy-to-read HTML version of the <a href="http://jamesforrestal.ariwatch.com" rel="nofollow"><b>Willcutts Report</b></a>, with an informative introduction, is now available. <br /> <br />The hard work of puzzling out the near illegible parts of the photocopy has been done once and for all. Besides being easy to read you can instantly search the report as with any HTML document.<br />.................................Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-473714899940264352008-01-17T04:12:00.000-05:002008-01-17T04:12:00.000-05:00We don’t need FDR. Fortunately solid eviden...We don’t need FDR. Fortunately solid evidence exists from other quarters that Drew Pearson was wrong about James Forrestal. David Martin – “DC Dave” as he is also known – has laid out that evidence with painstaking detail in a series of articles: <A HREF="http://www.dcdave.com/article4/021110.html" REL="nofollow"><I>Who Killed James Forrestal?</I></A> They have all the fascination of a mystery story that the title suggests.<BR/><BR/>The articles are informed by a Navy report – the Willcutts Report – uncovered by Mr. Martin using FOIA after having been filed away unpublished and forgotten for 55 years.<BR/><BR/>Mr. Martin not only describes the facts of the Forrestal case he dissects how journalists and commentators of the time treated it, such as Drew Pearson, and how those who came afterwards treated it: Rogow, Hoopes & Brinkley and someone known as Cornell Simpson.<BR/><BR/>The latest in Mr. Martin’s series, Part 5, is subtitled “<A HREF="http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080113.htm" REL="nofollow">Press and historians close ranks, minds</A>.” In it he describes an exchange between David Kaiser – this blog’s author – and himself. I’m afraid Prof. Kaiser comes off as a man unable, at this point, to consider something new.<BR/><BR/>I’ve read some of Prof. Kaiser’s other blog entries and liked what I found. I hope he will be persuaded to reconsider his position and read Mr. Martin’s analysis. Perhaps he will finish reading the Willcutts Report. I’ve read it from beginning to end. Even without Mr. Martin’s commentary <I>it gives me the creeps</I>.Markhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10347397383409521865noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-51294481334984121112007-12-11T22:22:00.000-05:002007-12-11T22:22:00.000-05:00Your admiration for the smear specialist, Drew Pea...Your admiration for the smear specialist, Drew Pearson, is, in my opinion, completely misplaced. Nowhere are you more off the mark than in the following quote: <BR/><BR/>"During early 1949 Pearson had been writing that James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, was mentally unstable, and eventually he reported correctly that Forrestal had tried to commit suicide."<BR/><BR/>Pearson did, indeed, write scurrilous things about Forrestal, including that he consciously cowered in his New York apartment while his wife was assaulted outside it, which was not true. It is also not true that Forrestal had attempted suicide. The day after Forrestal's death from a fall from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Pearson reported that Forrestal had made four previous suicide attempts. That claim, according to the doctors who treated Forrestal at Bethesda, was also false.<BR/><BR/>Looking at Pearson's record, I tend to agree with what President Franklin Roosevelt wrote about him in a letter to General Patrick Hurley on August 30, 1943, "His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a pity that anyone anywhere believes anything that he writes."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com