multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating in all military/strategic decision-making
by the Anglo-American alliance.
The U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, had become a problem to the
Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in
recent years he had gone astray. As Secretary of the Navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the
racial integration of the Navy. As Defense Secretary he pressed for integration in the
armed forces and this eventually became the U.S. policy.
Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement coupled with brinkmanship. He
was simply opposed to communism. On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of
office and flown on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to `` Hobe Sound ''
(Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist dealt with him.@s8
He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army Hospital and given
insulin shock treatments for alleged `` mental exhaustion. '' He was denied all visitors
except his estranged wife and children--his son had been Averell Harriman's aide in
Moscow. On May 22, James Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe cord tied tightly
around his neck, after he had plunged from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief
psychiatrist called the death a suicide even before any investigation was started. The
results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's diaries were published, 80
percent deleted, after a year of direct government censorship and rewriting.
North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, after U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close friend) publicly specified that Korea would not be
defended. With a new war on, Harriman came back to serve as President Truman's
adviser, to `` oversee national security affairs. ''
Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel to Truman. Clifford,
however, remained close to Harriman and his partners as they gained more and more
power. Clifford later wrote about his cordial relations with Prescott Bush:
Prescott Bush ... had become one of my frequent golfing partners in the fifties,
and I had both liked and respected him.... Bush had a splendid singing voice, and
particularly loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he organized a quartet that
included my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in Washington, and, on occasion,
he invited the group to Hobe Sound in Florida to perform. His son [George],
though, had never struck me as a strong or forceful person. In 1988, he presented
himself successfully to the voters as an outsider--no small trick for a man whose
roots wound through Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil, the CIA, a patrician
background, wealth, and the Vice-Presidency.@s9With James Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson drove to
Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the British-backed U.S. Gen. George C.
Marshall as Secretary of Defense. At the same time, Prescott's partner, Robert Lovett,
himself became Assistant Secretary of Defense.