Evil Empire 29can already see peeping over the horizon.” The future of the bomb and the
empire of bases were already on his mind.
Forrestal recognized that force and threat are always fungible things
to be leveraged in the service of the reality that truly interested him, the
reality made by men who own the future. For those of his cast of mind,
“international order” was never more than the fig leaf of wealth and power.
As he noted in a 1948 letter to Hansen Baldwin of the New York Times:
“It has long been one of my strongly held beliefs that the word ‘security’
ought to be stricken from the language, and the word ‘risk’ substituted.
I came to that conclusion out of my own business experience.” It was
the job, after all, of these East Coast lawyers and moneymen to make
sure all bets were hedged, and Forrestal knew that speculation could
turn into “an investment gone bad.” As a leading investor in the Cold
War project, he wanted a guaranteed return, even if the rule of law never
arrived and even when the price was ruin.