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Tag: James Forrestal

James Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Israel

David Martin

Alison Weir, the former journalist who heads up an organization aptly named, If Americans Knew, chose an equally appropriate title for her very popular 2014 book,  Against Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.   The fact of the matter is that the better judgment of the United States was, unlike today, well represented by its foreign policy leadership in 1948 when Palestine was most inequitably divided into Jewish and Arab parts by the United Nations, and the Zionist leaders of the Jewish part announced the creation of the brand-new state of Israel.  President Harry Truman made his decision endorsing the partition over the solid advice he received by the experts in his…

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Amazon Censorship

David Martin

I posted this poem on my web site when the Internet was still in its infancy. Of Swords and Pens The pen may be stronger than the sword, But pens, like guns, can be bought. And battles of words, like battles with guns, Can be unfairly fought. Those who rule know all too well The power of the word, And so they ration carefully The ones that can be heard. In our land there’s little chance That virtue will prevail When “truth” is a consumer good And words are all for sale. That was on April 5, 1998, and the word battlefield has changed quite a bit since then.  Back then, control of the airwaves, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and…

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Important Assassination Movie Quashed

David Martin

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations.  A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time.  This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner.  Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

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Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

David Martin

One might think that the remarks of the well-known historian, Counsel on Foreign Relations member, Douglas Brinkley, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol Building, ostensibly mainly by people protesting what they perceived to be the theft of the 2020 Presidential election, would be embarrassing to the other members of his profession.  To compare that relatively mild dust-up to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and even the Holocaust has to strike any sensible person as complete lunacy.  We have noticed, though, that those who practice his trade in the United States, at least in our lifetime, are really not very much interested in anything so bothersome to them as the truth.  Apparently, it has been the…

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“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

David Martin

His name is a simple one, but it is not a common one, and it’s not often in the news, so that makes it rather easy to forget.  Fortunately, there’s an easy way to call it up.  All you have to do it to turn to the “senior citizen’s memory,” the Internet, and search “dean of Cold War historians.”  It doesn’t matter whether you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.  They all agree that the native Texan, Yale University history professor, longtime George W. Bush friend and admirer and CFR member, John Lewis Gaddis is the man.  When it comes to what Gaddis has had to say about a vitally important American leader in the early years of the Cold…

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Untruths in Forrestal Book Review

David Martin

The latest reviewer of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, one “Robert Buckley,” (kin to William F.?) en route to giving it just two stars—compared to the 4.5 out of 5 average of 205 customer reviews—has the following to say on Amazon.com: I agree with the other commenters who said that the book needs a good editor. There’s too much information of doubtful relevance. Martin makes a pretty good case that the Zionists had a motive to kill Forrestal, but as any lawyer knows, motive by itself does not prove a case. There must be other evidence.  Martin, for example, fails to give us any suggestion of how the “murder” could actually have been carried out. Forrestal was in…

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Godfather of Soviet Containment Is Cancel Culture Victim

David Martin

In early 2020, I sent an email to 14 members of the history faculty of my alma mater, Davidson College, including one emeritus professor, whose primary purpose was to call their attention to a recent article by Laurent Guyénot entitled, “Fifteen Years before Kennedy, Zionists Murdered Forrestal.”  I have no idea how it was generally received, because only the emeritus professor responded, and, curiously, he ignored the main subject and chose to take issue with my take on the U.S. Civil War as he deduced from my article, “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech,” which I had alluded to in passing in the email. You can read about the episode in the beginning of my review article, “Life in the Confederate…

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Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol Quillen on Corruption

David Martin

Dear President Quillen, On June 1 of this year, you sent out a message to the Davidson College community in which you said “systemic racism” was a big problem in the country.  On June 10, a substantial number of others at Davidson went even further along those lines with their “Faculty Statement of Systemic Racism and Injustice.” I believe that I have effectively rebutted those claims as laid out in my October 15 article, “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke.”  But the recent presidential election has brought to a head a much more serious and demonstrable systemic malady that infects the country, and that is corruption.  Unfortunately, the academic community, hardly any less than the journalistic and entertainment communities and the…

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The Other British Forrestal?

David Martin

Chapter Six of The Assassination of James Forrestal is entitled, “Britain’s Forrestal.” The title character is Ernest Bevin, who was Foreign Secretary in the British Labour government from 1945 to 1951. Bevin, like Forrestal, won the enmity of the Zionists by resisting their ambitions in Palestine. Zionist terrorists attempted to assassinate him with letter bombs in 1946 when Britain still held the Mandate for Palestine, governing control over the region that it had been granted by the League of Nations in 1920. Since Bevin was the leading opponent of the Zionists in the British government at the time, and since they attempted to kill him, the parallels between him and Forrestal would appear to be obvious. However, there are two…

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Israel’s Murder, Inc.

David Martin

(This article is adapted from the concluding chapter of The Assassination of James Forrestal. ) Occupied Country Like the Germans we now know how it feelsTo be by foreigners bossed.It’s like we’d fought a big war with Israel,And we had, unfortunately, lost. Who is strong enough to remove the gun ever-pointed at the White House by the combined hands of supine politicians, the controlled media and the Zionist lobby? – Alfred Lilienthal From its inception, political Zionism has made great use of terrorism. The following observation is from the biography of General Patrick J. Hurley, who was President Roosevelt’s special envoy to the Middle East in 1943: While throughout the world Zionism was represented as a religious movement “based on humanitarian concern for a persecuted people,”…

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James Forrestal and Palestine

David Martin

As we relate in the newly published book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, the starting place for our examination of the fatal fall of the recently resigned first American Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, was the latter pages of the widely acclaimed 1992 biography, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley. We quickly discovered that their account of Forrestal’s death is replete with very obvious shortcomings, which for some strange reason no one else seemed to have picked up on. Apart from what appears to be Soviet-like obligatory adherence to the completely unsupportable notion that Forrestal took his own life, the biography is largely deserving of the accolades that it received at the time.…

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James Forrestal’s “Anti-Semitism”

David Martin

(This article is adapted from Chapter 2 of my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. ​ Terms of Opprobrium “Anti-Semitic”, “conspiracy theorist” Throw in “isolationist,” too. We don’t need laws to limit out thoughts When labeling language will do. The year was around 2004, as I recall, and I was attending an in-house lunchtime lecture by a professor from Georgetown University at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington on the subject of President Harry Truman’s racial integration of the United States military. I beg the indulgence of the readers, but I have completely forgotten the professor’s name. I do recall, though, that he was quite obviously Jewish. During the question and answer period after his lecture I suggested that…

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James Forrestal’s “Breakdown”

David Martin

Chapter 32 of Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley’s widely acclaimed 1992 biography of America’s first Secretary of Defense, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, is entitled “Breakdown.”  It begins like this: Forrestal was present at Louis Johnson’s swearing-in ceremony at the Pentagon on the morning of March 28 [1949].  Shortly thereafter, in accordance with custom, he drove to the White House for a final good-bye to the President.  To his surprise, Truman had assembled the entire Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other government dignitaries, and there followed a second ceremony, this one honoring the retiring Secretary of Defense for “meritorious and distinguished service.”  The President, beaming and ebullient, added his personal congratulations in effusive terms, and the audience warmly applauded the…

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James Forrestal, the Great Patriot

David Martin

(Note to readers: The following article is the introduction to my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, with hyperlinks added.) Fear Factor The truth may be there to see. But it won’t, like magic, appear. You must seek it diligently, And not be restrained by fear. James Vincent Forrestal was born on February 15, 1892, in the town of Matteawan, New York, on the Hudson River in Dutchess County between West Point and Poughkeepsie. In 1913, the town merged with adjacent Fishkill Landing and adopted the name, “Beacon,” after Beacon Mountain, the most notable landmark in the small urban area. His father, also named James, had emigrated from County Cork in Ireland to the town in 1857 at the age of…

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