![]() From humble beginnings he rose to become a New York millionaire and then Washington power broker. Then jumped out a window.įorrestal's life was pure Jazz Age, the kind of man who peopled F. " `Woe, woe!' will be the cry - No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale," he'd begun, stopping short, in mid-word. There was the book, "An Anthology of World Poetry," still open to an excerpt from Sophocles' "Ajax," still containing the paper on which he'd copied the poet's words: Later, after they found him, broken, 13 floors below on a low roof, they searched his room for clues to his last moments. He pulled out a screen, stepped onto the sill, leaped into the void. ![]() He went across the corridor to a small lablike kitchen, with locked filing draws, white tile walls, stainless steel and glass cabinets. Three windows in the room, all securely locked. His life had been as glamorous as it was successful, but he had attracted powerful and bitter enemies, not the least of which, perhaps, was his own tortured soul.įor one who had lived in great wealth, his hospital room was simply furnished - a narrow bed, a straight-back chair, an Oriental carpet on the dark tile floor, a rotating fan on the wall by a closed widow. He'd been instrumental in winning a war, The War, and was among the first to clearly perceive the dark shape of its aftermath and the looming Cold War with Soviet Russia. The result, when results mattered most, was that he transformed a ramshackle Navy into the most powerful armada the world had ever seen. Tough and combative, small but dashing, he combined the ascending genius of American capitalism with the can-do drive of a New Deal bureaucrat. ![]() His name was James Vincent Forrestal.įorrestal was an American hero during America's most heroic era. His room was on the 16th floor of the towering Bethesda Naval Hospital. He slipped the paper inside the book and set it aside. ![]() Then, abruptly, mid-sentence, it stopped. His hand moved across the paper, copying Greek poetry from a thick anthology. ![]()
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