A Cold-War Warrior Who Cracked
Newman, William J.
Arnold Rogow is seriously concerned about the impact of psychological disorder on politics and examines it through the career of James Forrestal, who began to go out of his mind in his last...
...Here Rogow considers some of the significant political struggles of Forrestal's career and especially his role in establishing a Department of Defense...
...It is doubtful, however, whether his idea that they should be given psychological tests is a sufficient answer...
...Nevertheless Rogow's book makes clear that Forrestal did have some sense of the rationality of balanceof-power politics, and that he did in fact operate to some degree on a rational plane of policy-making...
...Neither side paid much attention to what he wanted...
...The lesson of this book is that one should worry less about someone going berserk and pushing The Button than about trends of policy and their source in policy-makers who, because of psychological disability, are out of touch with reality...
...When they happen to be in positions of power, they can "sell" this idea to the public because it is an idea easy to understand and because the public has so little recourse to other information...
...to talk of 'forcing the issue' and the necessity of 'showdowns.' " It seems clear that Forrestal was only an extreme member of a group of policy-makers in Washington whose weakness expressed itself in toughness as a simple-minded answer to complex problems...
...The focus of consideration is narrow—there is no attempt to discuss the wider implications of policy...
...But his rational approach to power became dangerous because it was overlaid with the irrationality of "being tough with the Commies...
...The cold war has a basis in fact...
...A sophisticated account of the context being omitted, we are not left any the wiser as to alternative possibilities in those years...
...indeed, toward the end of his career he was literally snubbed by both sides...
...Rogow made the point thus: It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Forrestal's personality needs and policy recommendations were closely related...
...Anxieties and insecurities, regardless of personal source, could become focused on Soviet behavior and be partially appeased by a stubborn insistence on a "tough" foreign and military policy...
...The danger comes not so much from an official going berserk and pushing The Button, but from a distorted sense of reality which may lead both to a series of policy decisions and a public ideology that literally misinterprets the situation which the nation faces...
...In part the answer is that the press lords in America are of the same ilk...
...Why are we being allowed by our press not to see him as he is, and not to understand that the danger he poses results not from any one policy idea he may have but from the very nature of his psychological needs...
...Rogow makes only too clear the fanatic side of Forrestal and is thereby able to provide evidence for his argument that mental sickness in government officials is a danger to the rest of us...
...He shows that Forrestal was in a weak political position even before he became Secretary of Defense and that his influence on policy was not as profound as one might expect from the holder of such a high post...
...The cold war satisfies the needs of those who must find an evil to fit their paranoid personalities...
...the foolishness of Henry Wallace at this time indicates that the reverse syndrome could also appear...
...Instead of analyzing the strategical role of our armed forces in 1947-9, he provides a blow-by-blow report on the organization of the Department of Defense...
...In Rogow's book Forrestal becomes a case study of the problem posed by those who have made the cold war not into a classical conflict between two powerful states but into a stark confrontation of good and evil...
...The main decisions were being made elsewhere...
...A better answer is to train the public to recognize these people, a task which is not, after all, so very difficult...
...When he was Secretary of Defense, he was forced to defend a military budget much smaller than he thought necessary because President Truman wanted a small budget...
...in part because the press is stupid...
...But Rogow's work performs another service, and that is to make possible an evaluation of Forrestal as an antiCommunist crusader...
...And this is a pity, because if Rogow had given himself more leeway he could have made Forrestal the center of a book which would have placed these important years in some sort of historical framework and given us an important study of the origins of the cold war...
...Nevertheless, Rogow's discussion of Forrestal's role does make a significant contribution...
...It seems only too clear, too, that their need to be tough in front of an enemy also fitted—and fits—the needs of many Americans outside of government who respond with psychological relief to the demand that they be tough...
...Rogow is correct when he asserts that the problem 474 should be made public and not hidden behind the assumption that policymakers act according to a calculus of sanity...
...Most of the book is devoted to a straight biographical description of Forrestal's life, with emphasis on his days in Washington as Navy Under Secretary, Navy Secretary, and Secretary of Defense...
...He was also deeply suspicious of disloyalty in government, and saw the hand of Communist intrigue everywhere...
...Arnold Rogow is seriously concerned about the impact of psychological disorder on politics and examines it through the career of James Forrestal, who began to go out of his mind in his last months as Secretary of Defense and committed suicide a short time after leaving his post...
...It is, in general, one of the gravest weaknesses of psychological biography that it tends to miss the public issues...
...Perhaps Rogow's consideration of the Forrestal case will at least open up some discussion of the problem...
...Forrestal felt himself to be one of a select and little appreciated group who understood the Communist menace, in contrast to the great mass of slothful individuals who were taken in by Communist promises...
...but it is also partly a myth, a belief that we must not yield because to yield is to be weak...
...One of the men most likely to get the Republican presidential nomination literally shows all the traits of the Forrestal syndrome...
...Forrestal acted as a sort of frustrated and futile go-between for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...What is most disturbing about the problem Rogow presents so well is that "until the last few months of his life, Forrestal could impress almost everyone as a 'reasonable' man because it was 'reasonable,' in the context of the Cold War, to feel anxious, insecure, suspicious, and fearful, . . . to appear 'tough,' to warn against compromises and concessions...
...Those liberals and radicals who saw Forrestal as an eminence grise of the cold war were taken in by his public posture—which did not correspond to the reality of policy-making at the time...
...Rogow, it should be said, does not discuss the reverse problem of liberal and radical tender-mindness...
Vol. 11 • September 1964 • No. 4
