AS FORRESTAL SAW IT
Current, Richard N.
As Forrestal Saw It THE FORRESTAL DIARIES, edited by Walter Millis with the collaboration of E. S. Duffield. The Viking Press. 581 pp. $5. Reviewed by Richard N. Current AS THE last full-fledged...
...Truman comes off rather well...
...At the risk of being denounced as anti-Semitic, he fought, without success, to prevent Jewish political pressures from influencing American policy in regard to Palestine...
...if we had it would probably have avoided World War II...
...The United Nations was oversold...
...He opposed civilian control of atomic weapons but failed in his effort to have that control transferred from the Atomic Energy Commission to the Defense Department...
...Forrestal preferred him to Roosevelt as a boss...
...On many issues, though, he left no doubt about what he was for and against...
...MacArthur appears as a prophet no better than the rest...
...25, 1945: "He felt that we should secure the commitment of the Russians to active and vigorous prosecution of a campaign against the Japanese in Manchukuo...
...He proposed building up and maintaining U. S. seapower in the Mediterranean, and this was done—perhaps his most distinctive individual contribution to the strategy of the cold war...
...Here is a sample of Millis at his worst, regarding the very first diary entry: "There is even a touch of symbolism in the date—July 4, 1944—the national holiday—suggesting, as it were, the fundamental quality of Forrestal's patriotism," etc., etc...
...The Forrestal Diaries is full of high-level scuttlebutt...
...The book may, at least it should, give readers pause as they look at present-day foreign policy in the making...
...The Truman Administration, inheriting the mess that the Roosevelt regime had made in foreign affairs, tried to straighten things out...
...MacArthur and President Truman...
...Ring out the old war...
...Reviewed by Richard N. Current AS THE last full-fledged Secretary of the Navy (1944-47) and the first Secretary of Defense (1947-49), James Forrestal stood near the center of American policy making at the close of World War II and the beginning of another...
...The book provides some fascinating close-ups of statesmen at work, among them Gen...
...What Forrestal feared, next to the Russian threat itself, was a "resurgence of isolationism"—"the isolationists would claim that we were wrong to have fought Germany and exterminated Hitler, thus finding ourselves in a much worse position —that of the Russians swarming over Europe with no balance of power available to check them...
...When he resigned he left with the White House several filing cases and crates of diaries, correspondence, and memoranda, and after his suicide they were turned over to his estate...
...He got it, then found himself saddled with the impossible job of mediating between the admirals and the airmen...
...But the book is most important for the commentary, both implicit and explicit, which it gives on the management and mismanagement of the war and the postwar crisis...
...The new objective of policy, as Marshall stated it in 1947, "would be the restoration of balance of power in both Europe and Asia," and "all actions would be viewed in the light of that objective...
...But it seems to be edited in a somewhat different spirit from that...
...He believed in preventive war, as is shown by his statement that "we should have seen to it that we went to war" with Japan over the Panay incident in 1937...
...The central error of American wartime policy could hardly be better put than Forrestal, less than two years after V-J day, stated it: "We regarded the war, broadly speaking, as a ball game which we had to finish as quickly as possible, but in doing so there was comparatively little thought as to the relationships between nations which would exist after Germany and Japan were destroyed...
...In editing the papers, Millis has arranged and connected his selections (some of which were censored out by the Defense Department) in such a way as to provide good continuity, though occasionally the editor gets in the way with overlong and gratuitous exegeses...
...From these miscellaneous papers Walter Millis has culled the materials for a book which, while it by no means tells all, does give some intriguing glimpses of the way our foreign affairs are run...
...He favored a defense set-up which would coordinate but not combine the Army and the Navy...
...Time and again so-and-so said such-and-such to Forrestal, or in his presence, and he wrote it down with no comment of his own...
...Ring in the new...
...After talking with him in Manila, Forrestal recorded on Feb...
Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12
