ABSTRACT
THAT MONDAY MORNING, May 23, 1949, still in pajamas and bathrobe, I retrieved the New York Times from the front steps, as I did every morning while I was a graduate student at Princeton. But I did not immediately go back into our small “barracks” apartment, for I was transfixed by the most prominent news story on the front page. James Forrestal, the Times reported in its lead column story headed by large black type, the nation’s former Secretary of Defense, had fallen to his death from the sixteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. According to the Times, Forrestal since early April had been a patient at the hospital, where he was under treatment for “exhaustion.” The Times coverage of Forrestal’s suicide concluded with appropriate statements of sadness and regret by a large number of luminaries, among whom President Harry Truman was the most prominent.
