![]() ![]() He earned his wings as a naval aviator and a commission before being posted to Washington for the duration when his superior officer refused to part with such an able administrator.īack at Read and Co., he made partner at 31, ahead of many of his colleagues. His ascension in the financial world was interrupted by World War I. ![]() ![]() Though he began modestly, selling bonds in Upstate New York, he charged back on track. Read and Co., a New York investment banking firm that later became Dillon, Read and Co. He moved to Newark and found a job as a clerk/handyman, then spent 15 months working well below the station of his Princeton classmates, before he landed a position with William A. He did not return home, and appears to have permanently severed ties with his parents. What is clear is that his abrupt departure was not a happy one. Eight-tenths of a century later, Princeton has no records that can shed light. The era was one that allowed certain anomalous events in the private lives of public servants to remain private. This became one of the unplumbed mysteries of Forrestal's life. In 1915, Forrestal's senior year, he abruptly withdrew just before graduation. He quickly established himself, becoming editor of the Daily Princetonian, member of Senior Council, and voted "Most Likely to Succeed." But he kept at it, got accepted, found a way to afford the Ivy League. He applied to Princeton, just one more needy, bright student from Nowheresville reaching for the gold ring, and was turned down. The editor of the Matteawan Journal, where Forrestal worked after high school, noted he was "far beyond range of his age level." The young Forrestal was known as a serious student and a hard worker. His family was lower middle class, Irish and strict. He was born in upstate Matteawan, N.Y., not far from FDR's Hyde Park, in 1892. Money, power, glamour, treachery, sex and an untimely death were the themes. 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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