HISTORICAL NOTES: Civilian Casualty

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In the last days of World War II and the years that followed, a handful of selfless men within the Government fought a long, grueling battle to save the nation while the nation slept. The most important of these was James Vincent Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, and in 1947, the Secretary of Defense. Not until Forrestal jumped to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, in May 1949, did the world catch a hint of how exhausting the battle had been.

This week an assortment of Forrestal's dictated memoranda, calendar notes and letters were bundled together and published as The Forrestal Diaries (Viking, $5). The title is actually a misnomer, because Forrestal's notations were largely his personal reminders about people and events and rarely reported on his own actions.

Fragmentary as they are, however, the Diaries add new insight to the character of the tough, purposeful Government servant whom Washington remembers—the middleweight of the broken nose, the level gaze, the straight-lined lips and few words. James Forrestal was a man whose mind never put down the burden of responsibility for U.S. military security. His inner conflict was between his intense loyalty to his chiefs and his equally intense concern for the safety of his country. When politics or expediency dictated policies that violated Forrestal's calculations of military necessities, he kept his worries within the official family, obeyed orders, and waited for the next chance at temperate persuasion. The sum total of his influence slowly moved the U.S. toward military realism, yet he had few personal victories to record. He could never bring himself to break security and either boast or speak out against his critics, but the criticism cut him deep. "Public service," he once observed, "is no place for an introvert."

On Russia. In 1945 Forrestal noted happily that Harry Truman had grasped the point that the Russians despise concession as weakness. After Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes had left office, he confided to Forrestal that Stalin did not like Truman personally. Observed Forrestal: "Mr. Truman was the first one who had ever said 'no' to anything Stalin asked . . . [Stalin] had good reason for liking F.D.R. because he got out of him the Yalta agreement, anything he asked for during the war, and finally an opportunity to push Communist propaganda in the United States and throughout the world."

But in the tensing years of the cold war, Forrestal found that Harry Truman would talk tough at the right times, but was uninterested in working out a hardheaded plan for pursuing the cold war. When the Russians tried to drive the allies out of Berlin with the 1948 blockade, Truman summoned a Sunday afternoon session and said that "we were going to stay, period." But there had been no advance planning for the crisis. The happy solution of the airlift was never even suggested at the first conferences; it grew into a policy because the military men in Berlin had the good sense to get it started.