James Forrestal, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

James Forrestal

United States Navy officer and civil servant, Undersecretary of the Navy

Date of Birth: 15-Feb-1892

Place of Birth: Beacon, New York, United States

Date of Death: 22-May-1949

Profession: politician, military officer, banker, investment banker, diarist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius


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About James Forrestal

  • James Vincent Forrestal (February 15, 1892 – May 22, 1949) was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense.Although he came from a very strict middle class Irish Catholic family, he left both the Church and his ethnic group to become a very rich financier on Wall Street.
  • He became Undersecretary of the Navy in 1940.
  • President Franklin D.
  • Roosevelt wanted him to take the lead in building up the Navy.
  • He became Secretary of the Navy in May 1944, and the first Secretary of the newly created Defense Department in 1947.
  • He was intensely hostile to the Soviet Union, fearing Communist expansion in Europe and the Middle East.
  • He strongly opposed the creation of Israel because it would alienate Arab nations that were needed as allies. Forrestal was a supporter of naval battle groups centered on aircraft carriers.
  • He tried to weaken the proposed Department of Defense for the Navy's benefit, but whas hard pressed to run it in 1947-49 when Harry S.
  • Truman named him Secretary of Defense.
  • They were often at odds and Truman forced his resignation.
  • His mental health was rapidly deteriorating and he underwent medical care for depression, and died after jumping from a sixteenth floor window of his hospital.
  • Anti-communist and anti-Zionist writers ever since have claimed someone must have murdered him. In 1954, the world's first supercarrier was named USS Forrestal in his honor, as is the James V.
  • Forrestal Building, which houses the headquarters of the United States Department of Energy.
  • He is the namesake of the Forrestal Lecture Series at the United States Naval Academy and of the James Forrestal Campus of his alma mater Princeton University.

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