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which he approaches the problems of current policy. And they make
admirable background reading for James V. Forrestal's day-by-day ac–
count of the gradual evolution of U.S. foreign policy under the pres–
sure of the Soviet challenge.
The Forrestal Diaries
are fascinating, but ultimately a bit empty
and disappointing. In this respect, they are perhaps like their author.
Jim Forrestal was one of the most interesting figures to appear in the
Washington scene during the war. The son of an Irish contractor
in
upstate New York, he had risen by energy, intelligence and ambition
through the dizzying 'twenties and the chastening 'thirties to end up as
the president of Dillon, Read. I used to see him from time to time in
Washington in the 'forties; he came to remind me, a little romantically
perhaps, of Alexander Hamilton. Both were parvenus who had ascended
from obscurity to social acceptance; both found private power ultimately
unsatisfying and yearned after public power; both had personal courage
and administrative clarity and energy; both were hard and incisive in
their judgments, impatient of sentimentalism, ruthless toward ideas and
people. They even looked somewhat alike: both were under middle
height, erect in bearing, quick in movement, alert in response, cap–
tivating in manner. And both came to violent ends.
But in part, too, Forrestal could only be understood as a product
of the 'twentics. He was a Fitzgerald character (he was two years
ahead of Fitzgerald at Princeton) ; in his mad dash along the way, one
felt he had lost something which he desperately wanted to recover.
He did not perhaps have a genuinely reflective mind of the Kennan
type; but his intellectual range was wide, and his intellectual curiosity
almost compulsive. His home would be strewn with the weekly maga–
zines of comment, both American and British; he would talk freely
of Bagehot, whom he admired, and Laski, whom he hated; he was
fascinated by the clash of ideas. Yet somehow his life had stripped
him
of ultimate solace. He was the Great Gatsby in Washington,
his
past
transcended but never obliterated, and the reality always at essential
variance with the dream.
The diaries are mostly external. In the main, they summarize the
conversations and documents of which he wished to make private record.
His own comment was mostly curt and impersonal. But the entries do
give a remarkable picture of official Washington from 1944 to 1949.
Forrestal, of course, had a sharply realistic view of foreign policy. The
problem, as he saw it, was "to achieve accommodation between the
power we now possess, our reluctance to use it positively, the realistic
necessity for such use, and our national ideals." Like Kennan, he con–
sidered the national interest fundamental.
