Ancillary Mercy полностью

The official account of Forrestal’s death runs as follows. During the night of May 21-22, Forrestal was awake at 1:45 A.M., copying a chorus from Sophocles’s Ajax from a book of world literature. A navy corpsman guarding Forrestal’s room checked in, as was his job every fifteen minutes. Forrestal told the corpsman that he did not want a sedative, as he intended to stay up late and read. (A variation of this story appeared in the New York Times, which reported that Forrestal had been asleep at 1:30, then awake at 1:45.) The corpsman reported Forrestal’s refusal to the psychiatrist—Raines’s assistant—sleeping next door. They returned five minutes later to an empty room. The assistant later claimed that Forrestal had sent the corpsman out on a “brief errand.” During this time, Forrestal walked to the diet kitchen across the hall, tied one end of his bathrobe cord to the radiator, the other end around his neck, removed a flimsy screen, and jumped from the sixteenth floor. The cord came untied, and he fell to his death after hitting part of the building on the way down.

Forrestal’s most recent biographers discounted the possibility of murder, calling the Secretary’s death “a series of chance events.” Yet, the discrepancies in the official suicide story were never clearly resolved, and several people close to Forrestal did not believe it. An early biographer of Forrestal, writing in the 1960s, noted that “even now... certain details have not been made public,” and that some believed Forrestal’s death to be “very much desired by individuals and groups who, in 1949, held great power in the United States.” Others went further and maintained that Forrestal was murdered. Henry Forrestal, for one, believed strongly that “they” murdered his brother—they being either Communists or Jews within the government. (Forrestal’s geopolitics gave him a pro-Arab disposition.) Indeed, Henry later said that the more he thought about his brother being shut up at Bethesda and denied the right to see Father Sheehy, the more it bothered him. He decided he was going to take his brother to the country to complete his recovery, and made train reservations to return to Washington on May 22. He also reserved a room at the Mayflower Hotel for that day, then phoned the hospital to announce that he would arrive on May 22 to take custody of his brother.

Father Sheehy had reason to suspect murder. When he arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital after learning of Forrestal’s death, an experienced-looking hospital corpsman approached him through the crowd. In a low, tense voice he said, “Father, you know Mr. Forrestal didn’t kill himself, don’t you?” Before Sheehy could respond or ask his name, others in the crowd pressed close, and the man quickly departed.

There are several odd elements concerning Forrestal’s final moments. First, the corpsman guarding Forrestal was a new man, a young man named Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr., someone Forrestal had never seen before. The regular guard during the midnight shift was absent without leave and, the story goes, had gotten drunk the night before. Harrison was the only person to have had direct contact with Forrestal in the moments before his death, and it was on his word only that the official account rested.

Also, Forrestal never finished writing the chorus from Sophocles, and in fact stopped in the middle of a word. Quite possibly, Forrestal had not even written the fragment that evening, especially if he had been asleep at 1:30 A.M. How reasonable is it to suppose that, sometime between 1:30 A.M. and 1:45 A.M., he woke up, got out some writing material, located a gloomy poem within a huge anthology, copied out seventeen lines, put on his robe, crossed the hall to the diet kitchen, where he tightly wrapped and knotted his bathrobe cord around his neck and presumably tied the loose end to the radiator under the window; then climbed up on the window sill and jumped.