Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal.

• Author: Roberts, Chalmers

Townsend Hoopes, Douglas Brinkley. Knopf, $30. Townsend Hoopes tells us in the preface of this book that as a "recent Marine lieutenant who aspired to meaningful public service," he found in James Vincent Forrestal "the model hero." Hoopes, who became a "young-man-of-all-works" for the first secretary of defense, considered Forrestal's 1949 suicide "a towering loss to the country and a profound personal tragedy."

In 1987, Hoopes was offered the research papers of the late Charles J.V. Murphy, a prodigious Time Inc. cold warrior who had begun work on a Forrestal biography. With the Murphy papers came Douglas Brinkley, now a Hofstra University history professor, who had worked with Murphy for six months. Hoopes, who rose to be Air Force undersecretary and who wrote the well-received The Devil and John Foster Dulles, is now 70. Brinkley is 30. Although they collaborated, the judgmental tone is clearly Hoopes'.

Hoopes rightly felt there was "a major gap in the biographical history of World War II and the postwar period," and he and Brinkley have helped to fill it with this well-researched, exhaustive, and mostly favorable biography. This is not revisionist history; it is mainstream and conventional. It is sympathetic yet probing, right down to the title. Forrestal was a driven patriot, and how he came to embody this epithet is the essence of this book.

An Irish immigrant's son, Forrestal was born in 1892 in Matteawan, New York, in the unfashionable southern part of Westchester County. His mother, says Hoopes, was "a stern, rather dour matriarch and an unreluctant disciplinarian" who wanted the boy to become a priest. But his "natural affinity" was for "the wealthier, more socially accepted Protestant families," and he seemed "somewhat embarrassed by the whole ambiance of his lower-middle-class Catholic Irishness."

Much of this biography has to do with Forrestal's successful efforts to flee that environment. He made it to Princeton, a "poor boy in a rich man's school," where he ran The Daily Princetonian and was voted "most likely to succeed" as well as "biggest bluffer" and, presciently, "the man nobody knows." He quit Princeton months before graduation and soon was well on his way to Wall Street wealth as a bond salesman. During World War I he became a Navy pilot but sat out most of that conflict at a desk in the office of the chief of naval operations. After the war, Forrestal came back to New York for the Roaring Twenties.

A nose twice...