Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [129]
Clinton remained optimistic that the jury would see through Starr’s political motives and acquit the defendants. Then something happened to abruptly change that assessment. Said President Clinton, sitting back in his chair and remembering, “I don’t think he [Starr] would have ever convicted Susan or Jim Guy if McDougal hadn’t insisted on testifying.”
THE day Jim McDougal took the stand in his own defense, Tuesday, May 7, 1996, was the day the prosecution won its case, in the eyes of the stunned defense team. The plan among the defendants’ lawyers, from the start, had been to show President Clinton’s filmed testimony to the jurors and immediately rest their case. OIC’s case rested heavily on the testimony of David Hale. Hale had been badly damaged on cross-examination; the jurors wouldn’t have sympathy for this shifty-looking former municipal judge who had defrauded the federal government of nearly a million dollars and then received a light sentence in return for pointing a finger at the defendants. There was no denying that certain documents signed by the McDougals and Tucker were problematic—not all funds had been used for the purposes listed on the loan papers. Yet the intent to commit wrongdoing still had to be proven; the defense lawyers intended to hammer home that point in closing to the jury. According to George Collins, a veteran trial attorney from Chicago representing Governor Tucker, the defense team’s strategy was simple: “I’m from the school of criminal law that says ‘nobody talks, everybody walks,’” said Collins later. “The best successes I’ve had in my life, my defendant didn’t say anything.”
As Governor Tucker sat at defense counsel table each day, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad, it was obvious that his health problems were wearing him down. Two years earlier, Tucker had almost died from esophageal varices related to a debilitating liver disease. Now, the ordinarily handsome and robust governor—who was often compared to Robert Redford—had begun to appear grayish.
Tucker would later say that by this point in the trial, he had felt like an animal with a target on his back. He believed that he had become the Starr team’s “coonskin cap.” The former governor, who later pled guilty to tax fraud with respect to various cable television deals (yet continued to proclaim his innocence), survived this Whitewater ordeal to become a successful international businessman with cable television companies in the United States and Indonesia. The ex-governor would later confess that this was the low point of his life. “I was within months of a liver transplant, and I was in dreadful shape, so you had two fairly crippled defendants sitting there. Jim [McDougal] certainly was, and I certainly was.”
Tucker said, his blue eyes flashing with contempt, “The motivation to protect Hale to support his allegations was very, very high for that prosecutorial team.”
Tucker desperately wanted to make his case directly to the jury. He and his lawyer had “one hell of a blowup” about his desire to testify. Collins worried that Tucker was so “precisely honest and precisely truthful” that he would correct some of the flagrant mistakes Hale had made on the witness stand, unwittingly helping his accuser. The government had the burden of proof; Collins thought there was no reason to put Tucker on the stand to help clean up their case.
“So finally, we had an awful argument, and I told him, ‘You’re not testifying, God damn it. If you do, I’ll go home.’”
Up until this point, Susan McDougal had appeared as nothing more than a minor figure in the trial. The government had a duty to prove “intent to commit fraud” on the part of Susan McDougal. Her lawyer believed with “one hundred percent