Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [131]
At the end of each day, Susan McDougal had been telephoning her parents to report: “Another day. No one said my name.” A female reporter from the Los Angeles Times had recently asked, “How’s it feel to be the one person who will walk out of this unscathed?” Now, Susan’s estranged husband was placing her at the epicenter of Madison’s unorthodox business dealings.
In no time, prosecutor Ray Jahn was chewing Jim up on cross-examination. Jahn was a “kind of a cowboy guy, big old guy with cowboy boots.” To Susan McDougal, he looked like “Porky Pig with a cowboy hat.” Yet the San Antonio prosecutor was a master in the courtroom. At one point, Jahn confronted Jim McDougal with incriminating documents, forcing him to hem and haw, and then to accuse Starr’s office of forging his signature.
When it came to questioning about Jim Guy Tucker, with whom McDougal had maintained an often-stormy relationship, McDougal had cheerfully told the jury that despite a few spats, “I have nothing but warmest personal feelings for Jim Guy today.” On cross-examination, Jahn pulled out a transcript of an FBI interview and asked pointedly, “Mr. McDougal, isn’t it a fact on June 30, 1995, you told Special Agent Norris that Mr. Tucker was a, quote, ‘thief who would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down’?”
McDougal peered up at Jahn with a crooked grin. “I don’t think that’s exactly what I said,” he replied. He looked helplessly at the judge and jury. “I think I said ‘like most lawyers, he would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.’” There were twitters in the jury box. Nobody on the defense team was laughing.
With their prospects for acquittal swirling down the drain, Susan McDougal waited for the next break. She made her way shakily to the elevators in the hallway, rode down to an empty witness room, closed the door behind her, and broke down sobbing. Her attorney, Bobby McDaniel, described the feeling in the courtroom as “kind of like in a football game when a coach can feel the momentum switching to [the other] team.”
George Collins, trying to appear calm as the ailing Governor Jim Guy Tucker scribbled desperate notes to him, understood that the entire defense team’s ship was going down. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Yes,” Collins said, remembering. “It was absolutely the longest hours I’ve spent in a courtroom in my life. It was absolutely horrible. And Jim hated Susan. He wanted to bring her down. He deliberately did so, I think.”
As Collins saw it, there was a sea of anger churning inside Jim McDougal. “He really hated Jim Guy as you hate a friend that didn’t help you. He also hated Bill Clinton, because Clinton had not helped him.” McDougal had even confessed to his lawyer, Sam Heuer, that he had hoped to get some sort of federal job in the Clinton administration, but like everything he wished for, this had never materialized. At one point, McDougal had been in the men’s room with Governor Tucker’s attorney during a break. The developer turned to the lawyer and said, his eyes turning cold, “You’re the only SOB in the courtroom that never screwed me, and the only reason you didn’t is because you didn’t have a chance.”
As the defense team watched in horror, McDougal kept marching to his death, “and it was just the knife plunging into [his codefendants’] back over and over again.” Bobby McDaniel told Susan that he was going to have to “rip [Jim’s] heart out” in cross-examination. Susan turned to her lawyer and said, “He’s a sick old man, leave him alone.”
McDaniel begged Susan to try to talk sense to her ex-husband. “Tell him I’ll only ask two questions,” McDaniel said. “‘When did Susan leave for Dallas?’ And ‘Was she involved in the business affairs [at Madison] after that?’”
So Susan walked over to Jim before court resumed. Struggling to maintain her composure, she touched Jim’s shoulder and said, “Bobby McDaniel wants to ask you two simple questions, just to help