Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [134]
The conservative Washington Times readied the next day’s front-page story, declaring that the guilty verdicts might boost the sagging presidential campaign of Republican Senator Bob Dole. A spokesperson for the American Conservative Union declared: “It really is going to drive home to people the doubts they already have about Clinton’s integrity.”
Yet it was unclear that the Tucker and McDougal convictions had anything to do with President William Jefferson Clinton. Several jurors who granted interviews immediately after the verdicts made clear that they had disregarded Hale’s testimony entirely. Moreover, they had found no wrongdoing whatsoever on the part of the president. One juror described Hale as “sneaky” and added: “He could slide under the door with the door closed.” Juror Colin Capp told the New York Times that Hale was “an unmitigated liar,” not to mention a perjurer. Capp, the son of popular L’il Abner cartoonist Al Capp, told one reporter that “it was an absolute travesty that Hale got sentenced to [only] 24 months.” He went on: “David Hale invoked the President’s name for one reason: to save his butt. We all felt that way.”
Foreperson Sandra Wood told ABC’s Nightline that “the president’s credibility was never an issue.… I just felt like he was telling us to the best of his knowledge what he knew.”
The exhausted defense lawyers were certain that Jim McDougal had unilaterally sunk their case. The jurors later revealed, however, that there was a consensus that all three defendants were guilty, with or without Jim McDougal’s damning performance. When it came to Susan McDougal, one juror said she didn’t buy Susan’s message of, “Who me? I’m innocent.” As a woman, Laura Malat wasn’t prepared to swallow this excuse. “Your common sense tells you ‘No. You can’t be around it that much and not have a clue.’”
The most difficult decision concerned Governor Jim Guy Tucker. In the end, the jurors could not chalk up his conduct to “stupid mistakes.” Many believed that Governor Tucker was up to his elbows in McDougal’s bogus business deals. One juror said, “I think he knew what was going on. It was a case of the ends justifying the means.”
President Clinton later shook his head and said of the three convictions: “I thought he [McDougal] might well have been guilty. But of diminished capacity. And I wondered whether somebody that was as troubled as he was, in his need of constant medication, was either competent to be judged to have known what he was doing when he did it, or competent to stand trial.”
With respect to Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton questioned whether they were truly guilty of criminal conduct. Although Tucker had once been his political rival in Arkansas, Clinton did not wish this sort of persecution on anybody. “I worried about it… because I thought Starr and Jackie Bennett and Hick Ewing, and all those guys, would do anything they could to anybody they could if they thought they could break them and get them to change their story to lie about Hillary and me.”
In the days and nights after the verdict, President Clinton recalled, “I just felt sick at what was going to happen to them all.”
CHAPTER
16
THE “COOPERATING WITNESS”
From inside the White House, President Bill Clinton observed with sadness the metamorphosis of Jim McDougal from convicted felon to Kenneth Starr’s cooperating witness. “He was a brilliant, delightful, and fundamentally a decent person,” Clinton later said. “He always had demons that he wrestled with. And eventually he had, you know, a disintegration. And Starr used his morbid fear of going to prison to get him to change his story.”
Clinton concluded: “Ironically, he got the worst of all worlds. He lied for him