Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [139]
Part of McDougal’s special flair, in Stewart’s estimation, was for manipulating facts to wriggle out of danger. As soon as McDougal was convicted of multiple felonies, he began to change his tune, telling versions of his tragic story that directly implicated Bill Clinton. Stewart had trouble buying it. “That was really his ace in the hole, that testimony,” Stewart explained later, leaning his elbows on the desk in his Manhattan writer’s office. “That’s what kept him relevant, you know, and Jim would have been shrewdly aware of that. And just as Jim may have told story A the first time, because that was in his interest, he would have told story B the second time, and the truth may be neither one of them.”
Stewart analyzed this complicated Arkansan who dressed nattily and flirted with college girls at the Western Sizzlin: “In some ways, I think he would be more willing to lie under oath than if he wasn’t under oath.… Jim would see it as a game, as something to be manipulated, as something—as another system that he could, you know, operate in.”
Although Stewart was no apologist for the Clintons, he had spent enough time with McDougal to know that the felon-turned-informant was going to pose numerous problems for OIC. “I would say that he was never going to be a particularly credible witness on the stand. First, because he had made so many falsehoods before, and second, because he was fully capable of, again, lying under oath at any moment.”
Susan McDougal and Claudia Riley saw manifestations of those same qualities at an escalating rate. Both women recalled Jim’s wandering up from his trailer-cottage and sharing his thoughts about his debriefing sessions with Starr’s lawyers. He had settled back in a comfortable chair in Claudia’s living room and begun “weaving these tales”: “How does this sound—you know, remember that day I went to the capitol to talk to Bill [Clinton] about that water system? How about if I say that was about that Hale loan and I’m even going to tell them details about it?…”
After listening to Jim spin out various scenarios that would “help him at his sentencing,” Susan finally interrupted: “Jim, what makes you think you can make these up, these stories, just weave them up, and that the president of the United States, with all of his power and all the people helping him, are not just going to cream you?”
Jim replied that he now had access to documents, courtesy of OIC, that would allow him to construct a plausible paper trail. Hadn’t it worked for David Hale after he became a cooperating witness for Starr’s office? “All I have to do is make it all fit,” McDougal proclaimed.
On one occasion, Susan recalled, Jim rocked forward in his chair and said, “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t want to say something about Bill, let’s just think up something we can say about Hillary. I mean, what did Hillary ever do for us? We could just, you know, get you in there, and you could be against Hillary, and I’ll do all the stuff against Bill, and we’ll be a tag team.”
Susan replied to her ex-husband, “Jim, they will kill us. We do not have the truth here. And when you get up there and they start breaking all this down, you know, this is going to be exposed for what it is, and we’re going to be looking awful. I can’t do that.”
At this, Jim became enraged. “F——the Clintons!” he shouted. “What’d they ever do for us? I’ll make them sorry they ever went to Washington.” Pounding his cane against the floor, he hollered, “This will be the hardest presidency anyone ever had to endure.”
During this period, before Jim went to prison, both Claudia and Susan also observed worsening substance abuse problems. Susan recalled a “terrible episode at Claudia’s, where Jim almost overdosed. Some girls, too. They were vomiting. They had come up [to the house].”
Claudia later assessed Jim’s situation candidly: “To my knowledge, Jim used whatever he needed and wanted to give him relief.” Increasingly, McDougal was associating with “dubious” people who appeared at