Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [141]
The minute Susan returned to her parents’ home in rural Camden that night, the phone rang. It was Jim McDougal. He shouted into the receiver, “What’s going on? I just talked with OIC, and they said you never called them back.” Susan told her ex-husband that she couldn’t cooperate with Starr’s prosecutors. Jim rattled off a string of expletives and growled: “Susan, they’re going to make sure that you spend time in jail. They’re going to make sure they get you. If you don’t do this, Susan, I’m never going to speak to you again.” With that, he slammed down the phone.
As Susan McDougal finished the story years later, sitting on Claudia Riley’s couch, squeezing Claudia’s hand, and reliving that traumatic day, she said, “That was the last time I ever spoke to him, because I went to jail not long after that, and Jim died in jail, so …”
AT 9:30 A.M., on August 20, 1996, the heat and humidity were settling in a thick, heavy haze over Little Rock. On this day, Susan McDougal had returned to the courtroom of Judge George Howard, Jr., to be sentenced.
Although Susan faced up to seventeen years in prison, she and her lawyer had been praying that she might get probation, as a minor figure in this elaborate criminal scheme. Now her prayers were melting away. Ken Starr, dressed in a dark suit, had personally made an appearance alongside his prosecutors to communicate the seriousness of this sentencing proceeding. The independent counsel’s office viewed this as a watershed in its investigation: Susan McDougal, they believed, held the key to other information vital to their criminal probe.
Governor Jim Guy Tucker, just a day earlier, had been sentenced to eighteen months under house arrest and four years’ probation, because he was slated to undergo an emergency liver transplant. Judge Howard, mulling over the fourteen-page recommendation of the Office of Independent Counsel, was in a less magnanimous mood when it came to Susan McDougal. The OIC pre-sentence report described her as a person who had played “an active role” in obtaining the fraudulent loan from David Hale. Moreover, the report recited, she had “attempted to camouflage her criminal acts” and refused to cooperate with OIC. Gazing sternly down from the bench, Judge Howard hammered his gavel and imposed a sentence of two years in federal prison plus more than 300 hours of community service and $305,000 in fines and restitution. Howard told the defendant that she had exactly forty days to get her affairs in order before reporting to the custody of the U.S. Marshal.
As McDougal left the courtroom, an FBI agent walked up and handed her a subpoena to appear in front of Ken Starr’s grand jury.
THE battle between Senator Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton for the right to occupy the White House was in full swing. In late August 1996, as Bill Clinton boarded a railroad car dubbed the 21st Century Express en route from Virginia to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, his prospects of reelection were looking bright. The Paula Jones case was now on the back burner. The Whitewater case, following the convictions of the McDougals and Governor Tucker, seemed to be in remission, unless an andiron swung out of nowhere and knocked Bill Clinton off his perch on the flag-draped presidential train.
While Clinton was steaming toward reelection, Susan McDougal was weighing her options and deciding whether to strike a deal with OIC. She agreed to appear on ABC’s Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer and talk about her quandary. “It is tempting every time they put the carrot before my eyes,” Susan said. “It’s very tempting. It’s tempting when I see my mother crying. When I see my family hurting.…” At the same time, the convicted Whitewater defendant fixed her jaw and declared, “The Clintons didn’t do this to me.… This is something that Kenneth Starr and the independent counsel have done to me because they have an agenda, and I am the roadblock to what they want.”
The show’s producers had promised Susan that certain topics would be off limits during the interview.