Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [165]
The new prisoner attended his first meeting with the prison’s psychology department, which would evaluate his mental health status, on October 2 at 10:00 A.M. Here, in the basement of Building 4, James B. McDougal entered a small room where he encountered a thirty-four-year-old clinical psychology intern named Richard Clark. A thin, balding soft-spoken man, Clark had done his doctoral work after having obtained a master’s in counseling from the Denver Seminary. His specialty was the integration of psychology and theology—a brand of psychotherapy that was particularly useful in a prison environment.
The records of Clark’s first meeting with McDougal, obtained with permission of McDougal’s legal representatives after his death, indicated that the inmate was taking sixty milligrams of Prozac per day for depression as well as twenty milligrams of BuSpar to treat anxiety. The report further recorded that McDougal, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, was “polite and cooperative.” The report went on: “He stated his mood was ‘generally positive to upbeat.’ His thinking was clear and easy to follow. He denied having any suicidal ideation. No homicidal or delusional thinking was elicited.”
From his review of the central file, the doctor noted that McDougal had arrived late at Fort Worth, due to an anonymous death threat against him. A prosecutor from the Office of Independent Counsel in Little Rock, Hickman Ewing, had contacted the Fort Worth prison on McDougal’s behalf and expressed concern that there might be “forces at work” trying to make McDougal’s life more difficult than it already was.
McDougal’s criminal and psychiatric history revealed that he had been deemed mentally competent to stand trial during his first S&L prosecution in 1990. McDougal quipped that he was “the only Whitewater figure declared certifiably sane by the United States Government,” a comment that brought a smile to the young psychologist’s lips.
When it came to McDougal’s day-to-day activities in the prison, Clark was pleased to hear that McDougal had volunteered to pick up trash in the Fort Worth Unit. “And he told me he had done that for two reasons,” Clark recalled. Although trash pickup was “one of the lousiest jobs” in the prison community, McDougal saw a tactical advantage to the chore. “One, was that it gave him an opportunity early in the mornings to get some exercise. But also to be able to try to communicate to the other inmates that he did not view himself as being in any way above them.”
McDougal also confided in Clark that his book project was one of the few positive aspects of his new life as a convict. Each morning he would telephone his coauthor, Curtis Wilkie, a journalist from Mississippi, to discuss material for the book. The doctor recorded that McDougal told him that it was “therapeutic for him to do the book, much like the step in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] wherein a person takes a moral inventory.”
With respect to his ex-wife, Susan, Jim McDougal spoke in positive and protective terms, leaving the clear impression that he still cared about her. Even when it came to Bill Clinton, Clark noted, McDougal did not communicate hostility. This was true even though McDougal clearly believed that his incarceration was due to the fact that Clinton was president and that he was a victim of Clinton’s powerful political enemies. Clark summarized his initial impressions of the prisoner: “I found him to be highly cooperative with the process. He was very much a gentleman, very much in the Southern tradition of men being gentlemen.”
Moreover, being eligible for parole on April 29 of the following year clearly buoyed McDougal’s spirits. This date, Clark noted, seemed to be etched in McDougal’s mind,