Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [177]
Inside the White House, presidential lawyer David Kendall quickly dismissed McDougal’s allegations as spurious. “Mr. McDougal has never told this story before, no loan documents support it, and it is flatly contradicted by the contemporary bookkeeping entry of his own accountant,” Kendall told the Associated Press in response to the jailed felon. He added, “Mr. McDougal is hardly a paragon of credibility.”
Dr. Clark’s supervisor, Dr. James Womack, convened his entire team of six psychologists to decide how to deal with McDougal’s odd situation. They discussed in hushed tones whether this was “paranoia on the part of Mr. McDougal.” It was not uncommon, after all, for an inmate to make a claim that he was being incarcerated “because of some secret dealing that he had with the president.” Yet in this case, “the consensus was that this was not a matter of Mr. McDougal being delusional; it was not a matter of Mr. McDougal being paranoid.… The fact of the matter was he did have associations with the president and with the First Lady.” Moreover, the patient was a “chief witness now cooperating with the Office of Independent Counsel in regard to ongoing criminal investigations of the Clintons.” So the team determined, “again from a clinical perspective, from a psychological perspective, that these claims were certainly not evidence of paranoia on Mr. McDougal’s part.”
Womack deemed it prudent to evaluate McDougal further, as soon as he was released from solitary confinement, to determine whether he might have a “possible psychological basis for [his] inability to prove a urine sample.” He assigned Dr. Clark to complete this task and to determine the best course of action.
This meeting took place on Thursday, November 13. It was a session that the young doctor would never forget.
Jim McDougal, seated in the psychology department, looked more wary than usual. Someone in this prison, he told Dr. Clark, was out to get him. The young, balding doctor told his patient that he would try to help if McDougal trusted him to do that. After a long silence, McDougal reached into his pocket and pulled out something that crinkled with the sound of cellophane. He leaned over toward the young medical intern and asked, “Would you like a peppermint?”
Clark was not aware that peppermints held a special significance for McDougal—over the years, McDougal carried them around to dispense as treats for deserving children and friends. The psychologist did recognize, however, that this was a ripe opportunity. From a medical perspective, it was “one of those moments that occurs in therapy when my interpretation was that this was one final test on Mr. McDougal’s part of me to see if he could trust me.”
A second time, the patient reached out his hand containing the peppermint. As Clark would recall: “I did view it as an opportunity, a little therapeutic opportunity to further build trust with him. And so I reached out my hand and I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I took the peppermint.” McDougal then reached into his pocket for another mint, unwrapped it, and placed the candy in his mouth. Clark put his own treat aside, as if to save it until after his questioning was done. At this point, McDougal settled back and began talking freely about the events of the urinalysis that had landed him in solitary confinement.
According to the report summarizing that meeting, Jim McDougal stated that “he had never before had anyone stand beside him and watch him as he tried to urinate.” He described the experience as one of “embarrassment” and confided: “It just locked up.”
The humiliation had continued for three hours. McDougal had tried drinking water, consuming so much that he “threw up.” Still he was unable to produce a sample. Clark’s notes reveal that his patient expressed utter frustration and “a sense of being powerless.” Several things worried him, he told the psychologist, about being singled out for a drug-alcohol test and failing to