Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [178]
As well, alcoholism “had been the one demon in his life that he had been able to defeat.” He didn’t want anyone to question his sobriety. McDougal confided that he had been raised by “two very modest Victorian ladies,” in the persons of his mother and his great-aunt. He didn’t think that he would ever be able to “pee on command,” no matter how many times these prison officials tried to make him do it. All of this worried McDougal, because it might wreck his chances for parole.
McDougal then scooted his chair closer to the young doctor and said that he wanted to reiterate what he had said about the Madison Guaranty documents found in the trunk of the car after the freak tornado in South Little Rock. “The documents that they found corroborate everything I’ve been saying to the independent counsel.” With a furtive look toward the door, McDougal added that “it was evidence of perjury on the president’s part.”
McDougal went on to insist that his being thrown in the hole and the drug screening “was a setup, from the get-go.” According to Clark’s notes, “setup was a word that he repeated several times.” The last thing McDougal said, with a sardonic smile, was, “I’d do the same thing if I were on the other side. It’s the nature of politics.”
Immediately after his meeting, Clark sent a memo to Captain Bruce Corbett, the prison official in charge of drug screening. Clark concluded that McDougal suffered from a medical condition called paruresis, otherwise known as a “shy bladder” or “bashful bladder.” It was a social phobia inhibiting certain individuals from urinating when others were present, or when they were in foreign places. Because Clark believed that McDougal’s “performance anxiety” would “likely recur should he be placed in a similar situation,” he recommended that McDougal be granted “dry cell status.” In lay terms, McDougal should be permitted to take future urinalysis tests in the privacy of a cell without someone “standing right there watching.” The integrity of the test could be safeguarded by using a cell without access to water, so that the prisoner could not “compromise the urine sample.”
Clark’s evaluation and recommendation was cosigned by Womack, as head of the psychology team. A carbon copy was sent to the Fort Worth housing unit, to be kept in McDougal’s prison file.
That memo, however, inexplicably vanished.
CHAPTER
22
THE HUNDRED-PAGE REFERRAL
The Office of Independent Counsel, as it headed into late 1997, was pushing the pedal to see if there was any gas left in its investigation. Ken Starr’s aborted departure for Pepperdine had blown up in his face. Nor had his office’s image been helped by the Bob Woodward story about the OIC’s interviewing women and acting like sex police. The top lawyers on Starr’s staff wanted to regain the moral high ground so that the public would again view their investigation with respect.
In late September, OIC filed a fat 114-page report on the death of Vince Foster, but that document made virtually no splash. In ten words at the end of the report, Starr’s office reached the same conclusion that Robert Fiske had reached in 1994: “Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park.” Rod Lankler, the Fiske prosecutor who had headed up the initial Foster investigation, saw nothing new. “They went through the whole thing from A to Z,” Lankler said. “And spent a hell of a lot more time on it than we had.” Lankler believed that Starr’s office had spent three years retracing their steps simply to placate loud mouthed fringe conspiracy theorists who were shouting that Fiske’s office had “whitewashed [some] horrible crime.” Although Lankler was a registered Republican and had no political bones to pick with Starr’s office, he still considered