Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [314]
Neither the president nor the First Lady was able to attend the funeral services in Arkadelphia. President Clinton, however, would later say that he was deeply saddened by the circumstances surrounding Jim’s death in solitary confinement. In terms of rumors that the Clinton White House or his Justice Department had something to do with McDougal’s strange demise, the president would dismiss this as cruel and patently false. Bill Clinton had watched McDougal’s mental and physical decline over the years; this deterioration of a sick man had provided no cause for rejoicing or celebration. “You know, I never did nor could I have done anything to adversely affect his circumstances,” Clinton said later. “He was sent to prison because he got convicted. And, you know, Starr and those guys kept trying to work on him, getting him to say more stuff.”
Indeed, it was the independent counsel’s office, Clinton pointed out, that was watching over McDougal in the Texas prison. It was both absurd and wrong-headed to suggest that anyone associated with the White House had contributed, even one iota, to McDougal’s tragic death.
President Clinton rocked back in his chair and closed his eyes, recalling the Jim McDougal who had once been a friend and a fellow aspiring Arkansas politician. “They [Ken Starr’s office] played him, they squeezed him, they broke him,” said Clinton. “And there was nothing for them to be proud of, because he was an easy target. He needed his medication; he needed to be in a supportive, not in a difficult environment.” Clinton shook his head and observed that even if McDougal was guilty of committing crimes, “I don’t know that the interests of justice were served by spending all that amount of money to incarcerate a guy who was in the kind of shape he was in.… How can you get angry at a person who’s basically not in control of their life? Not even in control of their mind anymore?”
Clinton concluded, his voice becoming softer, “Nobody on my account would have done anything to make his life any worse.” Whatever Jim McDougal had said or done to implicate Clinton in order to save his own neck, the president had completely forgiven him. “I didn’t blame him,” said the former president. “He was just a vulnerable, weak reed in a strong wind.”
The Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to tamp down ugly speculation, issuing a statement that McDougal’s placement in the hole “had no adverse impact on Mr. McDougal’s medical condition.” Richard Clark and others, in the meantime, questioned this official line. What concerned Clark most was that the autopsy revealed a high level of Prozac in McDougal’s blood at the time of his death, indicating (most likely) that he had recently ingested that drug. Yet an internal prison report confirmed that “there is no evidence that inmate McDougal had access to his other self-administered medications,” specifically those related to his heart problems.
Clark was particularly concerned that McDougal had been placed in the hole without access to his nitroglycerin, which he normally had within reach to “take as needed.” Prison regulations required that inmates be given access to their meds at all times. Since the autopsy confirmed that McDougal had died from a sudden heart-related incident, Clark noted, “the nitroglycerin well could have bought some very necessary time.” He added, “The question at that point is, ‘Why weren’t his other medications given? Why weren’t those brought over?’”
In Clark’s professional opinion, the autopsy’s notation that McDougal had died from “sudden cardiac death” was particularly telling. This medical term referred to a specific type of cardiac event requiring “a precipitating