Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [37]
Sam Heuer, McDougal’s court-appointed lawyer, took a stab at pleading insanity on his client’s behalf; this motion failed. So McDougal took the stand in his own defense and beat the prosecutors. Invoking his humble roots and insisting that he was neither a fat-cat banker nor a crook, McDougal seemed to have a “spellbinding effect” on the jurors. The jury foreman told a reporter, as they exited the court house having acquitted McDougal and his partners: “If they [the bank examiners] had left ’em alone, they’d have really made some money!”
Out of the many people tried in 247 S&L prosecutions in the United States in 1990, Jim McDougal and Susan’s brothers were the only defendants to escape conviction. Charles Banks was sure beyond a reasonable doubt that McDougal was guilty—yet the jury had spoken. The case was closed. The prosecution of Jim McDougal, as far as U.S. Attorney Banks was concerned, was over.
Susan McDougal by now had relocated to California, starting a new life with Patrick Harris, who was preparing to attend law school, and working as a personal assistant to a former starlet named Nancy Mehta—now the wealthy wife of a famous symphony conductor. Jim McDougal had returned to the little trailer-cottage on the Rileys’ property in Arkadelphia, penniless and increasingly beset by emotional, psychological, and financial woes. As Susan observed the plight of her estranged husband, the criminal prosecution was “not even the thing that hurt the most.” The hardest thing for McDougal to accept was that he had been publicly declared a failure. “His sense of himself was just gone,” Susan recalled.
McDougal, holed up in Arkadelphia, sunk deeper into a depression. On rare occasions, he would drag himself off to Little Rock to visit Jim Guy Tucker and his wife—two of his last remaining friends. The Tuckers’ young daughters were among the few people who still treated him like a respectable human being. On one visit, tears nearly came to McDougal’s eyes when the girls walked into the family room with eyes sparkling and asked, “Do you have peppermints?” Jim always enjoyed handing out peppermints to people he liked. McDougal had grinned and pulled out two wrapped mints from his stash; he seemed to understand that there were few admirers left. There were few such moments of mental relief.
Susan recalled this period: “He was taking lithium, and the lithium was having a horrible effect of making him very sluggish and depressed and fat and unlike himself. And so he’d go off the lithium, and he discovered Prozac, and he would take twelve a day. And, you know, he was bouncing off walls and he was very bitter toward the Clintons because he felt that they all believed him guilty.” Whenever Jim talked to Susan in California, he would go into a tirade, shouting, “If the shoe had been on the other foot, you know, we would not have believed them guilty! We would have supported them; we would have been there for them!”
A single phone call solidified Jim’s hatred toward his old friends the Clintons. Near the end of the trial, Susan had called Bill Clinton and told him, “Jim’s mother’s very sick. One thing you could do that would be lovely, she loves you so much, is to call Lorene and say a word because she’s so sick.” Bill Clinton answered, “I’ll do it right now.”
Lorene McDougal did receive a call from the governor. Worried sick about her son, she asked Bill directly, “Would you get Jim a job?” She implored the governor, “If Jim could get work, he would be okay.” Clinton replied, “Yes, I think so.” This answer brought tears to Lorene McDougal’s eyes. She immediately called her son