Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [46]
Before long, Foster—like many of those in the inner sanctum of the White House—was becoming “beat down, used up,” and subjected to tremendous pressure.
VINCENT W. Foster, Jr., had come to Washington as a close personal friend of the president and First Lady, which guaranteed him direct access to the Oval Office and a strong position within the administration. Still, he had instant qualms about whether this move was a healthy one, from his family’s perspective. Foster’s nickname in high school had been “Pencil.” He was tall and thin—he “weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds dripping wet”—and had a natural studious bent. Foster had graduated first in his class at University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville; he had made partner in two years in one of Arkansas’s most prestigious firms. Foster was a handsome man whose “mouth curled up” and whose eyes squinted to give him distinct “feline features,” causing women to whisper that he looked like the actor Robert Wagner. Through hard work at the Rose Law Firm, Foster had emerged as a leader at the firm, poised to become the next president of the Arkansas Bar Association. He had serious doubts, from the start, that he should chuck all this to go to Washington with the Clintons.
Joe Purvis, who had attended kindergarten with Vince Foster and Billy Blythe in Hope, saw signs of Vince’s creeping anxiety early on. He recalled sitting in a restaurant in Little Rock in December 1992, just before the Clinton caravan left for Washington. After midnight, Vince and Lisa Foster waltzed in, having attended a late-night dinner party. Lisa had obviously had “a little something to drink” and made a beeline for Purvis’s table, oblivious to the fact that he was seated with an NBC correspondent. Lisa blurted out in rather “salty terms” that “by God, Vince had decided to chuck it all and was going to the White House, and she was miffed and p.o.’d at him and really couldn’t believe that he was giving up their life there in Little Rock to take a job in D.C.” Vince spotted the reporter and quickly steered Lisa away from the table, so that his wife’s expletive-filled commentary would not appear in the next day’s national news. Yet the decision to move to Washington, which entailed shelving a successful law practice, dragging his wife away from the home and neighborhood she loved, uprooting a son during his senior year of high school, and jumping into a cauldron of boiling oil in a city known for its unkind treatment of outsiders, was one that gnawed at Foster from the moment he said yes.
When an unflattering Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” ran in mid-June, this sent a jolt through him. The short but distinctly negative piece, containing a silhouette of Vince’s head with a question mark inside it, was prompted by Foster’s declining to supply a photograph to the paper, in conjunction with its series of editorials about Rose Law Firm partners now working in the White House. It went on to accuse Foster of playing footloose with the law in his failure to turn over documents relating to Hillary Clinton’s nascent health care task force, and suggested that he would face stiff penalties if he ignored a court order to do so. The paper editorialized: “Does it take a $50,000-a-day fine to get this mule’s attention?” As Joe Purvis would say, that article was particularly painful “because Vince read the Wall Street Journal every day.” Now, people around the world, Foster fretted, would see that story as they drank their morning cups of coffee and think that he was an “unscrupulous shyster with questionable ethics.” To make matters worse, a follow-up editorial in the Journal criticized the new administration for being too slow in finding a replacement for FBI Director William Sessions,