Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [461]
Susan had received several phone calls from Richard Clark, Jim’s prison psychologist, and struggled with remnants of her strange feelings of grief. When she finally learned the truth about the events leading to Jim’s death in solitary confinement, she wept like a child. “I had no idea he was going to be denied parole,” she said of her dead ex-husband, still shaken emotionally. “That’s what killed him. Seven days before he died? He thought he was going on a book tour. It killed him.”
Susan waited more than a year after she was released from jail before mustering up the courage to visit Jim’s grave at the Rest Haven Memorial Gardens, on the hilly plot where Jim was buried next to his mentor, war hero Bob Riley. She arrived at Jim’s resting place accompanied by Claudia, squeezing her friend’s hand, not knowing how she would react. When she finally lowered her eyes toward the nondescript plot, Susan almost shouted, pointing at the simple bronze marker on the ground that identified Jim’s eternal resting place: “Claudia,” she cried out, “they’ve got him as a Vietnam veteran, for God’s sake!” With that, Susan began laughing and crying in a mixed outpouring of emotion. It seemed too rich to be true: Jim fleetingly had served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve in his twenties; during his youthful drinking days, he had made a sport of going to bars with a coat draped over his arm, telling wide-eyed patrons that he had lost his arm in Vietnam and spinning tales about his imaginary acts of valor, thus earning himself free drinks. Jim had probably prodded someone at the Fort Worth prison to make sure he was buried with military honors, Susan said, no doubt repeating his apocryphal stories and insisting that the paperwork be filed for his grave marker from the Veteran’s Administration. “Jim’s down there laughing,” Susan told Claudia, sweeping the leaves off the bronze marker. “He always wanted to be a veteran, a wounded soldier.” In death, she said, her deceased ex-husband Jim had pulled off his final con job.
“It’s entirely Jim McDougal,” Susan said laughing, her eyes sparkling with a distant flicker of nostalgia that resembled a remnant of love.
PRESIDENT Bill Clinton’s principal regret about his final days in office was that he had not pardoned Webb Hubbell at the same time he had pardoned Susan McDougal. That forty-eight-hour period now seemed like a blur. He had made several unfortunate decisions that he wished he could undo—such as pardoning billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, whose ex-wife Denise Rich had donated nearly a half million dollars to his nascent Clinton Presidential Library, and whose pardon for tax fraud had sparked Senate hearings and another big controversy. Clinton said, looking back on that sleep-deprived time, “I’d have pardoned [Webb] and I wouldn’t pardon [Marc] Rich.” He confided, “I woke up in the middle of the night several times in the first two months I was out of the White House, not worried about Rich, but full of regret that I hadn’t pardoned Hubbell and [Governor Jim Guy] Tucker.”
Webb Hubbell himself admitted that he was deeply hurt by the nonpardon. But he eventually concluded, as a philosophical matter, that it was probably meant to be. “I don’t hold any regret or grudge,” he said. “Or animosity whatsoever. That was a decision he made. We all make decisions … [some] we wish we had back.” Hubbell lifted his head and added, in a subdued drawl, “If I had been pardoned, it might have taken away from the rehabilitation that I’ve gone through from having served my time and dealt with the issue and come face to face with it. So in a lot of ways … it was probably