Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [467]
Holmes had one other cheap memento: After the case was over, Paula had sent him and the other Dallas lawyers a small FTD floral arrangement in a coffee cup with a picture of a duck on it. Now that the historic Clinton v. Jones case was over, Holmes kept that cup in his office as his final souvenir of his efforts. Lifting the chipped ceramic mug by its handle to inspect it, he concluded, “We hadn’t gotten paid for nine months; we hadn’t seen our wives; it was financial Armageddon for us to take that case, and at the very end of the deal, she sends us a little FTD thing.”
“So I still have [this] coffee cup with a duck on it; that’s all I have.” He sighed. “It’s just so perfect.”
RICHARD Clark, the prison psychologist who had worked closely with James Bert McDougal at the federal facility in Fort Worth, Texas, had never fully gotten over the tragic death of Jim McDougal in solitary confinement. A year after Jim’s funeral, Clark pulled into the driveway of Claudia Riley’s house in Arkadelphia, past the little trailer-cottage that had served as Jim’s last home before he was jailed. The doctor had decided it was time to pay a visit and show his respects. Here, the balding young psychologist sipped iced tea with Claudia, sharing stories about the kindly Southern gentleman-convict whom they both missed.
Claudia took Clark around the house. She pointed out the chair where Jim liked to sit; various knickknacks from Jim’s career as an aspiring politician and a real estate visionary before he became a felon; and a collection of family photos of Jim—as a child, standing proudly alongside his parents, and as an adult posing with an aspiring young politician named Bill Clinton. “Jim just always appeared to be so very different than his family was,” Dr. Clark remarked softly as he flipped through the photos. Claudia answered, “That’s right. Jim was a diamond in a patch of cabbages.”
On this day of Clark’s visit, thermometers recorded new highs for mid-September, sweltering even by southern Arkansas standards. Dabbing a bead of sweat off his forehead, Clark drove into town, located the Murray-Ruggles Funeral Home, and then exited with a map of the cemetery that identified where the Riley family plot was situated.
He shooed away flies as he tramped up the hill, finally reaching the plot where Bob Riley was buried, and, beside him, James Bert McDougal.
Over the hillside, a pond shimmered green in the sunlight. Tall, spindly pines huddled around the secluded patch of grave markers. The former prison psychologist knelt down, reached into his pocket, and removed a pink and white peppermint—the same peppermint Jim McDougal had given him during one of their last meetings in his prison office as an offering of trust and friendship.
Here at the peak of the hilly graveyard, Clark remained motionless on one knee, said a quiet prayer, placed the wrapped peppermint on the grave, stood up, then tramped down to his car and drove silently away, taking the long, flat expanse of I-30 from Arkansas, down through Hope (where Bill Clinton had been born) and back into Texas (where Ken Starr’s family had established its roots), relieved that he had fulfilled this final important mission.
In this private fashion, the epic scandal ended—a scandal that had spanned twenty years and thousands of miles, from the cool Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where Jim and Susan McDougal had once imagined success and prosperity awaiting them in the sparkling waters of Whitewater, to the stark marble edifices of Washington, where the conflicts involving President William Jefferson Clinton had played out, one by one.
Clark’s silent prayer, as he had gazed on the tall pines casting shadows over Jim McDougal’s grave, stirred by a gentle Southern wind that bathed the cemetery in a rejuvenating air that permitted temporal wounds to heal, had been a simple one: However this had happened,