Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [50]
In Arkansas, the night was rainy and windy. Thunderstorms had knocked out the power in some sections of Little Rock. The First Lady, staying at her mother’s home in the Hillcrest neighborhood, withdrew into a state of shock. President Clinton called his own mother, Virginia Clinton Kelley, in Hot Springs. Together, they wept. “Every man has his breaking point,” Virginia said to her son, attempting to keep him strong. “We just don’t know where it is.”
Skip Rutherford, one of the Clinton’s closest friends and advisers, had turned down an offer to join the migration to Washington. He lived only a few blocks away from the Fosters’ home in Little Rock. As lightning flashed across the sky, he received a call from Mack McLarty in the White House. Rutherford had been watching the president on Larry King Live; he needled Mack—why had they cut short the second hour when Clinton was on such a good—McLarty cut him off. “Skip, will you listen to me?” he said, his voice all business. “Vince Foster is dead.”
There was only time to convey basic details. McLarty would move the president out to the Foster home with the help of a Secret Service detail. He told Rutherford, whose experience was in public relations, “Your phone is going to start ringing off the wall in the next thirty minutes. I want you to be prepared.”
As soon as McLarty hung up, Rutherford readied himself for the onslaught. The only person at home with him was his nine-year-old daughter, Mary. He set Mary up at the kitchen table with a bottle of Coke and a piece of paper on which he had printed out words to recite. The script read: “My dad is on the phone, and he will call you back when he gets a chance. May I have your number?” Dressed in pajamas, Mary Rutherford understood that something bad had happened. As sheets of rain blew against the kitchen window and thunder rumbled ominously, she asked, “Daddy, what’s wrong?” He answered calmly, “Vince Foster apparently just killed himself.… I’m going to need your help because it’s going to get real busy. You just tell them you are Mary Rutherford and your dad’s on the phone and he will call you back just as soon as he gets the chance.”
Five minutes later, the calls began in a surge that lasted all night and long into the week.
PRESIDENT Clinton could still picture that night vividly, as if it were the worst nightmare of his life. Two things flashed through his mind, as the Secret Service agents in the Presidential Protection Division made arrangements to transport him to Georgetown, where the Fosters lived. First, he had just realized the previous day “how depressed Vince was about the criticisms we were getting … and the way he personally was being treated. Especially in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.” Learning how upset Vince was had troubled Clinton. “I sometimes forgot that a lot of people who were working for me had not been through the political rough-and-tumble I had been through. And they actually thought if any newspaper in the country editorialized against them that everybody in America read it and believed it.”
Foster had seemed so distressed, the president had called his friend the previous night, trying to coax him to come to the White House theater to watch a movie. On occasion, they had relaxed like that together, “especially if Lisa and Hillary were doing something else.” The president did his best to sell the idea to Vince. “I loved being with him, and I wanted him to come back to the White House and watch a movie with me. But he said he was home, and he thought he ought to stay with Lisa.”
The president had next tried to reassure his friend: “Vince, you can’t pay any attention to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. You know they’re not for us. Anybody that believes what they write on their editorial page is already against us.” He explained the politics of the situation, telling Vince in a soft drawl, “They’re not going to hurt your reputation. You’ve got to understand they think they’re an arm of the right-wing Republican party. It’s