Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [53]
After waking up his entire staff to convey the terrible news, Nussbaum locked the door leading into the White House suite of offices and went home. He later remembered that surreal night: “I could only sleep for a few hours. The phone rang. I bolted up. It was about six o’clock in the morning. It was Lisa [Foster]. She wasn’t crying. She seemed calm.”
Lisa asked, as if in a trance, “Bernie, I just want to understand something. Did you fire Vince?” Apparently, this rumor had already begun to circulate, along with dozens of other bizarre reports. Nussbaum answered, “Of course not, Lisa. I’d never do that. I’d never want to do that.” He added gently, “You know how much admiration I had for Vince.”
Lisa replied serenely, “I thought so. I knew it didn’t happen. I just wanted you to tell me you didn’t fire him.”
As Nussbaum remembered the dreamlike conversation, Lisa “spoke in a sweet, calm voice. She was obviously still in shock.… She just wanted to satisfy herself.”
WHEN Bernie Nussbaum returned to the White House the following morning, the staff was still in a collective state of disbelief. One distraught secretary, Betsy Pond, had gone into Foster’s office at 7:01 A.M. to straighten up. She wanted it to “look nice when people came to see it.” Executive secretary Linda Tripp later testified that Pond had told her she was “looking for a note” in Foster’s office. Pond denied ever saying this to Tripp and passed a polygraph test corroborating her denial. An air of suspicion was already settling over the scene. Nussbaum realized that there might be questions about who did what in Foster’s office, yet it did not yet occur to him that the room should be sealed. As he would later testify before a Senate Committee investigating Foster’s death: “It was not a crime scene. Vince did not die there. One does not typically seal the workplace of a person who commits suicide.” To quell rumors, Bernie asked a Secret Service agent to post himself outside Foster’s office to watch ingress and egress.
Later that afternoon, President Clinton drifted unannounced into the White House counsel’s suite. He and Nussbaum walked past the Secret Service sentry, entering the office to look around. Clinton stopped abruptly; he picked up a framed photo from the early 1950s of Miss Mary’s kindergarten class in Hope, Arkansas. It showed a five-year-old Vince Foster standing beside a five-year-old Billy Blythe. Carrying that photo into Bernie’s office, Clinton sat down and reminisced about his boyhood experiences with Vince, wiping away tears. The photo was then returned to Foster’s office. According to Nussbaum’s sworn testimony: “Nothing else was removed from Vince’s office that day.”
Nussbaum finally met with representatives of the U.S. Park Police and the Justice Department, agreeing to allow those officials to conduct interviews and scour Foster’s office the following day, “to search more thoroughly for a suicide note, or similar such document.” He also authorized the installation of a lock on Foster’s office door to prevent any more unauthorized visits.
It was Nussbaum’s belated sealing of Vince Foster’s office, his handling of documents, and the carrying away of boxes contained in that office that would trigger the first of many accusations of a possible cover-up, and efforts to link Foster