Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [57]
While Mrs. Clinton and the other participants in these White House calls would later insist that they had “commiserated [with] each other” about Vince’s death and did not discuss the papers in his office, it all seemed too doubtful. Phone records and sworn testimony given to the Senate later confirmed that Mrs. Clinton and her advisers (Thomases and Williams) had actively taken part “in formulating the procedure for reviewing documents in Mr. Foster’s office” and directly or circuitously passed along their plan to Bernie Nussbaum. Perhaps most puzzling, a uniformed Secret Service agent recalled seeing Williams leaving Foster’s suite of offices at 10:42 P.M. the night of Foster’s death, after Nussbaum arrived on the scene. Officer Henry P. O’Neill would testify that Williams was “carrying what I would describe … as folders,” which were “3 to 5 inches” in thickness. Although Williams denied removing any documents that night—and passed a polygraph test to that effect—the Secret Service officer had a “clear recollection” of these events and was “certain that he saw Ms. Williams remove the documents.”
The Justice Department lawyers did not presume that there was anything “terrible” in the papers taken away from Foster’s office that would implicate the Clintons in criminal wrongdoing. Rather, they surmised there was something that posed a political danger to the First Family. Perhaps Foster had investigated allegations of a sexual affair involving Bill Clinton during the campaign; perhaps some other documents containing embarrassing material were mixed in with the papers. Whatever the reason, Justice Department officials could not help concluding that the White House was “overreacting to the fear of scandals.”
As conspiracy theories and doubts about the circumstances surrounding Foster’s death continued to multiply, the government struggled to reach closure on the matter. On August 10, 1993, three weeks after the autopsy, the U.S. Park Police, accompanied by top Justice Department officials, held a press conference. The park police announced that they had completed their inquiry into the death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr. According to Chief Robert Langston, the indisputable cause of death was suicide: “Mr. Foster was anxious about his work, and he was distressed to the degree that he took his own life.”
IT was the ultimate irony that the Foster suicide helped to revive the Whitewater scandal—since this was the last thing Vince Foster would have intended, if his mind had been clear enough to assess the consequences. Author James Stewart, who wrote about Whitewater and the Foster suicide in Blood Sport, his authoritative book on these events, would later sit in his New York office and state, “It brought it all back. I mean, if Vince Foster hadn’t killed himself, it would have all gone away.” The story now had all the ingredients of a bestseller, he explained. “The press loves a mystery. If you want to keep them out in full hue and cry, sustain the mystery. And then if you really want to add fuel to the fire, act like you’re trying to prevent the actual truth from coming out. This had all of those elements, plus a dead body.”
The suicide of a senior White House official so close to both the president and the First Lady had few parallels in American history. James Forrestal, an aide to President Harry S. Truman, had jumped out a sixteenth-floor hall window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949, after having been ousted as secretary of defense. This sparked a brief investigation that never fully satisfied some conspiracy theorists. But the Vince Foster death was an altogether different beast. It seemed to bring out of the woodwork an unprecedented swarm of doubting Thomases and accusers, who possessed a morbid curiosity for suicide, drama, political intrigue, and skulduggery.
On July 22, the Wall Street Journal published a piece titled “A Washington Death.” The paper noted: