Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [60]
Before she went to bed, Virginia called her son the president. Her body was still trembling after taking the medicine. Yet she did her best to sound chipper, talking about the wonderful shows she had seen in Las Vegas. After that brief phone call to check in on Bill, Virginia turned in early. But Dick sensed something was wrong and had trouble falling asleep.
“Well, I got up about one o’clock,” he recounted quietly. “I woke up and I just reached over, and Virginia felt cold. And I said ‘Oh, my goodness.’ So then—I could tell that she was gone. I called the doctor, and of course, he came right out. And then the coroner came out, and the ambulances came out and all that. They said—this is probably one-thirty in the morning—they said she’d died around midnight.”
As his wife’s body was being transported to the local funeral home, Dick walked to the phone and dialed a special number that he kept in his wallet for emergencies—the president’s direct number in the family residence of the White House. Remembering that night, the eighty-nine-year-old Kelley sat back in his chair and said, “I have never had such an experience in my life as when I had to call Bill at [two] o’clock in the morning to tell him that his mother had passed away. This was really tough.”
The president flew to Hot Springs with Hillary and Chelsea for a one-night visitation at the tiny lake cottage. Close friends, including Barbra Streisand, flocked to Arkansas for a funeral service at the Hot Springs Convention Center, which was overflowing with three thousand mourners. Reverend John Miles, who presided over the funeral, told the assemblage: “Virginia was like a rubber ball; the harder life put her down, the higher she bounced.”
President Clinton, tears welling up in his eyes, rode in the procession of black cars as his mother’s casket was transported to the tiny cemetery in Hope, across the street from where she had grown up as a child, a short distance from the plot where Vince Foster had been laid to rest months earlier. The president was scheduled to attend a Europe an summit to discuss expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include Central Europe an nations, an appointment he could not cancel. As Dick Kelley hugged his stepson good-bye, the older man could see deep pain in Bill’s eyes.
A decade later, gazing at an oil painting of Virginia on the wall above his fireplace, a gift from a local Arkansas artist, Dick observed: “Bill loved her very, very, very much.” He cleared his throat and added, “Bill was so busy with this other business that he really never had time to grieve over his mother’s death.”
Even as the dirt was being shoveled on Virginia’s grave in Hope, the calls for a Whitewater special prosecutor were growing louder. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, a likely Republican candidate for president in 1996, declared that the Whitewater/Madison scandal “cries out more than ever now for an independent counsel.”
At his NATO meetings in Europe, the president flashed anger and frustration when reporters encircled him, peppering him with questions about Whitewater. A peeved Clinton switched off an NBC News reporter’s microphone, snapping, “You had your two questions.” CBS News anchor Dan Rather, reporting from Moscow, pronounced that “a cloud has followed Mr. Clinton this entire trip.”
The night of January 11, Clinton’s advisers gathered in the Oval Office. An exhausted president joined the discussion from Prague, at 2:00 A.M. his time. The Washington group huddled around a speakerphone to rehash the pros and cons of having the White House request that Attorney