Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [70]
Bill Kennedy, who had served as managing partner at the Rose Law Firm before relocating to the White House, was “absolutely devastated” by the revelation of Hubbell’s double life. Not only had Hubbell betrayed the trust of every partner in the firm, but he had recklessly dragged the president and First Lady into the mess. The fact that Hubbell had left Little Rock to become associate attorney general of the United States, when he knew “he’d stolen a whole lot of money from clients of this firm,” was simply mind-boggling.
Yet Kennedy and others who were victims of Hubbell’s thievery were equally angry at how political enemies had manipulated the story. After all, the Clintons, personally, had been victims of Hubbell’s scam; Hillary’s share of partnership profits had been stolen. Yet someone had leaked the story to the media, managing to get the inquiry funneled to Robert Fiske rather than to the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Board or to the local authorities, where it belonged. “Somebody leaked it at the firm,” Kennedy would later say. “Some rat bastard went to the press.” In Kennedy’s view, it was wholly “inappropriate” to inject an independent counsel into the equation. “There’s no national crime here,” he said. “There’s no federal involvement.”
But the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) did get involved, first subpoenaing Webb Hubbell’s bills relating to Madison, and then digging deeper into the scam by which Hubbell had ripped off his partners and clients. Attorney General Reno formally expanded Robert Fiske’s jurisdiction to include this new blockbuster criminal matter, determined to keep the Justice Department (where Hubbell had been third in command) out of the mess.
IT was in the context of the sudden uproar involving the Hubbell case that the dormant conspiracy theories relating to the death of Vince Foster resurrected themselves, now reaching a deafening pitch. The New York Post raised questions about how “little blood loss” there was at the Fort Marcy Park scene, intimating that Foster’s death had occurred elsewhere. Christopher Ruddy, a journalist who wrote about Foster for the Greensburg (Pa.) Tribune-Review—a paper owned by staunchly conservative millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife—churned out articles raising questions about strange carpet fibers on Foster’s clothes; the pistol in Foster’s hand; the discovery of Foster’s eyeglasses more than a dozen feet from his body; and other suspicious factors. Televangelist Pat Robertson asked his 700 Club program viewers: “Suicide or murder? That’s the ominous question surfacing in the Whitewater swell of controversy concerning Vincent Foster’s mysterious death.” The New York Post picked up on that thread of innuendo, reporting that Foster had shared a “secret apartment hideaway” in Virginia with Clinton intimates and hinting that he had been sneaking off with Hillary to engage in an affair there. These reports reached a crescendo with the shocking story aired by conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who announced that a media source “claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton.”
Joe Purvis, the burly childhood friend of Vince Foster and Bill Clinton, later said of Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast: “It was absolutely repulsive, you know, the way he slammed [Vince’s] reputation, an excellent man’s reputation,” with this “seamy slime that he just made up.” Purvis said he wanted to shout at Limbaugh and other conservative rumormongers: