Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [72]
Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.), the presumptive Republican challenger to President Bill Clinton in 1996, likewise chastised the special prosecutor for cozying up to the Clinton White House. Yet Fiske held his ground. He continued to oppose “congressional hearings on any aspect of the Whitewater affair” until he completed the criminal probe. There was precedent for this position. During Watergate, special prosecutor Archibald Cox had fought mightily to block Senator Sam Ervin’s Senate Watergate Committee from holding and televising hearings, because these might taint his case against John Dean and other defendants. Cox had gone so far as to gather up his evidence against Dean and lock it in a safe, so that he could segregate his own criminal case from information derived from Dean’s public testimony in Congress. Otherwise, the blurring of Cox’s own evidence with the public testimony might wreck his prosecution. Robert Fiske, like Cox, believed that good independent counsels should stay as far away from Congress as humanly possible.
Consequently, many Republicans were beginning to view Fiske as an apostate.
The final nail was pounded into the coffin when Fiske announced that he was wrapping up portions of his criminal probe within six months of his appointment. On Thursday, June 30, Fiske rode the Metroliner from New York to Washington, filing two reports. In one, Fiske cleared the White House with respect to the Treasury Office flap, reporting that no crimes had been committed. In the second, more noteworthy document, he concurred with the Fairfax County medical examiner and park police that Vince Foster had “committed suicide by firing a bullet from a .38 revolver into his mouth. The evidence overwhelmingly supports this conclusion, and there is no evidence to the contrary.” Fiske also concluded: “We found no evidence that issues involving Whitewater, or other personal legal matters of the president or Mrs. Clinton were a factor in Foster’s suicide.”
The Clintons felt vindicated. White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler issued a statement: “We hope these rumor mongers … will now leave the Foster family in peace.”
Yet the reaction to the dual Fiske reports, in certain quarters, was one of outrage. Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), one of Fiske’s most ardent critics, took to the Senate floor in June and decried the special prosecutor’s investigation as a “coverup.” He declared that further hearings were needed to clean up “a whole web of intrigue that has collectively come to be known as Whitewater.” Faircloth also publicly rebuked Fiske for issuing his reports, suggesting that they were both premature and flawed. The senator wrote directly to Attorney General Reno on July 1, calling Fiske “unfit for the job.”
Looking back on the outcry to Fiske’s work in the summer of 1994, President Clinton expressed incredulity. “It wasn’t like he [Fiske] deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor or something. He just did what he was supposed to do with the facts,” said the former president. “And, God, the way the Republicans went nuts—Lauch Faircloth and all those right-wing Republicans and the media people.”
Clinton believed that his critics were particularly incensed because, once he was foolish enough to agree to an independent counsel, he and Hillary were “supposed to be hung from the highest tree. The truth could not be allowed to get in the way. The facts were completely irrelevant.” The hysterical reaction to Fiske’s Vince Foster report was proof enough. “Because it wasn’t even a complicated case. I mean it was just a no-brainer, a lay-down. Everybody else had concluded it was a suicide. There was no compelling evidence to the contrary. And they were mad.”
President Clinton took a deep breath before finishing his thought: “I only began to come to grips with the magnitude of what I was up against when I realized that the facts of Whitewater and all were utterly irrelevant. That’s basically why they had to get rid of Fiske. I mean, he, Fiske, was actually doing his job. He was going to find out if