Contempt Read online

  The response from the Washington press in the first six months of the Clinton administration was disparaging. “Who’s Vincent Foster?” asked the Wall Street Journal editorial page. At each administration misstep, Foster was being attacked, painted as a slimy political operative with no integrity. I could well imagine his pain.

  Vince Foster was struggling to put out fires and getting blasted by the Wall Street Journal. On May 8, 1993, two months before his death, Foster gave a commencement address to the law school graduates at the University of Arkansas, his alma mater. He seemed reflective and, in hindsight, troubled.

  “The reputation you develop for intellectual and ethical integrity will be your greatest asset or your worst enemy,” Foster said. “You will be judged by your judgment. . . . There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor, which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity. . . . Dents to [your] reputation in the legal profession are irreparable.”

  Days later, yet another furor erupted over the Clintons’ purge of the entire White House Travel Office, which arranged travel for the press corps that followed the president.

  The seven career employees, who had served Republican and Democrat administrations going back to the Reagan years, were summarily fired. Director Billy Dale, who had worked in the office since 1961, was charged with several crimes and had to hire a lawyer. One of Hillary’s cronies from the campaign, a Hollywood producer named Harry Thomason who had his own air charter business, took over.

  Catherine Cornelius, Bill Clinton’s second cousin, had been spying for Thomason inside the Travel Office, removing documents and reporting rumors and innuendo that the Travel Office people were skimming money and living far beyond their means.

  Based on these rumors, and on Thomason’s assurances that Dale and his employees were dirty, the First Lady pressured members of her staff to get rid of the career folks and get their own people in. “We need those slots,” she told a member of her staff.

  Her attitude was: Off with their heads!

  The Travel Office staff served at the pleasure of the president. It was certainly within the prerogative of the new administration to fire or reassign those employees. But the abrupt housecleaning and the manner in which it was carried out smacked of an ugly form of political patronage. Members of the press condemned the White House for the lack of due process and besmirching the employees’ reputations.

  Hillary told Foster to clean up the mess.

  On the plus side of the new administration’s political ledger, the Supreme Court nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been well received, and was destined to sail easily through the Senate even though she’d been an ACLU women’s reproductive rights lawyer before she went on the D.C. Circuit. Foster had been a pivotal member of the team that vetted and shepherded Ginsburg through the confirmation process. That was a huge victory for the fledgling administration.

  But White House life is filled with exhilarating ups and depressing downs, sometimes on the same day. The mistakes landed on Foster’s desk, and he was tasked with sorting them out—and at all costs, protecting his bosses.

  His close friend Hillary didn’t seem grateful. She excoriated Foster within earshot of others, then gave him the cold shoulder for weeks.

  Shortly after lunch on July 20, Foster grabbed his coat; bade farewell to his executive assistant in the White House Counsel’s office, Linda Tripp; gave her some mints from the White House Mess; and left.

  Tripp was the last known person in the White House complex to see Vince alive.

  Heading west across the Potomac into Virginia, Foster drove north on the George Washington Parkway toward Maryland, and pulled into a small park named after the fort that, during the Civil War, had protected the southern banks of the Potomac.

  Foster parked his car, locked it, walked into Fort Marcy Park, and sat down on a berm that had been a Civil War fortification. He pulled out a pistol that had been in his family for two generations, put the gun in his mouth, and fired. No witnesses. No suicide note left behind. No farewell call to his spouse, or to anyone else. His body was discovered a little after 6:00 P.M.

  The news of Foster’s death shocked and perplexed everyone. He had no known enemies. Everyone liked and admired Vince.

  Making his suicide even more inexplicable, Vince’s wife and children were moving from Little Rock to D.C. that summer. His family would be reunited and at least three and a half years of prestige-filled service in a coveted West Wing office remained ahead of him.

  The provocative question inevitably emerged: Did a depressed Foster really take his own life? Or was he murdered?

  An investigation by the U.S. Park Police confirmed that he committed suicide, but questions remained. What happened to the bullet? Why had the White House prevented the Park Police from searching his office in the aftermath? The official finding didn’t quash the rumors. Conspiracy theories began to spread, alleging that Foster had been murdered by the Clintons’ operatives, to protect them from his testimony or to prevent him producing records damning for the Clintons. These rumors took hold of the public imagination.

  Seeking to put the matter to rest, Fiske opened an investigation. His investigators confirmed that Foster had committed suicide in the place where his body had been found. They found no evidence of foul play. Reflecting Fiske’s Yankee personality, his team’s report was short, succinct and to the point. The case was clear, so there was no need for elaboration. Unfortunately, Fiske’s report was dismissed in various quarters as unconvincing at best and a whitewash at worst, raising more questions than it answered. Adverse reactions to the terse death report were strong, and they didn’t subside over the ensuing days.

  Vince Foster’s death haunted me. In many ways, I was a lot like him: serious about the law, conscientious, and loyal to a fault. Foster had been needled by the media, which I knew all too well could be brutal, especially for someone not used to the public eye.

  A note he had written had eventually been found torn to pieces in the bottom of his briefcase: “I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork. I did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conduct. . . . I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

  I understood that a sensitive man, plagued by the media and depression, might take his own life. I also understood that the brief investigative report would not satisfy the public.

  Years earlier I had worked with lawyer David Belin, who had been senior counsel to the Warren Commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of JFK. Warren was a man in a hurry and believed the nation needed to know what had happened as soon as possible.

  Belin concurred in the commission’s findings, but lamented that in the final report they had not discussed and debunked various conspiracy theories. Released on September 24, 1964, the report failed to knock down the wilder stories that sprang up. Consequently, they grew exponentially. Belin was so upset by this fallout that he wrote his own book: November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury.

  Learning from Belin’s experience, I decided the investigation into Foster’s death would begin anew. I was stepping into Fiske’s shoes, but I would not simply retrace his path. I would start over and take a second look.

  He had personally directed the Washington office’s operations out of Little Rock. We would augment the ranks for a more in-depth investigation.

  The question of leadership for the OIC’s Washington office loomed large. There was no senior lawyer like Hickman Ewing at the Washington office. To my relief, I was able to recruit Mark Tuohey, a friend and prominent leader of the D.C. bar. He was entering a stage of professional transition, ready to move from his Pittsburgh-based law firm to a more national platform. He came on board as senior deputy.

  Tuohey set a significantly different tone in the D.C. office. A great raconteur who c
ould charm birds out of trees, Tuohey was a people person with street smarts. And he knew everybody who was anybody in Washington.

  A highly accomplished lawyer in private practice, Tuohey had limited but intense experience at a policy level at the DOJ. Though he wasn’t a career prosecutor, he was well known to local federal judges, especially in the District. A devout Irish Catholic, he was an active Democrat who had supported Clinton’s election. The White House could not attack him as a partisan out to get them.

  Looking ahead, I thought that prosecutorial experience was less likely to be important in the Washington office. We were more likely to run into complex issues of law and policy, and to have significant interaction with Capitol Hill. I began developing a D.C.-based “brain trust” of young lawyers I knew well. The intellectual firepower assembled in our Washington office was strong, rounded out by a singular hire: the “Legendary Sam” Dash (aka LSD by my team), a professor at Georgetown Law Center.

  I knew Dash well through Washington legal circles. A longtime criminal law professor and former prosecutor, he was universally admired for his dogged pursuit of truth during the Watergate era, when he became a national figure and household name. He had later been a key architect of the original independent counsel statute.

  Dash had served as senior counsel to the colorful Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, who had chaired the Senate Select Committee probing the White House scandal. With his twitching white eyebrows, Senator Ervin became an American folk hero. And Sam Dash was always at his side.

  With the Watergate hearings featured on national television every day, Dash’s incisive questioning of various witnesses, such as Nixon White House counsel John Dean, was still vivid two decades later in the minds not only of lawyers but of the American people. The Washington press corps respected Dash for his unbending integrity.

  Dash was very self-possessed; in some ways, he lived in the past. Watergate was almost always on his lips, but at the same time he was well versed in criminal law and practice, more a street prosecutor than a scholarly lawyer.

  Dash called me during the early weeks of the investigation and asked to come over to the D.C. office. In our windowless conference room, he got right to the point.

  “Ken, you are already coming under fire because of your Republican background. You also haven’t been a prosecutor. You’ll have tough decisions to make. I would like to help you. I can be a sounding board for the whole staff, including in Little Rock as you come to decisions about whether and who to prosecute.”

  I enthusiastically welcomed the idea. Dash would serve as our ethics counsel. He would not leave his academic perch at Georgetown, but would jettison all other projects to come alongside my staff both in D.C. and in Little Rock.

  Especially appealing to me was the fact that the presence of Tuohey and Dash put the lie to the allegations that the Starr investigation was politically motivated. Insults, condemnations, and outright lies about the Starr appointment were now an everyday occurrence. The metanarrative had solidified: the GOP had engineered the firing of the nonpartisan Fiske, and gerrymandered the system through Judge Sentelle to insert a Republican loyalist and right-wing hit man to “get” the Clintons.

  My motivation in hiring both men was to promote public confidence in the honest administration of justice. With Dash and Tuohey, we created institutional structures or “guardrails” that would guide the exercise of prosecutorial discretion as we tackled important questions.

  For example, a proposed indictment would be presented before the grand juries in either Little Rock or D.C. only after undergoing an exacting internal review, what I called the “deliberative process.” This process would always include Dash. The roundtable discussion, common in judges’ chambers, was painstakingly thorough, with all participants not only welcome but encouraged to speak up.

  For the most part, Dash did not work with witnesses, or appear in the grand jury. He was to serve instead as an outside adviser, ethics counselor, and ultimately our independent voice of professional conscience. He asked probing questions, and at times played devil’s advocate. He made sure we were careful and our cases were airtight.

  And we did have to be careful, since many distractions, in the form of accusations outside our purview, came up. One day at the Little Rock airport, as I was emerging from a connecting flight, I was accosted by an agitated Arkansas resident.

  “Mr. Starr, have you looked into the Calico Rock prison deal?” she sputtered. “Crooked as a snake.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely. “I’ll alert the FBI to your concern.” And I did, right away.

  Whether that Arkansas state prison transaction was clean or dirty was not the business of my investigation. That was the responsibility of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Little Rock or the DOJ’s Criminal Division in Washington.

  But once I took over the Fiske investigation, I realized even more clearly how uncovering evidence in a Whitewater-related crime sometimes led to the discovery of others. Those crimes would fall under our jurisdiction.

  With my team largely in place, the Starr investigation got under way. At our first roundtable in Little Rock in the fall of 1994, Dash described the method Watergate investigators had used when tackling the issue of “what did the president know and when did he know it?”

  They identified people closest to the targets of the investigation—aides, secretaries, friends, coworkers, lovers—and worked their way out in circles. That’s how they first learned of Nixon’s secret taping system, which ultimately revealed the president’s obstruction of justice.

  Over time, the team in Little Rock grew fatigued with Dash’s stories. Some would say he was a shameless self-promoter. That wasn’t my experience. He tended to pontificate, but I wanted to hear what he had to say.

  Hickman had another method of eliciting information: “getting the molecules moving.” Say a dirty sheriff had both a wife and a mistress. They’d end up in the grand jury waiting room together, standing by for their turn to testify. We didn’t have that particular scenario, but there were periods in our investigation when it seemed molecules definitely were moving.

  But that would take time. With Tuohey on board in Washington, we launched our reinvestigation into the death of Vincent Foster. We later brought on three of the nation’s preeminent experts in homicide and suicide: Dr. Brian Blackbourne, medical examiner for San Diego County; Dr. Henry C. Lee, an expert in physical evidence and crime scene reconstruction, and director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory; and Dr. Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. They began working with a handful of experienced FBI agents dedicated to the Foster investigation.

  On December 20, 1993, the White House had confirmed that Whitewater-related documents had been in Foster’s office at the time of his death. Why had they disappeared? And did their absence have anything to do with his death?

  Our Washington office began interviewing personnel of the U.S. Park Police, White House employees, and Foster’s friends and family members. I knew how Washington thinks. Leaving any doubt as to the cause of death by a high-ranking Executive Branch official was a recipe for endless conspiracy theories. I was determined to get to the bottom of Foster’s death.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Whitewater Complexities

  The night before I flew to Little Rock each week, my D.C. assistant, Neille Russell, would call Hickman’s assistant, Debbie Gershman, with a message from me:

  “Tell Hickman we’re going to go get some lard.”

  That meant breakfast at the Waffle House, that iconic purveyor of high cholesterol fare so familiar in the South.

  On December 7, 1994, Hickman and I ate waffles and bacon and drank a vat of coffee while we talked about where the Whitewater investigation stood. Hickman, who had been working on it for about three months, pulled out a yellow legal pad and began sketching an extraordinarily
complex diagram.

  At the top were the initials BC and HRC—Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton—with lines connecting them to a web of perhaps thirty associates, foremost Jim and Susan McDougal. Hickman’s diagram reinforced the briefing I got from Fiske on that first night in Little Rock.

  Bill Clinton had known Jim McDougal for decades. In the late 1960s, both had come into the orbit of Democrat senator Bill Fulbright, an elegant, eccentric man from a wealthy Arkansas family. A Rhodes scholar, Fulbright managed to repeatedly get reelected in his home state despite his vaguely English accent.

  McDougal, who was six years older than Clinton, worked as an aide to Fulbright, soaking up stories and Arkansas political lore. McDougal had a reputation as a raconteur and playboy. He adopted Fulbright’s sense of style, wearing fine suits and Panama hats. The press could count on him for a pithy quote no matter the situation.

  When Clinton returned to Arkansas during a term break as an undergrad at Georgetown, he took over McDougal’s job as driver for Senator Fulbright. To McDougal, the twenty-one-year-old from Hot Springs seemed “affable and obviously smart,” but that gig didn’t last long. Clinton kept up a steady stream of patter and argued with the senator about the Vietnam War and other policy issues. He saw no need for deference to the venerable lion of the Senate. The job didn’t turn into anything long term, and Clinton went off to law school.

  The connection with Fulbright may not have benefited Clinton much, but the senator’s connection would turn out to be pivotal for McDougal.

  After Clinton decided to run for office, he and McDougal reconnected and forged a strong friendship. Clinton and another friend, Jim Guy Tucker, a lawyer who at one point was McDougal’s roommate, were rising stars in Arkansas politics.

  McDougal would be unsuccessful in his own election bids, but he had good political instincts and a deep knowledge of Arkansas political history, thanks to Fulbright. Perhaps even more important, he knew how to find money. McDougal had begun investing in real estate, often inviting friends like Fulbright to invest with him. Despite his family’s wealth, Fulbright pinched pennies and was delighted when one of McDougal’s land-flipping projects made him money.