A Woman in Charge

  Tinkering with the levers and personnel changes, however, were just that: tinkering. In the last year of the Clinton presidency, a member of the White House legal team, Mark Fabiani, succinctly and devastatingly explained many of the difficulties of the early days of the administration: “Based on everything that anybody ever found out about that period, she was the one that was directing. During the campaign, they went out and got Jim Lyons, the lawyer in Denver, to write the so-called Lyons Report to justify their investment in Whitewater. She was the general. She said, ‘You know, these people are coming after us. Here’s what we’re going to do.’ And no one ever disputed that. When the New York Times threatened to run a front-page story saying that she lied about having released all the Whitewater records, there wasn’t even a thought about saying, ‘Well, she wasn’t in charge of releasing the records.’ Because she was in charge of it. She was the one that made the decision. And as far as I can tell it was that way from then on….

  “But it was always very ad hoc. It would be event-driven: scramble, marshal what people you could drag together. Drag John Podesta in. Drag Susan Thomases in. You know, get people in a room. Decide what to do and then, you sort of handle it as part of your other duties. Which never really worked for anybody. The Travel Office was a very similar thing…. No matter what you believe about what she said or didn’t say, she was at the center of that whole effort to review the Travel Office. People updated her about it. People talked to her about it. And, you know, she’s in the middle of these things, because she wants to be in the middle of these things. And she’s concerned about this stuff.

  “When there was an [internal] investigation of the Travel Office, she was not under oath. But the counsel’s office basically wrote an answer that purported to be her. ‘Mrs. Clinton does not believe…Mrs. Clinton did not do this, or that…Mrs. Clinton did not instigate….’

  “Basically, the response was to say, she did not order the firing of these people and wasn’t involved in it. And, again, it’s the type of situation where the aftermath is much worse than the original action.

  “And there was a pattern…. I mean it happened every time. It happened with Whitewater in ’92. It happened with the Travel Office. It happened when Foster killed himself. You know, she was the one who got people together and figured out, you know, ‘How are we going to handle this? How are we going to deal with it?’”

  FOR THE LAST MONTH of Vince Foster’s life, Hillary spoke with him at most once—and then for hardly a second. Foster’s position in the White House was unique. He was deputy counsel to the president, technically the deputy to Bernard Nussbaum, but his knowledge of what was going on in the White House, upstairs and downstairs, was far greater than Nussbaum’s owing to his lifelong friendship with the president and, even more important, his relationship with Hillary. In fact, his overriding knowledge of the intricacies of White House business, private and public, exceeded that of the chief of staff, McLarty, or anyone else in the administration.

  No one has ever presented convincing evidence that Vince and Hillary were lovers. But they had been, in some ways, closer than lovers, absent the rancor and messy business that usually attends a love affair. By all accounts, Hillary was totally unguarded in his presence, and, until they got to Washington, he in hers, at least as far as his restrained self would permit.

  Perhaps even more than Bill Clinton, Vince understood Hillary’s good intentions in everything he had ever seen her do. And because he knew her so well, he understood her gray areas, the shadings, complexions, and context that would never be nearly so apparent to someone else.

  In four months in Washington, Foster had come to understand the harshness of the place. Unfortunately, he found little to enjoy, not even the physical beauty of the city. The political combat that had come to define the capital and demean the practice of governance was something far removed from anything he’d observed in Arkansas, or from his faraway view of Washington from Little Rock. He had been completely unprepared for the sheer brutality of the place, and he was out of his league.

  A first-rate litigator, a wise counselor, a gentle soul, his rapid immersion into the Washington cauldron, feet first, was far different than that experienced by, say, a congressman, who gradually got used to the place without the whole country watching his every move.

  Foster came to Washington to personally serve the president and the first lady; by extension, he was there to help them serve the country. His interests were theirs. Let Bernie Nussbaum worry about the institutional sanctity of the White House (Nussbaum actually spent little time doing so, and saw himself as a zealous, pugnacious defender of this president and his presidency).

  Only Betsey Wright had ever had as clear a view of what transpired between Bill and Hillary in public and private, and her view was from the perspective of the governor’s office; her interaction with Hillary was based on the mutual interest they shared in keeping Bill functioning at his best. Vince’s perspective was almost exactly the opposite of Betsey’s: though he had first known Bill when they were children in Hope, he had become a presence in his life again only after Hillary came to work at the Rose Law Firm in 1976. He knew more about Bill from Hillary than from Bill. Vince had become a shoulder for her to lean on. Though insouciance was not the first word that many acquaintances would use to describe Hillary, Vince saw that in her and loved it. He shared a side of himself with her as she shared a piece of her life that she could not with Bill. There was nothing threatening to Bill about their closeness, nothing illicit, and he, too, had great appreciation for Vince’s qualities of discretion, wisdom, legal skill, and—something Bill often lacked—decorum.

  Foster was particularly stressed about the internal investigation of the Travel Office firings. He had brought Bill Kennedy in to work on the audit and FBI investigation, and now he felt responsible. He told Webb Hubbell he was thinking of hiring a lawyer, though Hubbell didn’t know if that was for Foster or his deputy. Foster was also worried that there would be hearings on Capitol Hill, and that he would be part of the investigation. The stress was taking a physical toll on him. His face became drawn and gray, and he appeared perpetually exhausted. His wife and children had recently arrived to take up residence. “At the time, we laughed about the fact that Bruce, Vince, and I were all losing weight,” Hubbell recalled. “We called it being on the Stress Diet.”

  Particularly grating to Foster was the series of destructive editorials in The Wall Street Journal criticizing the president’s aides. When one day the newspaper asked him for a photograph of himself, he stalled because he knew the Journal’s intentions weren’t good and because he wanted no part of the political spotlight. Lawyers should do their work in private, he told a friend.

  Foster eventually sent in his headshot, but on June 17, the paper printed a column entitled “Who Is Vince Foster?” with a large question mark where the photo normally would have gone. The editorial argued that the Clinton White House tended toward “carelessness about following the law,” and pointed to the example of Foster’s refusal to provide the newspaper with a photograph of himself, the Journal’s Freedom of Information Act request to obtain one, and how Foster and the White House had not responded within a ten-day period as law required. “No doubt Mr. Foster and company consider us mischievous (at best),” the Journal’s editors wrote. “Does the law mean one thing for critics and another for friends? Will we, in the end, have to go to court to get a reply, or will even that work? Does it take a $50,000-a-day fine to get this mule’s attention?”

  On June 24, another Journal column, “Vincent Foster’s Victory,” attacked Foster’s partially successful appeal defending the procedures of Hillary’s health care task force, in the physicians and surgeons lawsuit. “We suspect that Vincent Foster and Ollie North might hit it off,” the editors wrote.

  Barely anyone in Washington outside of the political right paid attention to the paper’s editorial page, which was overtly biased in contrast to the rest of the paper’s journ
alism. But Foster knew that members of Arkansas’s professional community read the Journal, and its editorials, religiously. He believed the Journal’s editors were trying to force an Arkansan to leave the White House. Foster also worried that its reporters or someone else’s would again allege that he and Hillary had had an affair. Foster’s sister, Sheila Anthony, and his colleagues at the White House tried to convince Foster that the editorials were “par for the course” in Washington politics.

  THE WHITE HOUSE released the internal Travel Office Management Review’s findings on July 2. Watkins, Kennedy, Cornelius, and Jeff Eller, director of media affairs in the White House, received formal reprimands. Harry Thomason, Myers, Stephanopoulos, and the counsel’s office were also criticized.

  Podesta and Stern had allowed Maggie Williams to review a draft of the report before it was released, and, in the final version, barely mentioned Hillary’s participation and the effect her interest had on the staff. Still, Hillary was furious at Podesta for dragging her through the investigation. She would hold a grudge and blacklist him the following November when he was considered for deputy chief of staff.

  As the White House had hoped, the report lost some of its sting in the dead news cycle over the long July 4 weekend. Still the New York Times asked, “Why was notice sent to Hillary Rodham Clinton and not her husband the president?”

  Back in May, Senators Bob Dole and Arlen Specter had called for a congressional investigation, but the Democrats who controlled the majority rejected hearings on the firings. On July 14, Dole made a speech from the Senate floor asking Attorney General Reno to appoint a special counsel. This was the first moment in the Clinton presidency when Republicans made a strong case for a criminal investigation of the Clintons and the people around them. A line was crossed psychologically for Hillary, and even more so for her chosen protector, Vince Foster.

  Foster was beside himself. He believed that he had personally failed Hillary and the president on the Travel Office matter. He spoke to his wife about resigning. Foster told Hubbell he feared his office phone was being bugged by the Secret Service or Republican loyalists at the White House. Foster’s wife suggested he put his frustrations on paper as a kind of therapy. “I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience, and overwork,” he wrote. “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.” He wrote of the Journal editorials, “The WSJ editors lie without consequence.” The Travel Office fiasco appeared to be the greatest source of his anxiety. He wrote, “No one in the White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the Travel Office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group.”

  He urgently asked Susan Thomases to meet with him. He told her he feared Hillary would be blamed for the Travel Office firings and dragged through the mud. He also confided to Thomases that he was exhausted and that his marriage was strained. He and his wife were fighting about whether to go back to Arkansas. “I’m sure he wanted to go, but felt he couldn’t,” Hubbell explained. “He also wanted to stay in Washington, but felt he couldn’t. He couldn’t do either because of that thing inside him that demanded he not fail—that he always march proudly forward toward excellence and never turn back in defeat.”

  At the same time, it was increasingly hard for Foster to keep fighting tooth and nail for Hillary’s interests when their relationship had degenerated, said Hubbell. “Vince had her heart, he did,” said a close friend of Foster. “In the end, I think they both were brokenhearted. He couldn’t serve her, he couldn’t do enough for her, once she became the first lady. And, she couldn’t allow him to be her real friend, like he’d been, because she wasn’t herself.” When he had left Arkansas for Washington, he had expected the relationship with Hillary to remain as deep as ever. The last thing he had expected is that it would turn upside down. Some days he was a flunky, some days he was a legal counselor, other days he was a fixer, but no longer was her intimate. “He was completely out of his game, and the work kept piling up,” Foster’s friend recalled. “And Hillary does not like things not happening when she wants them to happen. And trails were leading back toward her.”

  Each day he came back to his drab office. He had no pictures on the walls, just a few in a bookcase. There were still boxes everywhere. He couldn’t really confide in his friends about much more than the workload. Still he got together once or twice a week for dinner with his old friends from Arkansas—Hubbell, Marsha Scott, Nancy Hernreich, Deb Coyle. They would go to Two Quail or other places open late. They wouldn’t leave work until after 10 P.M. The Arkansas crowd knew he was struggling, but they did not suspect the severity of the depression he was experiencing.

  On July 16, Foster went to the White House medical unit to have his blood pressure taken. He called his sister and told her that he was depressed. She recommended three Washington psychiatrists.

  The Wall Street Journal tied Foster and Hillary to the Travel Office firings in yet another editorial on Monday, July 19. “The mores on display from the Rose alumni are far from confidence-building,” the editorial chided. “So the gang that pulled the great Travel Office caper is now hell-bent on firing the [outgoing] head of the FBI…. Mr. Hubbell and Mr. Kennedy are alumni of Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, as are Mrs. Clinton and Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, both of whom were also involved in the travel-office affair.”

  The president was concerned about how Foster would react to the editorial, and called to invite him to a White House movie screening of In the Line of Fire (strangely, about a would-be presidential assassin and a heroic Secret Service agent) that night. Foster declined, saying that he was already home for the night and wanted to spend some time with his wife. Clinton tried to help him forget about the Journal’s criticism, telling him the editorials had no influence except with conservatives already hostile to the administration, Clinton recalled many years later. Foster remained upset. As Clinton wrote in his memoir, he felt like “everyone had read the negative things about him and believed them.” Foster agreed to come see the president two days later.

  Foster had received a prescription for antidepressants from his family doctor in Arkansas. That night, he took his first dose.

  On Tuesday, July 20, Foster left the office around 1 P.M. Five hours later, the United States Park Police found him shot dead at Fort Marcy Park in northern Virginia. A bullet had been fired into his mouth. A revolver was in his hand.

  Hillary got the news from Mack McLarty, who called her between 8 and 9 that night. Hillary was stunned silent. She had taken the call in her mother’s kitchen in Little Rock. She and Chelsea had flown there to visit her mother and some friends. From across the room, she appeared so stricken that Lisa Caputo worried that something had happened to the president.

  “I can’t believe it’s true,” Hillary said. “It just can’t be true.” She started to cry.

  “Let’s hope and pray that this is some terrible mistake,” McLarty said, giving her some of the details of how the body was discovered. “What about Bill, does he know?” she asked.

  McLarty said he hadn’t yet told the president, who was in the middle of being interviewed live by Larry King on CNN. He promised to call her back when there was more information.

  McLarty entered the White House Library, where the president was being interviewed. The appearance was going so well that Clinton had agreed to continue for an extra thirty minutes. But McLarty told the producers the president could not stay, and he led Clinton out during a commercial break. They went upstairs to the residence, and McLarty relayed what had happened.

  Does Hillary know? the president asked, his eyes filling with tears.

  Clinton and McLarty went to Foster’s house to comfort the family, where they were joined by Webb Hubbell and his wife, Suzy, Marsha Scott, David Gergen, Vernon Jordan, and other friends.

  Hillary stayed up all night calling friends and crying. “I’m okay,” she told Hubbell over th
e phone. “How are you holding up?” They agreed to talk more in person when Hubbell came to Arkansas for Vince’s funeral. “Take care of Lisa and the kids, Webb,” she said. “But hurry home.”

  Hillary had already had the experience of her uncle’s self-destructive death and the suicide of Bill’s close friend Frank Aller, in 1971, the first year of the courtship, but she said she could never have made the assumption that Foster had hit his breaking point. “Of a thousand people, of those who might commit suicide, I would never pick Vince,” she said. She asked Nussbaum, How could he have done this? Why didn’t he tell us? We could have helped him. We could have known. We should have known, she said.

  The president gathered his staff the day after Foster’s death to urge them to spend time away from the office with their loved ones. He eulogized Foster’s “extraordinary sense of propriety and loyalty, and I hope that when we remember him and this, we’ll be a little more anxious to talk to each other and a little less anxious to talk outside of our family.” Hillary had already consulted with Tipper Gore, who had suffered from depression, about bringing in grief counselors. She told her staff to take some time for themselves, to go on vacation.

  When Clinton addressed reporters in the Rose Garden, he unintentionally made it sound—to those who wanted to listen for it—like he had something to cover up. “As I tried to explain, especially to the young people on the staff, there is really no way to know why these things happen,” Clinton had said, referring rather to the theory that the motivations for suicide were difficult to understand. Some right-wing groups and press immediately intimated that the president, the first lady, or surrogates had ordered Foster killed. It would become a familiar refrain.