Living History (29 page)

―and it would name a man who claimed to be Bill’s half-brother. Happy Father’s Day.

Bill’s press office asked me to call and tell him about the article so that he wouldn’t get blindsided by reporters’ questions about his father. Then Bill and I had to find Virginia, who also had no idea about her husband’s past. I was particularly worried because her cancer was getting worse and she didn’t need any more stress.

When I called Webb’s house to cancel my dinner plans, Vince picked up the phone. I told him why I couldn’t make it that night.

“I’ve got to find Bill, and then we have to find his mother,” I said. “He has to be the one to tell her that this story is coming out.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry” Vince said.

“So am I. You know, I’m just so sick of this.” That’s the last time I remember talking to Vince.

For the rest of the month and into July, Vince was busy with Bernie Nussbaum, the White House counsel, in vetting candidates to replace both retiring Justice Byron “Whizzer” White on the Supreme Court and William Sessions, who had been asked to step down as head of the FBI. I was still working to keep health care reform on the congressional agenda. And I was preoccupied with preparing for my first trip out of the country as First Lady. Bill was set to attend the G-7 summit, an annual meeting of the seven leading industrial countries, in Tokyo in early July, and I was going with him.

I was looking forward to visiting Japan again. I had been there during Bill’s governorship, and I remember standing outside the gates and gazing at the beautiful Imperial Palace grounds. This time we would attend a formal dinner on the inside, hosted by the Emperor and Empress. Gentle, artistic and intelligent, this engaging couple embody the grace of their nation’s art as well as the serenity of the peaceful gardens I finally visited while at the Palace. During this trip I also met with a group of prominent Japanese women―the first of dozens of such meetings that I held around the world―to learn about the issues women were facing everywhere.

I was especially pleased that my mother could come with us on the trip. I thought she could use a radical change of scenery to help her deal with my father’s death. She had a great time with us in Japan and Korea, and then she and I met Chelsea in Hawaii where I attended a meeting about Hawaii’s statewide health care system. On July 20, Chelsea and I flew to Arkansas to drop off my mother and to visit some friends. That night, sometime between eight and nine o’clock, Mack McLarty called me at my mother’s house and told me he had terrible news: Vince Foster was dead; it looked like a suicide.

I was so staggered that I still can’t sort out the sequence of events that night. I remember crying and questioning Mack. I just couldn’t believe it. Was he sure there wasn’t a mistake? Mack gave me some sketchy details about the body discovered in a park, the handgun at the scene, a gunshot wound in the head. He wanted my advice about when to tell the President. At that moment Bill was appearing on CNN’s Larry King Live from the White House and had just agreed to go into an extra half hour. Mack asked me if I thought Bill should finish the show. I thought Mack should cut the interview short so he could tell Bill as soon as possible. I couldn’t bear the idea of Bill being told on live TV

about the tragic death of one of his closest friends.

As soon as Mack got off the line, I told my mother and Chelsea. Then I started dialing everyone I could think of who knew Vince, hoping someone could shed light on how and why this could have happened.

I craved information like oxygen. I was frantic because I felt so far away, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. As soon as Bill finished the show, I called him. He sounded shell-shocked and kept saying, “How could this have happened?” and “I should have stopped it somehow.” Immediately after I talked to Bill, he went to the town house Vince and Lisa had rented in Georgetown. In one of our numerous calls, he told me how Webb was a pillar of strength and efficiency, taking charge of the funeral that would be held in Little Rock, making the travel arrangements, doing everything that needed to be done for the family. I’ll always be grateful to Webb for that, and when I spoke to him, I offered to help in any way I could. I also talked with Lisa and with Vince’s sister Sheila.

None of us could believe what we were being told. We were all still clinging to an irrational hope that this awful nightmare stemmed from a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity.

I called Maggie Williams, who was devoted to Vince and saw him daily. All she could do was sob, so both of us tried to talk through our tears. I called Susan Thomases, who had known Vince since the 1980s. I called Tipper Gore and asked her if she thought we should bring in counselors to educate the staff about depression. Tipper was both comforting and informative, explaining that many suicides come as a surprise because we don’t know how to read the warning signs.

I stayed up all night crying and talking to friends. I wondered ceaselessly whether this tragedy could have been prevented if I or anyone had noticed something amiss in Vince’s behavior. When The Wall Street Journal editorial page had started pillorying him, I told him to ignore the stories―advice that was easy for me to give but, it seems, impossible for Vince to take. He told mutual friends that he and his friends and clients had always read the Journal in Arkansas and he couldn’t imagine facing those people after they saw the stories about him.

Vince’s funeral service was held in Little Rock’s St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Vince wasn’t Catholic, but Lisa and the children were, and holding it there meant a great deal to them. Bill spoke eloquently of the special man whom he had known all his life, and he ended by quoting a Leon Russell song, “I love you in a place that has no space or time.
I love you for my life.
You are a friend of mine.”

After the service, we drove in a long, mournful caravan to Hope, where Vince was born and raised. It was a blazing summer day, and heat rose in waves over the dusty fields. Vince was buried just outside of town. By then I was beyond words. Numb. All I could feel was a vague notion that Vince was finally safe now, back home where he belonged.

The days that followed seemed to pass in slow motion as we tried to resume a normal routine. But all of us who were close to Vince were still obsessed with the question Why?

Maggie was especially heartbroken. Bernie Nussbaum was beside himself that he had been with Vince the morning of his death and never had a clue. It had been the best week for the counsel’s office since the inauguration. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on her way to a seat on the Supreme Court, and just that morning the President had named Judge Louis Freeh as the new FBI Director. Bernie thought Vince seemed relaxed, even lighthearted.

As I learned more about clinical depression, however, I began to understand that Vince may have appeared happy because the idea of dying gave him a sense of peace. As always, Vince had a plan. His father’s Colt revolver was already in his car. It is hard to imagine the sort of pain that would make death seem like a welcome relief, but Vince was feeling it. We found out later that he had reached out for psychiatric help a few days before his suicide, but it was too late to save him. He drove out to a secluded park along the Potomac, put the gun’s barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Two days after Vince’s death, Bernie Nussbaum went to Vince’s office and, with representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, reviewed every document there for anything that might shed light on his suicide.

Bernie had already conducted a cursory search for a suicide note on the night of Vince’s death but had found nothing. According to volumes of subsequent testimony, in the course of this first search, Bernie discovered that Vince had stored in his office some personal files containing work he had done for Bill and me when he was our attorney in Little Rock, including files that had to do with the land deal called Whitewater. Bernie gave these files to Maggie Williams, who delivered them to the residence, and, soon after, they were transferred to the office of Bob Barnett, our private attorney in Washington.

Since Vince’s office was never a crime scene, these actions were understandable, legal and justifiable. But they would soon spawn a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove that Vince was murdered to cover up what he “knew about Whitewater.”

Those rumors should have ended with the official report ruling his death a suicide and with the sheet of notepaper Bernie found torn into twenty-seven pieces at the bottom of Pence’s briefcase. It was not so much a suicide note as a cry from the heart, an accounting of the things that were tearing at his soul.

“I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport,” he wrote.

“… The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff… .”

“The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] editors lie without consequence.” Those words left me grief-stricken. Vince Foster was a good man who wanted to make a contribution to his country. He could have continued to practice law in Little Rock, to serve someday as President of the Arkansas Bar Association and to never hear a bad word breathed about him. Instead, he came to Washington to work for his friend from Hope. His short time in public service destroyed his self-image and, in his mind, irreparably stained his reputation.

Shortly after his death, a columnist for Time magazine summed up the sad transformation of his life in Vince’s own words: “Before we came here,” he had said, “we thought of ourselves as good people.” He was speaking not just for himself, but for all of us who had made the journey from Arkansas. The six months since the exuberance of Inauguration Day had been brutal. My father and close friend dead; Pence’s wife, children, family and friends devastated; my motherin-law dying; the faltering missteps of a new Administration being literally turned into federal cases. I didn’t know where to turn, so I did what I often do when faced with adversity: I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding. I can see now that I was on automatic pilot, pushing myself to attend health care meetings on the Hill and deliver speeches, often on the verge of weeping. If I met someone who reminded me of my father, or I ran across a nasty comment about Vince, I would feel the tears well up in my eyes. I’m sure that I sometimes appeared brittle, sad and even angry-because I was. I knew that I had to carry on and bear the pain I felt in private. This was one of the times when I kept going on sheer willpower.

The great budget battle finally ended in August, with the passage of Bill’s economic plan. Before the vote, I had spoken with wavering Democrats who worried not only about the tough budget vote, but also about how they would explain equally difficult votes that might follow on health care, guns and trade. One Republican Congresswoman called me to explain that she agreed with the President’s goal to tame the deficit but had been ordered by her leadership to vote no regardless of her convictions. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the balanced budget package. It squeaked through the House by one vote, and Vice President Gore in his official role as President of the Senate had to vote to break a 50-50 tie. Several courageous Democrats, exemplified by Representative Marjorie Margolis Mezvinsky, who did what they believed to be in America’s long-term interests, lost in the next election.

The plan wasn’t everything the Administration had wanted, but it signaled the return of fiscal responsibility for the government and the beginning of an economic turnaround for the country, unprecedented in American history. The plan slashed the deficit in half; extended the life of the Medicare Trust Fund; expanded a tax cut called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefited fifteen million lower-income working Americans; reformed the student loan program, saving taxpayers billions of dollars; and created empowerment zones and enterprise communities that provided tax incentives for investing in distressed communities. To pay for these reforms, the plan raised taxes on gasoline and on the highest-income Americans, who in return got lower interest rates and a soaring stock market as the economy boomed. Bill signed the legislation on August 10, 1993.

By the middle of August, we were so wrapped up in work that Bill and I both nearly had to be bound, gagged and tossed onto the plane for our vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

It turned out to be a wonderful and healing time for me.

It was Ann and Vernon Jordan who persuaded us to come to the Vineyard, where they had been vacationing for years. They found us the perfect spot, a small, secluded house that belonged to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson.

The two-bedroom Cape Cod cottage sat on the edge of Oyster Pond, one of the large saltwater ponds off the southern coast of the island. I slept and swam and felt the months of tension beginning to melt away.

The Jordans’ party to celebrate Bill’s forty-seventh birthday on August 19 was filled with old friends and new people who made me laugh and relax. It was one of the best times I’d had since the inauguration. Jackie Kennedy Onassis was there with her longtime companion, Maurice Templesman. The always gracious Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, came, as did Bill and Rose Styron, who became trusted friends.

Styron, a wry, deeply intelligent Southerner with a wonderful weathered face and piercing eyes, had recently published Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, recounting his struggles with clinical depression. I talked to him about Vince at dinner, and we continued the conversation the next day during a long walk on one of the Vineyard’s beautiful beaches. He described the overwhelming sense of loss and desperation that can grip a person until the desire for release from the daily pain and disorientation makes death seem a preferable, even rational, choice.

I also spent time with Jackie. Her house, surrounded by several hundred of the most beautiful acres on Martha’s Vineyard, had books and flowers everywhere and windows looking out over the gentle dunes leading to the ocean in the distance. The house had the same unpretentious elegance that characterized everything Jackie did.