The Clintons' War on Women (25 page)

Evans-
Pritchard found out that “Jerry Parks had carried out sensitive assignments for the Clinton inner circle for almost a decade, and the person who gave him his instructions was Vince Foster.”
vi

Things between Foster and Clinton began to change dramatically once she reached the national stage.

In the White House, Foster was denied access to Hillary. “It’s just not the same…. She’s so busy, Hub, that we don’t ever have time to talk,” Foster told Hubbell.
333
Foster said that his affair had disintegrated into miserly commands from the First Lady, who would snap at him “Fix it, Vince!” or “Handle it, Vince!”

Shunned from Hillary’s presence, Foster began to refer to her as the Client. Foster was put to task, “handling” and “fixing” all the legal problems that Hillary was creating.

The murders in Waco, Texas, in April 1993, had traumatized Foster. He believed he was partly responsible for the carnage.

A month later, Foster’s remorse was amplified by a mass firing in the White House Travel Office. The action was instigated sub rosa by Hillary and executed on May 19, 1993. The White House Travel Office handled travel arrangements for the press corps that covered the president.

Travel Office Director Billy Dale and six other employees were canned. The business of the office was handed over to World Wide Travel, an Arkansas agency that had handled travel for the 1992 Clinton campaign and whose president, Betta Carney, was a Clinton campaign contributor.
334

Dale had been the director of the office since 1982 and was immensely popular with the press corps. The firings caused a media firestorm, and the Clintons immediately claimed ignorance.

In truth, Hillary had spoken to both Foster and White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty about expediting the firings.

Five
days before the firings of the White House Travel Office, Hillary told David Watkins (Clinton crony and then White House director of administration) “We need those people out—we need our people in—we need the slots.”

Attorney and author Barbara Olson found that “William Kennedy III [a Hillary intimate] called the FBI and set them loose on the Travel Office staff like Dobermans to destroy Billy Dale’s reputation and justify the firings. As Kennedy told the FBI: It came from the ‘highest level.’”
335

Watkins wrote a memo that he put into his files to explain what really happened. Watkins said that there would be “hell to pay” if they did not fire the seven members of the White House Travel Office.

On January 5, 1996, the
New York Times
reported the Watkins memo in a story entitled “Memo Places Hillary Clinton at Core of Travel Office Case”:
336

At
the time Hillary had said she “had no role in the decision to terminate the [Travel Office] employees.”
337

Hillary perjured herself when she repeated that statement in her answers to twenty-six questions presented to her by the General Accounting Office during their investigation. An outraged Barbara Olson, who led the Travelgate investigation, wrote, “These questions were signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton on March 21, 1996, under penalty of perjury.”
338

Hillary should have been prosecuted by the Independent Counsel for lying under oath, but when the final Independent Counsel report on the Travel Office firings was issued on June 23, 2000, there simply was not the political will to prosecute Hillary. The Independent Counsel Richard Ray concluded that “Mrs. Clinton’s input into the process was significant, if not the significant factor influencing the pace of events in the Travel Office firings and the ultimate decision to fire the employees.”
339
The Independent Counsel also stated that Hillary had provided “factually false” testimony about the Travel Office firings to the GAO, the Independent Counsel, and Congress. The Independent Counsel, which had proven Hillary’s guilt, gave her a free pass without prosecution, but the scandal damaged both Clinton and Foster.

On June 17, the
Wall Street Journal
published an article titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” Foster, normally a composed, confidant lawyer, was pale, shaking, unable to speak, and probably could not even walk according to Hubbell.

Amid the stress, Foster was looking forward to having a reunion dinner with Hillary and the Hubbells the day before Father’s Day, Saturday, June 19. Hillary, Foster, Webb, and their spouses planned to gather at the Italian restaurant Matti.

The First Lady canceled at the last minute.

“We went to dinner and Hillary soon called to say she just couldn’t make it. Vince hardly said a word the rest of the evening,” recalled Hubbell. “Suzy, as much as she loved Vince, thought his behavior was extremely bizarre. ‘He was sulking,’ she said. ‘It was so
uncharacteristic of him.’ He pulled his chair back and turned himself away from the rest of the table. He was just like a child who had been promised quality time with a parent, only to have the parent renege when business had called him away.”
340

Foster’s life continued to deteriorate personally and professionally.

Hubbell had some revealing things to say about Foster’s wife, Lisa, and her thoughts on Hillary: “Lisa Foster hated that Vince would talk to Hillary, tell her things that Lisa did not know,” Hubbell wrote. Hubbell recalled an internal Rose Law Firm power struggle in the 1980s. He had told his wife Suzy about it, “but this was the first Lisa [Foster] had heard of it. She hated it. And though it had nothing to do with Hillary and everything to do with Vince, I think Lisa’s jealousy was mainly aimed at Hillary.”
341
Lisa Foster was so angry at Vince that she refused to attend the inaugural ball with him that January.
342

Another
WSJ
editorial focused on Foster’s role defending the controversial procedures of Hillary’s Health Care Task Force. The column was titled “Vincent Foster’s Victory” and it had the snarky line “We suspect that Vincent Foster and Ollie North might hit it off.”
343

“He urgently asked [Hillary’s tough gal fixer and confidant] 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,” wrote legendary journalist Carl Bernstein.
344

“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, Hubbell said…. 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 a legal
counselor, other days he was a fixer, but no longer was he her intimate.”

In July 1993, Hillary had a huge disagreement with a legal objection that Foster had raised and she “humiliated Foster in front of aides.”
345

“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-sized meeting…. She told him that he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick-town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time,” recalled FBI agent Copeland.
346
Dozens of Foster’s associates would tell Copeland and other agents that “The put-down she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge. It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”
347

On July 19, 1993, the
Wall Street Journal
ran yet another editorial slamming Vince Foster and the ethics of the Rose Law Firm lawyers who had come to Washington, DC, with the Clinton Administration. The
WSJ
also hit Hillary and Vince for being tied to the Travel Office firings.

The next day Foster took an old .38 caliber pistol, held it with both hands, and shot himself in the head in his White House office.

Ronald Kessler reported that the FBI agents’ reports of their interviews with the Clintons in relation to Foster’s suicide are mysteriously missing from the proper files where they should be at the National Archives.
348

“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, Hillary later wrote.”
349

Hillary told the Office of Independent Counsel while under oath that the last time she spoke to Vince Foster was before Father’s Day, June 20, 1993. However, Tom Castleton was an aide to Vince Foster, and he “saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed.” Castleton started working for Vince Foster after June 20, 1993.
350

The
FBI interviewed Marsha Scott, a longtime mistress of Bill Clinton and a friend and confidante of Foster who worked in the White House. The FBI report on the death of Vince Foster stated: “Scott is of the opinion that Foster committed suicide for personal reasons but commented that he didn’t separate work from personal matters. He had talked about ‘wanting out.’ He talked about ‘wanting to rest.’”
351

vi
Parks was found dead in September 1993. ‘“I believe my father was assassinated because he was the one link that could actually close everything and completely shut Clinton down,”’ said Parks’s son, Gary. ‘“I feel that Bill Clinton had my father killed to save his political career.”

CHAPTER 14

THE BODY

I
n her chronicle of life in the White House,
Living History
, Hillary Clinton admitted to some guilt over the death of Vince Foster, but a majority of the blame was shifted to the columnists who investigated crookedness in the administration.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying that the actions and reactions concerning the travel office helped drive Vince Foster to take his own life,” Hillary wrote. “Vince Foster was stung by the travel office affair…. Apparently the final blow came in a series of spiteful editorials published in the
Wall Street Journal
, which attacked the integrity and competence of all the Arkansas lawyers in the Clinton Administration. On June 17, 1993, an editorial titled ‘Who Is Vince Foster?’ proclaimed that the most ‘disturbing’ thing about the Administration was ‘its carelessness about following the law.’ For the next month, the
Journal
continued its editorial campaign to
paint the Clinton White House and my colleagues from the Rose Firm as some sort of corrupt cabal.”
353

Conservative activist Reed Irvine ridiculed the theory as “Death by Editorial.”

In truth, there was some crookedness transpiring in Foster’s office on the night of his suicide, with several aides very close to Hillary securing important items. These people were White House Counsel Nussbaum (who knew Hillary since they worked on the House Watergate Committee investigating Nixon), Maggie Williams (the chief of staff for Hillary Clinton), and Patsy Thomasson.

Secret Service Agent Henry O’Neill spotted Thomasson in the office sometime after 10:42 p.m. “I saw Maggie Williams walk out of the suite and turn to the right in the direction I was standing,” O’Neill subsequently said under oath, “She was carrying what I would describe in her arms and hands, as folders.”
354

Williams had a very different story to tell in her testimony. “I disturbed nothing while I was there [in Foster’s office],” she declared.
355
Williams said she did not remove any documents from Foster’s office; that she merely sat on the sofa.

In a 1994 press conference, Hillary denied sending her chief of staff into the office of her deceased lover. She repeated this lie to Barbara Walters on
20/20
in 1996. “I want to be very clear about this,” a stern Clinton told Walters. “There were no documents taken out of Vince Foster’s office on the night he died and I did not direct anyone to interfere in any investigation.”
356
Foster had billing records in his office that pertained to Whitewater, a scandal that threatened the administration. At the heart of Whitewater was Madison Guaranty, a bankrupt savings and loan company that financed shady real estate transactions. The collapse of Madison Guaranty cost taxpayers $60 million. The bankrupt company was partnered with Whitewater Development Corporation, the subject of the Whitewater probe and owned, in part, by the Clintons.

Clinton later admitted to a sweep of the office.

“Since Vince’s office
was never a crime scene, these actions were understandable, legal and justifiable,” Hillary wrote in
Living History,
offering a defense of the removal of Whitewater documents.