Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (52 page)

Later still, remarried to an attorney, Jane Parks recalled that in July 1993, Jerry had been called by a White House aide and Arkansas friend of the Clintons, Vincent Foster. Now she remembered that Jerry had shouted at Foster, “You’re not going to use those files! My name’s all over this stuff. You can’t give Hillary those files. You can’t! Remember what she did, what you told me she did. She’s capable of doing anything!” Jane’s excellent hearing also picked up what Foster said in reply: “He was going to meet Hillary at ‘the flat’ and he was going to give her the files.”
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A few hours later Foster was dead, found shot.

As Evans-Pritchard conceded, the telephone timetable outlined by the widow was impossible. He suspected that “Jane Parks has muddled the day.” It annoyed him, however, that some people in the press did not think that muddle was involved. He contrasted their attitude with the way in which Vincent Foster’s wife, Lisa, was treated when she accepted that her husband’s death was a suicide and not, as we shall see, the cunning murder that Evans-Pritchard believed it to be. “Why is it,” he demanded, “that every utterance from the lips of one widow—Lisa Foster—is treated with reverence, while the other widow, brushed aside by an arrogant FBI, offers a conflicting version of events that is totally ignored by the American press? Is Lisa Foster an inherently more accurate witness of events than Jane Parks simply because she belongs to a higher social caste? Is that what American justice and journalism has come to?”
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This splendid outrage might have had even more force had Evans-Pritchard been able to scan the future. It wasn’t just that Jane Parks was subsequently accused by her stepdaughter, on equally thin evidence, of killing her husband. By 2006, Jane Parks was divorced from the attorney and married to a well-known local urologist, Dr. David Millstein. On Saturday, June 18, in the first homicide seen in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in five years, Millstein was stabbed to death at a home that he does not seem to have shared with his wife. To lose one husband to an unknown killer is certainly a rare misfortune. To lose two . . . The odds are against it.

To the Internet keepers of something called the “Clinton Body Count,” though, Millstein’s murder was simply chalked up as yet another, though very late-era, suspicious death associated with Bill Clinton, along with the boys on the tracks, Vince Foster, Jerry Parks, former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and entourage lost in a plane crash over Croatia, the four ATF men killed at Waco, and just about anybody else who met someone whom Bill Clinton had met and who subsequently died.

An interestingly circular form of narrative transmission had developed, in which the fringe would communicate rumors to a journalist like Evans-Pritchard, who would “investigate” and then declare himself satisfied in print that the rumors were true, thus apparently giving intellectual and mainstream support for fringe contentions. Helping this process along were people who straddled the formal and informal news worlds, people like Joe Farah. There are many examples of Farah’s own journalistic approach to the Clinton stories, but one of his WND pieces from 1998 illustrates his way of knitting elements together to create an impression, while leaving himself enough room to deny that he was making a concrete accusation. Under the title “Clinton Body Count,” he referred to the impeachment process and added that “a growing number of Internet denizens and talk-radio listeners are all but convinced he’s much worse than a lying Gigolo.” Actually they believed he was a murderer, but Farah wondered whether the list of those suspicious deaths that could be linked to Clinton wasn’t too low. “For instance, not one version of the ‘body count’ lists that I have seen,” he wrote, “included the name of Eric L. Henderson. Yet, everything about his remarkable death cries out for examination.” This young man had been shot while riding his bicycle in Northeast Washington, D.C., sixteen months earlier, and a juvenile had been convicted of the murder. So perhaps Henderson had died at the hands of a young criminal “or maybe, just maybe, he knew too much.” Too much about what? Well, he had been associated with the plane-dead Ron Brown, and Brown, it was rumored, had been about to reveal something unknown about Clinton. On this utterly fatuous basis, Farah concluded, “Is it time to add one more name to the growing and staggering Clinton body count? I don’t know, but the fact that such questions are not even raised in polite media company is not a good sign in a supposedly free society.”
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If you paraphrase this insouciant masterpiece you get the following: I don’t know if this outrageous theory of mine for which there is no evidence is true, but the very fact that I have invented it is itself a sign of the terrible times we live in and the terrible president we live under. It is a perfect demonstration of what psychotherapists call “violent innocence.”

The Death of Vince Foster

There was plenty of room among those who suspected Bill Clinton of being a criminal to disagree about precisely which charges could be held against his account. But one thing they all tended to agree upon was that there was something very suspicious indeed about the death, on July 20, 1993, of Vincent Foster, deputy legal counsel to the president and former law firm colleague of Hillary Clinton’s.

The police did not concur, nor did the FBI, nor did two separate investigations by two independent prosecutors (both Republican), nor did the Republican-chaired Senate Oversight Committee. All these bodies concluded that, on that day, suffering from depression, Mr. Foster had driven to Fort Marcy Park near Washington, D.C., walked to a remote spot near an antique cannon, and placed a revolver in his mouth and taken his own life. This was also the conclusion of the writer Dan Moldea, who alone among the authors of books on the Foster death interviewed all the police and emergency personnel involved.
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A torn-up note discovered in Foster’s briefcase indicated that he was struggling in his job, felt that he had made mistakes, and thought that he was being pursued by newspaper reporters concerned only with creating scandal and destroying people, not with telling the truth. In his wallet were the names and numbers of three psychiatrists given to him by his sister, in whom he had confided that he was depressed. He had also been sent antidepressants by his own physician in Little Rock, but had not taken them. Photographs shot at the scene showed the gun under his hand, with his thumb trapped by the trigger. The autopsy revealed a wound from his mouth to an exit point in his head. There was no sign of a struggle, there were no other marks on the body, there was no indication of the presence of a second party. In his car an oven mitt was discovered, which forensics established had carried the revolver, and traces of which were found in Foster’s pocket. His pager had been switched off. Unsurprisingly, from the very beginning the police believed that they were dealing with a suicide.

Almost from the very beginning too, a number of Clinton critics believed that it was, in reality (though they were reluctant to say so), a murder. Helping them were a series of minor contradictions between the testimonies of incidental witnesses and emergency personnel, the absence of certain crime-scene objects, and a number of incompetencies. The bullet, for example, was never found. No one heard the shot. Some people who saw the body didn’t see the gun, or thought they saw a wound in the neck. A roll of film shot by the police at the scene proved useless. Some witnesses said that they didn’t see Foster’s car in the parking lot, while others said that they saw menacing and unidentified men. There were disputes between the police and the White House counsel about which documents from Foster’s office the police could see or impound.

The mainstream press began to suggest, without much evidence, that Foster’s death might have been linked to an effort to cover up information concerning Whitewater—an effort that gave rise to the depression that caused him to take his own life. Some people even raised old rumors that he had been a lover of Hillary Clinton’s back in Arkansas.

Leading the case for murder—first in articles, then in books—were a reporter for the
New York Post
, Christopher Ruddy, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The latter devoted nine chapters of
The Secret Life
to the Foster case. His conclusion was unequivocal, if vague. “I do not know whether Vincent Foster was depressed before his death. It is irrelevant anyway. The hard evidence indicates that the crime scene was staged, period. Even if Foster was depressed, somebody still put a gun in his hand, somebody still inflicted a perforating wound on his neck, his body still levitated 700 feet into Fort Marcy Park without leaving soil residue on his shoes, and he still managed to drive to Fort Marcy Park without any car keys.”
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As Moldea showed in his book, every assertion in this passage is wrong. But it did have the advantage of being bold, implicating, as it did, a large number of people in multiple agencies, in a cover-up of a murder committed somewhere else. Ruddy’s
The Strange Death of Vince Foster: An Investigation
, on the other hand, using much the same “fact set” as Evans-Pritchard and strongly suggesting that suicide was impossible, never confronted the obvious implication of this accusation. Ruddy was keen to tell his readers that he was alleging not a conspiracy, but something positively accidental. Terms such as “conspiracy,” he wrote, “serve to marginalize legitimate criticisms of the handling of the case. . . . ‘Complicity’ would be a far more appropriate term. A major cover-up, rather than being an active effort by a tight-knit group of conspirators, may simply be the result of a number of people—acting on their own, for any number of reasons—whose interests would be threatened by the disclosure of some part of the truth. These individuals become ‘compliant’ with a tendency to conceal information or misdirect investigators.” A witness in the Foster case, for example, “might have been asked by someone who told him it would embarrass the administration and Foster’s family if it were revealed where Foster really was that afternoon. The staffer tells the Park Police this ‘little fib’ thinking he is doing a noble service to Foster’s family, his superiors or even his country. To others that little fib is one of inestimable importance: it conceals the fact that Foster perhaps did not eat lunch at his office, but somewhere else. It might also explain why Foster’s autopsy found a full meal of meat and potatoes in his stomach.”
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As might the fact, confirmed by Foster’s staff, that he had ordered a cheeseburger and french fries for lunch before departing the White House that day. In 1993, one imagines, a burger was made of meat, and french fries from potatoes. In any case, what was the relevance of this unless Ruddy was arguing that Foster had been in some incriminating alternative covered-up place before appearing dead in Fort Marcy Park.

Ruddy’s significance lay in the fact that his journalism of insinuation was picked up by other groups and writers in the period after Foster’s death, and then disseminated widely enough to noticeably affect public opinion and so keep several unnecessary and expensive investigations in motion. One of these groups was Farah’s Western Journalism Center, which would regularly parcel up Ruddy’s reportage on Foster and buy expensive full-page ads in papers including the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
to showcase Ruddy’s work. In this way, as Moldea put it later, the Foster affair became the story of “how a simple suicide of a troubled White House official developed—and was manipulated—into a long-running soap opera with historical significance.”
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The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

In late January 1998, as the Lewinsky affair burgeoned, the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, appeared on NBC’s
Today
show and told the host, Matt Lauer, that there had been an underhanded campaign to destroy her husband, a campaign that amounted to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” There were two elements of this campaign. The first, she said, involved the charges “accusing my husband of murder, of drug-running.” As far as some of the things written and said about him, her attitude was, “You know, we’ve been there before. We have seen this before.” The second element was Kenneth Starr, whom she described as a “politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband, who has literally spent four years looking at every telephone call we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some kind of accusation against my husband.” Starr was part of “an entire operation.”
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The phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” was widely ridiculed in the media, some of whose members doubtless felt themselves accused by Mrs. Clinton. But was she right? Certainly many of those on the center-left of American politics thought so. In their 2001 book
The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton
, journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, both of whom worked for
Salon.com
, detailed meetings, payments, and inducements involving anti-Clinton forces, including one bank-rolling multimillionaire. In the journalists’ view, by the time it became clear how special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s office had behaved during the Lewinsky affair, “there was little argument about the existence of a ‘conspiracy’ and still less about whether the plotters were ‘right-wing.’ Only the ‘vastness’ of their enterprise remained in question.”
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