Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

the press. I have the highest regard for Bill Kennedy’s honesty and legal skills. Like most of us, however, he was a newcomer to Washington and its ways. He didn’t know that his direct contact with the FBI, asking them to investigate the alleged misuse of funds, would be considered a serious breach of Washington protocol.

After an internal review, released in full to the media, Mack McLarty publicly reprimanded four Administration officials, including Watkins and Kennedy, for their poor judgment in the way they handled the matter. But at least seven separate investigations―

including those conducted by the White House, the General Accounting Office, the FBI and Kenneth Starr’s Office of the Independent Counsel―failed to turn up any illegality, wrongdoing or conflicts of interest by anyone in the Administration and confirmed that the initial concerns about the travel office were justified. The Independent Counsel, for example, concluded that the decision to fire the Travel Office political employees was lawful and that there was evidence of financial mismanagement and irregularities.

The Justice Department found enough evidence to indict and try the former head of the travel office for embezzlement. According to press reports, he offered to plead guilty to a criminal charge and to serve a brief prison sentence, but the prosecutor insisted on going to trial on a felony charge. After several famous journalists testified as character witnesses at his trial, he was ultimately acquitted.

Despite the unanimous conclusion that there was no illegality in the White House’s handling of the affair, it was a disastrously inauspicious first date with the White House press. I’m not sure I’ve ever learned so much so fast about the consequences of saying or doing anything before knowing exactly what’s going on. And for a long time after, 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. Vince Foster was stung by the travel office affair. A meticulous, decent and honorable man, he felt that he had let down the President, Bill Kennedy, Mack McLarty and me by failing to understand and contain the drama. 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.

Bill and I may have been inexperienced in our White House roles, but we were seasoned enough in the rough world of politics. We knew we had to isolate the attacks and focus on the reality of our lives. Vince Foster had no such defenses. He was new to this culture, and he took the criticism to heart. Although we will never know what went through his mind in those last weeks of his life, I believe that as he absorbed each accusation, he was driven deeper into pain and distress. I will go to my own grave wishing I had spent more time with him and had somehow seen the signs of his despair. But he was a very private person, and nobody―not his wife, Lisa, or his closest colleagues, or his sister Sheila, with whom he had always been close―had any idea of the depth of his depression.

The last time I remember speaking to Vince was in mid June, on the Saturday night before Father’s Day. Bill was out of town giving a commencement address, so I made plans to go out to dinner with WebbHubbell; his wife, Suzy; the Fosters and a few other couples from Arkansas. We arranged to meet between seven and eight o’clock at the Hubbels’ house.

Just as I was getting ready to leave the White House, Lisa Caputo called to tell me that the lead story in the “Style” section of the next day’s Washington Post would be about Bill’s birth father, William Blythe. The story would reveal that he had been married at least twice before he met Bill’s mother―something nobody in the family had known-

―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