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

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