Chapter Six

FACES OF WASHINGTON

By late spring of 1993, Bill Clinton was searching for a tonic for his presidency. Impulsiveness and denial might be his first instincts; self-criticism and correction were his second. When the first got him into trouble, the other got him out: twin phases in a familiar cycle of crisis and survival. So it was that after midnight on May 28, the president was on the telephone making an improbable appeal. David Gergen was a magazine columnist, public broadcasting commentator, longtime Washington worthy—and, most notably, a Republican. He was also, Clinton believed, precisely the tonic he needed. “I’m in trouble,” Clinton purred. “I need your help.” Clinton said he wanted Gergen to join him as a new member of the senior White House staff.

It was an astonishing offer. Gergen took Clinton’s call at the home of Mack McLarty. A week earlier, the chief of staff had invited Gergen to lunch in the White House mess. McLarty said he wanted to discuss ideas after reading Gergen’s columns in U.S. News & World Report critiquing the president’s shaky first months. Gergen had worked as a mid-level speechwriter and press aide in the White Houses of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan before ascending into the lofty precincts of Washington punditry. After two decades in the capital, he was a quintessential product of the Washington establishment. His columns were balanced and sensible—and an accurate barometer of capital conventional wisdom. “As he nears his 100th day in office, Bill Clinton is in trouble—not deep, certainly not fatal, but worrisome all the same for a man who will be the only leader the country has for at least 1,300 days more,” he warned earnestly in early May. Three weeks later: “Friend and foe alike think he can be rolled. Sadly, these perceptions are now creeping in about Clinton—one of the most gifted, dedicated men ever to serve in the Oval Office. He has a wonderful head and a big heart, but people are looking for more backbone.” At the lunch, McLarty asked for some suggestions of a Washington veteran who could join the listing White House ship. Clinton, by evident prearrangement, stopped by the lunch to chat about his problems. Clinton and Gergen had known each other casually for a decade. Both men typically spent their New Year’s holidays on the South Carolina shore with several hundred like-minded high achievers at the famous Renaissance Weekends. Gergen promised that he would come up with some names of Democrats who would fit McLarty’s bill. Days later, Gergen was on the road in Louisiana when he received an urgent message to call the White House. McLarty came on the line. Clinton, he said, had decided Gergen was his choice to add some Washington wisdom to an unseasoned White House. “I damn near dropped the phone,” Gergen recalled.

The lobbying campaign had just begun. Clinton said he wanted to meet with Gergen the next day—late, as the president would be returning from a day trip to Philadelphia. Next, Vice President Gore called to make an urgent pitch. Gergen, he said, would be an all-purpose counselor and wise man in the top ranks of the White House. He would have all the access to the president he needed. While waiting for Clinton at the White House residence, Gergen sat down for a searching conversation with Hillary Clinton. She gave Gergen the answers he was eager to hear. The perception that she was pulling the presidency to the left was wrong, she said, asserting that people did not understand how traditional she was in her values. After all, she noted, she had been a “Goldwater Girl” in the 1960s. She agreed that it was time for rapprochement with the Washington press and the Georgetown establishment. They needed Gergen to help. When Clinton finally arrived after 11 p.m., he was just as direct. “He thought the administration was way out of position politically,” Gergen recalled years later. “He had intended to come as a New Democrat and he was perceived as being way off to the left and he had to get back to the center and he had to get back to working with Republicans and he thought I could be a potential bridge to help him get back to the center where he wanted to govern.” Gergen wanted to think it all over. Clinton said there was no time for that. Gergen’s appointment would be shock therapy. For maximum effect, it needed to play in the news media as a surprise. Clinton wanted to announce Gergen the next morning, a Saturday, at seven-thirty, before he left to give a speech at West Point. With his new appointee’s reluctant agreement, that’s exactly what they did.

An obsession with moving quickly for the sake of news coverage, a tendency to lurch from one plan to another in response to press criticism, was itself one problem in the Clinton White House; it was also a hint, though Gergen could not have known it, that Clinton’s interest in him was not principally as a “bridge to the center.” Before recruiting the Republican Gergen, Clinton had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Democrat Bill Moyers, another respected commentator with White House experience, but one who tilted as much to the left as Gergen did to the right. Moyers begged off the appeal, just as he had six months earlier during the transition. What Clinton was looking for was not an ideological anchor but an ambassador to establishment tastemakers. Most of all, he was looking for a swift fix to deep problems.

When Gergen arrived on the job nine days later, he was stunned by the man he found. The natural buoyancy he had known previously in Clinton had given way to tentativeness and confusion. “Here was a fellow who had lost his way and, most importantly, he had lost his self-confidence,” he said. The remedy, Gergen figured, was to “get the organization tightened up, and to give him the opportunity to find himself again.” For a time, the Gergen experiment worked as planned. The commentator had the high-level access he was promised. He lavished attention on the White House press corps, especially prominent reporters like Ann Devroy and Andrea Mitchell, helping soothe resentments that had festered among the networks and major papers. Clinton opened a charm offensive, inviting Washington journalists to the White House for off-the-record dinners and chats.

Gergen’s problems, however, emerged quickly. He was greeted with stony resentment from much of Clinton’s staff. Some of it was ideological, from liberals who did not understand the point of Democrats winning the White House only to install a Republican warhorse. Some of it was personal. Paul Begala, for example, regarded his new colleague as a self-promoting operator, showing up for meetings with Clinton with ideas and speech drafts that he had not bothered to share with others. Gergen was hardly the man to bring organizational ballast to this unruly White House. He was himself chronically tardy and overcommitted, dropping in on meetings, dispensing his nuggets of Washington wisdom, then ducking out to deal with the telephone message slips stuffed in his pockets.

The main problem with the appointment had nothing to do with Gergen. It was the contradiction inherent in a president who needed “to find himself again.” Gergen had allowed himself to believe that he was recruited to the Clinton fold as a clarifying agent—a statement about the administration’s essential philosophy and bipartisan approach. In truth, he was joining simply as one more voice in the chorus of advice for Clinton. As it happened, Gergen’s voice began to fade nearly from the outset. Despite her protests to the contrary, the first lady soon proved herself to be something close to the liberal partisan Gergen had feared. This was the root of his undoing. He could live with the resentments of Clinton’s young campaign veterans. The mounting tension with Hillary Clinton was another matter.

The ascension of David Gergen had been big news that spring morning, not merely because of the oddity of a young Democratic president recruiting a Republican wise man into his ranks. A subplot in the Rose Garden that morning was Clinton’s unspoken rebuke of the most celebrated name on the White House staff. George Stephanopoulos, indeed, was among the most celebrated presidential aides ever. From his podium in the White House press room, Stephanopoulos had become a bona fide star. With his stylish wardrobe, shock of dark hair, and angular boyish face, he was the public symbol for the brash young team Clinton had brought with him to the White House. He was referred to in Washington conversation as simply “George.” Updates on his romance with actress Jennifer Grey were a staple of the gossip columns. Like his friend James Carville, and before that the Republican Lee Atwater, Stephanopoulos represented something new on the Washington scene: the elevation of the Washington operative into a figure of glamour. He was known as a master of spin—a new name for the old art of trying to win favorable press coverage for the boss—and had become famous in the bargain.

With Gergen’s arrival, the story Stephanopoulos needed to spin was his own. Clinton was moving him out as communications director, and from his prized spot at the podium, to a new and hazily defined post as presidential “senior adviser.” It was not a firing, nor a demotion, but it was not a voluntary move. Stephanopoulos later acknowledged that he had been a terrible choice as the White House spokesman. In private he was intelligent, reasonable, and reflective—one of the most impressive figures of his generation. At the podium, however, he came off as cocksure and defensive. His delivery only underlined the administration’s reputation for callowness that was already one of the White House’s main vulnerabilities.

Yet even as he was being dislodged, he was landing in a new spot that only added to his mystique. Stephanopoulos had first earned a place by Clinton’s side during the presidential campaign. He soon emerged first as an indispensable tactician, a role that later blossomed into something like a Clinton alter ego—a protégé even. Stephanopoulos, everyone knew, was the man Clinton bellowed and complained to when he came into the office in the morning, upset about his schedule or the morning papers. But this was a sign of how close he was. “One of the reasons for this move,” Clinton said, “is that I have missed very badly and I have needed the kind of contact and support that I received from George in the campaign, that I think was absolutely essential to the victory that was secured.” He laid it on just as thick in private. “I need to have you close by me,” he said soothingly when he first talked with Stephanopoulos about the personnel moves, during a middle-of-the-night phone call the morning before the shake-up was announced.

It was from such comments that a mythology about the Clinton-Stephanopoulos relationship was born, but the public statements only hinted at its true complexity. Among reporters, Stephanopoulos was known as the cardinal Clinton loyalist and defender. From the outset of their collaboration, however, strong currents of ambivalence flowed between Clinton and his dashing young retainer. Like other veterans of 1992 who had gone through the controversies over the draft and Gennifer Flowers and Whitewater, Stephanopoulos had found Clinton on first blush to be a thoroughly captivating and inspiring figure. On second blush, amid the crises of New Hampshire, he had discovered him to be a maddeningly unreliable and even untrustworthy candidate, so he concentrated his gaze on the appealing side of Clinton and insulated himself against the other side by concentrating on the unsavory nature of Clinton’s opponents. His value to Clinton was that he was a skilled guide and interpreter of the media-political axis, the world of operatives and journalists who watched Clinton and in turn interpreted him to a larger audience. For all of Clinton’s political gifts, he found this chattering class an alien and confusing constituency. As Clinton knew, however, the reason Stephanopoulos could anticipate the reactions of the media pack was that he essentially shared its values. During the draft controversy, it fell to Stephanopoulos to tell the candidate the obvious: that this was serious enough to force him from the race. Here was the paradox: Stephanopoulos gained influence by being the one who was bold and realistic enough to talk about bad news with the boss, but each time he also revealed himself in the minds of both Clintons as someone less than a true believer. Years later, the president often retold the story, but he exaggerated it to assert that Stephanopoulos had been urging him to drop out. His point was obvious—George had always been a naysayer, part of the Washington crowd, one of them. Clinton, with his sensitive antenna, was essentially right: Part of Stephanopoulos had always been judging him with disdain. For all his modish persona and liberal views, the young man was something of a moralist. He had grown up in suburban Cleveland as the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. He was disciplined and ascetic, tightly coiled, and possessed of rather rigid beliefs in right and wrong—a pious streak that, in the political field he had chosen, meant he was forever wrestling with matters of conscience and compromise. Clinton was the supreme relativist—he believed in right and wrong, surely, but also believed that on most questions there were all manner of ways to split the difference. Clinton always maintained the psychic edge over his brooding aide. Once, during the 1992 campaign, Clinton had gone off script during an important debate. Stephanopoulos returned to the staff van sputtering about the candidate’s lack of discipline. As it turned out, the volunteer driver was a woman who was an old friend of Clinton’s, and apparently a close one. Out of the blue, Clinton later surprised his young retainer by calmly asking, “George, was everything okay back in the motorcade today?” Like many overworked advisers through the years, wrestling with powerful feelings of attraction and resentment toward the boss, Stephanopoulos sometimes had the feeling that Clinton was hovering omnisciently over his life.

For the next year, at least, Clinton was true to his word and kept Stephanopoulos by his side. The young man was among the most important figures shaping Clinton’s political and communications strategy. Yet Stephanopoulos, sharp and aggressive as tactician, was conventional and even timid as strategist, and putting him in such a dominant position was in retrospect one piece in a larger sequence of strategic miscalculations Clinton made in his early presidency. After winning office with a wobbly 43 percent plurality, the president found that his preeminent challenge in 1993 and 1994 was to engage the electorate’s disaffected center, including the Perot voters, who were wary of partisans. Stephanopoulos, however, was a creature of Capitol Hill, where he had earlier served as a House Democratic leadership aide, and he endorsed the dubious strategy by which Clinton, in his approach to the budget and health care, deferred to the parochial demands of the Democratic caucus. Having run as a modern and tough-minded New Democrat in 1992, Clinton now had to give programmatic substance to his slogans on welfare reform and crime. Stephanopoulos, like many liberals in Clinton’s fold in 1992, essentially regarded the label as a campaign ploy, and spurned the policy proposals of authentic New Democrats like Bruce Reed and Al From. The failure to settle on a consistent strategy—tacking to the center one day and back to the left the next—was most of all Clinton’s. For two years, the president who was supposed to be an electoral mastermind was running an administration with only the blurriest notion of how to connect the president’s daily policy battles to his larger political ends.

Gergen and Stephanopoulos were important members of Clinton’s Washington sphere. In the other sphere that dominated the president’s life were the Arkansans. Inside the White House, these were two distinct cultures, each with its own claims on the president’s attention. At best, the two sides viewed each other with earnest curiosity. At other times it was more like disdain. As a rule, the Arkansans believed the Washington crowd, which had gravitated to Clinton from the campaign and think tanks and law firms, was filled with operators and opportunists who little understood the moods and manners of the complicated man whom the Arkansans had known for so long. As a rule, the Washingtonians viewed the Arkansans as naÏve capital tourists. Many of them could not penetrate the southern style, further widening the cultural gulf. The Arkansans spoke in chatty drawls and wore sunny dispositions that made them hard for outsiders to read—and easy for some to dismiss as hayseeds. For his part, since he was a young adult heading east to Georgetown and Oxford, Clinton had loved performing his Arkansas rhapsody to outsiders. He boasted of its colorful characters and oversized watermelons, of its decent people gamely facing the challenges of a poor state. In 1992 the best side of Clinton’s Arkansas past—the progressive governor who had moved his state forward—was an appealing part of the biography he presented to the nation. Even so, for those who came into Bill Clinton’s life from elsewhere, Arkansas and everything it connoted was hardly a positive association. Stephanopoulos had learned it was best to simply avert his gaze from the Arkansas past, he once confided to a reporter. Gergen had been warned by his friend and fellow commentator Mark Shields to steer clear of the Clintons’ unsavory home-state connections. From this perspective, Arkansas was a perpetual trapdoor in Clinton’s presidency. It was always swinging at unwelcome moments to reveal complicated tales from the past—relationships and rivalries, alleged affairs or murky business deals, that were always just a bit hard to explain.

A benign yet fascinating example came in June when the Washington Post revealed that William Blythe, the father who had died on a rain-slicked highway in 1946 three months before the future president was born, had a complicated life of his own before marrying the then Virginia Cassidy. He had fathered one and possibly two children and had two previous marriages that neither Clinton nor his mother had known anything about. The president told reporters he looked forward to speaking with a man now known as Henry Ritzenthaler, his newly discovered half-brother, who was now living in California. But when he called, the man was off giving television interviews and no one was at home.

Vincent W. Foster Jr. was preeminently part of the Arkansas sphere in the Clinton White House. He was also an emphatic reminder that the Arkansas contingent in Washington included highly intelligent and accomplished individuals. Like Clinton himself, Foster was an appealing face of the New South. He had grown up with McLarty and Clinton in Hope (before Clinton moved away to Hot Springs). After graduating from North Carolina’s Davidson College, he returned home to finish first in his class at the University of Arkansas Law School. Then he settled into a respectable career as a lawyer, becoming a partner at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm. Here, in the mid-1970s, his Clinton connection was revived anew. His best friend at the firm was the wife of the state attorney general, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Despite the convergences in their lives, Foster and the future president were hardly similar personalities. Friends knew Foster as proper, cautious, self-effacing. He was the kind of man who navigated discreetly among powerful and affluent people, not the sort to plunge into the fray and seek out public office himself. Behind the scenes, though, there was no doubt at all about his influence. Upon coming to Washington, the Clintons had installed Foster as deputy White House counsel even before they settled on a person to lead the office providing legal advice to the president. When Bernard Nussbaum, the powerful New York litigator who had been a mentor to Hillary Rodham two decades earlier, became the leading candidate for the top job, he met with Foster. Soon it became apparent that the deputy was interviewing him. So when Nussbaum got the job he was under no illusions that he was in any real sense Foster’s boss. It was understood that Foster was working directly for the Clintons, handling significant chunks of their personal legal business that carried over from Arkansas, in addition to White House business. Most of all, it was understood that Foster regarded the first lady as his principal client. Foster and Nussbaum got along well, and early on they asked each other what their greatest vulnerability would be if the press or administration critics went after one of them. Foster gingerly explained that there had been rumors that he and Hillary Clinton were romantically involved. “It’s total nonsense,” Foster said, when Nussbaum asked if the rumors were true.

Even without a romantic dimension, the relationship between the two law partners was something special. Indeed, if Hillary Clinton had taken some different paths in her life, one can easily imagine she might have ended up with someone like Vince Foster. There was a side of her that wanted affluence, respectability, steadiness. Foster lived with his wife, Lisa, in a big home in the Heights neighborhood of Little Rock. He enjoyed quiet dinner parties and was a wine aficionado. He was tall, at six feet three inches, and handsome in an understated sort of way, with flecks of gray in his full head of hair. Webster Hubbell, a Rose partner and close friend of both Foster and Hillary Clinton, once observed, “He seemed like a man who had never made the stop at childhood. There was a seriousness about him that made him old beyond his years.” He lived an anchored, private, prosperous life of the sort that Hillary Clinton did not, in her relationship with a hyperkinetic politician making $35,000 a year as Arkansas governor. “Why can’t we lead the lives of normal people?” she vented once, when an adviser said that her hope for installing a pool in the executive mansion in Little Rock would be politically insane. In her heart, of course, Hillary Clinton wanted a life of respectable obscurity no more than her husband did. Yet perhaps because of the stresses of her life—as a modern woman in a state that preferred its first ladies on the more traditional side, working at a starched law firm where many partners were themselves ambivalent about her—the friendship with Foster was a special refuge. “I think Vince and Hillary became such friends because each recognized that the other was battling to find a viable life,” Hubbell observed. “Hillary, assailed from all sides, drew into herself. Vince, assailed from inside, drew even deeper into himself.” When they were together, the trio of lawyers—Clinton, Foster, and Hubbell—formed their own whimsical club. There were weekly get-togethers at the Villa, a Little Rock Italian restaurant where they drank wine at lunch and Hillary Clinton, who usually picked sparingly at meals, indulged in pasta and garlic bread with abandon. She had a rare ability to bring Foster out of his shell, mortifying him but also delighting him by ordering a belly dancer to the law offices to celebrate his birthday. She called him “Vincenzo Fosterini.” Hubbell and Foster called her “Hillary Sue.”

For a time, Foster was as giddy as everyone else in Clinton’s Arkansas delegation about the ascension to power. This is gold, he said to Hubbell, twirling the White House pass that hung around his neck. “I could never go back,” he said early in 1993. The magic wore off quickly. Within weeks, he was handling some of the White House’s more delicate business. It had been Foster with whom Watkins had discussed the impending shake-up in the White House travel office, as well as the alleged importunings by the first lady that action be taken promptly. Foster was also defending the task force that Hillary Clinton had convened to draft the administration’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health care system. She wanted the task force’s deliberations to be private, its meetings closed to reporters and its documents privileged. It was an understandable preference for privacy—no previous administration had drafted its policy proposals in public—but also unrealistic, given that the task force included hundreds of participants who were not government employees. Soon the battle over the secret deliberations was yet another in the string of controversies buffeting the new White House. In short order, Foster began feeling pressures that were entirely new to him in his forty-eight years. He was in the public eye. The Wall Street Journal focused on him in part of a series of biting editorials looking at the role of Hillary Clinton, Hubbell, and other Rose partners who had arrived in senior positions in the government. A small matter drove Foster to distraction. He did not want to provide the Journal with an official photograph. He was aghast; lawyers, he told his friends indignantly, do their work in private. Eventually, after a lengthy delay, he relented and the photograph was sent. But not before the Journal published an editorial with a question mark where it would have displayed a likeness of Foster. “Who Is Vincent Foster?” read the editorial page’s headline of June 17.

The editorial seemed harmless to everyone but Foster. The paper continued to fire shots at him and other Rose partners a few more times over the next month. It was the kind of criticism, especially coming from such a conservative venue like the Journal, that most public officials quickly learn to brush off. Foster, though, was in agony. He had revealed his own attitude on such matters in May when the University of Arkansas Law School had invited him back to speak at commencement. He told the young graduates, “dents to the reputation in the legal profession are irreparable.” This was hardly an accurate description of life in Washington, where good folk and scoundrels alike suffer ethical contretemps and bounce back none the poorer. For his part, Foster warned his audience that they could expect “failures, and criticisms and bad press and lies, stormy days and cloudy days.” Even as he agonized over public scrutiny, Foster was feeling beleaguered at home. Lisa Foster had spent the period from the inaugural through June back in Little Rock so that their son could finish high school there. She was unhappy and resentful about being left behind. The couple’s phone conversations were sometimes snappish. Meanwhile, Foster was stunned that his relationship with Hillary Clinton had taken a quite new complexion in Washington. She was no longer a favorite colleague. She was now his client and his boss—and a demanding one on both counts. “Fix it, Vince!” she snapped at him in a conversation about the health-care task force. “It’s just not the same, Hub,” he told Hubbell of his friendship with Hillary Clinton. “She’s so busy, Hub, that we don’t ever have time to talk.” Foster told him he no longer trusted his office phone, believing it might be monitored by the Secret Service, or even by Republican sympathizers burrowed in the executive branch bureaucracy.

Many people in the White House knew Foster was feeling harried and blue. What no one realized was that Foster was suffering from acute depression. He had had several long conversations with Marsha Scott, a former Arkansas girlfriend of Clinton’s who had also joined the White House, in which he had spoken of his troubles. Clinton knew of these troubles, though only vaguely. He resolved to help cheer his friend up. On July 19, he invited Foster to come to the White House to watch a movie with a small group of Arkansans—Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire, about a Secret Service agent trying to thwart an assassin. Foster, who had by now been joined in Washington by Lisa Foster, begged off, saying he wanted to spend the night at home. On July 20, Foster left the White House early, around 1 p.m. The last colleague he spoke with at work—indeed very possibly the last person he spoke to on this earth—was a White House secretary named Linda Tripp.

His dead body was found shortly before 6 p.m., lying near a Civil War cannon at Fort Marcy Park, which overlooks the Potomac River in suburban northern Virginia. An antique .38 caliber revolver was in his hand. The bullet he had fired into his mouth left his face intact, exiting through the back of his skull. Two United States Park Police investigators arrived on the scene. One of them looked at the blazer Foster had left in his nearby car and discovered his White House badge—the “gold” he had boasted about to Hubbell months before. “We better notify the Secret Service,” said the other. Clinton was about to hear news that would echo for the rest of his time in Washington.

The president was on live national television when White House aides learned the news. His interview with CNN’s Larry King had been going so well that, spontaneously and on air, Clinton had just agreed to King’s suggestion that they continue for an unplanned extra half hour. By this time, Chief of Staff McLarty—in grief over the death of a man he’d known for more than forty years—had broken the news to Hillary Clinton, who was in Little Rock visiting her mother. She broke into sobs at the news, then turned aghast with the knowledge that her still oblivious husband might learn of the tragedy on live television. During a commercial break, the chief of staff rushed into the White House library, where the interview was taking place. “Mr. President,” McLarty said, “we need to quit while we’re ahead.” Enjoying his banter with King, Clinton plainly wanted to continue, but then he seemed to realize from McLarty’s tone that something more serious was afoot. “Mack, what’s wrong? What’s up?” he said as they rushed out. McLarty responded: “It’s not a national emergency or crisis, but it’s a very serious matter. Let’s go upstairs where we can sit down.” Learning the shocking news, Clinton, too, began to cry. “I want to call Hillary,” he said. “Have you told Hillary?”

The president immediately decided to visit Lisa Foster at her Georgetown home. Without assembling the usual limousine motorcade and press pool that ordinarily accompany the president whenever he is outside the White House grounds, he raced over to Georgetown in an unmarked Chevy Suburban. As it happened, Gergen and Vernon Jordan had been dining just a short distance away, at the home of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and writer Sally Quinn. They, too, descended on the Foster home, along with Hubbell, Marsha Scott, and other Arkansans. Gergen, who in the two months he had been at the White House had seen how emotionally raw and harried Clinton was, worried about whether the president could withstand a tragedy this personal. What he saw that night surprised him. Clinton was poised and strong, soothing Lisa Foster and his other friends with exactly the right words. It was a revealing moment. Vince Foster had been broken by his Washington encounter, and there were friends in the room that night who would be broken, though not in the fatal sense, in the years ahead. By contrast, Bill Clinton was not someone who would break under adversity. However much he might in some moods complain about the unfairness of his critics or the hardships he was facing, the president was at bottom an accommodator. When his Arkansas habits proved untenable in Washington, he was flexible enough to adapt. He was a man of uncommon resilience, a trait that always surfaced when he needed it most.

Foster’s death was more scarring for the first lady. The usual reactions to a friend’s death—grief and remorse—were mixed with quite unusual ones, including a defensiveness about what might be found once investigators began looking through Foster’s office. Foster had many documents pertaining to the Clintons’ personal affairs. The night of his death, Hillary Clinton acted like a stricken friend, calling confidants like Harry Thomason and Susan Thomases and her chief of staff, Maggie Williams. She talked to Tipper Gore, who had herself suffered from depression, about the need for counselors to help White House aides cope with the tragedy. Two days later, she was acting like a lawyer. The White House had reached an understanding with the Justice Department to allow a search of Foster’s office as part of the death investigation. The record suggests that Hillary Clinton expressed acute interest in this. On the morning of July 22, Williams called the first lady at 7:44, and they spoke for seven minutes. Then the first lady called Thomases and talked for three minutes. A minute later, records showed, Thomases paged White House counsel Nussbaum. Later that morning, Nussbaum canceled the agreement with Justice officials. Nussbaum said he would examine the office first, then decide what documents to let the investigators see. A heated phone conversation followed between Nussbaum and Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, whose attorneys were cooling their heels outside Foster’s office. “You are messing this up very badly,” Heymann said. “You are making a terrible mistake.” Several files of materials relating to the Clintons were removed from Foster’s office, taken to the official residence, and then to the Clintons’ personal lawyer.

And so the human tragedy of Foster’s suicide became an ethical bog. Counseling his staff the next day, Clinton could not help thinking of the tragedy partly in terms of his own battles with the press and Washington. He told aides that Foster had “an extraordinary sense of propriety and loyalty, and I hope that when we remember him and this, we’ll be a little more anxious to talk to each other and a little less anxious to talk outside of our family.” He then faced reporters in the Rose Garden. “As I tried to explain, especially to the young people on the staff, there is really no way to know why these things happen.” What Clinton intended presumably as a rumination on the imponderability of human motivation was heard instead as a defiant vow to bury the truth—“an electric prod on the press,” wrote columnist Mary McGrory. This was especially so in conservative precincts. Within a few weeks of the death, conservative commentators like R. Emmett Tyrrell of the American Spectator, who pronounced Clinton’s “the weirdest presidency I have observed,” was urging greater consideration to the possibility that Foster met with foul play. “He is dead now, and from all that we have heard about him foul play cannot be ruled out,” he warned darkly. The White House’s own actions did nothing to discourage paranoia. Six days after Foster’s death, Steve Neuwirth, an attorney working in Nussbaum’s office, found torn pieces of yellow paper deep in Foster’s briefcase. They had been overlooked in the earlier search. White House officials dubiously chose to wait thirty hours before alerting law enforcement officials of the discovery.

Most suicide victims leave no formal note, and Foster was not an exception. The torn-up paper seemed to be an index of grievances he wrote to himself, rather than a public explanation for taking his life. These jottings were released two weeks later, after the Justice Department and Park Police issued a finding concluding that Foster committed suicide—the first of what was ultimately five different official inquiries. Foster railed about the travel office uproar from the previous spring, saying that “the FBI lied in their report” about the matter to the attorney general, and accusing the press of “covering up the illegal benefits they received” from the travel office staff. He fulminated about Hillary Clinton’s battles with the White House usher’s office, saying the ushers had “plotted” to increase the costs of her White House redecoration. He said the Wall Street Journal editors “lie without consequence.” Famously he said, “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

There were more surprises still to come from Foster’s office. Five months later, in December, the White House revealed that among the documents taken from Foster’s office was a file labeled “Whitewater.” New suspicions erupted. By taking his life, Foster had contributed immeasurably to the cause of those who were trying to ruin the Clintons.