Presswatch / Killing the Foster Story

...Nussbaum, for example, did not search the office under the "supervision" of the officials...

...In fact, Newsweek had the wrong night for the call—it was Monday, not Sunday—but no matter...

...On CNN's "Capital Gang," a lonely Robert Novak called for a special counsel, but Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal was unctuous...

...Even on Mat first day, though, the Post found a different story...

...Washington reporters may approve of Bill Clinton's policies, but most do not trust the man...

...Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel, conducted the search, the Post reported, under the "supervision" of the officials...

...Then he detailed the rumors about Foster's sexual life that the paper might have published, but didn't...

...He couldn't let go...

...It seemed a bit much when the White House admitted that it had delayed turning over to Park Police for some thirty hours the now-famous note in which Foster listed his grievances...

...The White House had dissembled...

...Clinton was silent in the wake of Foster's death...

...Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize winner, but he followed the gentlemanly practice the Times also displayed when the Post first beat it on Watergate...

...You don't get to be a confidant of Hillary's without being incredibly bright...

...Even if you had a whole set of objective reasons, that wouldn't be why it happened, because you would get a different, bigger, more objective set of reasons...

...The same "Style" story also reported that when McLarty heard of Foster's death, he called Mrs...

...The White House meeting in which it was decided to release the note to the police had begun on a Tuesday night at 7 o'clock, the same time the "NBC Nightly News" goes on the air in Washington...

...But even as Mrs...

...I worry that this will sour them," he said earnestly, fearful that Foster's death might disillusion the Clintons...

...Vince was one of the few people here who was close to both of them...

...Newsweek described what she had confided: "Vince Foster was, having trouble handling the pressure...

...Apparently, the note was in one place, and the president and his staff in another, but the president was terribly busy, and anyway there were legal issues to be researched...

...he had run the search himself, and allowed the others to see only what he had wanted them to see...

...What's the story here...

...It is also realistic, or at least reasonable, to think this persuaded the White House the fat was in the fire, and that it might as well release the note...

...Foster was worried about her husband also said that "on Sunday night, the President himself called and tried to buck up his friend with twenty minutes of chatter...

...The Times could not possibly have known whether Foster left any clues about the suicide, but it accepted the White House's word—a dicey thing to do with any White House, and particularly foolish when the president is Bill Clinton...

...The White House was beginning to implode...

...After the Newsweek story appeared, reporters questioned Dee Dee Myers...

...He has discreditedhimself too often, and they waited for him to lapse again...

...The same day that the Post quoted the unidentified Clinton friend in its news columns, its "Style" section quoted an apparently adoring "Clintonite," who spoke of Foster and his relationship with the Clintons: "He even went so far as to help them on their finances and their blind trust," the Clintonite said...

...He took everything to heart, too much to heart...

...He couldn't sleep, and he was losing weight...

...and then raising related issues: Did Foster see anyone after he left the White House...

...In the absence of facts, it is lovely to speculate, and the facts in the Foster case had always been in dispute, even without the numerous rumors...

...Perhaps that was what made the Times finally cast off its inertia...

...Mark Gearan, the White House communications director, insisted that Foster "never said anything to indicate that anything was out of the ordinary to his colleagues," but the Post reported that Foster's friends had been worried...

...As it turned out, none of what was reported was true...

...Who found his body...

...If this seemed bizarre, it was...

...Mack"—Mack McLarty, the White House chief of staff—"is the president's friend...

...Sleek columnists and commentators lamented the savagery of Washington life with their usual mock solemnity, and most mentioned that Foster had been criticized in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal...

...if Clinton was trying to buck up his friend, he presumably knew he was depressed, even though he had denied it...

...All this, of course, was plausible, but Time reconstructed Mrs...

...Park Police...

...He seemed down...

...The Post reported that, despite its previous promise to investigate Foster's death, the Justice Department was merely participating in what it called an "inquiry" by the Park Police...

...The exact nature of these burdens was unclear, but likely they involved the Clintons...

...Actually, the criticism had not been severe, but after Foster died, it was made to look sinister...

...Newsweek had reported, for example, that the same day her husband's body was found in Fort Marcy park, Mrs...

...He felt responsible for things he should not have felt responsible...

...The same issue of Newsweek that...

...Careless reporting and what turned out to be White House duplicity were joined, while America's premier news organizations danced around a story they were never quite sure how to cover...

...After Foster's body was found, the White House announced that happened was a mystery about something inside of him...

...Time said authoritatively that Mrs...

...McLarty were at the Fosters' new house at about the same time Foster "passed through the iron,gate of the White House in his gray Nissan...

...Foster was feeling troubled...

...She doesn't put up with people who are slow...

...It seemed like only yesterday the New Yorker was thought of as serious...

...onetheless, it was inevitable N that even the most malleable members of the press would turn skeptical...

...Four of the twelve events were editorials in the Wall Street Journal...

...Foster was worried about her husband, no matter what Newsweek said...

...NBC reported that night that it had learned that a "document" had turned up that indicated Foster had problems...

...Meanwhile, according to the Times, the Justice Department "would continue investigating" the death of Vincent Foster...

...The Post also reported that the Park Police had characterized the inquiry as "routine...

...It was hard now to imagine them taking on the White House...

...The Post did not use the word "coverup," but the suggestion hung in the air...

...Therefore, "the Administration needs to gather the facts and give an honest briefing about what it knows" about the death of Vincent Foster...

...The next night, NBC's weekly review did not mention him, either...

...Indeed, the search may have been irrelevant...

...Where had the gun come from, and was there any relevant information on the phone logs and computer records in Foster's office...

...The media, however, remained generous...

...Myers's statement, it reported stiffly, "appeared somewhat at variance with a previous White House assertion that no one had known Mr...

...The headline on a page-one story said: "Clinton Aide Appeared Depressed Before Death, His Associates Say...

...Then he went on to explain the 30-hour delay...

...A reporter checks with official sources, and suspends critical faculties on a messy story...

...Foster's afternoon differently...

...The damage to the public trust has already been done...

...One may reasonably interpret this as the statement of a man who wants to shrug off something unpleasant...

...In a delicately worded editorial, it said that "the White House has shifted its ground too often to let matters sit where they now are...

...In fact, before it did its remarkable about-face, the Washington Post came close to agreeing...

...Sidney Blumenthal attacked the Washington Times—"the right-wing newspaper is one of the oddities of Washington"—and said that even though it had not published any stories about Foster, it might have...

...The Times even published a chart: "Key Events in Mr...

...Clinton's confusion is classic among survivors...

...Nonetheless, the press was ready at first to overlook the discrepancies emanating from the White House...

...Indeed it was at variance...

...The Times and the Washington Post were also silent...

...At best she was inscrutable...

...We thought we were doing the right thing," the White House counselor answered bravely, but he looked as if he wished he were elsewhere...

...Hunt's worry was misplaced...

...When Foster was buried, on a Friday, it appeared that further speculation about his death had been interred with him...

...It is realistic to think someone in the White House was notified of what NBC would report...

...Jim Lehrer asked David Gergen on the "NewsHour...

...Foster had confided to Mack McLarty's wife in the Garden Terrace Restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel...

...On the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" that night, Roger Mudd cited the stories that had roiled Washington all week—the budget, Dan Rostenkowski, Bosnia, gays, and so on—and neglected to mention Foster...

...The Post and almost everyone else also reported that Robert Langston, the chief of the Park Police, said the police had examined Foster's telephone logs, paperwork, and computer files, and also interviewed a "number of people" who had talked to Foster before he died...

...McLarty "that Vince's distraction—no one called it depression—had lifted during a getaway weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore...

...Foster's office was not sealed until the day after his death, and White House aides had passed in and out...

...The Post and the Times had entered Foster's mind just as surely as the much criticized Joe McGinniss had entered Ted Kennedy's mind in The Last Brother...

...Foster told Mrs...

...There was no escaping the implication: the Wall Street Journal had killed Vincent Foster...

...This was not necessarily the fault of the reporters...

...Nonetheless, the Post did have a thought...

...He felt these burdens and could not seem to shake them off the way others do...

...And so it went, almost from the moment Foster's body was discovered...

...McLarty tried to cheer up her friend, Newsweek said, "Vincent Foster was driving out of the White House gates in his Honda Accord" on his way to Fort Marcy...

...The Teirace Restaurant disappeared in Time's account, and so did the Honda, and while that might have been inconsequential, larger matters were at variance, too...

...The paper is kinder to liberal Democrats than to conservative Republicans, but a good scandal, real or imagined, can do in either, and the apparent suicide of a high White House official is not the kind of story the New York Times knows how to cover...

...t appears now that all these questions will never be answered, and that the Wall Street Journal was right when, two days after Foster's death, it called for a special counsel to oversee the investigation...

...In Little Rock, though, when she was given a stuffed animal as a gift, and smilingly said it would be a great comfort to her in Washington, Andrea Mitchell asserted on NBC's "Nightly News" that it was obvious she was thinking of Vincent Foster...

...Clinton before he called the president...

...No one can ever know why this happened," Clinton had said of Foster's death...

...The most stunning example of liberal-left media cant, however, appeared in the New Yorker...

...The same largesse was accorded his wife...

...the Justice Department would be the "point of contact" for an investigation by the U.S...

...Foster's Last Months...

...said Mrs...

...The White House, of course, never intended to suppress Foster's note...

...Indeed, the Post could, speak with authority...

...ABC's "World News Tonight" reported on the family and friends of suicides, and said that "Mr...

...Time said Mrs...

...In Italy these matters are more straightforward...

...Time did not seem to think Mrs...

...It said that critical editorials in the Wall Street Journal—"where the battle on behalf of movement conservatives is waged with no quarter"—had weighed heavily on Foster's mind, a suggestion endorsed soon after by the New York Times...

...In a much publicized recent case, the Park Police had failed to find the person or persons unknown who scattered thumbtacks along the George Washington Parkway Bike Trail...

...The blind trust was not mentioned, either, although only weeks before Foster's death, Money magazine, a respectable publication, had criticized the Clintons for not having set one up, even though the last three presidents had done so even before they took office...

...Foster and Mrs...

...So what T he damage, however, was as nothing compared to the damage yet to come...

...That's not good enough," Money charged in an editorial...

...They could have altered or destroyed what they pleased...

...A dozen Italian politicians and business leaders have committed suicide in the lasteighteen months, and the press never talks about clinical depression...

...Michael Kinsley began a column in the New Republic by saying, "I don't really believe that deputy White House counselor Vincent Foster was driven to suicide by aseries of viciously unfair editorials in the Wall Street Journal," but spent the rest of the column suggesting that he did...

...Getting the facts would be enough...

...That was not mentioned in other news stories...

...Well, yes, and the explanation was generally accepted, although it may be Gergen had left something out...

...In the days after Foster died, however, only the "CBS Evening News" asked the hard questions, beginning with, "Was it blackmail...

...Under the headline "Did Washington Kill Vince Foster...

...After nearly a month of examination," the Washington Post declared, summing up its investigation into Foster's death, "no rumor has panned out, no unmasking has occurred...

...Thomas L. Friedman wrote the Times's first full account, and the headline on the story—"White House Aide Leaves No Clue About Suicide"—accurately reflects its content...

...The press does not have to chase down all rumors...

...But what depressed him, and whatever it was, was it sufficient to drive him to suicide...

...T he grace period could not last...

...Even the Times had a hard time with that...

...One of them was quoted as follows: "His friends could see his depression, and his wife was terribly worried about it...

...It was as if reporters did not want to explore further, worried about what they might find out, or perhaps even think, about the president...

...When it asked the White House about the blind trust, Money said, it was told only that the Clintons were working on it...

...The White House press secretary confirmed that Clinton had made the call, but she had insisted he had done so only because he knew Foster was "having a rough time" at work...

...The next day, the Post reported, Foster's office had been searched' "in the presence of officials from the National Park Service...