Presswatch

...Starr's report, he wrote, will not end the Foster matter, but "sealed forever, however, is history's judgment on Kenneth W. Starr...

...Ruddy does not tell us, although presumably they involve inconsistencies in the statements of witnesses and on what seem to be the violations of proper investigative procedures...

...The partisans have made much of the fact that the gun found in Foster's hand was black, even though it was a .38 Colt that did indeed look like a cowboy gun...

...The .45 was still there, but the .38 was missing...

...Even the resourceful Oliver Stone did not dare mention Scoggins in his movie...

...Vince Foster's younger son also remembered seeing one or two handguns in a shoebox, along with a number of loose bullets...

...Obviously what the Washington Times thought exhaustive and incontrovertible, the partisans did not...

...Pierre Salinger can insist that a Navy missile brought down TWA 800, and Dexter King can say the FBI had something to do with the assassination of Martin Luther King, his father...

...Scoggins made a positive identification...

...Beware when an investigative reporter begins sentences with words like "oddly," "strangely" or "interestingly...

...Beware also when an investigative reporter frequently cites "sources," "confidential sources," or "sources" who are supposedly "close to" something or someone or other...

...56 December 1997 • The American Spectator to his father, Vincent Foster, Sr...

...As the Starr report said, this may not be conclusive, but it did support its finding: that Foster had died by his own hand, on the berm near the second cannon in Fort Marcy Park...

...The American Spectator • December 1997 57...

...Therefore he wants experts outside the Washington establishment "to take up the serious questions raised by the investigation...

...It seems he is a part of the Washington establishment, and so he cannot be trusted...

...Starr's integrity...and tarnished his reputation...

...she pointed out the "wavelike" detailing at the base of the grip...

...A "colleague," for example, tells Ruddy that witnesses "relating" to Foster's death were no longer being called before the grand jury...

...Partisans, though, would have none of this...

...He neglected to mention in the memo, however, that O'Connor, as an Arizona state legislator, had supported an abortion-rights law...

...After all, if the gun did belong to Foster it was hard to imagine how his killer or killers might have gotten it, except, perhaps, by breaking into his house and stealing it, or else accosting him when, inexplicably, he just happened to be carrying it around Washington...

...The DNA tests did not matter...

...At the same time, someone is leaking "vital and top-secret grand jury information" to the press, which apparently alarms Miguel Rodriguez, one of Starr's prosecutors...

...A gentleman who described himself as the director of communications for the Clinton Investigative Commission said in a letter to the Washington Times that the report had "compromised Mr...

...Usually it is found on the left, of course, but this time it turned up on the right...

...Meanwhile, in Ruddy's telling, hardly anyone in the Foster investigation comes off very well...

...And yes, the White House did its best to obstruct a proper investigation, but everyone already knows this...

...As the Washington Times said, Starr's report provided "exhaustive and incontrovertible evidence" that supported his finding, including "overwhelming physical evidence, examined by an impressive team of highly experienced law enforcement officers and scientists...that clearly puts to rest various controversial non-suicide theories of Mr...

...Indeed, this touches off most of the heavy breathing...

...Everything seems to him, and to many of his sources, too, to be suspicious...

...Henry Lee examined the oven mitt, he found traces of lead and antimony, which suggested, he said, that the oven mitt had been in contact with something that had gunshot residue on it, such as a revolver...

...Lisa Foster, Foster's widow, recalls seeing it in a bedroom closet in their home in Washington...

...There were also traces of lead residue and of a sunflower seed husk in Foster's front, left pants pocket...

...Ruddy, however, shows no signs of knowing that...

...T he Strange Death of Vincent Foster, however, disputes that, even the part about the second cannon...

...This may be an accurate account, but who can tell...

...She also recalls seeing two guns: one a .45 caliber semi-automatic, and the other a silver-colored pistol that she called a "cowboy gun...

...they confirm one another's suspicions, usually elliptically...

...The plausible explanation for the discrepancy in color, which the partisans will not accept, of course, is that Mrs...

...Moreover, when Starr was solicitor general under George Bush, Ruddy writes, he did not argue forcefully enough on behalf of a Pennsylvania law that would place restrictions on abortion...

...Starr, it seems, was to be damned through the ages...

...Sharon Bowman said the .38 Colt looked liked the gun her father had kept in the house in Hope...

...It takes its name from William Scoggins, the cab driver who saw Lee Harvey Oswald toss the spent shells from his revolver into the bushes after he shot officer J.D...

...Foster's death...

...Where is an old-fashioned police reporter when we need one...

...and Tippit lay dead not far away...

...What are the "serious questions" that Rodriguez wants the outside experts to consider...

...Those scenarios, however, were unlikely...

...But any big investigation—and the Foster investigation was very big, with overlapping jurisdictions, and people falling all over one another —produces inconsistencies in witnesses' statements and violations of proper procedures...

...Remote-control bombs, apparently, had been placed in their Mercedes...

...Foster was simply mistaken...

...The Scoggins factor is the ability of partisans of one cause or another to dismiss evidence that stands in their way...

...neither did the gunshot residue found on Foster's right hand, nor the gunshot residue found in his mouth...

...Meanwhile, Vince Foster's older son said he knew his father had an old .38-caliber revolver, and that Vince Foster had told him it had once belonged Christopher Ruddy and the Scoggins factor...

...Alice Mae Foster, Foster's mother, told Starr's investigators that her late husband had kept a revolver in a bedside table at their home in Hope, Arkansas...

...This is a book with very few direct quotes, but a great many insinuations...

...Possibly he wanted to establish his credentials as a conservative, but instead he manages to suggest that if you have reservations about Foster's death and its aftermath you are probably a right-wing nut...

...Ruddy, in fact, is a very heavy breather...

...Nothing, of course, and it is unfortunate that Ruddy had to mention it...

...And what does that have to do with the investigation into Foster's death...

...In 1991, when he was ill and bedridden, she also said, her daughter, Sharon Bowman, had taken the revolver and at least one other handgun and put them in a shoe-box, and placed the shoebox in a closet...

...Prominent Egyptian commentators now say flatly that MI6, the British secret service, killed Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed...

...he had engineered a massive cover-up...

...Worse, he is a political moderate...

...Starr, in particular, gets rough attention...

...Tippit in a parking lot in Dallas...

...The principal figures in the investigation are either knaves or fools, and for the most part they are involved in a cover-up...

...You wonder if Ruddy, or his sources, has ever been around cops before...

...Ruddy notes that when Starr was in the Reagan Justice Department, he wrote a memo endorsing Sandra Day O'Connor for appointment to the Supreme Court...

...Reed Irvine, the chairman of Accuracy in Media, told the New York Times that Starr's report was "a joke—and a bad joke...

...Grant now that this does not prove beyond the shadow of doubt that the gun was Foster's, but it establishes a reasonable case, strengthened now by new forensic findings...

...When independent counsel Kenneth Starr found that Vincent Foster had cornJOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...

...mitted suicide in Fort Marcy Park, he raised the Scoggins factor once again...

...Foster and her daughter both say, Vincent Foster took possession of the shoebox...

...Foster, Ruddy says, died by the first cannon...

...This seemed to indicate that Foster had put the gun in the oven mitt when he had taken it from his home, and later, presumably when he arrived in Fort Marcy Park, removed it and stuck it in his pants pocket, where it left the lead residue as well as a remnant of the sunflower husk...

...the spent shells were where he said they were...

...He thinks it is an attempt to undermine the investigation, and he fears the case will be "written off as a suicide with no criminal wrongdoing on the part of officials...

...The sources often turn out to be people who talk only among themselves...

...The fancifulness knows no bounds...

...It supports the finding that Oswald was the lone assassin, and undermines the scenarios about, say, Mafia, CIA, or Corsican gunmen involvement...

...Meanwhile, Christopher Ruddy, the author of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster (Free Press, 316 pages, $25), took to his web site...

...Subsequently Ruddy develops "several sources close to the Starr probe" to find out why...

...On the other hand, he also says, or at least he also seems to say, that he might not have died there, either...

...71 besides, the "experts" Ruddy spoke to —he speaks to them quite often, although he doesn't always tell us who they are —had concluded that the official version of what happened was fishy, and you can't believe a word of it, anyway...

...In a lengthy footnote, however, one of Ruddy's own experts says Rodriguez is "doing exactly what he should be doing...

...Foster died, Mrs...

...Rodriguez is never quoted...

...When the pathologist Dr...

...After the elder Mr...

...Scoggins's testimony was unimpeachable, and because it was, conspiracy theories about who really shot John F. Kennedy have always had to ignore it...

...Thus the demagogue Maxine Waters can claim, as she did at the Million Women's March, that the CIA "had a role" in importing "tons" of cocaine into Los Angeles...

...More important, Lisa Foster said that after she learned of her husband's death, she looked into the shoebox...

...Lisa Foster and her older son identified it as one that had been in their kitchen...

...There was this road in the park, you see, and he, Ruddy, had visited it himself, and concluded that it was navigable, and anyway Fort Marcy Park had a rear entrance, although the park police claimed they did not know it existed, even though the police had been posted there during the Gulf War to protect the Saudi compound across the street, and44 What the Washington Times thought incontrovertible the partisans did not...

...Starr's report cites the oven mitt that was found in the glove compartment of Foster's car...

...in fact, he may even be a liberal...

...Inside the oven mitt he also found "sunflower-type seed husks...

...There may be nothing odd, strange or interesting at all, but the game is to make you think there is...

...Moreover, Starr, by any reasonable standard, had established that Foster had owned the revolver that had been found in his hand,and as his report said, "Virtually all theories that the manner of death was not suicide rest on an assumption that the gun did not belong to Mr...

...Foster's body might only have been dumped there...