The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

One of the first controversies to lap at the door of the Oval Office was the death of Vincent Walker Foster Jr, a deputy White House legal counsel. A childhood friend of Bill Clinton and a partner in the Rose Law Firm of Arkansas with Hillary Clinton, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, on 20 July 1993, with a gunshot wound to the head. The alleged weapon was still in his hand, the latter stained by gunpowder residue.

Foster was known to have been depressed, and only the day previously had contacted his physician and been prescribed a mild sedative/anti-depressant, Trazodone. In his briefcase was found a suicide note: «I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.»

Vincent Foster had run foul of the city’s media for his role in «Travelgate», in which White House travel office workers had been sacked on corruption charges and replaced with operatives from Clinton’s power base in Arkansas. The incident looked and smelled bad, and a Washington Post editorial specifically charged that Foster’s internal investigation into Travelgate was a whitewash.

His death seemed an open and shut case of suicide, and investigations by the United States Park Police, the United States Congress and Independent Counsels Robert B. Fiske and Kenneth Starr all ruled that Foster took his own life.

«Fostergate», though, refused to die, largely because conservative opponents of Clinton saw in it a chance to bring him down. Leading the anti-Clinton charge was the right-wing multi-millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who bankrolled an investigation into «Fostergate» by journalist Christopher W. Ruddy which would be published as The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. Close behind Scaife were Citizens for Honest Government, whose video The Clinton Chronicles not only fingered Foster’s death as dubious but stated that some fifty other people associated with Bill and Hill had died in suspicious circumstances.

According to The Clinton Chronicles, Foster was plain murdered and the gun placed in his hand (the wrong hand) to make it look like a self-inflicted death. Why was he murdered? Probably because he knew too much about «Whitewatergate», yet another scandal pounding at the Clintons’ doors — this time concerning land and banking deals from the time of Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial stint in Arkansas. Or, maybe, because Foster was having an affair with Hillary Clinton, which needed to be terminated in the most effective way possible to save the president the humiliation of a public cuckolding.

Not all conspiracists believed that Foster was murdered. An alternative scenario had Foster committing suicide but doing so in a place likely to cause the Clintons a maximum bad news day; to obviate this, the Clintons had the body removed to far-off Fort Marcy. Since the body was transferred from the place of demise, this explained the surprising lack of blood said to be on and around Foster’s corpse at Fort Marcy. Meanwhile, on the furthest shores of the Foster-suicide theory, journalists J. Orlin Grabbe and James R. Norman «discovered» that Foster committed suicide because he was about to be unmasked as a Mossad agent.

The conspiracists of «Fostergate» wished to get Clinton in the crosshairs but unerringly drew a bead on their own feet. One key «witness» in The Clinton Chronicles turned out to be the video’s producer; two more — Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patteson — proved to have been paid for their «evidence».

Aside from the conspiracists there was, in the eyes of the public at least, one more party out to crucify Clinton. This was special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

Son of a Texan minister and sometime member of Ronald Reagan’s legal staff, Starr spent four years producing the Starr Report, which appeared in September 1998. This recommended the impeachment of the President. All the dirt that Starr could dredge up, after using $40 million of American taxpayers’ money, was that the President had enjoyed fellatio from an intern and then lied about it. Blameworthy behaviour certainly, but hardly Nixon-ite immorality. Naturally, Starr in his zealousness examined the death of Vince Foster — and found it to be a suicide. Surely, if Kenneth Starr is content that Foster died by his own hand, the remainder of the American right could be?

For the record, here is the conclusion of Starr’s report on the death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr: