REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Hillary and Us
She omits a few facts from the Vince Foster story.
Life is hectic, so we admire those dedicated readers marching through all 562-pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton's new memoir, "Living History." We stopped to do our own historical reliving when we saw what she had to say about us.
Mrs. Clinton more or less blames this newspaper all over again for killing Vincent Foster, the former White House aide who committed suicide in 1993. This was also the spin from the Clinton White House at the time, perhaps forgivable given its grief. But lately the theme has been resurrected by Sidney Blumenthal, the Clintons' faithful Boswell, and his new protege, David Brock. Allow us to fill in the missing facts.
The former first lady writes that Mr. Foster was under stress, and that "Apparently the final blow came in a series of spiteful editorials published in The Wall Street Journal, which attacked the integrity and competence of all the Arkansas lawyers in the Clinton Administration." She cites in particular an editorial ("Who Is Vince Foster?"), published a month before the suicide, that "proclaimed that the most 'disturbing' thing about the Administration was 'its carelessness about following the law.' "
As history unfolded, we weren't the only ones who came to realize the Clinton Administration's legal carelessness. But in regard to Vincent Foster, his suicide was a tragedy that no one welcomed. The long investigation into his death also showed there was much more troubling him than newspaper editorials.
The state of Mr. Foster's mind was a focus of two independent counsel probes. The first such counsel, Robert Fiske, wrote that a major Foster worry was the White House Travel Office scandal, and that his wife Lisa believed it "was the greatest cause of Foster's stress and anxiety in the weeks prior to his death."
Ken Starr's later, and more exhaustive, probe concluded in 1997 that Mr. Foster almost certainly suffered from depression. Mr. Starr's office interviewed Mr. Foster's family, friends and colleagues, and even hired Alan Berman, a noted expert on suicide.
Dr. Berman reported that "mistakes, real or perceived, posed a profound threat to his [Foster's] "self-esteem/self-worth and represented evidence for a lack of control over his environment. Feelings of unworthiness, inferiority and guilt followed and were difficult for him to tolerate. There are signs of an intense and profound anguish, harsh self-evaluation, shame, and chronic fear. All these on top of an evident clinical depression and his separation from the comforts and security of Little Rock."
The Starr report concludes that Mr. Foster "was involved in work related to a number of important and difficult issues," including controversial appointments and "litigation related to the Health Care Task Force; the dismissal of White House Travel Office employees and the ensuing fallout from that incident; the Clintons' tax returns (which involved an issue regarding treatment of the Clintons' 1992 sale of their interest in Whitewater); the Clintons' blind trust; liaison with the White House Usher's office over issues related to the White House Residence; and issues related to the Freedom of Information Act." Other living historians might recall that most of those controversies involved Mrs. Clinton.
We'd just as soon move past the Clinton years, but if its partisans are going to rewrite history, someone has to keep track of the billing records. Now Senator Clinton has Presidential ambitions, and her memoir is being portrayed as an attempt to clear away the 1990s for her White House run. If she really wants to be trusted in the future, she could start by being more honest about the past.
