My life полностью

That night I appeared on Larry King’s show from the library on the ground floor of the White House to talk about my battle for the budget and whatever else was on his and his callers’ minds. Like everyone else, I liked Larry King. He has a good sense of humor and a human touch, even when he’s asking tough questions. About forty-five minutes into the program, things were going so well that Larry asked me if I’d do an extra thirty minutes, so that we could take more questions from viewers. I agreed immediately and was looking forward to it, but at the next break Mack McLarty showed up and said we had to end the interview after an hour. At first I was irritated, thinking my staff was worried that I might make a mistake if I kept going, but the look in Mack’s eyes told me something else was going on. After Larry and I wrapped up the interview and I shook hands with his crew, Mack walked me upstairs to the residence. Holding back tears, he told me Vince Foster was dead. Vince had left the Rose Garden after the ceremony for Louis Freeh, driven out to Fort Marcy Park, and shot himself with an old revolver that was a family heirloom. We had been friends virtually all our lives. Our backyards had touched when I lived with my grandparents in Hope. We had played together even before Mack and I started kindergarten. I knew Vince had been upset by the Travel Office controversy and held himself responsible for the criticism directed at the counsel’s office. He had also been wounded by questions raised about his competence and integrity in several Wall Street Journal editorials. Just the night before, I had called Vince to invite him to watch a movie with me. I was hoping to give him some encouragement, but he had already gone home for the night and said he needed to spend some time with his wife, Lisa. I did my best in our phone conversation to persuade him to shrug off the Journal editorials. The Journal was a fine paper, but not that many people read its editorials; most of those who did were, like the editorial writers, conservatives who were lost to us anyway. Vince listened, but I could tell I hadn’t convinced him. He had never been subject to public criticism before and, like so many people when they’re pounded in the press for the first time, he seemed to think that everyone had read the negative things said about him and believed them.

After Mack told me what had happened, Hillary called me from Little Rock. She already knew and was crying. Vince had been her closest friend at the Rose firm. She was frantically searching for an answer we would never completely find—why this had happened. I did my best to convince her there was nothing she could have done, all the while wondering what I could have done. Then Mack and I went over to Vince’s house to be with the family. Webb and Suzy Hubbell were there, as were several of Vince’s friends from Arkansas and the White House. I tried to console everyone, but I was hurting too, and feeling, as I had when Frank Aller killed himself, angry at Vince for doing it and angry at myself for not seeing it coming and doing something, anything, to try to stop it. I was also sad for all my friends from Arkansas who had come to Washington wanting nothing more than to serve and do good, only to find their every move second-guessed. Now Vince, the tall, handsome, strong, and self-assured person they felt was the most stable of them all, was gone.

For whatever reason, Vince came to the end of his rope. In his briefcase, Bernie Nussbaum found a note that had been torn into little pieces. When put back together, it said, “I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport. . . . The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff.” Vince was overwhelmed, exhausted, and vulnerable to attacks by people who didn’t play by the same rules he did. He was rooted in the values of honor and respect, and uprooted by those who valued power and personal assault more. And his untreated depression stripped him of the defenses that allowed the rest of us to survive. The next day I spoke to the staff, telling them that there are things in life we can’t control and mysteries we can’t understand; that I wanted them to take more care with themselves, their friends, and their families; and that we couldn’t “deaden our sensitivities by working too hard.” That last bit of advice had always been easier for me to give than to take.