Part 5: Communications Stream of DiscreditI accuse the War Office of having conducted an abominable campaign in the press (especially in L'Eclair and L'Echo de Paris), in order to cover up its misdeeds and lead public opinion astray.
--Emile Zola
If your goal is righting wrongs
You won't get very far
By pretending things are better
Than they really are.
--DC Dave
What is the most persuasive thing, in the eyes of the American public, that might convince many--though fewer than the molders of opinion would have us believe-- that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster did, indeed, commit suicide? It is certainly the fact that they are being told so by virtually all of the nation's authority figures. How many times, when one tries to talk about actual evidence, is he confronted with the rejoinder that "four investigations" have all concluded that it was, indeed, a suicide (They refer, presumably, to the U.S. Park Police investigation, the Robert Fiske investigation, the Kenneth Starr investigation, and then either to the inquiry by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee or the one done by the office of Rep. William Clinger, then ranking Republican on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, neither of which was an actual independent investigation of Foster's death. Presumably, they do not refer to the largely secret cursory investigation conducted by the FBI based upon which it concluded that the assassinations law [18 U.S.C. Section 1751] requiring it to be the principal investigative body in the case did not apply.) Never mind that several investigations have been required instead of just one definitive one, as is customary. That fact, alone, should be more than sufficient to make people suspicious.
More than the fact of the official "investigations," it comes down to ones essential faith in our major institutions. As the French newspaper, L'Autorite, put it in the earlier case, "If Dreyfus is not guilty then the government is." If Vincent Foster is not guilty of self-murder, then not only are our government leaders protecting those who are guilty of the assassination, but so, too, are the controllers of our major news organs. This is a very unsettling thought. It should make all of us feel rather insecure, suggesting that we don't have the government of laws that we thought we did nor a free press, as we thought was guaranteed by the First Amendment, that would keep the government under scrutiny. It would mean, to put it bluntly, that Thomas Jefferson's last line of protection against tyranny has been breached.
Let us look at a couple of examples of how this faith in our institutions plays itself out. I had just finished describing the outlines of the case for murder to a friend of long standing who I had not seen for a while. He is a professional historian of a somewhat standard liberal political orientation. "I can't believe," he said, "that if what you are telling me is true that Republicans like Dick Armey or Newt Gingrich wouldn't be making all kinds of political hay over it." The logic is impeccable if one believes that we really do have the vigorous, two-party system that we think we have. An opposition party that would let the party in power literally get by with murder is certainly no opposition party worthy of the name. To be sure, continued congressional inaction on the Foster case since the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in 1998 speaks volumes, but I would suggest that my friend is seriously misreading what is in the volumes. Suffice it to say that the main difference between my historian friend and me is that I have studied the Foster death and he has not. Maybe, too, we are different in that I have the urge to satisfy my curiosity over something I regard as very important to the nation and he does not. Perhaps he, like so many Americans, has made the rational calculation that it could not be good either for his peace of mind or for his career to do too much picking on this festering little sore. Whatever his motivation, this putative seeker and revealer of historical truth has revealed to me in unmistakable terms that as for this messy little episode in very recent history, he would truly rather not know.
On the press front, I was at a forum on politics and the news media at American University in Washington, DC. Someone in the audience raised a question about the harassment of the witness, Patrick Knowlton, in the Foster case. Rather than address herself to the specifics of the question, one of the panelists, television news commentator, Cokie Roberts, responded that we have many, many excellent journalists in the country who you can be sure have looked into every aspect of the Foster case and if it were anything more than a simple case of suicide you can be sure that they would have told you about it.
Again, what we have is an appeal to the public's faith in our basic institutions, and, again, if the premises are granted the reasoning is impeccable. Certainly all the major news organs have told us over and over again that Vince Foster committed suicide. And we see how the "conservative" and the "liberal"ones war with one another, or so it seems. Even arch-Clinton opponent Rush Limbaugh has been virtually silent on the Foster matter, as have nationally-syndicated talk-show hosts G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, while such "conservative" standard bearers as The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the American Spectator have all weighed in in support of Kenneth Starr's suicide conclusion, slapping down dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" in the process. The national publicity machine has also given a great deal of attention to books by "conservative" writers like Gary Aldrich, James Stewart, and David Brock, all of whom reinforce the suicide conclusion. No wonder the appellation "nutcase" or "right-wing Clinton-hater" is hung so freely on anyone with the temerity to take issue with the official verdict. Surely all these people we trust for informed opinion could not be, in effect or in fact, lying to us, could they? To believe it is to see ones belief system come completely un-tethered. To deny that Vince Foster committed suicide becomes, then, a very radical act, and most people don't like to take very radical actions.
It all comes down to this: To believe Vince Foster was murdered is to believe that our government is corrupt to the core and that what represents itself as a free and vital press is nothing more than a big propaganda machine. Put another way, so high have the stakes been raised in this case that one cannot have any faith at all in our federal government and in our vaunted free press and still entertain the notion that Vincent Foster might not have committed suicide.
Before we further explore the implications of all this, we should first deal with one more "authoritative" voice that has been invoked in support of the suicide conclusion, that is the voice of the Foster family. Although we have been told that on the night of the death none of them could think of any reason why he would have committed suicide and although none of them has made a positive identification of the gun found in Foster's hand, and three days after the death the family was still saying "with certainty" that he had not been treated for depression, and although the Park Police seem to have gone out of their way to avoid questioning Foster's three grown children, claiming that the Foster family lawyer would not make them available (as though he had that power) the family has through that lawyer, James Hamilton, and in a New Yorker interview with the widow Lisa climbed aboard the suicide-from-depression train.
All that is required to deal with the authoritativeness of the family is to contrast the Foster example with that of the Martin Luther King family and a number of other similar examples around the country. The King family has recently proclaimed its belief in the innocence of James Earl Ray, hinting that they think that the government may have been involved in the death, and has certainly been involved in the cover-up. When the King family held a news conference on February 13, 1997, in which they called for a new trial for Ray, the supposedly liberal Washington Post reacted to this extraordinary new development by ignoring it, writing nothing at all about it the next day. The press has generally treated the King family as simply hopelessly misguided and has lent no editorial support for the family's call for a reopened investigation. For less-well-known people whose death has been ruled suicide over the vigorous protests of the families involved, America's press has been largely silent. One hundred and thirteen squares were in the cover-up quilt displayed at the second annual Washington, DC, Quilt Day program on the National Mall, May 23, 1998, sponsored by Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up. The whole purpose was to gain publicity for the families in their attempt to obtain justice for their lost loved ones, but the publicity was not forthcoming. For the second year in a row the event was blacked out by America's major press.
So, the authority of the family in these cases may be subsumed under the authority of the press because it is the press that tells us which families we should pay attention to and which we should not. In turn, the authority of the press must be subsumed under the authority of the government because, invariably in all these controversial cases, whether it be the ones mentioned or the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, Pan Am 103, or TWA 800, the only families whose voice carries any authority with the press are those who happen to agree with the government's version of things.
The (Intentional?) Losing HandWe are back, then, to the press and the government whose moral authority is at issue. Anyone who would dispute the official finding in the Foster case, but stops short of calling into question the very legitimacy of America's basic institutions, plays from a losing hand. If our basic institutions are not corrupt and illegitimate, then Vince Foster did, indeed, commit suicide from depression. The evidence of Vince Foster's murder must be placed against not just the evidence of suicide in Fort Marcy Park but also against the evidence of overall government and press probity.
Now one might argue that simply from a narrow, tactical standpoint it is better not to bring these larger issues up. One runs the risk, after all, of simply being denounced as someone who sees conspiracies everywhere. The only American reporter to investigate the Foster death from a standpoint critical of the government, Christopher Ruddy, up until recently when he spread his net to look into the suspicious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, had been very careful not to look beyond the Foster death to any larger pattern of corruption. He won't even go so far as to suggest the likelihood that Foster was murdered. A lot of good his circumspection has done him. Consider the review of Ruddy's book by Jacob Cohen in the "conservative" National Review (Nov. 24, 1997), a review that is all too representative of the sort of treatment Ruddy has received from the mainstream. Cohen begins with some red herring examples of spurious witnesses in the Kennedy assassination case, witnesses of whom this writer in all his considerable readings on that case has never heard, and represents them as typical of the anomalies or "contradictions" that sober investigators must resolve, and usually do most satisfactorily, in almost any real or apparent crime. But, says Cohen:
"There are those, however, who revel in the contradictions, resisting every effort to resolve even the most easily resolvable of them, as if every human report had equal metaphysical validity and therefore had to be respected permanently. To people of this sort, efforts to resolve contradictions and to scoff at the ridiculous are seen only as proof of blind prejudice, a desire to cover up evil-doing, or worse. For them reality is not singular but, like Alice's Wonderland, fundamentally absurd. Some of this sort devotedly read wild conspiracy books, or write them.
"As a case in point, consider the tolerance for contradiction and the resulting insinuations in Christopher Ruddy's investigation' of the apparent suicide of Vincent Foster, Bill and Hillary Clinton's close friend and legal advisor, an event which, Ruddy palpably implies, was a murder followed immediately by a massive cover-up, engineered by people who are thereby implicated in the murder."
In short, Ruddy is nothing more than just another one of those "wild" conspiracists. This is the kind of ridicule and abuse to which Ruddy has been subjected in spite of his great caution. Before I elaborate further upon the fundamental fecklessness, either intentional or unintentional, of the Ruddy approach, please indulge me a brief digression upon the subject of Professor Cohen. He first came to my attention a few years ago with an article in the magazine Commonweal, I believe, in which he engaged in the kind of debunking of the film "JFK" by Oliver Stone, that has been completely universal in America's press. Unlike the run-of-the-mill journalist, however, Cohen is an academician, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. American studies, the reader should know, is one of the favorite places for the Central Intelligence Agency to plant professors who double as recruiters for their agency. That is because this is one of the favorite courses of study for foreign students with leadership potential in their home countries. Furthermore, those destined to become experts on the United States back home are prime candidates for recruitment by our spooks, and who better to recruit them than one of their professors? Perhaps it is just a coincidence that an American studies professor would be the one to dash cold water on a movie that points the finger of suspicion at the CIA for the Kennedy assassination or upon a book about the death of a high-level government official with numerous associates connected in one way or another to illicit drug smuggling and money laundering in his home state that has, in turn, been linked to the CIA, but perhaps it is not.
I did a search of Brandeis on the Net, and found out that they have a student-run FM radio station that features political talk shows. I e-mailed the station, introduced myself as the author of "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster," which they could access on the Net, and offered to debate Professor Cohen about the Foster case on the air. The response was very favorable, but a final decision had to be put off until after the end-of-year break. After the break I received an amazing correspondence telling me that Professor Cohen was amenable and I was asked my preference for a format. I communicated my agreeableness to almost any format and waited with great anticipation. Several weeks passed and I heard nothing. I followed up and got the response that Professor Cohen, now that he had gotten around to reading "Dreyfus," had concluded that it would not be "productive" to be on the air with me, but that they still would like to have me on for an hour-long interview.
"Fine," I responded, though disappointed, and once again waited.
A couple more weeks passed and then I was hit with the proposal that I be interviewed for thirty minutes (on tape). Professor Cohen would then be permitted to hear what I had to say and would be taped in a thirty-minute interview which would follow my interview immediately (leaving the impression that he was responding to me spontaneously). With few options, I responded that I would do it if they could explain to me how the proposed arrangement was fair. The response was that Cohen was no friend of the students at the station, and that they would be even-handed in their questioning of the man.
"Okay," I answered, and once again waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing. Several follow-up e-mails have been ignored, and I have given up. There is something about this case that forbids open discourse.
I had attempted to pique the students' interest from the beginning by characterizing the Cohen review as one of the most dishonest I had ever encountered. It seemed to work initially, but something happened to dampen their initial interest. Here is but one example of the Cohen dishonesty. He is making light of Ruddy's case for the body having been moved to the park:
"Continuing the implied scenario: the killers drove into the park, to a spot near the first cannon, removed Foster's body, carrying it a considerable distance over rocky, hilly terrain. They then propped him beneath the cannon, the first cannon, perhaps shot him again in order to make it look like suicide, and left him there. Of course, we have already learned elsewhere in the book that they had no worries that medical authorities would find signs of the murder because those authorities were willing to do anything to preserve the suicide legend. All this would have happened in broad daylight, in a park across the street from a dense residential area, a park that is routinely filled with lovers, joggers, picnickers, cruisers, and men who wish to relieve themselves. Park rangers drive through quite frequently. One wonders, didn't the killers worry they might be seen? Perhaps not, since they could be confident that the conspiracy would bully any inconvenient observer into remaining silent. Perhaps that explains why they did not wait for nightfall, when the park would have been closed."
Cute, but Cohen describes a park that does not exist. This story told to a knowledgeable audience would mark one purely and simply as a big-time liar. I have been to the park many times--usually on the weekend--and most commonly there is no one there. The chance of encountering anyone on a weekday is particularly low, especially on a disagreeably muggy summer afternoon. Wedged between two busy commuter roads, the George Washington Parkway and Chain Bridge Road, it is preserved for its Civil War interest and for no other reason. It affords no view of the Potomac River. Usually the sightseers are at the two scenic Parkway Potomac-cliffs overlooks before one gets to the entrance to the Ft. Marcy parking lot, an entrance which one comes upon suddenly and unexpectedly. The park is spooky in its emptiness.
The dense residential area "across the street" does not exist. There is only the compound of the Saudi Arabian ambassador. Middle-class residences abut the park on the same side of the road, but the residents have no easy access to the fenced and wooded park, and no real reason to go there. Once you've seen the cannons and the earthen works, you've seen them. There are no facilities and there's hardly enough open space even to throw a frisbee. Virtually perfect clandestine access is available from an abandoned road off Chain Bridge that ends at an abandoned cabin. One would be less noticeable in the day than the night because most people are away at work and because no car lights would give you away. The park is fenced, but there is a break where a tree has fallen across it near the cabin. From there to the body site (either the official one or the one where Ruddy says it was) is an easy walk in very secluded woods of about 100 yards. Neither site would be easily seen by the occasional visitor to the park.
Interestingly, there is no mention of the old road in the many volumes of official documents that have now been released to the public. Even Ruddy makes no mention of the old road and pointedly leaves it out of the map of Fort Marcy Park and its surroundings that he has in his book. From the official documents we do learn that a young woman who lives in the area reported seeing a man wearing a suit, who did not fit Foster's description, walking most improbably in the woods near the old road the day before Foster's body was found near there. It was a hot July day. The police apparently did nothing with her information. What could that have to do with a suicide the next day, anyway?
By chance, the people most likely to know about these unique park features work at a building a scant mile up Chain Bridge road. It is said that they conduct some training at the park. I speak of the public servants who toil at the headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The autopsy doctor compliant toward corrupt higher-ups is hardly a figment of the Ruddy imagination, either. On this subject, Ruddy is remiss in his book only in that he does not convey to the reader the true rottenness of the performance of Dr. James C. Beyer in the Timothy Easley and Tommy Burkett cases. Based on that sorry record, which I lay out in some detail in "Dreyfus 4," it is abundantly clear that killers with the right connections would have no more to fear from Dr. Beyer than they would from a mainstream journalist approached by an "inconvenient observer," or from Jacob Cohen, for that matter.
Ruddy raised his exercise in futility to new heights recently in an article in the May 17, 1998, issue of The Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Rather than taking the obvious step of assaulting those opinion-molding organs that are his greatest nemesis, he went a long way out of his way to build them up. Any reasonable, dispassionate and objective student of the series of assassinations and attempted assassinations that have had such a major effect on public life in this country over the past 35 years can see that the routine, official "lone-crazed-gunman" explanation of events is exceedingly weak, but, as with the Foster case, it prevails because it has the unanimous support of our news media right across the political spectrum. To ridicule the critics is to build up the credibility of precisely those people who stand between Ruddy-on-Foster and the American public, but that's precisely what Ruddy does in his May 17 article, and he does it in tones reminiscent of Jacob Cohen.
The chosen critic to scoff at is none other than Sidney Blumenthal, currently a controversial high-level White House advisor but formerly journalist for The New Yorker, in which capacity, Ruddy neglects to tell us, he wrote in the September 9, 1993, issue the first magazine article that made the case for Foster having committed suicide from depression. Blumenthal, in fact, was the source of the fiction that Foster had lost 15 pounds. Ruddy has discovered an obscure book that the young Blumenthal co-edited in 1976 entitled Government by Gunplay: Assassination Theories from Dallas to Today.
"Because of his own conspiracy thinking," says Ruddy, "Blumenthal has been nicknamed Grassy Knoll' by White House insiders." He then proceeds to lampoon Blumenthal for the latter's apparent belief that the government--perish the thought-- might have had something to do with the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the shooting of George Wallace.
"The world knows that Blumenthal is a radical left-winger. His book demonstrates that. Its introduction is written by former CIA agent Philip Agee, who became something of an icon for the left as he fled the country to find safe haven in Castro's Cuba and later Europe."
Thus does Ruddy burnish the obverse of the line he and both his public supporters and detractors have cultivated in the Foster case, that it is all a matter of right-wing versus left-wing. While only the political "extremists," of one stripe or its opposite, are permitted under the color of their blinding and self-discrediting ideological bias to point the finger at the most awful goings-on, the "responsible mainstream" is able to appear to rise above the fray, dismissing them all as marginal "nutcases."
What a fine formula to keep the great mass of the public divided and impotent while the permanent government and their paid propagandists in the ostensibly independent press go their lawless way! The last thing in the world they would want us to see is that there might be a consistent pattern and many of the same actors in the recurrent outrages. To take one example, one finds in the index of Sylvia Meagher's meticulously-researched, thoroughly non-ideological 1967 book about the Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination ten pages of references under the heading "FBI, alleged intimidation of witnesses," and another four pages under "FBI, alleged misreporting."
Ruddy chronicles precisely the same sort of actions by the FBI in the Foster case, but yet he can write, when speaking of Blumenthal's professed youthful opinion, "The paranoia that marks a true conspiracist is evident when the conspiracist begins to believe that all of his pet conspiracies run together, forming a unified conspiracy theory.
"Thus, one chapter argues that the same right-wing anti-Castro Cubans who were part of Nixon's Watergate plumbers' operation had links to the same people who killed President Kennedy 10 years earlier. Blumenthal's chapter, 'Cointelpro: How the FBI tried to destroy the Black Panthers' argues that the FBI domestic surveillance efforts used against the Black Panthers created the framework for the Watergate operation."
No wonder Ruddy has received an approving pat on the head in the form of a book-jacket promotion from former FBI Director William Sessions. The fiction is perpetuated with the right-wing faithful, as with the book by former FBI man Gary Aldrich, that the tyrannical actions we are now witnessing are an aberration, the product only of the takeover of the government by the "liberal" Bill Clinton and his Arkansas desperadoes.
Ruddy also discovers in the book that Jeff Gerth, the New York Times reporter who broke the Whitewater story, has a chapter on Richard Nixon's alleged secret mob ties and Jeff Cohen, now head of liberal media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who was head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Assassination Information Bureau, "a left-wing group that promoted theories about Kennedy's, King's and other deaths," wrote the chapter on the killing of Martin Luther King.
His presumed purpose in pointing these things out is to show how the mainstream press and the liberal establishment is infested with a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. A much more plausible interpretation is that these young writers were being given a good, leftist, anti-establishment sheep-dipping pursuant to being placed on a journalistic career track to power and influence. Just as Ruddy has established his bona fides with the right, and has already parleyed it into a Media Fellowship at the prestigious "conservative" think tank, the Hoover Institution, Blumenthal, Gerth, and Cohen were being groomed for bigger things when they got their tickets punched with their low-impact book with its self-discrediting title and its off-putting leftist bias. Judging from their complete public inability to see the most serious current crimes of our government, along with most of the rest of their professed leftist brethren in the mainstream press, I am inclined to conclude that, in reality, they were no more radical critics of the government than the driven, politically-ambitious young Bill Clinton was a principled, anti-Vietnam War protestor.
Ruddy has given me reason to believe that he knows better. I was in regular communication with him from the time he wrote his first article on Foster in late January of 1994 up until shortly after I came out with my first installment of "Dreyfus" almost exactly two years later. Ironically, it was he who suggested that I do the essay showing the parallels between the Foster and Dreyfus cases when I showed him the passage by Barbara Tuchman in her book, The Proud Tower: "(General Mercier) had all the strength but truth on his side." I never made any bones about the fact with him that one of the things that raised my suspicion from the beginning about the Foster death was the similarity to the Kennedy assassination in the performance of the major news media, the lack of suspicion, the lack of curiosity, the high tolerance for anomalies, the inconsistencies and the changes in the early stories with hardly a comment from the press, and the overall willingness of the press to accept at face value virtually anything they were told by government authorities. He never took issue with me on any of these things. At one point he arranged for me to be a regular weekly guest with political poems and commentary on Scott Wheeler's "Reporter's Journal" on the American Freedom Network out of Johnstown, Colorado. Several times I got back to Ruddy with my doubts about Wheeler's sincerity, because Wheeler, who is now with Paul Weyrich's National Empowerment Television, insisted on seeing things in simplistic good-conservative, bad-liberal terms, hardly any different from Rush Limbaugh. The screed that Ruddy recently penned against the young Blumenthal and his nutty conspiracy theories might have tripped from the tongue of Wheeler at any time.
When I expressed my doubts about Wheeler to Ruddy his response was, "Scott's okay, but you have to understand that he's just not as politically sophisticated as you are." The implication was that though Wheeler may not have such sophistication about various government misdeeds that transcend party and ideology, he, Ruddy, did. Ruddy was also quite defensive toward me about his reliance upon retired New York homicide detective, Vincent Scalice, because one of Scalice's big claims to fame is that he worked as a consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the body which, to my mind, perpetrated the second major cover-up, after the Warren Commission, of the Kennedy assassination.
The Script that DividesRuddy began to cool toward me noticeably as soon as I came out with the first installment of "Dreyfus." At first I took him at face value that he was upset because I had written that he made a "mistake" when he reported that the Park Police had not taken crime scene photographs. Now that I have seen the national script that is being followed over the Foster case, with all challenges to the official version of the truth supposed to have emanated from the "conservative" orbit of Richard Mellon Scaife, I can see why my work might be a little upsetting to Ruddy, or more precisely, to those who have written the script. Even excellent Internet web sites on the Foster case tout Ruddy's work and have links to his web site, which could lead to charges that they are ultimately Scaife operations as well. I do not fit the Scaife-beholden conservative mold, and I am willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if it involves the revelation of massive malfeasance in America's press. I am also a lot more inclined than Ruddy to give the required attention to cases like that of the December, 1991, murder of Tommy Burkett, which is related to government corruption in the so-called drug war that well pre-dates Bill Clinton's presidency and to the FBI-embarrassing lawsuit of the harassed witness, Patrick Knowlton.
About the same time as I came out with the first installment of "Dreyfus," I was given a powerful object lesson on the force of the right-versus-left script. For quite some time I had been urged by my fellow Foster researcher, Hugh Turley, to get a computer that is up-to-date and fast enough to negotiate the Internet. He particularly wanted my voice to join his on a discussion group entitled the "cs (Clinton scandals) list." Though the very name of the group connotes a blinkered view of the political landscape, Turley told me that I would be among friends who were as skeptical of what the government was telling us about the Foster death as we were.
To the contrary, hardly more than a couple of months had passed before we were both banished from the group--to be precise, put punitively into the purgatory of "digest status" for the postings of others and told that anything we wanted to post must first clear a censor. Yes, political censors on the Net! And what was the charge. We were said to be engaging in "media-bashing" and "ad hominem attacks." Upon the specific request of fellow cs member, Hugh Sprunt, no examples of the latter could be produced, which is no surprise because we never did it. We only defended ourselves when attacked by others. The real offense, then, was the media bashing, and as long as we have the press we do in the U.S. I shall remain a felon in the eyes of any discussion group that, in effect, criminalizes the pointing out of our media's shortcomings. As with the Dreyfus Affair, the principal enabler of tyrannical actions is a press that is in league with a corrupt government. They won't print your letters to the editor and they dump you like a hot potato from radio call-in shows--or screen you out in the first place. All we have left is the First Amendment and the Internet, and we would be seriously remiss in our civic responsibilities if we did not use them to the maximum extent of our ability.
Actually, I got the distinct impression that it was not the press-bashing per se that was so much the problem as that I departed so radically from the right-versus-left script. Apart from its apparent great interest in the minutiae of the Foster case, the overall tone of the group was little different from what one might hear on Rush Limbaugh or read in the pages of The Washington Times. I wasted no time in pointing out that the "conservatives" were as much a part of the Foster cover-up as the "liberals" were. The so-called "Confidential Witness" who ostensibly found the body and then claimed to see no gun in the hand, I told the group, was not to be trusted. That is not just because he had wavered in his story when questioned by Robert Fiske's FBI interrogators and not just because his long uphill hike to take a leak was implausible, but also precisely because he had gone public through the "conservative" G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy, I reminded the group, is not only a former FBI agent, but in the Watergate caper he was accompanied by CIA man E. Howard Hunt and former Cuban freedom fighter, Frank Sturgis, both of whom have been linked to the Kennedy assassination in published books. CW's tale was also suspect, I noted, because it was being touted by ultimate Washington insider columnist, Robert Novak, and that Novak had otherwise shown no interest whatsoever in the Foster case. Both Liddy with his unsavory connections and Oliver North, with his reported connections to Latin American drug smugglers, have been handed the national megaphones they now hold not in spite of these connections but precisely because of them, I speculated, in postings to the group.
Upon those preaching trust in "conservative" organs like The Washington Times or the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal I dashed cold water as well, and my assessment has been thoroughly borne out by the very positive reaction of these two publications to the cover-up report of Kenneth Starr on Foster--and their blackout of the news of the court-ordered attachment of the critical letter by the lawyer of aggrieved harassed witness Patrick Knowlton thereto. As evidence at the time I had begun to post my rejected letters to the editor to The Washington Times and my series of exchanges with the editors of the Wall Street Journal when I was banished. You'd think that curiosity alone would have made them hold off, but apparently I was cutting a bit too close to the bone and there was no time to waste. Assuming the readers of this tome have greater curiosity, I shall at this point, give you my first never-published Washington Times letter, with the others in an appendix, and my exchanges with the Journal. Recall that Foster's body was discovered on July 20, 1993:
July 26, 1993
To the Editor
The Washington Times
Dear Editor:
Anyone with a shred of curiosity must wonder about the identity and motives of your "source close to the Foster family" who seemed to go to such lengths to persuade us that senior White House aide Vincent Foster, Jr., was deeply and obviously depressed and therefore a likely candidate for suicide. Brother-in-law former Rep. Beryl Anthony was in much closer harmony with acquaintances in Arkansas who have spoken for attribution when he angrily denounced such insinuations. Strong, solid, stable, and responsible, a successful professional litigator accustomed to pressure and hard work, Vince Foster hardly seemed the type who would take his own life because of a few minor setbacks and a hectic schedule.
Other news reports describe him as a man of uncommon intelligence and integrity. You may label me a cynic, but it seems to me that such is our current condition that those qualities alone would mark him as a prime candidate not for suicide, but for murder.
Sincerely,
We are referring here to the front-page Saturday, July 24 article by Frank Murray in which Murray checks on the allegations by the anonymous source that Foster had sought psychiatric help through the aid of his sister Sheila and her husband Beryl Anthony. Anthony had responded, according to Murray, "There's not a damn thing to it. That's a bunch of crap." Recall that Ruddy in his book notes that on July 27 Anthony becomes the first witness to refer to Foster's "depression," but Ruddy never mentions how radically Anthony's story had changed since he was caught off guard by the Murray phone call. (For the record, Dan Moldea, who says he supports the suicide conclusion, actually does recount the Murray-Anthony exchange, but as with many other such curiosities in his new book, which we shall discuss in detail later, he then proceeds as though he had never reported it.)
The Wall Street Journal's RoleInterestingly, in an editorial on July 28 strongly critical of the White House handling of the Foster death investigation entitled "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" the Wall Street Journal made pointed reference to the Anthony quote, suggesting that something was seriously amiss. By the late summer of 1996, however, the Journal editorial page had given strong advance indication that its tune was changing on Foster and that it was in on the cover-up. It was no surprise, then, when on November 25, 1997, Micah Morrison weighed in at the top of the Journal's editorial page with a long article entitled "In Re: Vincent Foster" in which he reviewed the Starr Report on Foster, Ruddy's book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, and Webster Hubbell's book, Friends in High Places. What he had to say is summed up in the following two sentences: "Mr. Starr's report convincingly answers the questions Mr. Ruddy has raised over the years and repeats in his book.... Most of the...allegations, including the recollections of much-touted witness Patrick Knowlton, represent the confusions inevitable in any large investigation of a dramatic event."
Let us back up now to Thursday, March 23, 1995. Reporter Ellen Joan Pollock, demonstrating the apparent split personality of the Journal, has just written a truly scurrilous front-page article with the hackneyed title "Vince Foster's Death is a Lively Business for Conspiracy Buffs." True to its title, the article rips into the crowd of supposed right-wing nuts and religious fanatics who are exploiting the Foster death by selling videos and sending out fund-raising letters outrageously suggesting that Vince Foster was murdered. I get a call from Ruddy urging me to send in a letter of refutation.
"There hasn't been a critical letter permitted in any American newspaper, yet," I respond. "I don't see why I should waste my time."
"This time it's different," answers Ruddy, "I have a friend who is letters editor there. Address it to Micah Morrison and it will get in."
"Okay," said I, and I hastily and not too optimistically slapped together a short letter that was less than my best effort, and lo and behold, on April 11 between the much longer ones of Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, Joe Farah of the Western Journalism Center, and James Dale Davidson of the Strategic Investment newsletter, under the heading "Vince Foster, Big Questions Remain" my letter got in. It is reprinted in the order in which it appeared among the other letters in Appendix II.
I couldn't help but think that the four letters together would have been quite a body blow to the casual Journal reader, who never before had been exposed (and hasn't been since in that paper) to so many doubts about the official version of events in the Foster case.
On July 1, 1996, I was further encouraged by the following nice, short letter:
Dear Mr. Martin,
The Wall Street Journal is about to publish another volume of our commentary on Whitewater. We're planning to include your April 11, 1995 letter to the editor. It will be published in full, as it appeared in the Journal.
We hope to have the book out in early August, and we'll send you a copy then.
Yours sincerely,
Melanie Kirkpatrick
Assistant Editor of the
Editorial Page
I had occasion to follow that letter up with a not-for-publication letter to the editor himself, which went as follows:
July 29, 1996
Mr. Robert L. Bartley, Editor
Dear Mr. Bartley:
Last week at a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute, in response to a question, Paul Gigot of your newspaper stated that The Wall Street Journal had taken its copy of the famous torn-up note said to have been found in Vincent Foster's briefcase to its own handwriting expert who had, in contrast to the three experts hired by Strategic Investment newsletter, pronounced the note authentic. Mr. Gigot's assertion raises several new questions which I trust you will be able to answer:
1. Has this development, which would be of great importance to the nation, been reported in the pages of your newspaper? If so, when? If not, why not? Might it be so recent a development that it has simply not yet been reported?
2. Who is the expert and what are his credentials? How do they compare to those hired by Strategic Investment?
3. Will he make his full analysis public, including his methodology?
4. What is the status of your Freedom of Information Act request for at least a first generation copy of the actual note, in contrast to the bootlegged copy which you printed in your newspaper? Were you able to get this FOIA copy, and was this the one your expert used?
By the way, I was gratified to learn that my April 11, 1995, letter will be included in the update of your Whitewater compendium. The collection of letters that appeared in your paper on that date remains, to this day in my opinion, the most thorough and compelling discussion of the Foster death to appear anywhere in an American newspaper. It makes one wonder why we can't see more of the same elsewhere.
Sincerely,
I got no response, but I eventually did get my book, which prompted me to write again.
September 11, 1996
Dear Ms. Kirkpatrick:
Thank you very much for the complimentary copy of Vol. 2 of your Whitewater compendium. I suppose I should be especially grateful for the free book because, as it turned out, I apparently did nothing to earn it. I was expecting, as I had been told, that my letter of April 11, 1995, would be included in the volume, but try as I might, I can't find it, nor can I find the letters of Reed Irvine, James Davidson, and Joseph Farah published the same day. All these letters, as you are no doubt aware, cast serious doubt upon the official version of events surrounding the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr. Instead, I did notice articles and editorials in which the expression "Foster's suicide" was routinely used, as though it were a proven and universally agreed upon fact that Foster murdered himself.
I trust that being dropped from your book is not your answer to the enclosed inquiry which I sent to Editor Bartley on July 29. If it is, it is the only one I have yet received, and I really would like to have your newspaper's answer. Was Mr. Gigot not telling the truth to his audience at the American Enterprise Institute? Since I have not received an answer to the questions, my natural assumption can only be that Mr. Gigot must have resorted to fabrication in order to maneuver out of an uncomfortable spot created by a difficult question.
Now I have one more question. Does the dropping of my letter, and related ones, signal that even the editorial page of your newspaper is now on board with the government's Foster coverup?
Sincerely,
Enclosure
Ms. Kirkpatrick eventually responded to that letter as follows:
October 8, 1996
Dear Mr. Martin,
As we were putting "Whitewater II" together, it grew to be too long and we had to cut some material. I'm sorry your Letter to the Editor didn't make the final cut, but I hope you enjoy our collection nonetheless.
As for you query on Vincent Foster's death, I just don't know when or whether we'll get into it again. We are following many threads and have to set priorities.
Sincerely,
Melanie Kirkpatrick
To which I could not resist responding as follows:
October 16, 1996
Dear Ms. Kirkpatrick:
Thank you for your October 8 letter responding to my letter of September 13. As I am sure you were aware when you wrote it, your response is generally unsatisfactory and your stated reason for dropping my letter from your Whitewater volume, in view of your overall treatment of the Foster death, is, I'm sorry to say, not very believable.
The questions I posed about Mr. Gigot's remarks before a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute were not idle ones. To put it bluntly, I wanted to know if your columnist was telling the truth when he said that the Wall Street Journal had submitted a copy of the famous torn-up note reportedly found in Vincent Foster's briefcase to its own hired handwriting analyst, who declared it authentic. It certainly didn't ring true because I shouldn't think that a news disseminating organization would keep such important news to itself.
In my letter to you I said quite clearly that it was only natural for me to assume that the silence by which my initial query was greeted indicated that, indeed, Mr. Gigot had taken liberties with the truth. Your continued silence on the questions initially directed to Mr. Bartley, but redirected to you, even though you did take the trouble to write and there is no reason why you would not know or be able to get the answers, has turned my original assumption into a virtually certain conclusion.
You end your letter by telling me in an off-putting way that you don't know "when or whether" your paper will address the Foster death mystery again, implying that there are any number of things that have a higher priority than solid evidence of White House complicity in the apparent murder of one of its top officials, even to the point of forging a suicide note. At the AEI presentation Mr. Gigot boasted that, of our major newspapers, the Journal's performance on the Foster case had been the best, and, you know, he was right about that at least. Is it any wonder that the American people have lost confidence in their newspapers and are turning away in droves?
Sincerely,
I'm sure that you are not surprised to learn at this point that that was the end of our correspondence.
At least from this episode we were able to get a fine education as to why you won't see anyone from the mainstream press putting his head up on any of the Internet news groups. And as the things to keep covered up continue to mount, it seems that there are fewer and fewer functions being announced in the Washington area where one may go and ask a tough question or two of one of these authority figures.
Spin-Doctor MoldeaAnyone wanting to see world-class argument-from-authority on display, as well as a prime exhibit, much of it unintentional, of the fake right and the fake press at work, should check out A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm by crime writer Dan E. Moldea. Published by "conservative" Regnery Publishing, Inc., the same people who gave us Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton and Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access (though the former is a far, far better book, please note which one got the national publicity), it has the most in common with the Simon and Schuster-published Foster book of Christopher Ruddy. One gets the distinct impression, as much as their different interpretation of events is touted, that they are horses out of the same stable. Ruddy, in the way he stays away from the continuing pressure points on our political system by downplaying the significance of the lawsuit against FBI agents for their harassment and intimidation of the witness, Patrick Knowlton, avoiding elaborating upon all connections that might lead to larger bipartisan scandal like the slaying of Jerry Parks in Arkansas a couple of months after Foster and the murder of Tommy Burkett a year and a half before, and ignoring the Republican cop-out, shows that he, or those who are behind him, never wanted more than to fan the flames of the left-right "political firestorm," not to obtain justice in the case. Ruddy seems to want very little more than to buy credibility with those who think of themselves as conservatives.
Moldea, describing himself on the flyleaf as a "pro-cop liberal," (as though declared bias and murder investigation were compatible) as he picks over the case, seeming to side with the tortured logic of the authorities at every turn, ends up doing the same thing for Ruddy that the infamous 60 Minutes interview of Mike Wallace or the White House's "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" did for him. The more Moldea, the self-professed liberal, tries to show up Ruddy with half-baked defenses of the official line, the more he gives Ruddy all that he ever seemed to want out of the case, credibility with a narrow band of "conservative" followers. No one ever adhered to "the script" more scrupulously than Moldea, the script that says that the Foster case represents nothing more than a scrap between the "liberal" Clinton White House and a fringe of the "right wing." Ask yourself which one you are and that tells you what you are supposed to believe.
Let's dive right into the heart of this phony wrestling match. Look at how they both treat Indiana Republican Representative Dan Burton. To both, Burton is the great skeptic on Capitol Hill. Neither seems to have noticed the fact that now that he is Oversight Committee chairman, and in an ideal place to put up on the Foster case, he has shut up. Moldea gives us long passages from Burton's floor speech of July 13, 1994, when he was not even the ranking committee member of the minority party. Take a critical look at the snake oil he was selling:
"I believe there is a real possibility that Vince Foster committed suicide. I do not believe, after reading that (Fiske) report in some detail with about seven other people, that he committed suicide at Fort Marcy Park. I believe that his body was moved to that location...."
---
"There was blonde hair, not Mr. Foster's, on his T-shirt and other parts of his garments. Whose hair was it? It was not his. There were carpet and other wool fibers found on the body. Where did they come from?
"I do not like to talk about this, but there was semen found on his underwear, which would indicate there might have been a sexual experience that afternoon between one and five."
---
"Why did the man who found Foster's body say there was no gun in either hand, not once, not twice, but three times when he talked to Gordon Liddy, and that is the man the FBI investigated.
"My concern is for the facts and the truth. When people say I am down here trying to bring this body to a low ebb, I resent it." (pp. 249-251)
One cannot help wondering where the great concern for facts and truth went when Burton became committee chairman. But was it really ever there? Even in the "courageous" floor speech there are the earmarks of fake-right misdirection, the same emphasis on the curious, difficult-to-believe witness who comes to us through the dubious auspices of G. Gordon Liddy and Robert Novak and the promotion of what looks for all the world like a safe fall-back position, the suggestion that Foster killed himself in some embarrassing place or manner and some folks then took it upon themselves to protect the family, the White House, and the American people from the embarrassment by dumping the body in the out-of-the-way park. Even the fact that there is apparently "hard" evidence for such a scenario such as the unknown hair and the semen in the shorts might well be doubted. It originates, after all, with the dubious FBI lab, whose probity has recently been called into question in a number of other cases and which claimed to have detected the anti-depressant Trazadone in Foster's blood when it was missed by the autopsy toxicologist.
The Feeble Fall-Back PositionThe biggest argument against the moved-suicide-victim theory, of course, is that it is simply farfetched on its face. Who would run the risk of making themselves look like murderers by transporting and dumping a suicide victim? And the assumption of suicide elsewhere fails to clear up many of the anomalies. How did he do it? What gun, if any, did he use? Why did he do it, when all the evidence of depression seems to be based upon changed stories or forged writings that turn up in strange places?
It has been standard fare among the official right-wing crowd, however, which we might regard as reason in itself that it is not true. I heard it from an FBI-agent friend of Gary Aldrich as I stood in line at a book-signing in a store in McLean, Virginia. The late Bernard Yoh, Director of Communications for Accuracy in Media (AIM), tried to cajole me and the professional writer Richard Poe into writing a fictionalized account of Foster being moved from a safe house after he had done himself in in some embarrassing way. Obviously, neither of us went for it.
An early article by Christopher Ruddy, on March 11, 1994, which Moldea talks about (pp.173-174) might well have been designed to buttress the suicide-elsewhere line and/or to take attention away from the real murder scene. Citing a confidential White House source, Ruddy said that Foster had "shared a secret apartment with several senior administration officials at the time of his death." The apartment was supposed to be just across the Potomac River from Washington, perhaps in the Crystal City section of Arlington.
Shortly after that article came out I was told by an acquaintance of mine who used to work for the CIA-contract Mitre Corporation that Mitre had installed the security equipment at the White House and that their surveillance cameras were, as one might expect, state of the art. "They could tell you how close the driver of a car had shaven when he drove in the gate in the morning," he said. It had intrigued me that with everyone wondering where Vince had gone after he left the White House proper, no one had ever raised the question of when the surveillance videos showed him leaving the White House grounds or whether they showed him leaving the grounds alive at all. I passed the word on to Ruddy and asked if he might look into it. A week or so later he came back to me with the incredible story that his White House source had told him that there were no such surveillance cameras, that Clinton had found that they cramped his carousing style and he had had them removed. I relayed that word to my acquaintance, who simply shook his head in disbelief.
Upon further reflection, the failure of the Park Police or the FBI to interview on the record anyone minding either of the gates to the White House compound or the exits of the Old Executive Office Building that Foster would have had to use to leave the White House compound, as opposed to the White House, itself, is as telling as the failure to consult the surveillance record. Taken together they strongly suggest that Foster, in fact, never left the White House compound alive on July 20, 1993, and the investigators know it. Ruddy's lack of interest in these matters, in fact, his apparent fabrication to steer me away from them, is, in retrospect, at least as telling. It is also reminiscent of the apparent fabrication by Paul Gigot that a handwriting expert hired by the Wall Street Journal had examined the torn-up note "found" in Foster's briefcase and had pronounced it authentic.
Nowhere is the false trail that members of the fake right would want us to follow laid out more explicitly than in a March 14, 1995, letter that was sent to Foster researcher, Hugh Sprunt:
My feeling is that the Foster death indeed was a suicide, and that the scandal will arise from (a) where he was during the time he left the White House and his body was found; (b) why he killed himself and (c) what the Clinton crowd was so eager to conceal afterwards ... Ruddy and others have done good work in keeping the pressure on for the truth. We've lived with various Grassy Knoll conspiracy theories since Nov. 22, 1963, and we do not need another. That is why the investigation of the Foster death should be thorough and leave no avenues unpursued. (Moldea, p. 288)