America's Dreyfus Affair, by David Martin

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Money, of course, is not just a force for bad. It is as necessary for those who would do good as for those who would do evil. In fact, the evidence is very strong that the German foreign minister was wrong about the importance of Captain Dreyfus’ Jewishness in effecting his return from Devil’s Island. Publicity usually takes money, and Dreyfus’ case emerged from its initial first couple of years of obscurity not because of any organized Jewish effort, but because the Dreyfus family had money, and the dedicated older brother, Mathieu, was determined to spend as much as it took to get justice for Alfred. To be sure, the first Dreyfusard, the young firebrand journalist, Bernard Lazare, was one of the first aggressive Jewish activists, having written a major work on the history and causes of anti-Semitism, and to him, both in his heart and in the case he made publicly, “Dreyfus was the symbol of the persecuted Jew.”8 But contrary to the claims of the anti- Dreyfusards, he apparently got very little, if any, organized Jewish assistance for the cause of the convicted Captain.

For most French Jews, this intransigent, overly vehement, revolutionary writer lent support to the legend of the Jewish syndicate of cosmopolites and compromised the Jews dangerously by supporting, because he was Jewish, the cause of a traitor.9

Jews are like any other people in choosing to believe that which it is most comfortable to believe. Even the man who later founded Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who covered the first Dreyfus trial as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of Austria, wrote in his dispatch upon the conclusion of the trial that Dreyfus was probably guilty, though he would later claim that it was the Dreyfus ordeal that “made me a Zionist.”10

There was more than enough reason for Jews, like everyone else, not to want to believe Lazare. Certainly very few would want to admit to themselves that “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could only make everyone feel less secure. The state had put its full authority behind the conviction. The Dreyfus family was from Alsace, and though they were culturally French right to the bone, their textile factory still operated there even though the region had become a part of Germany as a result of the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And what sort of man would want to defy convention and assault that bastion of privilege that was the French military officer caste in the first place? Dreyfus’ strong French patriotism, which was a major motivation for his choosing the military career, was for others, not the least of whom were fellow Jews, just another good reason to suspect him.

In addition to Lazare, perhaps the most politically prominent Jew in the country, Chamber of Deputies member Joseph Reinach, was eventually won over to the Dreyfusard cause and he did yeoman’s work for it, but he had to struggle against his co-religionists. By late 1897, three years into the Affair, organized Jewish opinion was gravitating much more toward the new idea of a restored homeland in Israel, a development that to Reinach could only undercut the cause of justice for Alfred Dreyfus. Reinach was so disturbed that he wrote an article in Le Figaro denouncing it:

The sole result of this campaign, which in any case is destined for a pitiful failure, would be to give the impression...that those Frenchmen who belong to the Jewish faith are subordinating the idea of the fatherland to I cannot imagine what sort of solidarity which existed in a vague way during barbarous times, which was prevalent no doubt at the origin of civilized societies, but which in modern societies is an anachronism.11

Profiteers?

So the eventual exoneration of Dreyfus was a triumph not of Jews as a group, but a triumph of truth and justice. It was also a triumph of a group of individuals dedicated to truth and justice, some of whom were Jewish and some of whom were not. But it was not all just a case of high ideals winning out. It was no doubt, to a degree, a triumph of money as well. Here is Bernard Lazare’s initial reaction when asked by his publisher to take a position on the Dreyfus case:

Why? I know neither him nor his people. If he were some poor devil, I would have worried for him. But Dreyfus and his family are very rich, they say; they’ll be able to take care of themselves very well without me, especially if he is innocent..12.

But after examining the evidence he was won over and did prodigious work for the cause. Though the author David Levering Lewis says Lazare “volunteered” his services to the Dreyfus family, anti-Dreyfusards have consistently claimed that he was “bought” by the Dreyfus family. The debate, I believe, is a pointless one. The family had lawyers who could hardly have been expected to work for free. Lazare was a journalist who had to earn a living, and he did put in a great deal of time for the Dreyfus family. The family no doubt bore much of the logistical expense of his work such as printing up and distributing the initial 3,000 copies of Lazare’s pamphlet laying out the case for Dreyfus’ innocence. But Lazare was extraordinarily idealistic, and if he contended that he was not actually paid for his services to the Dreyfus family he more than earned the right to be taken at his word. The relevant point, for our purposes, is that the “bought” charge was so persistently made by his opponents. The implication behind it is that the truth of the matter is not the important thing. Confident that the disparity of resources is massively on their side, the authorities and their apologists are quick to attack anyone who would dispute them as a “profiteer.”

When it comes to the Foster case the disparity of resources on the two sides is even greater than in the Dreyfus Affair. We have noted the large and fluctuating number of daily newspapers there were in Paris at the time, which is an indicator of the ease with which one could get into the newspaper business and reach a significant audience. Newspapers were how the residents of Paris got their news. We have a number of media, and with the exception of the Internet, all are prodigiously expensive to get into. The greater their scope and reach, the more expensive it is to enter the business. Most people now get their news from television, the most expensive business, and the major television networks have been a monolith on the Foster case, actively preventing news from reaching the public that dispute the official government line, and, in some instances, actively and very dishonestly promoting the government line. Newspapers are next in the hierarchy, both in expense to operate and in influence, and they have been almost as monolithic, with only a few little chinks in the armor creeping in at The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Investor’s Business Daily. Magazines come next, and, surprisingly, across the political spectrum from The Nation on the left to the American Spectator on the right, no information has been allowed out through their pages that breaks ranks in the slightest with the massive cover-up effort13. At the bottom of the news hierarchy are the local radio stations with their call-in talk shows. Even the radio stations are mainly owned by large, rich conglomerates, but some have permitted guests like the journalists Christopher Ruddy and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, citizen researcher Hugh Sprunt, and the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer, John Clarke.

As great as the disparity of power has been, it has not been great enough for the people in the White House. The White House Counsel’s Office has actually produced a 331-page report entitled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” which it supplied secretly to media people until the Wall Street Journal made the existence of the report public. The principal thesis of the report is that all the information about the Clinton scandals that gets out, which is, of course, characterized as nothing more than mere conspiracy theorizing, can be traced ultimately to the banking fortune of Pittsburgh conservative, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife employs Ruddy at his small newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and does provide financial backing to such entities as Accuracy in Media, Strategic Investment Newsletter, the Western Journalism Center, and the American Spectator (this last having been terminated after the magazine attacked Ruddy on his Foster reporting).

There is no doubt that without Scaife’s considerable commitment of money the news on the Foster death would have been even more effectively suppressed, but all that Scaife has spent has really done very little to penetrate the public consciousness. Only the American Spectator has anything like a mass audience, and, as we have noted, it has gone along with the government on Foster14. The relative meagerness of the opposition did not prevent the government and its apologists from raising the “bought” or “profiteer” charge, though. What they apparently fear above all else is that the free enterprise ideal in journalism might actually work and that someone might spread the truth in a self-sustaining manner by selling it. Thus, on its scurrilous Sixty Minutes piece on Ruddy, CBS had a lawyer for one of the Park Policemen say, outrageously falsely, that Strategic Investment had made a half-million dollars on its Foster video (Bear in mind that there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of this entire Scaife operation. Christopher Ruddy is certainly “bought” by Scaife--in the sense that he openly employs him-- to a greater degree than Lazare was ever bought by the Dreyfus family so Ruddy’s work can be interpreted as probably the best reflection of the Scaife intentions.. The reader is referred, in turn, to Part 2 of my “Dreyfus” for a detailed examination of Ruddy’s bona fides. It was on this video where the bald and unsupported statement was made---a statement that Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes jumped all over-- that Foster was left-handed.).

My own experience perhaps offers better parallels with the charges leveled against Lazare than does the experience of the Scaife team. The family of the young Fairfax County, Virginia, college student, Tommy Burkett, whose violent death on December 1, 1991, was ruled a suicide, certainly has behaved more like the dedicated Dreyfus family than have Vincent Foster’s survivors. His connection to the Foster death is, among others, that he had the same autopsy doctor, James Beyer, who performed the same sort of job as he did on Foster; he had the same medical examiner, Donald Haut; and the current second ranking man in the FBI, Robert Bryant, involved himself in his case before he had any apparent jurisdiction, as he did in the Foster case. At least as significant is the fact that Tommy, his parents learned after his death, had been induced into doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, in his powerful new book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as one of two cases illustrating, at the very least, Dr. Beyer’s lack of competence refers to the “highly sensitive death of Tommy Burkett,” and proceeds to prove how sensitive it is by not bothering to tell us why.15

The parents found Tommy seated dead in his upstairs room with his legs crossed at the feet, his hands folded on his lap, and the family revolver lying on top of his hands with its cylinder slightly ajar. A single bullet was in the wall above his head but not where it should have been if he had shot himself through the mouth as the police concluded. The family also noticed blood spatter as though from gunshots on downstairs walls. The emergency workers who first arrived told the parents that from the condition of the body it was apparent that Tommy had been dead for several hours. The first arriving policeman, on the other hand, said that he had died just minutes before the parents arrived home, and before that, even before he viewed the body he told the mother, “I’ve seen lots of these suicides. Don’t blame yourself.” Even though the bullet was not taken from the wall and the curious blood spatter was not analyzed by the police, with the help of Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, they ruled suicide.16 Later, the parents paid for the body to be exhumed and another autopsy to be performed. That autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous contusions that had not been noted by Dr. Beyer. Young Burkett had clearly been beaten to death.

This is only a small sample of the numerous anomalies in the Burkett death. After it appeared on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries the FBI was moved to conduct a civil rights investigation of the case. Predictably, in December of 1995, they came to the same conclusion as the police, but they held back what they said was a 1,800-page report backing up their conclusions. Only recently, with the help of the Virginia congressional delegation, has the FBI begun to release piecemeal to the parents a heavily redacted, unnumbered hodgepodge of documents which they say constitute part of the report. As of this writing the parents have just begun to analyze and respond to it through the same congressional channels by which they received the report. Their next immediate goal is to obtain congressional hearings on the case.17

Another similarity to the Foster case, and perhaps the most telling one, has been the role of the media. For 18 months no newspaper would even mention Tommy’s death even though reporters would sound very interested when the parents first talked to them. Only when the parents got the idea of making the original overture by pay phone instead of their home phone did they get results, Later they had a professional sweep done of their phone system and found that the phone was being tapped. A reporter for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine later interviewed the parents at length, but, to this day, the only thing that has appeared about Tommy Burkett in The Washington Post has been an “in memoriam” on the obituary page paid for by the parents.

I have written for the newsletter that the family puts out periodically, and I included song lyrics about the story and an essay about the connections and similarities of the case to Foster’s in my privately-published book, The New Moral Order. Internet correspondents professing to care greatly about government corruption and the scandals of the Clinton, and, tellingly, only the Clinton administration have labored mightily to hang the “profiteer” label on me for offering the book for sale on the Net and one of them went so far as to ask me, as one of many prying questions he put to me by private E-mail, if I was being paid by the Burkett family.

The Burkett parents are both English teachers, the father in public high school and the mother in college. They don’t have the money that the Dreyfus family had, but they do have the same dedication and determination. If they did have that much money there is a very good chance that they would be a good deal farther down the road toward justice than they are now. And if they could so easily afford to pay people to publicize their quest for justice, I don’t know that I would refuse any offer they might make to pay me, but the usual route these days is to hire a public relations firm for such things. From the experience I can certainly say that I know how Bernard Lazare must have felt when he was publicly dismissed as someone who had been “bought” by the Dreyfus family.

Stacked Deck Against Freedom

It is now time to reflect upon the lessons of the of the highest ranking government official to die violently under mysterious circumstances since President Kennedy. The cost, in a purely monetary sense, of the apparent murder would have been nominal, but the expense of the continuing cover-up is enormous. What are the meager resources of a few independent truth seekers selling a few books, tapes, and videos compared to the federal government, with its tentacles into academia and its joint operation with the corporate media establishment? As we look upon the pyramids of Egypt or some magnificent Gothic cathedral in Europe, we can’t help thinking about the sheer manpower that had to be mobilized to create such structures. Similarly, we cannot help but be impressed with the expensive manpower holding together the edifice of lies in the Foster case. The millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went to the Fiske and Starr cover-ups may be the most obvious monetary hemorrhage, but think for a minute of what the simple act of attempting to intimidate the witness Patrick Knowlton must have cost. He has counted at least 25 different men putting the evil eye on him in the streets of Washington, and behind them there had to be a support structure that could mobilize so many people on short notice. More than that, the perpetrators had to be sure in advance that the vast resources controlled by those who run the media empires would not, in turn, mobilize any part of those resources to inform the public of the brazen act.

Recall now the words of the first Republican Party president with which we began the first part of the larger “Dreyfus” essay:

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

Those words were spoken in a period of great crisis for our country. Abraham Lincoln, in the first of their series of debates, was faulting Judge Stephen Douglas for his influential public pronouncements on the slavery issue, which Lincoln deemed to be excessively legalistic and lacking in morality. Consider further the words of Thomas Jefferson, a man who we might say was our first Democratic Party president:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.

Jefferson wrote this in a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington shortly before the formulation of our Constitution, whose writers took the sentiments to heart with their powerful protection for freedom of expression in the very First Amendment.

America’s Dreyfus Affair has made plain, with the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson sharing power and responsibility, and with a man at the top who took his middle name from the latter, that what that great founding father most dreaded is now a reality. For all the protection that he had hoped they would provide us against that government, and don’t, we now have a government without newspapers.

David Martin
December 30, 1997

_______________

Notes:

1. David Martin, from “Of Swords and Pens,” in The New Moral Order, the Poems and Essays of David Martin (Chantilly, VA: DCD Publishers, 1995) p. 46. The entire poem is as follows:

Of Swords and Pens

The pen may be stronger than the sword
But pens, like guns, can be bought,
And battles of words, like battles with guns,
Can be unfairly fought.

Those who rule know all too well
The power of the word,
And so they ration carefully
The ones that can be heard.

In our land there’s little chance
That virtue will prevail
When “truth” is a consumer good
And words are all for sale.

2. David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973) p. 301.

3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: The New American Library, 1951) p. 89.

4. “The Cult of Hope,” in Prejudices (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 89.

5. Op. cit., p. 325.

6. ABC-TV reporter and commentator Cokie Roberts demonstrated another tack that is commonly taken when responding to a question about the Foster case at a panel discussion at American University in Washington. “There are hundreds of first rate reporters in the country,” she said, “and you can be sure you would have read about it if there had been anything to it.”

7. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987) p. 35.

8. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986) p. 138.

9. Ibid. p. 139.

10. Lewis, op. cit., p. 60.

11. Ibid., p. 260.

12. Bredin, op. cit., p. 135.

13. Perhaps in 1998 the cover-up house will crumble. The January 1998 issue of The American Spectator has a very favorable review by quintessential Washington insider, Robert D. Novak, of the best and most powerful book that the American Press has ever largely ignored, Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories. Novak repeats uncritically the following charge from the Evans-Pritchard book:

Authorities rearranged the “crime scene” at Fort Marcy Park to move White House aide Vincent Foster’s body and place a gun in his hand. Evidence was hidden and destroyed, and testimony by witnesses altered by the FBI to fit the suicide theory. Witnesses, in fact, were harassed. Foster’s “suicide” note appears to be a planted forgery. The career Justice Department prosecutor assigned by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr found himself blocked as he probed for the truth, and he returned to his former duties with his mouth shut tight.

Novak goes on to say that “...Evans-Pritchard holds out hope for the ‘the ordinary citizens’ who will ‘cleanse the institutions of this country before they become irretrievably corrupt.’ Patrick Knowlton, a harassed witness in the Vince Foster case, last year filed a federal tort claim naming FBI agents as defendants.”

14. But see the late breaking development detailed in the previous note.

15. The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.) p. 148.

16. The parents themselves later had the bullet removed and analyzed. The examiners found no trace of human tissue on the bullet, indicating that it had not passed through any part of a human body, but it had apparently passed through something. About half of the bullet was missing and could not be accounted for.

17. For more information contact Tom Burkett and Beth George, 13456 Muirkirk Lane, Herndon, VA 20171, Tel. (703) 435-3112. E-mail tburkett@clark.net. Especially recommended is the web site of the national organization the Burketts have founded, Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up: http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. For all four parts of “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” go to http://www.aci.net/kalliste/

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Part 5: Communications Stream of Discredit

I 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 Hand

We 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 Divides

Ruddy 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 Role

Interestingly, 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 Moldea

Anyone 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 Position

The 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)

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The writer of that letter to Sprunt, at the time the number two man at AIM under Reed Irvine, is described this way by Moldea in a note:

(Joseph C.) Goulden, a respected award-winning journalist and the former Washington bureau chief of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was also the bestselling author of sixteen books. Many in the world of journalism and publishing were shocked when Goulden joined Irvine and the right-wing AIM group in January 1989. But the fifty-nine-year old Goulden, who had all the money he needed from the success of his books, believed that his generation had made a mess of journalism, and that serious media criticism had been lacking.

I received a quite different view of Goulden from AIM's Bernie Yoh. He virtually apologized to me for a piece that AIM had put out debunking the very idea that the government could have been involved in any way in the arms and drug smuggling operation at Mena Airport in northwestern Arkansas, saying that the piece was the exclusive work of Goulden, and Goulden, he told me, was "connected." He certainly meant by that that Goulden was connected to the intelligence community, most likely the CIA. Goulden does little to dispel the notion. He tosses off lines in his articles and books like "...when I was having lunch with an old friend who had spent twenty-five years with CIA as a covert agent" (The Death Merchant, p. 15), and I recall his having made reference at a conservative conference to his own training in "psychological warfare," which is spook speak for propaganda. Most recently he had a column in The Washington Times praising the new book by Gerald Posner that predictably attempts to debunk the notion that James Earl Ray might not have been guilty of the murder of Martin Luther King.

Goulden even turns up in the Meagher book (p. 348) on the Kennedy assassination floating the rumor in the Philadelphia Inquirer just 16 days after the killing that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the FBI payroll as an informant. Meagher marvels that neither Goulden nor two other writers reporting such speculation or allegations were ever called to testify before the Warren Commission. Peter Dale Scott in his Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, overlooking the third writer, Harold Feldman of The Nation, handles the episode this way in an end note: "The story was first floated by two journalists with intelligence connections, Joe Goulden (Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1963) and Alonso Hudkins (Houston Post, January 1, 1964)." (p. 368)

Goulden was also overheard by Hugh Turley, who was seated directly in front of him, mutter almost under his breath, "That's nonsense," at a C-Span-televised, AIM sponsored panel discussion on Foster at the Army-Navy Club when Patrick Knowlton's lawyer, John Clarke, rose to describe the staring-down intimidation treatment that Knowlton claims to have suffered on the streets of Washington, DC. Afterwards, in the lobby, Turley asked Goulden what he meant by the "nonsense" remark. Goulden responded, "I know about psychological operations, and they don't do things like that."

The most compelling evidence on Goulden's CIA affiliation comes from his own pen in a footnote on page 138 of Death Merchant, his book about the CIA "renegade," Edwin Wilson:

"Even after Wilson's convictions no one in the CIA would speak about him for attribution. Therefore, what I call "informal answers" came from officials who desired to state "CIA's side of the story," but who were also bound by the decision to say nothing publicly about Wilson. My own view, which I argued vigorously in the upper echelons of the CIA, is that the agency could have shaken much undeserved mud from its boots by talking candidly about Wilson. I did not prevail. The persons who did talk with me, on a background basis, are of sufficient rank that I am confident they "spoke for the Agency," even if anonymously."

Yoh, a charming, cultured, broadly-educated man with whom I conversed by phone almost daily for a couple of years, when he talked about intelligence, Goulden, and psychological warfare, certainly was one to know whereof he spoke. Here he is alluded to by Douglas Valentine in his 1990 book, The Phoenix Program, "Eight years later, after enduring religious persecution in Laos, Father Hoa was persuaded by Bernard Yoh--a Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) intelligence officer on loan to the CIA--to resettle his flock in the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau peninsula in southern South Vietnam." (p. 37)

Here he is colorfully and disparagingly described doing his public relations work for the President of South Vietnam in the 1965 book by Hilaire du Berrier, Background to Betrayal, the Tragedy of Vietnam:

"Bernie Yoh was the stooge to fly back and forth between Washington and Saigon; to Saigon so he could say he had been there, then back to America to tell editors, women's clubs and congressmen, Don't believe what you hear. I have just come from Vietnam. I have been in the jungles with the guerillas, killing Communists, and we are winning. You are not going to desert Vietnam as you did my country, are you?" (p. 143)

Yoh denied to me that he had ever worked for the CIA, saying that he thought they were too stupid for him to have anything to do with them, but he had lectured to the U.S. Army War College on a subject in which he claimed world-class expertise, psychological warfare.

Since Ruddy was working hand and glove with AIM on the Foster case (though he had told me that it was an anonymous Washington Times reporter thwarted by his superiors rather than Reed Irvine who had enticed him into the investigation, as Moldea tells us a couple of times), I passed on Yoh's intelligence about the journalist-cum-spook Goulden to Ruddy, who seemed to take the report at face value. Ruddy, who is not altogether lacking in a sense of humor, later joked with me that when he met with Goulden he let drop on a couple of occasions that he, Ruddy, was capable of being bought and that his price was a million dollars. The idea was that if he should ever be offered such an amount to stop pursuing the Foster case by spook-central, he would know how they arrived at the figure. I would inquire from time to time if the offer had been forthcoming, and the answer was always in the negative. Now I wonder who the joke was on all along.

More Spooks?

Before leaving the subject of apparent cloak-and-daggery involved in the Foster "political firestorm," we must mention a couple of very curious organizations showcased by Moldea. Referring to a March 13, 1994, article in The Washington Post, he writes, "(Michael) Isikoff also spotlights Floyd Brown, the chairman of Citizens United, a nonprofit conservative group, which has hired two full-time investigators' to investigate Foster's death. One of the investigators is David Bossie, known by some as a young attack dog' who has been brought on, specifically, to investigate President Clinton in a practice known as opposition research.'" He also reminded us that Brown had been behind the production of the Willie Horton commercials which played on racial fears and made Michael Dukakis, in his presidential campaign against George Bush in 1988, appear to be soft on crime.

That Isikoff article--and particularly that passage-- had jumped out at me when I first read it, but certainly not because I believed it was true. I surmised that what I was witnessing was the propaganda technique that would later reach its finest flower in the Moldea book. The Post, I suspected, was intentionally showcasing Citizens United to give the group free publicity, building them up as legitimate, though unscrupulous, overzealous, and exceptionally-partisan conservative opponents of Bill Clinton. Those thinking of themselves as conservative would then gravitate toward the group rather than form their own groups while everyone else would be given an easy explanation as to where all these scurrilous, irresponsible and unfounded charges against the Clintons might be coming from. For their part, Brown and his group could be counted on the create a lot of sound and fury primarily about minor and complicated Clinton financial shenanigans centered around the joint vacation-home investment with the McDougals known as Whitewater, with perhaps a sexual peccadillo or two thrown in for spice.

These were my suspicions because, active as I was in looking into the Clinton administration misdeeds by this time and although I lived and worked in the Washington area, I had never heard of Citizens United. Most importantly, in the small world of people nosing into the Foster death the paths of the "two full-time investigators" had never crossed mine. Bossie had not been named as one of them, as Moldea implies, and, at any rate, I had not heard of him either. I also wondered how, if they were spending so much time on the case they were yet to come up with anything that had been made public, considering all there was to come up with. I tracked down a phone number for the group and called them, asking them who the two Foster investigators were. The woman on the other end of the line didn't know what I was talking about and couldn't find anyone there at that moment who did. I requested that she have one of their two investigators call me so we could compare notes should she ever ferret him out and asked her to send me some of the group's material. I never heard from the "investigators," but I did get some material from them although it took at least a month to arrive. The literature was slick and expensive-looking, with a number of boxes to check at the bottom of the last page for how much money I would send them, ending on the top end at some outrageously high figure, but the disclosures of Clinton misdeeds were so bland and the organization had been so languid in responding to my initial inquiry, one had to wonder why anyone would be moved to send them a dime. The distinct impression left with the perceptive reader was that the plea for contributions was there to give the group some visible means of support. To this day I have never read or heard of the first thing with respect to the Foster case that this organization has ever uncovered or publicized.

Later when I learned that Bossie had ended up, in spite of his lack of legal, law-enforcement or even journalistic experience, as Rep. Burton's chief investigator of the Clinton scandals, I was not at all surprised. I was even less surprised when he turned out to be the guy held responsible for the Burton-discrediting selective release of Webb Hubbell's prison tapes. It is no less than what one should expect of a fake-right operative.

Speaking of which, another patently phony Clinton-opposition group accounts for no more than a flickering zephyr in Moldea's "political firestorm" account, but he appears to take them seriously, nonetheless. That is the bizarre outfit that fashions itself the Clinton Investigative Commission. In his penultimate endnote, Moldea credits "investigative reporter" Byron York of The American Spectator with having written a "hilarious expose" of the group (speaking of outfits lacking evident economic viability, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, Moldea tells us in his text, had a review by York of Ruddy's book in which he concluded "the conspiracy theorists simply have too much invested in their scenarios to conclude that the evidence proves them wrong."). One can't help wonder what awesome investigative and literary skills York had to bring to bear to make this crew appear ridiculous. It could hardly be more obvious that their entire reason for being is to make all suspicions of the Foster death appear almost humorously absurd. That our clandestine community has gone to such lengths as to manufacture such ruses is just about the best evidence we have that we are dealing with something far more important here than a simple suicide.

Consider the fact that on Saturday, October 19, 1997, (it would be a Saturday) The Washington Times, on the heels of its ringing endorsement of the Starr suicide conclusion, permitted under the heading "More questions than answers on Vince Forster (sic)," its first and only skeptical letters to date on the Foster case. The first and by far the longest of the letters almost comically mixes up the facts in the case. It is signed "Scott Lauf, Director of communications, Clinton Investigative Commission, Annandale (VA)." Lauf maintains once again that Foster was left-handed, the apparently erroneous assertion over which Ruddy had been crucified on national TV by Mike Wallace, and tells us that park policeman Kevin Fornshill "stated to the FBI that there was no gun in Mr. Foster's hand, that both palms were face up and his arms were laid by his side as if in a coffin." (Here he is putting the testimony of several other witnesses into the mouth of Fornshill, who, in fact, claims not to have seen a gun, but he said that after discovering the body he never bothered to look to see if there was a gun in the hand.).

The second letter is a vague, two-sentence fluff ball by a California reader who also happens to be a heavy participant in the alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater news group on the Internet. This reader, by coincidence, has, of late, taken to attacking me, though I find it almost impossible to pin down what it is he doesn't like about my message.

The third letter, five short paragraphs in length from a reader in Pennsylvania, faults The Times in a general way for not having done enough of its own research, compares Starr's work unfavorably to Ruddy's, offers an on-script gratuitous swipe at "conspiracy theories," saying that they (I think he means the theorists.) are "intellectually lazy," and concludes, "As you point out, the Clintons have dissembled and covered up. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask why."

In the first, almost comical, fund-raising letter that I saw from the Clinton Investigative Commission I noted that they gave the name of a non-profit group in Arlington, Virginia as their respectable-sounding parent organization. They provided no telephone number but gave a street address. I went looking for their office, but found that although the street existed, there was no address with a number even close to the one given.

If, in this Orwellian world that America has become, letter writers aren't really letter writers, leftists aren't really leftists, rightists aren't really rightists, citizens' groups aren't really citizens' groups, respected veteran journalists aren't really respected veteran journalists, major book authors aren't really major book authors, and magazine investigative reporters aren't really magazine investigative reporters, one can surely say the same thing for newspapers and their reporters.

Moldea's Big Revelation

The big scoop in the Moldea book, the thing that would have commanded headlines if we had anything remotely resembling a free press in the country, is the revelation that the pivotal newspaper article linking Vince Foster and his death to the lesser scandal known as "Whitewater" and precipitating the employment first of a special prosecutor and then an independent counsel, is fraudulent. Moldea, the "pro cop" writer has been given access to the Park Police that apparently goes beyond anything we have seen before, even in the official investigation. At times, then, when cops are his source, he breaks new ground. With this in mind, let us look now at the revelation by lead Washington Times reporter, Jerry Seper, on December 20, 1993, that "Whitewater documents" were removed from Foster's office in the wake of his death.

First, Ruddy's account is straight from the script:

"Fiske's appointment may be a classic example of how much influence the press can have in not only opening a criminal probe, but defining its extent. In this case, it was the conservative Washington, D.C. daily, the Washington Times, that drove the case.

"On December 20, 1993, five months to the day after Foster's death, the Times reported that it had learned from Park Police sources that Whitewater documents in Foster's office had been spirited out before the Park Police could search the office. (p. 138, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster).

----

"The all-but-forgotten Whitewater affair, first broached by the New York Times (Jeff Gerth, remember. ed.) in 1992, might have passed forever were it not for the December 1993 coverage of the Washington Times and the links it was suggesting between Foster's death, the strange activities of officials in his office, and the land partnership deal." (p. 139)

Readers of my entire "Dreyfus" will recall that back on page 24 of the initial installment I had expressed skepticism that the Park Police could have known at that time that Whitewater files were among those removed from Foster's office, implying that what we are actually dealing with here is an official, purposeful leak. Moldea as much as confirms it, but doesn't seem to have recognized what he has done.

First, he improves on Ruddy by telling us that The New York Times on December 19, 1993, had an article which reports that "law-enforcement" sources say that Foster had a separate file on Whitewater figure Jim McDougal and speculates that those documents might have found their way to Foster lawyer Jim Hamilton.

"In reality, Hamilton has no such file, and never did," says Moldea. (p. 145) What he then says about Jerry Seper's headline article entitled "Clinton papers lifted after aide's suicide" in the next-day's Washington Times deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

"While the New York Times and the Washington Post had merely speculated about the disappearance of Foster's files on McDougal during the July 20 and July 22 searches' by (Bernard) Nussbaum, Seper, citing two U.S. Park Police investigators,' flat-out declares: White House officials removed records of business deals between President Clinton, his wife and an Arkansas partnership known as Whitewater Development Corp. from the office of Vincent W. Foster Jr. during two searches after the deputy presidential counsel's suicide.' Then Seper makes the same mistake the New York Times had made the day before, saying, The Park Police investigators familiar with the Foster inquiry say the Whitewater documents were among those taken from the office by White House officials and later turned over to Mr. Foster's attorney, James Hamilton.'" (pp. 145-146)

At this point Moldea has an asterisk and an accompanying note at the bottom of the page which completely confirms my earlier suspicion that this story did not, as Seper tells us, originate with the Park Police:

"During my separate interviews with Captain (Charles) Hume and Detective (Pete) Markland, who were the only two Park Police officials present for Nussbaum's search of Foster's office, they each told me that, at the time of the search, they had no idea what Whitewater was. Also, both Lieutenant Robert Kass and Investigator (John) Rolla, who went through Foster's personal files in Jim Hamilton's office on July 28, told me that they, too, neither saw Whitewater documents, nor had any knowledge of what Whitewater was at the time."

What Moldea says next is almost as interesting:

"Consequently, even though this claim in Seper's story is inaccurate, White House Communications Director Mark Gearan is forced (that same day) to issue a statement..." which confirms that Whitewater files were indeed taken out of Foster's office on the 22nd by Nussbaum and turned over not to Hamilton but were sent instead to the Clintons' personal attorney, Robert Barnett and later David Kendall of Williams and Connolly.

Moldea appears to be saying that it is untrue that there were Whitewater files taken from Foster's office because they did not, contrary to reports, end up with either Foster's or the Clintons' personal attorneys, but he offers no evidence for that assertion. But he does nail down solidly his claim that the Park Police were not Seper's source for his monumental scoop. All of the possible Park Police sources for the leak deny it on the most believable of grounds, that they, in effect, didn't know Whitewater from white wine at that point. But then Moldea shows all of the aggressiveness of a manatee by letting Seper off the hook, saying simply that he made a "mistake."

What mistake? Seper knows who gave him the information. Moldea is providing us with compelling evidence that the razor-sharp "investigative reporter" for the paper that "drove the case" and kept Whitewater alive as a political issue, The Washington Times, is simply lying. And what an influential lie it was!

A cry for those precious files goes up all around in the mainstream press and in the Congress along with calls to Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor. The putatively liberal and definitely influential newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times both weigh in with editorials crying wolf over the White House stonewalling. Even the TV networks get interested. Among those pretending outrage over White House lack of cooperation in this little misdirection ruse related to the precious Whitewater files is our friend at the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot: "Whitewater may not be Watergate, but the Clinton White House's skill in handling the real estate S&L suspicions has certainly earned it the right to be called Nixonian," he writes on January 7, 1994.

"You probably think I'm part of the conspiracy," he had said at the AEI gathering, as he smugly dismissed the pesky questioner about the likelihood that the suicide note was forged. Either possibility, he would have had us believe, projecting the insufferable self-importance of the American celebrity journalist, is as farfetched as the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.

On January 12, Janet Reno produced the desired result and the Foster case had its first General Mercier, someone to personify the cover-up and give it credibility in the form of Robert Fiske.

Seper may have fabricated his source for the leak that changed history, but if, as Moldea maintains, the whole story of the Whitewater connection to Foster's office is a fabrication as well, you can be sure that it did not originate with Seper, no more than the story that the police were turned away from the Foster residence the night Vince died originated with Ann Devroy or Michael Isikoff of The Washington Post or the story that the list of psychiatrists was found in Foster's office rather than his car originated with Isikoff or Sidney Blumenthal of the New Yorker, or the many stories recounting how "depressed" Foster seemed originated with the various mainstream reporters who passed the tale along from anonymous sources.

Another Journalistic "Mistake"

Moldea also tells us of another confirmed significant fabrication relayed by a reporter, this one a recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize, but once again he excuses it as just a "mistake," and he misses its likely fake political firestorm significance completely. I refer to the infamous ballyhooed "Case Closed" article by Mike McAlary in the New York Daily News. The article, notes Moldea, is riddled with factual errors, and he continues:

"In the biggest mistake of all, McAlary further claims: The body was discovered by a park maintenance worker who had slipped into the area for a quiet midday drink. He reported finding the body, but then made up a story about having seen a white van. He has since recanted the white van story, admitting it was created to cover up his own behavior.'"

How truly bizarre! Moldea can recognize in retrospect that the story has problems because the final official story is the same as the original, that is that the man in the white van found the body and he then drove up the road and told the maintenance worker who phoned in the report, but what can one make of Moldea's complete lack of curiosity about either the provenance or the purpose of this intervening story relayed by our new Pulitzer laureate?

The McAlary story was worrisome from the beginning. If the maintenance worker had lied initially he would have, in all probability, stuck to it. Drinking and goldbricking on the job is not something one readily owns up to even if it doesn't involve admitting lying the first time through and even if it isn't related to something so important as a potential homicide. In short, it sounded like a whopper, sort of like the absence of security cameras at the White House or the Foster family lawyer not permitting the Park Police to interview the grown Foster children.

The only purpose for it that I can see is that it gave the so-called "confidential witness," now identified as construction worker Dale Kyle, an excuse to break his silence and come forward. He said he did so because he had heard that this maintenance worker was now telling a false story about the body's discovery, and he just wanted to set the record straight. He chose Liddy as his conduit, he said, because Liddy had shown he was the sort of man who could keep secrets in the Watergate case. If that was his real reason it had to be an act of extraordinarily poor judgment. Considering Liddy's secret-government background and associates, he's about the last person I would confide a life-and-death secret to involving high-level skulduggery. Kyle also said that he didn't come forward at the beginning because he "didn't want to end up like that fellow back in the park. But at that point the body in the park could have been anybody, and now he knows who it was and he has first-hand information that suggests that it was a murder and not the suicide they say it was, and he's confiding it to the G-man? First he's inexplicably cowardly and then he's inexplicably bold.

So where did McAlary get the story that ostensibly flushed Kyle out? It probably came from his stated primary source for the article, the Park Police, but the chance that they originated it is about is great as that McAlary did himself. Tell me where this one and Seper's story and several of Isikoff's stories came from and I'll tell you who the Foster killers were. I think, probably, that the crime writer Moldea could do so as well. Whether he would do so, of course, is the more interesting question.

Minus the obvious errors (One gets the distinct impression that Moldea's book was proofed by the folks at AIM and perhaps by the independent researcher Sprunt as well, though it is hard to see how they could have missed Moldea's completely unfounded claim that Patrick Knowlton ever said or denied he said that he could pick a certain GW Parkway van driver out of a lineup. [p. 417]), what Moldea has wrought is nothing more than a much longer version of the McAlary article. A safe reporter has been selected to embellish the official suicide line with inside information. Just as McAlary says he was given access to a Park Police report that had not been made public more than half a year after the official verdict had been rendered, Moldea claims to have seen autopsy and crime scene photos which we are not allowed to see and he is also allowed to talk to policemen who tell him things that they not only have not told to reporters but they haven't even said before in their official depositions, at least in none that have been released.

Moldea Undercuts Himself

For one whose apparent purpose is to continue to keep the lid on the scandal, this method has its pitfalls. We have already seen how it has resulted in exposing the reporter Seper and his newspaper, The Washington Times, as apparent liars and frauds. There are other examples. Take, for instance, the following passage:

"Hume then walks over to Detective Markland and tells him that a torn-up note from Foster has been found. When Markland asks where the note was discovered, Hume replies, In Foster's briefcase--the one Nussbaum searched on the floor.'

" Bullshit!' Markland exclaims in disbelief. Either it didn't come out of the briefcase, or Nussbaum was lying that he didn't see the note!'"

Detective Pete Markland, Moldea dutifully reminds the reader, was present and observing intently, as were several other people, when Nussbaum cleaned out the briefcase and inventoried its contents. On page 111 we have this from Markland's written report: "After the contents were removed, I could see that he spread open the briefcase and visually inspected it as if to confirm that it was, indeed, empty. Mr. Nussbaum did not recall doing what I described."

Most of all, though, Markland's spontaneous reaction to the claim that not one but twenty-seven pieces of a torn-up note had subsequently been "found" in that emptied-out briefcase speaks volumes. It would be hard to find better evidence that the note is a fraud, and it negates almost completely Moldea's attempts to paint the note as authentic by calling Ken Starr's handwriting expert "respected" (an adjective that he also uses for former BCCI lawyer Robert Fiske and, as we have seen, Joe Goulden) and dishonestly casting aspersions in a note on the motivations of noted literary document authenticator Reginald Alton of Oxford University who had declared the note a forgery.

If the note is a fraud the whole suicide house of cards comes tumbling down, of course. Although he is only talking about the Foster lawyer Jim Hamilton at the time, and not the authenticity of the note, Moldea lets drop the following bit of information in an end note on page 410:

"On August 25, 1993, Hamilton sent a letter to Attorney General Reno, asking her for the original of Foster's torn-up note. In his letter, Hamilton wrote: The family, of course, understood the need for the Park Police and the FBI to obtain and analyze the note. Now, however, the investigations into Vince's death are concluded and family members see no good reason why the note should not be returned to Mrs. Foster.'

"Reno politely turned down Hamilton's request."

That is the letter that I reproduce in its entirety on page 50-51 of the first installment of "Dreyfus." Hamilton in that letter also says, "The family appreciates the manner in which the Department and you handled the note during the investigations and particularly thank you for your decision not to release a photograph of the actual note. That clearly was the correct decision for all concerned."

What's the big deal with the photocopy when the text is already out, if not to keep it out of the hands of authenticators? If one were trying to act guilty of a forgery it is hard to see how he would behave any differently. Had Moldea reproduced the whole letter--along with the Markland observations-- in the context of the note's authenticity he would have left little doubt that it is, indeed, a forgery, which is reason enough why he didn't do it.

Toward the end of the book, Moldea presents new police evidence that virtually destroys Dr. Henry Lee's desperate attempt to show, in conflict with the testimony of all the witnesses at the park that night, that a bloody mess came flying out of the back of Foster's head along with the exiting bullet. The problem is that no one saw or collected any evidence of it under the path of the bullet or on surrounding vegetation. According to the autopsy report, the bullet as it passed through the back of Foster's skull opened up a one inch by inch-and-a-quarter hole. The pressure of the gases from the explosion that propels the bullet, the bullet itself, and Foster's own blood pressure should have all caused blood and brains to spew out of the relatively large hole like a geyser, which it apparently did not. Here's how the Starr Report tries to salvage the situation:

Possible Bloodstains on Vegetation at Scene

Dr. Lee stated that one photograph of the scene "shows a view of the vegetation in the areas where Mr. Foster's body was found. (Note the imprecision. ed.) Reddish-brown, blood-like stains can be seen on several leaves of the vegetation in this area. He also noted that "[a] close-up view of some of these blood-like stains can be seen in [a separate] photograph." (p. 59)

Moldea, in his summary of the Starr Report, refers to this passage but then gives us this end note:

"USPP Investigator Renee Abt told me that she, along with other police investigators had specifically examined the foliage around Foster's body for blood but found none. However, "Abt, a gardener, did observe minuscule raised brown spots on the leaves which she described as leaf disease.'" (p. 443)

If this is the conspiracy debunking book it's been touted to be, perhaps we need more of them. We have given just a few of the many, many examples in which Moldea just drops out powerful evidence that thoroughly undercuts the official suicide line to which he doggedly pretends to adhere. In his promotional interviews for the book Moldea, like Kenneth Starr and James Stewart, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of the book Blood Sport, has stressed motivation, concluding that it was private more than public worries that led Foster to do himself in.

Turning to Moldea's book all we find in the way of support for his argument is a rehash of Blood Sport, which he pumps up by calling it "a widely respected chronicle of the Clinton administration" and "a well-researched and important book," as evidenced by the fact that it made number one on the New York Times best-seller list. One of the reasons for the book's success, he tells us, is the "penetrating interview" of Susan Thomases, the Clinton confidante who told of an evening meeting in the privacy of her guest-house boudoir on July 14, 1993, in which Vince poured out his heart to her about his despair for his marriage on account of his burdensome wife in whom he is unable to confide.

Moldea, believe it or not, takes at face value this account in which the very private and supremely confident Vince Foster, the handsome southern gentleman whom Moldea tells us elsewhere the female employees of the White House had chosen as the man with whom they would most like to have an affair (Now that has the ring of truth. They're only a few months on the job and look what they're concerning themselves with.), looks for all the world to be hitting on the dauntingly plain Susan Thomases.

"Thomases, didn't know what to say. Foster seemed calm, dignified--but infinitely sad," concludes Moldea's long quote from Stewart on page 340 (a quote that also appeared in a long excerpt from the book in a Time cover story).

Moldea appears to forget completely what he had written back on page 224 about Thomases' earlier deposition to the FBI:

"Thomases tells the FBI that the last time she saw Foster was on either Wednesday, July 14, or Thursday, July 15, 1993, just days before Foster's death. They had lunch together; other people were present, she says. She adds that she could offer no reason or speculation as to why he may have taken his life.'"

The best one can say for Moldea here is that at least he doesn't attempt to resolve the contradiction by suggesting that this is one of the examples where the FBI misreported a witness's statement as Chris Ruddy does in his book. The script that Stewart was using was apparently the real thing. In order to adhere to it on this subject Ruddy would undercut himself almost as badly as Moldea does repeatedly.

So regularly does Moldea undercut himself that one begins to think of him as a hostage forced to write a letter to the outside world in which he is told what he is supposed to say. He knows he must please his captors so all the broad outlines of the letter are completely in accord with their wishes, but he laces the letter with hidden messages for alert outside readers so they will know he really doesn't mean what he seems to be saying. Another comparison that one might make is with The Washington Times. The Times has done one-time, bump-and-run articles telling us of the suit by the aggrieved witness Patrick Knowlton against his alleged FBI harassers working for Kenneth Starr, the forgery findings of the three handwriting experts, and on Dr. Beyer's indefensible autopsy performance in the Timothy Easley and Tommy Burkett cases. They also regularly printed full-page ads by Ruddy in which he detailed many of the unexplainable anomalies in the official version of the death. If one accepts what is in these articles and ads as true then one cannot endorse the official suicide verdict, but that is precisely what the newspaper's editorial writers and reporters do, embracing the Starr Report and routinely referring to the "Foster suicide."

[admin]

Upholding "The Script"

What seems important to Moldea, as to The Times, is not really the truth in the Foster case but that the left-versus-right fiction be kept up. To read Moldea, from early-August, 1993, when the Park Police declared suicide, to late-December, 1993, when The Washington Times wrote of the removal of Whitewater documents from Foster's office, everything was going along just swimmingly. And no one has any real reason to be concerned until the "conservative" Ruddy and the "conservative" AIM start stirring things up the next month. All the problems with the case evident from just reading the newspapers carefully and using ones own common sense, which I detail in the first part of "Dreyfus," simply do not exist. In light of the fact that the Foster case is only a concern of the far right, the general public can put it out of their minds. It works just as well from the other side:

"The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with (Martin Luther) King when he was shot, said he agrees with the family's quest (for a new investigation of the killing), and has told Mr. Clinton of his own feeling that federal officials should keep investigating because rumors persist among black Americans that King was the victim of a government conspiracy." (The Washington Times, June 17, 1998)

Get the message? If you are not a black American, it's none of your concern, no more than the Foster death should be your concern if you are not a right-wing fanatic, in particular, a follower of the godfather of most major right-wing conspiracist's causes, Richard Mellon Scaife.

In the final analysis, the obvious overall purpose of the Moldea book, even with it's numerous revelations that undermine the official suicide case, is to further flesh out the White House charges contained in their 331-page Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. He even makes quite uncritical reference to the document along with a favorable acknowledgment to another script-reader, Philip Weiss of the New York Times Magazine, for revealing the existence of the White House report in his mini-version of Moldea's book, "The Clinton Haters," a February 23, 1997, cover article. Weiss lets out some useful information as well, such as the news of the Knowlton harassment and lawsuit, but as long as the broad-brush impression is left that only some kind of nut could possibly care about or even believe these things, and everything remains contained within the right-versus-left structure, that's okay. A by-product of the operation is that fake opposition, or, at the very least, acceptable opposition, which is regarded with all the mock horror of Br'er Rabbit contemplating the briar patch, is built up and publicized. Unapproved opposition not using the horse-and-buggy, never-bother-to-defend-what-you-write traditional media, only gets the back of Moldea's hand:

"...an avalanche of questionable data and wild speculation about the Foster case finds its way onto the Internet, demonstrating the best and worst of the new information superhighway. President Clinton, one of the Internet's greatest supporters, is accused of everything from weapons trafficking to murder, among many other groundless allegations." (pp. 326-327)

Finally, Moldea's very different perspective from mine on the scurrilous, Weiss-style front-page article for the Wall Street Journal about the lively business shameless right-wing "conspiracy buffs" have made out of the Foster death, and the article's aftermath, is instructive. Many of the Scaife-dependent culprits who later turn up in the Weiss article and the White House "Communications Stream" are there, but Accuracy in Media and its director, Reed Irvine, who have certainly done more than their share to keep the Foster case alive, are missing.

Moldea then has an amazing long passage in which he quotes from and alludes to the taped transcript of Reed Irvine's call of complaint to Ms. Pollock for having been left out. Irvine, the responsible government doubter, gets all the better of Ms. Pollock in the exchange as Moldea recounts it, demonstrating his far greater command of the subject than the Wall Street Journal reporter who is supposed to be covering the case.

Noting earlier in the book Moldea's use of previously unpublished excerpts from White House press briefings in the wake of the Foster death, briefings that a friend of mine first ferreted out and furnished to me, which I then passed on to Irvine, I had suspected that Moldea worked very closely with the people at AIM in preparing this book. His use here of AIM-taped phone transcripts and Moldea's uniformly positive mention of the organization throughout the book certainly confirms that. (Giving Irvine the benefit of the doubt, he might have thought that exposing Moldea to the facts would lead him to the proper and obvious conclusion. Moldea, unfortunately seemed determined not to let facts get in the way of what was apparently a conclusion that was foreordained)

"After this conversation," writes Moldea, "Irvine, Farah, and Davidson all write letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, defending their work, as well as the reporting of Christopher Ruddy."

Please notice that he does not give us the April 11, 1995, date when the letters were published so the reader cannot easily track them down and read them for himself, and something else seems to be missing as well. Hmm.

"You probably think I'm part of the conspiracy," I can imagine his response to my insights into his work.

Yes, Dan, I do.

Gary David Martin
June 22, 1998

Appendix I

Additional Letters of Mine to The Washington Times that Were Rejected

January 27, 1994

Dear Editor:

I have read the London Sunday Telegraph article to which Richard Grenier alludes in his January 26 column, "The Tonya Harding and Bill Clinton Parallels," and I must say that he gives only the slightest inkling as to its real power and importance. You would do your readers and the country a great service were you to reprint the article in its entirety.

Sally Miller Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, was, according to her own well-substantiated account, one of the victims of a vigorous 1992 effort to suppress "bimbo eruptions" threatening to the Clinton campaign. She was, the Telegraph reports, offered a cushy federal sinecure if she would cooperate and deny everything, and was threatened with bodily harm if she would not. She didn't cooperate and although she has not been physically injured, she has been subjected to career and life-threatening harassment.

A better parallel than with the amateurish buffoons associated with Tonya Harding is with the much more effective plata o plomo (silver or lead) intimidation techniques of the Medellin cartel. It shouldn't take a letter-writer to say it, but such thuggery has no place in any country which pretends to be civilized. We must eliminate it root and branch before it spreads and takes us over. But before it can be eliminated it must be exposed in all its ugliness. That's where you in the vaunted American free press come in. Get with it.

Sincerely,

----------

Feb. 15, 1996

Dear Editor:

Your February 15 report on the testimony of former White House aide Helen Dickey contains a blatant and verifiable untruth which goes right to the heart of the Vincent Foster death case. You report, correctly, that Ms. Dickey testified that she did not call Arkansas reporting Foster's death before 10:20 p.m. Eastern Time on July 20, 1993. You then say: "Conspiracy theorists focused on a supposed 7:30 p.m. call by Ms. Dickey as central to a Foster murder theory. Minority counsel Richard Ben-Veniste noted that Arkansas troopers who first said the call had come earlier refused to testify or supply the panel with any corroborating evidence."

It is indeed curious that the Washington Times, of all newspapers, should satisfy itself with the Clinton-apologist minority counsel on this vital factual question. Had your reporter called the troopers in question, as talk show host Michael Reagan did (see enclosed transcript), he would have learned that Mr. Ben-Veniste has not talked to Trooper Larry Patterson or to his attorney about this matter and that the trooper is ready and eager to testify on the subject. Please set the record straight, and let's get on with the pursuit of justice without the gratuitous name-calling.

Sincerely,

Commentary:

Though the letter was not printed, The Times did have an article a few days later based on an interview with the troopers' lawyer in which they did, in fact, set the record straight. That did not stop Gene Lyons from repeating the Ben-Veniste story in a long negative review of Partners in Power, the Clintons and Their America in the August 6, 1996, issue of The New York Review of Books, with the added embellishment that the troopers had actually declined to honor a subpoena by the committee to appear. The Review has a very generous letters policy, often printing several long letters attacking articles that they have published, but with the proviso that the original author is able to get in the last word with a rejoinder. I was willing to play by those rules and I sent in my letter straightening Mr. Lyons out on the matter.

I had never seen them do it before, but they changed the rules. Mr. Lyons himself had a letter in the September 19 issue in which he was permitted to respond to "some readers" without naming them and without their being allowed to make their case for themselves. This letter contained additional factually erroneous information to which Reed Irvine responded. To my knowledge, neither that letter nor any letter correcting the errors ever appeared.

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May 22, 1996

Letters to the Editor
The Washington Times

Dear Editor:

Why should you expect the public to read and take seriously the pages of your newspaper when, in a matter of utmost importance to the country, your editorial page people apparently do not? In the May 22 issue, editorial page editor, Tod Lindberg, says, " Here, ruining people is considered sport,' Vince Foster famously wrote before his own suicide." The editorial on Whitewater the same day also refers twice to Foster's "suicide."

But your paper reported in a Reuters dispatch on October 26 of last year that three well-credentialed handwriting experts, including a noted literary documents authenticator from Oxford University in England had examined the note and each, independently, had declared it a forgery. Considering its disjointed, sophomoric text and the curious way and condition in which it was found, their ruling should not have come as a surprise to anyone with anything resembling a critical mind.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Kenneth Starr's investigation of the death still open and ongoing, and hasn't that also been reported by your paper? So why do your editorial page people insist upon ignoring the news part of the paper and protecting Bill Clinton by continuing to treat the belatedly-discovered torn-up note as authentic and the strange death of Vincent Foster as a completely-confirmed suicide?

Sincerely,

Commentary:

I don't think I shared this letter with Christopher Ruddy, so I shouldn't think of taking credit for the title of his book, but, then again, maybe it reached him through other channels. For all I know, my material is widely-circulated in our political nether world.

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August 28, 1996

Dear Editor:

May I take it that in printing a long, front-page article about new evidence of Hillary Clinton's involvement in the delay in reporting the "discovery" of a note attributed by authorities to Vincent Foster without even hinting at known, published (in your own newspaper), credible and convincing challenges to the authenticity of the note, you at the Washington Times have cast your lot quite clearly with "authority?" Might I ask further if, in so doing, you believe you are continuing to perform the role of a vigorous, independent, truth-seeking press so necessary to our survival as a free people?

Sincerely,

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December 16, 1996

Dear Editor:

I wish to thank you for publishing periodically the very learned and deeply philosophical letters of Stephan Zachartowicz of Chantilly. So substantive and thoughtful are they, and so well grounded in Christian tradition, that collected together they ought to be worth about a semester of college credit in one of our elite universities these days.

His most recent letter, "History does not culminate in liberal democracy'," (Dec. 14) reminding us that conservatives should not credit Enlightenment-inspired "liberalism," by either its original or its current definition, for our most cherished values, I thought was one of his best. A people unnurtured in the deeper values of the Western tradition can't handle the freedom that liberal democracy espouses, and the Leviathan state, often in the guise of anti-crime measures, must grab for ever-more-concentrated power.

Mr. Zachartowicz could have made his letter a good deal more powerful and poignant in one area, however. "Human rights and the rule of law? Ask a parent who has seen his child's murderer freed on a technicality," he says. Perhaps he hasn't heard about it, but at that point he might have cited the example of his 21-year-old neighbor in Chantilly Highlands, Tommy Burkett, the story of whose violent death in his own home was reported on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries on November 11, 1994 (Of the area's major news organs, only the Times found this significant enough news to report.). In spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, the police ruled his death a suicide, supporting the conclusion stated to Tommy's mother by the attending policeman even before he saw the body. The episode ended with the news that the FBI had taken over the case and would conduct its own investigation.

Late last year Louis Freeh's FBI announced that it had completed its review of the matter and had concluded that it was, indeed, a case of suicide. Supporting the conclusion was a 1,800-page report, their spokesman said. However, up to now no one from the press or the public, which includes the outraged parents, has been permitted to see the report, though it has been shared with certain members of a couple of Congressional "oversight" committees who, in turn, won't let anyone else see it, nor will they heed the parents' plea for Congressional hearings.

If this is the sort of thing we can continue to expect from the Juggernaut that governs us, I shall have to join Mr. Zachartowicz in digging in to hold off the "Great Decline."

Sincerely,

Commentary:

Critics on the Net who certainly do not wish me well have taunted me by saying my letters don't get printed because I am too unrelentingly critical of the newspaper, which ignores the fact that a person's usual motivation for writing is to disagree with what a newspaper says, and such is the tenor of most published letters to the editor. I have also had letters printed in The Washington Times that are critical of The Times or one of their columnists, but only about much less controversial topics. Nevertheless, in an effort to increase the chances this letter would be printed I stroked the paper not once but twice, attacked their competitor, and had nothing critical of them to say. I even sent it in twice.

No luck. Could it be the message? They actually only did one pretty unsatisfactory bump-and-run on Tommy Burkett three years after the murder, and they have reported nothing on the FBI perfidy. Obviously there is a reason for their silence, and like so many other things that our press keeps a lid on, it clearly includes enforced silence from the citizenry, at least as far as the paper's assistance is concerned.

Appendix II

Other Wall Street Journal Letters, April 11, 1995

Vince Foster: Big Questions Remain

Your March 23 page-one article labeling critics of the botched investigations of the death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr. as "conspiracy buffs" reflects the fact that most journalists who have written about this case want to believe the official reports and refuse to examine critically the evidence they present.

You say that those who have pointed out flaws in the investigations are "generating elaborate and scurrilous rumors about his suicide." You describe Christopher Ruddy, the first reporter to challenge the findings of the Park Police investigation, as "the king of Foster conspiracy theorists." You say this that Mr. Ruddy and many other conspiracy theorists stop short of saying they have proved murder." You say this "may be because so many of the theorists' suspicions can be explained away by a cursory reading of a report by Robert Fiske, the former independent counsel."

A cursory reading of Mr. Ruddy's stories should have shown you that rather than weaving conspiracy theories and generating scurrilous rumors about Mr. Foster's death, Mr. Ruddy did what you and other journalists should have done. Hearing charges that the Park Police investigation had been bungled, he did his own investigation. He was the only reporter who interviewed the EMS personnel and Park Police officers who had seen Foster's body as it lay in Fort Marcy Park.* He reported that some of them and experts he consulted had doubts about the quick rush to judgment that this was a suicide. There was the unusual posture of the body (laid out as if it was in a coffin), the paucity of blood, the gun in the hand, the failure to find the bullet or bone fragments from the exit wound in Foster's skull and his shiny shoes in a dusty park.

As Mr. Ruddy pursued the story for the New York Post, he found many flaws in the Park Police investigation, all resulting from their failure to observe the rule that unattended violent deaths should be investigated as a homicide until there is enough evidence to rule out that possibility. The Park Police admitted that they didn't immediately check Mr. Foster's car for fingerprints because "it was obviously a suicide."

Mr. Ruddy neither generated nor disseminated rumors. He reported facts that exposed serious flaws in the Foster investigation. Your article's statement that many of the suspicions raised were explained away by the Fiske report is inaccurate. The Fiske report actually revealed even stronger evidence that cast doubt on the finding that Foster killed himself in Fort Marcy Park. The appended FBI lab report concluded that Foster's head had not always been in the face-up position in which it was found. This was proven by the blood on his right shoulder and on his cheek and jaw.

Mr. Fiske's rejection of the alternative explanation--that the blood indicates that the body was moved--was based on the claim of his four pathologists that moving the body would have resulted in a lot of blood being spilled on Mr. Foster's clothing and skin. One of these pathologists (Dr. Donald Reay) has since acknowledged that this could have been controlled by bandaging the exit wound.

The Park Police investigators apparently made no tests for gunshot residue on Foster's hands or face, but the autopsy reported that black marks presumed to be gun smoke were observed on both index fingers in front of the gap between the cylinder and the barrel, precluding the possibility of his having a firm grip on the gun to aim it. It would be awkward to have even one hand in that position and senseless to have two. It would have been difficult to aim the gun accurately, risking incurring an injury that would paralyze but not kill.

These are only a few of the unanswered questions that have been posed by those that you berate as :"conspiracy buffs" who generate "scurrilous rumors" about Foster's death. If you don't have the answers, you could at least tell your readers what the questions are.

Reed Irvine
Chairman
Accuracy in Media Inc

*Editorial Comment: Ruddy may not have been the first journalist to interview the emergency workers. Recall what was written back on page 16 of the first part of "Dreyfus." After Ruddy had produced his first New York Post article based on interviews of a couple of emergency workers on January 27, 1994, The Washington Post responded two days later with a short article buried away in Saturday's Metro section in which it maintained that the workers had "consistently described the scene of Foster's death as tidy, but only recently indicated their suspicions that his death might not have been a suicide."

If reporters for The Post had not interviewed them, how did they know how the workers had consistently described the scene. Assuming that someone from the paper must have interviewed them before and the paper is not just making up this story of how the emergency workers had described the body before, one must seriously question the probity and professionalism of a news organization that would keep such vital information to itself.

---------------

As a concerned former college mate of Vincent Foster Jr., I have done much more than a "cursory reading" of the Fiske Report, and I can say unequivocally that the report (which is itself quite cursory) does not "explain away" the numerous inconsistencies in the case pointed out by Mr. Ruddy.

The flecks of mica the FBI lab found on Foster's shoes, socks and clothing are consistent with his body having been transported and dumped in the park. But I have walked the 200 or so yards that Foster would have had to walk to get to where they say his body was found, and that simply can't be done without getting dirt on your shoes. The barren ground in front of the second cannon where they say they found his body is also inconsistent with the one photograph that has been released to the public and also inconsistent with the description of surrounding "heavy vegetation" given by all initial viewers of the body.

I also wonder how it is possible for a police investigator to write that he was told by the autopsy doctor that X-rays showed no bullet fragments in Foster's head when the doctor, as he now maintains, took no X-rays, and how it is possible for assiduous investigators to overlook for almost a week a crucial note torn into 28 pieces and left in Foster's briefcase.

Gary D. Martin
Chantilly, VA

-----------

If the CIA or La Securite were doing a course on professional disinformation they could hardly find a more worthy exhibit for study than your articles on Vincent Foster. You have helped to convince the world that Vincent Foster committed suicide--notwithstanding compelling evidence to the contrary.

Your most recent article of March 23 is yet another study in insinuation and falsehood. Your intent is plainly to discredit those of us who have attempted to maintain public pressure for a thorough and honest investigation of Foster's death.

Crucial forensic evidence strongly suggests that he met foul play. At least seven of America's leading forensic experts have stated for the record that the pattern of powder burns on both Foster's left and right index fingers is "not consistent with suicide." They include Masaad Ayoob, head of the Lethal Force Institute, Dr. Vincent Di Maio, medical examiner for San Antonio, Texas; Dr. Martin Faschler, who headed the U.S. Army's Wound Ballistics Laboratory, and Vincent Scalice, who was for many years a New York Police crime scene expert as well as a forensic consultant to the House Committee on Assassinations.

Yet rather than report this important expert testimony, you say that all that keeps Foster's memory alive are "elaborate and scurrilous rumors about his suicide."

A lot more is involved. What is at issue are not rumors, but facts, few of which are known to most Americans. To ask that the truth be told is not to search for conspiracies.

The thinking citizen who looks beyond your reports to review the medical, biographical and simply descriptive facts of the case will be left with the strongest impression this side of certainty that Foster was murdered.

Jim Davidson
Baltimore

-------

For someone who thinks conspiracists are silly (yet newsworthy), you certainly weave a pretty good conspiracy tale of your own.

You assert that my organization, the Western Journalism Center, has a political agenda because of its connections with "conservative activists." One of those, it turns out, was a major contributor to Bill Clinton's political campaign.

Any good conspiracy theory must, by definition, do two things: (1) explain who's behind it, and (2) reveal what really happened. In our investigation we have scrupulously avoided doing either of these two things. We have simply and painstakingly raised questions and inconsistencies that our colleagues have missed.

So what is your agenda? On April 4, 1994, your news story stated that then-Special Counsel Robert Fiske was about to conclude Foster had killed himself. While it turned out you were right, the curious thing about it is that by April 4, 1994, Robert Fiske had not yet conducted any substantive aspects of his investigation--no FBI lab tests, no pathology review. This fact was reported by Christopher Ruddy in the Pittsburg (sic) Tribune-Review on March 21.

Mr. Ruddy's 20-page response to former special counsel Robert Fiske's report was the only detailed critical analysis published before Fiske was sacked by a three-judge panel. Though you apparently forgot to mention it, Mr. Starr has empaneled the first grand jury investigation into the case.

Some of the substantive points raised by Mr. Ruddy: The gun did not have Foster's fingerprints on it. The family has not been able to positively identify the gun. The gun remained in Foster's hand despite the explosive recoil. Gunpowder residues, as noted in the Fiske report, demonstrate that neither of Foster's hands was on the gun's grip when it was fired.

There was uncharacteristically little blood at the scene, according to the medical examiner on the scene--a direct contradiction of the Fiske report. Mr. Foster left no suicide note and made no final arrangements for his family. The note he allegedly left did not have his fingerprints on it. Key crime scene photos, as well as X-rays, are missing. Mr. Foster would have had to walk more than 700 feet through the heavily wooded park without getting a trace of soil on his shoes and clothing. Wile he had no soil on him, his clothing was littered with unexplained carpet fibers of various colors. Several witnesses even dispute the location of the body's discovery.

Joseph Farah
Executive Director
Western Journalism Center
Fair Oaks, Calif.

[admin]

Part 6: The Reign of the Lie

It is a crime to lead public opinion astray, to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium.

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I have said it elsewhere and I repeat it here: if the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it.

-- Emile Zola

It was a Wednesday night in the late summer of 1998 at the mausoleum-like headquarters for America’s information commissariat in Washington, DC, the National Press Club building. Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., had now been dead more than five years, and in spite of three official investigations of his July 20, 1993, violent death, all heavily involving the FBI, and some Congressional pecking around the edges often represented as investigations as well, the evidence of homicide as opposed to the official verdict of suicide was as strong as ever. But in the dominant hollow terminology of the time and the place, most of the nation’s citizenry, we were given to believe, had achieved "closure" over this matter, and many other very serious things of a highly-suspicious nature as well, and were satisfied to "get on with their lives."

The gathering was the periodic meeting of an odd mixture of the civic-minded, policy junkies, and likely government agents, replicating in the flesh what one sees on Internet news groups. Officially, it is called the Sarah McClendon Study Group, after the hostess of the meetings, the doyenne of the Washington press corps who, as she does periodically, had reserved the room for the occasion. On this evening the guest speaker is another grande dame of the Washington press, long-time chief UPI Washington correspondent, Helen Thomas, speaking on the timely impeachment issue. Assiduous Foster-case researcher, Hugh Turley, and I are there not only to hear what Ms. Thomas has to say but also to see to it in the question-and-answer period that larger issues don’t get overlooked by the 20-odd attendees.

We managed to get our points in. Mine, picking up on Ms. Thomas’ remark that President Clinton remains quite popular with women, was that he would likely not be if the numerous allegations of thuggish intimidation of various of his actual or would-be paramours had been properly reported to the American people by the American press. Turley’s was that Kenneth Starr is a good deal less upright than we are given to believe, and the beliefs about his rectitude persist only because the American press has failed to report on the lawsuit against several members of his "investigative" team for witness intimidation. Ms. Thomas, who comes across in person as every bit as much a Clinton partisan as news magazine reporters and TV celebrities Eleanor Clift or Margaret Carlson, was immediately hostile to my suggestion and, perceiving an "enemy" of Starr as a friend, was initially quite receptive to Turley. By the time Turley revealed that he was talking about the Foster case and the lawsuit of Patrick Knowlton, Ms. Thomas had agreed to review carefully a copy of the addendum to Starr’s report on Foster that the three-judge panel had forced Starr to include in his report on Foster. In the process she had had to shush a couple of men in the back of the room who knew right off the bat where Turley was headed and had tried to prevent him from getting there.

Turley’s real main point, as was mine, was a truly heretical one to make in such a place, that is, that there is major news suppression in the country. That point was most vociferously challenged by a large, blond fortyish man in the back--one of the shushees--who really didn’t like the use of our word "suppression" one bit. Wielding the authority of one who claimed to have worked for Ted Koppel’s Nightline and for ABC News for many years, he staked his objection upon what seemed to me the pedantic point that suppression requires conscious, collective agreement not to report something that is newsworthy, and if we had no proof of that we were irresponsible to sling around the charge of "news suppression."

After the meeting formally ended, we continued our discussion of this point in private. Attempting to get around the collective-action prerequisite, I asked him if he would consider the actions of The Washington Post alone in the Tommy Burkett case "news suppression."

"No," he responded, "just sloppiness."

"How can you say that? What do you know about the Burkett case, anyway?" I shot back.

"I know plenty," said he.

"But what do you know?" I persisted.

"Stuff," was his last word on the subject, which he said with great bravado as he broke off the discussion and then walked away at a surprisingly fast clip. It really had to be seen to be believed.

The Tommy Burkett case is by now quite familiar to readers of this series, and it might ring a bell with the readers of Christopher Ruddy’s The Strange Death of Vincent Foster or Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, who both mention it briefly, Evans-Pritchard elaborating somewhat more than Ruddy. Burkett was a 21-year-old college student in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, who was found dead in his room in his parents house on December 1, 1991. The Fairfax County Police, who did virtually no investigation, ruled death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The parents later exhumed the body and a second autopsy revealed a cleanly broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous bruises and scrapes. He had clearly been beaten to death. The parents also learned later through confidential informants that Tommy had been doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The original autopsy doctor was James C. Beyer, the same person whose later autopsy of Foster, as with Burkett, was absolutely vital to the suicide conclusion.

Walt Harrington, a writer for the Sunday magazine of The Washington Post, interviewed the parents at length about their experience, demonstrating great enthusiasm over the prospects for an ensuing article as he did so. No article ever appeared. To this date The Post, in fact, has blacked out the Burkett story. They have written nothing, not even a simple news report.

To my mind it is one of the most compelling examples of blatant news suppression that one is likely to find, and the large blond self-proclaimed ABC News veteran initially claimed a familiarity with the case. But he was bluffing. Put somewhat less politely, he was lying, and he had been caught in the lie right off the bat. This calls to mind our experience with Wall Street Journal columnist and TV commentator, Paul Gigot, who, as we recount in "Dreyfus 5," claimed that his newspaper had hired a handwriting expert who had determined that the torn-up note "found in Foster’s briefcase" had, indeed, been written by Foster. The only difference is that we hadn’t the means to catch Gigot in the lie almost as soon as it left his mouth. That only came later.

The experience also provided a poignant reminder of one of the things that most offends one about the whole Vincent Foster episode. It’s the lying. Such lying is a hallmark of oppressive regimes across the political spectrum from the far right to the far left. It is a chilling thought, and one perhaps that not too many people have had. One must begin to examine things for himself to realize the extent to which the United States of the late twentieth century has begun to resemble such regimes. Lying and tyranny, wherever one finds them, are bound up with one another. Consider what the famous Soviet writer Boris Pasternak had to say about it in his epilogue to his novel, Doctor Zhivago:

"It isn’t only in comparison with your life as a convict, but compared to everything in the ‘thirties, even to my easy situation in the midst of books and comfort, that the war came as a breath of deliverance...its real horror, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared to the inhuman reign of the lie."

I would fault only his use of the adjective, "inhuman," because, unfortunately, lying is an all-too-human failing, but it is one the better angels within us strive to overcome. We do so not only because it offends our innate moral and religious sense and because it goes hand and glove with tyranny, but also because lying is the handmaiden of injustice, and a sense of justice seems to be even more innate in the human species than a sense of truth. "That’s not fair" typically springs much earlier from the toddler’s mouth than "that’s not true," but in a mature society with pretensions of decency and civility the two can hardly be separated:

"Truth and justice--how ardently we have striven for them! And how distressing it is to see them slapped in the face, overlooked, forced to retreat!"

"Not for one minute do I despair that truth will triumph. I am confident and I repeat, more vehemently even than before, the truth is on the march and nothing shall stop it. The Affair is only just beginning, because only now have the positions become crystal clear: on the one hand, the guilty parties, who do not want the truth to be revealed; on the other, the defenders of justice, who will give their lives to see that justice is done."

Thus did Emile Zola appeal to the people of France a century ago. As truth and justice go together, so, too, do untruth and injustice.

In my study of both the Foster case and of the framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France I have become acquainted with a variety of propagandistic methods by which the authorities have managed to do damage to the truth, to leave a false impression with the public. As we have noted, it has become easier to do so than it was for the French at that time because both our political and our media power are a great deal more concentrated than was theirs. A much narrower spectrum of opinion is represented by America’s dominant news media, and they are generally much more in thrall to the government on major issues. What is more, the political choices that the voters face are much more narrowly circumscribed. On major issues such as world trading arrangements or exposing deep, systemic national corruption, the two dominant parties might as well be one party, not all that different from the one that has controlled our southern neighbor, Mexico, for most of this century.

I have summarized the techniques used by our ruling Uni-party and its media cohorts with the following list, a list which has enjoyed wide circulation on the Internet:

Fourteen Techniques for Truth Suppression

1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.

2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "How dare you?" gambit.

3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")

4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.

5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nutcase," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.

6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).

7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.

8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."

9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.

10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.

11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster "suicide" note was forged, they would have reported it. They haven't reported it so there is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report the leak.

12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. For Example: If Foster was murdered, who did it and why?

13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions.

14. Scantly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.

All of these techniques have been used in the Foster matter in lieu of a discussion of the actual facts. Doubtless, most of them were used in the Dreyfus Affair as well. We have already discussed how #6 and #7, in particular, were relied upon heavily. The reputation and the honor of the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, was placed against that of the shadowy, Jewish-led international "Syndicate." With no one in the United States commanding the respect that Mercier did then, our ruling elite have had Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr play the role of the partisan out to get President Clinton any way he can. Most recently that reputation has been embellished to a great degree by the Monica Lewinsky episode. The only ones who could possibly question him, they would have us believe, when he lets the administration off the hook on Foster are a tiny, irresponsible clique of folks politically aligned with the extreme right. Most of them, the artificial scenario goes, are in the pay of arch-conservative moneybags, Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or they are simply unscrupulous opportunists out to make money. Facts, once again, are forced to take a back seat and the truth is successfully suppressed.

The experience with our ABC news veteran at the National Press Club, as with the Wall Street Journal’s Gigot earlier, brought home to my friend, Turley, however, that I had left the oldest, the most obvious, and still the most effective truth suppression technique of all off the list. That is not just to create a false impression through the use of various subterfuges, but simply to lie.

It is an old and effective technique, but it has one big disadvantage, as President Clinton has had the misfortune to learn. One can get caught in a lie. In the case of the Foster death, however, that danger is substantially lessened by the disinclination of anyone with an audience to point it out. Here we can see what is so truly bad about a corrupt Fourth Estate. On the most serious of matters, government officials and journalists as well can lie with impunity, knowing that they will not be held accountable in the court of public opinion, and justice is the loser.

Up to this point in the Foster case we have assigned central place to the first of the truth suppression techniques, "Dummy up," that is, we have noted repeatedly the blatant suppression of very important news. There are a surprising number of examples of plain, provable old-fashioned lies as well, but before we get into them we should note that the Foster news suppression has continued in spectacular fashion. In October of 1998 the aggrieved witness, Patrick Knowlton, amended his complaint to name in his lawsuit alleging conspiracy to violate his civil rights through harassment and intimidation, Deputy FBI Director Robert Bryant and Dr. James C. Beyer, among others. The main reason for naming Bryant relates to another bit of suppressed news, that is the revelation of an FBI memorandum sent to Bryant only a couple of days after the Foster autopsy which reported that the autopsy revealed no exit wound. That memo had been obtained by Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media through a Freedom of Information Act request. Bryant, along with the Park Police and Justice Department announced some days later, on August 10, 1993, that they had concluded suicide, though he was aware of this recently disclosed information that contradicted the official version of the suicide. Beyer was named in the suit for general misfeasance in his autopsy, but also specifically for moving up the starting time contrary to accepted practice, beginning it even before his announced starting time and apparently tampering with the evidence in the process, and misreporting powder burns on the soft palate in Foster’s mouth that a laboratory report contradicted.

The most voracious reader of American newspapers or listener to the news on the airwaves, of course, would have no idea whatsoever that this latest event, this naming of the second highest official in the FBI and of the Foster autopsy doctor as defendants in an important lawsuit, had taken place. While the blackout of this more important news proceeded, the public was busy falling victim not only to Truth Suppression Technique #1, but also to variations of #13 and #9, with the Monica Lewinsky matter. The host of extremely serious scandals associated with the president could all be boiled down to the relatively trivial illicit sex question, a monumental distraction or changing of the subject, and the system could be made to appear to be working by, in effect, coming half clean about the president’s corruption.

A Parade of Lies

The public would not have been so ripe for distraction and "confession and avoidance," however, had all the other techniques not been practiced on them throughout, not the least of which is the latest we are adding to the list, plain old lying. Reviewing the Foster case, one is surprised at how often members of the press and the government have resorted to outright whoppers. We are not talking about merely misleading statements or sweeping conclusions based upon weak evidence, matters that might be subject to some honest disagreement, nor do we propose to examine the numerous instances where the chance is quite high that the person is lying. Rather, what we propose to do in the remainder of this "Dreyfus" installment is to point out instances in which clearly identifiable individuals tell obvious lies for the furtherance of the official conclusion that Vincent Foster committed suicide out of depression.

Let us look first at the nationally-televised attempted destruction of the reputation of the one American reporter, Christopher Ruddy, who has consistently demonstrated skepticism about Foster’s death. Bear in mind that, as I indicate in Part 2 of this series, that was a reputation demolition in which there is a very high likelihood that Ruddy conspired. The more important of the two instances in which Ruddy was pounded on national television was by Mike Wallace on October 8, 1995, on 60 Minutes. By less than honest reporting methods Wallace was able to leave the impression with the viewers that Ruddy had misrepresented what Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Haut said about blood at the scene. He then nailed Ruddy quite effectively by revealing that Ruddy exercised editorial control over a video in which the narrator asserted unequivocally that Foster was left-handed, when, according to Wallace, Foster was actually right-handed. Therefore, the fact that the gun was found in the right hand was not the anomaly that the narrator of the video so confidently stated it was.

Neither matter was so cut and dried as Wallace represented them. Ruddy had taped his conversation with Dr. Haut and had told Wallace so, and the tapes would prove, according to Ruddy later, that Haut had changed his story about the blood, but Wallace never checked that evidence against Haut’s on-camera statement. And Ruddy had corrected himself in print about Foster’s dominant hand and had told Wallace, but, again, Wallace ignored that fact on his program. One might say that, in essence, Wallace was lying in each instance here, but we can do better than "in essence." Wallace went on, in his authoritative baritone, to make the following statement: "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger."

No doubt most people believe that Wallace was telling us the truth. "He wouldn’t just baldly lie about something this important, would he?" And if he was telling the truth, that pretty much seals the matter, doesn’t it? The only, quite-unlikely, murder possibility remaining if Wallace is truthful here is that Foster had been rendered unconscious and someone then placed the gun in his hand, maneuvered the muzzle of the gun into the mouth, and then pressed Foster’s thumb against the trigger.

But, in fact, Wallace is flatly lying. There is no evidence whatsoever connecting the supposed fatal bullet to the revolver found in Foster’s hand. How could there be when the bullet has never been found? As far as the evidence of Foster’s thumb having pulled the trigger goes, it is interesting that on television Wallace has Rep. William Clinger state that the depressed mark noted on Foster’s right thumb indicates that he had used that thumb to pull the trigger. Clinger, of course, has no medical-examiner qualifications for arriving at such a conclusion (See my two-letter exchange with Wallace’s producer, Robert Anderson, over this and other matters in the Appendix.). Maybe Clinger was picking up on some legerdemain by Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske on this point:

"The physical evidence also demonstrates that Foster himself pulled the trigger. An autopsy photograph depicts a mark on Foster’s right thumb consistent with the recoil of the trigger after firing. Based on the existence of this mark and Park Police scene photographs showing the position of the gun, the Pathologist Panel concluded that after Foster fired the gun, his ‘right thumb was trapped and compressed between the trigger and the front of the trigger guard..’ Pathologist Report, Paragraph 8.

Fiske was good enough to furnish us with the three and one-half page report of his four consulting pathologists as an appendix, and, sure enough, the concluding quote is right there in paragraph 8, but there is no mention of autopsy photographs depicting a mark. Consequently, there is no conclusion that the mark shows that Foster fired the gun with that thumb, or even that it is "consistent with the recoil of the trigger after firing," which is really nothing but a tricky nonsense statement by Fiske. The supposed mark or indentation is also consistent with his thumb having been wedged in there after the gun was fired as well, and if, in fact, there was such a visible indentation in the photographs that is a much more likely explanation.

Perhaps the failure of Fiske’s experts to support the conclusion which he appears to attribute to them explains why Kenneth Starr in his report more than three years later on Foster has as yet made public none of the reports of his hired experts even though fully three-quarters of his footnote references are to those reports. In effect, Starr has returned us to where we were after the first official suicide verdict on August 10, 1993. We now have a conclusion based upon multiple secret reports instead of just one, not unlike Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ conviction for treason based upon secret evidence. All the while our media "watchdogs" seem perfectly content with the state of affairs.

The first influential TV trashing of Ruddy occurred on March 11, 1994, in the wake of his New York Post "photo blunder" article in which he left the clear impression that the Park Police had taken no photographs at all of the Foster death scene. Jim Wooten on ABC Evening News just four days after Ruddy’s article appeared produced a photograph of a hand with a gun which he said was, indeed, one of the crucial crime scene photographs that Ruddy had reported did not exist. Later a still of the photograph with the ABC logo in the corner appeared in Newsweek, and it has since been reproduced in many other places. "Pro-cop" author Dan E. Moldea, with his special access to the Park Police, has the photograph as well in his book, A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, but, unlike the others, he didn’t have to use ABC’s copy. He got his photo straight from the Park Police.

Like Mike Wallace, though, Wooten could not leave well enough alone with this Ruddy embarrassment. He went on to say that Ruddy was wrong about the absence of blood at the scene as well, and showed a photograph of a sylvan setting in which he said blood was obvious. It was a lie.

This, supposedly, was another crime scene photograph that had been taken, and again Ruddy had apparently been contradicted. Unlike the hand with the gun, this still photograph didn’t get reproduced for the print media. No wonder. Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media has examined the video and, just as I recalled from the TV, he sees no obvious blood in evidence, but what is worse, he sees no green foliage, as there would have had to have been on July 20, the day of the death.

And here is the best that Kenneth Starr can do in his report referring to Dr. Henry Lee’s examination of a scene in which a man who, according to the autopsy doctor, and the autopsy doctor alone, has blown a hole an inch by an inch-and-a-quarter out the crown of his head:

"Dr. Lee stated that one photograph of the scene ‘shows a view of the vegetation in the areas where Mr. Foster’s body was found. Reddish-brown, blood-like stains can be seen on several leaves of the vegetation in this area.’ He also noted that ‘[a]close-up view of some of these blood-like stains can be seen in [a separate] photograph.’

Recall, though, that Park Police investigator Renee Abt told Moldea that they had looked for blood on the foliage and found none, and that what Lee takes for blood is merely leaf disease.

If is very, very hard to come to any conclusion about Wooten’s claims for what his photograph shows than that he is simply lying. Had Foster fired the gun as Mike Wallace described and had it produced the sort of massive exit wound that Dr. Beyer described, there would have been a good deal of blood and other tissue on the foliage under and around the path of the bullet. It would be nice for the government’s case and for Wooten’s credibility if it were there, but it wasn’t.

Lies Fit to Print

Wallace and Wooten are hardly alone in the press with their lies on the Foster case. Working our way forward in the alphabet, let us look at the performance of the stalwart New York Times duo of reporter Douglas Jehl and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Anthony Lewis, in the wake of the Fiske Report. The August 5, 1994, Lewis column in particular is a veritable virtuoso performance in propaganda, employing a number of the truth suppression techniques, and like his counterparts from the fake right, Lewis goes out of his way to perpetuate the notion that the Foster death, like many another high-level scandal, is strictly a partisan political issue. The column, entitled predictably enough, "The Grassy Knoll," is such a representative sample of the sorry genre of Foster cover-up articles that we can’t resist sharing with the reader a good deal more than his out- and-out lies:

The desperate nature of the Republican effort to make something of Whitewater was on marked display in the Senate hearing on the death of Vincent Foster. Partisan zeal would not yield to elemental human decency.

Ever since the assistant (sic) White House counsel committed suicide in July, 1993, the political right has tried to use the death to attack President and Mrs. Clinton. Conservative commentators claim that Mr. Foster killed himself over the Whitewater affair, or was murdered.

As crackpots from Mark Lane to Oliver Stone had a theory about President Kennedy’s assassination, so with Mr. Foster they have come up with conspiracy fantasies. A newsletter suggested that he had died in a Virginia apartment, and the body was moved to the park where it was found. Rush Limbaugh reported that charge to his large audience, embellishing it to say the newsletter "claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton."

All these claims were exhaustively investigated by the independent counsel on Whitewater, Robert B. Fiske, Jr. His massive report concluded that Mr. Foster committed suicide because he was depressed, as he had been earlier in his life. The many colleagues, family and friends questioned by the counsel’s staff said Mr. Foster had never mentioned Whitewater was a cause for concern.

Last month Mr. Foster’s family pleaded for an end to the use of "outrageous innuendo and speculation for political ends." It was "so unfair," the statement added, "for the family’s privacy and emotions to be pawns in a political struggle."

All in one short article Lewis waxes indignant, knocks down straw men, calls the skeptics names, impugns motives, and invokes authority. He even changes the subject to the Kennedy assassination, about which he leaves no doubt that he is in the same camp, defending the indefensible Warren Commissions findings, as is his putative adversary over Foster, Christopher Ruddy. So he has given us numbers 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13 of the popular techniques for truth suppression--anything but facts about the case--, but when he talks about the "massive report" of Robert Fiske he is giving us the newly-minted technique number 15. He is simply lying. As we noted in the first installment of this series, the body of the Fiske report is only 58 double-spaced pages in length. No one with an iota of integrity who has actually bothered to crack its pages would call it "massive," or "exhaustive," for that matter. Most of its seven-eighths of an inch in thickness comes from the 97 pages of the resumes of Fiske’s team of pathologists and the fact that the text is printed on only one side of the paper.. But if invoking authority is what you are up to, a "massive report" surely does sound authoritative.

Lewis’ suggestion that Foster had been depressed "earlier in his life" looks a lot like a number 15 as well. He doesn’t say where that bit of intelligence came from. Here’s what the Fiske Report says:

Foster’s family and friends said that Foster did not experience any extended period of depression prior to the spring of 1993. Although he experienced some brief episodes of depression and anxiety, these appeared to be resolved without treatment. From time to time Foster experienced what his wife described as anxiety or panic attacks, marked by heavy sweating or a strained voice. In late 1992, he told his physician in Little Rock, that he was feeling depressed and anxious. At least two of Foster’s close relatives have suffered from periods of depression.

Reading this carefully one encounters here what sounds like a normal man, not the man with the history of depression that Lewis suggests, especially when one notes that the wife, Lisa, and Dr. Watkins were rather slow to come around with their stories of Foster’s recent agitated frame of mind. Furthermore, "suicidologist," Dr. Alan L. Berman, who labored so hard in Kenneth Starr’s much longer report to persuade us that Foster was suicidally depressed, for some reason didn’t see fit to tell us about any bouts with depression "earlier in his life," so we can safely assume that they did not happen.

Dishonest as he is in this column, Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis still is not the worst bearer of false witness in America’s "newspaper of record" when it comes to the Foster case. That prize belongs to reporter Douglas Jehl. This is from his July 1, 1994, report on the freshly-released Fiske Report, which he presents to us without any degree of objectivity or skepticism, but amplified and embellished through the medium of the White House in an article entitled "First Whitewater Report Pleases Clinton Advisers."

The special prosecutor devoted nearly 200 pages to his review of an exhaustive investigation that he said left no doubt that Mr. Foster, a kindergarten classmate of the President’s and former law partner of Mrs. Clinton, put a revolver in his mouth and took his life July 20, hours after he left his office in the White House West Wing.

Very few citizens have the time, the natural skepticism, the inquisitiveness, or the resourcefulness to order a government document like this for themselves. They depend on the newspapers, and they expect that what they read in the newspapers is the truth. But Mr. Jehl and The New York Times lied. The investigation was in no way "exhaustive," and 58 scant pages are not "nearly 200 pages." One might say that Jehl is including the various exhibits and the doctors’ resumes, but they cannot be construed as the special prosecutor’s "review."

Then, not content to lie, Jehl in his very next sentence manages to sprinkle in truth suppression techniques 3, 4,5, 6, and 7:

Although the Park Police quickly concluded last year that it was a suicide, the death of the 48-year-old Arkansan has spawned theories so widespread and ugly that Mr. [Lloyd] Cutler [the White House counsel] went on today to express hope that "those rumormongers and those parts of the media that published their rumors will now leave the Foster family in peace." Among the rumors spread by political opponents was that Mr. Foster had been killed in another location and that his body had been moved to the park.

The reader gets no hint of the host of anomalies already apparent to the astute observer as detailed in "Dreyfus 1," nor would he guess that the "part of the media" which has raised doubts, The New York Post and their reporter Christopher Ruddy almost exclusively, had dealt primarily with facts such as the paucity of blood and gore at the scene and the curious straight positioning of the body with the arms down by the side "as though ready for a coffin."

This is the same Douglas Jehl, we might remind you, who nine days after the death, in another "special to The New York Times," had heavily influenced public opinion in the case by revealing "facts" that came as news even to White House spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers. We touched on this briefly in "Dreyfus 1," but with lying as our theme, a somewhat fuller treatment is in order. Here’s a longer excerpt from the Jehl article:

Clinton Aide Appeared Depressed Before Death, His Associates Say

Federal officials said today that a piece of paper with the names of at least two psychiatrists had been found among Foster’s possessions, but White House officials insisted that they had learned of the discovery only late last night.

In contrast to White House assertions that there had been no signs of trouble, Vincent W. Foster Jr., the longtime friend of President Clinton who apparently committed suicide last week, had displayed signs of depression in the final months of his life, according to federal officials and people close to Mr. Foster.

Mr. Foster, the deputy White House counsel, had been so depressed about his job that before his death he had spent parts of several weekends working reclusively at home in bed with the shades drawn, a close associate said today.

The 48-year-old lawyer had also told at least one doctor that he was dispirited and had obtained the names of at least two Washington psychiatrists, Federal officials and associates of Mr. Foster said. A family doctor in Little Rock, Ark. sent antidepressant medication to Mr. Foster.

The medication arrived in the final days of Mr. Foster’s life, but he apparently had only just begun to take it, said a person close to the family. This person said that Mr. Foster’s wife, Lisa, recalled after her husband’s death that when he would try to smile it was a "forced, hollowed-out kind of expression."

In a court of law, a witness who has been caught in a lie in his testimony isn’t worth very much. Neither would he be permitted to pass on what he says he has been told by people that he does not identify. What evidence is there that Mr. Jehl isn’t simply lying here, as he would provably lie later? Has he given us any reason to believe that even the "federal officials" themselves and "people close to Foster" are not simply inventions or stooges? What reason would they have had to want to remain anonymous at this point, anyway? And what’s with this "at least two psychiatrists" business? Didn’t they just tell us that they have the list in hand? Can’t these "Federal officials and associates of Mr. Foster" count? Might this have something to do with the fact that the photocopy of the paper with the list of names that was released with the police investigative papers three weeks after the Fiske report came out had the names blacked out?

Then when the same list was reproduced in the Senate Banking Committee documents, the names appear--probably by mistake--, but the writing of the first name, that of Dr. Robert Hedaya, is scrawled in block letters, unlike the other two. It is easily perceived as an afterthough, added at the beginning instead of the end to make it look less like a late addition. Were they unsure at the time that Jehl wrote that Hedaya would go along with the cover-up? He is the one, after all, who said in his deposition that Foster’s sister, Sheila Anthony, had called him about her brother’s depression just a few days before. Even more curiously, Park Police lead investigator, John Rolla filed a report only a couple of days (if it is not fraudulently back-dated, which seems a distinct possibility) after the death in which he said he called each of the psychiatrists, and Hedaya made no mention of the Anthony call, saying only that he had not talked to Foster. Isn’t that strange? You’d think he would have responded to the inquiring policeman, "No, Mr. Foster didn’t call me about an appointment, but his sister did just this past Friday."

While we are asking questions, we might also ask who Mr. Jehl works for. The fact that these two key articles are denoted as "special to The New York Times" suggests that he is not a regular employee of theirs. Hasn’t Mr. Jehl, whose anonymous sources are eventually virtually unanimously contradicted by friends and associates who testify on the record, given us good reason to believe that he actually works for one of those organizations that counts lying as part of its "trade craft?" Whoever their employer, Jehl and Lewis both would be high on my list of candidates for the Duranty Prize, a proposed award named after the Times’ Moscow correspondent of the 1930s, Walter Duranty, who regularly filed glowing and fictitious accounts of Joseph Stalin’s "workers’ paradise."

When we see how eagerly journalists like Jehl and Lewis seize upon the suicide-from-depression report of Robert Fiske it becomes apparent how necessary it was to get a high-profile special prosecutor on the case, someone advertised as independent who is supposed to uncover wrongdoing, but whose real role is precisely to cover up wrongdoing. It was deemed so necessary that a connection to the long-ago Whitewater land scandal had to be fabricated in the form of "Whitewater documents removed from Foster’s office the night he died." We saw in "Dreyfus 5" how crime writer Dan Moldea let Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper off the hook by saying that he was simply "mistaken" about his sources for that December 20, 1993, story revealing the Whitewater document removal, when, in fact, it was very nearly the central lie in the entire Foster death cover-up.

It may be rivaled, though, by one told in another "special to The New York Times" in the summer of 1994. David Johnston, in a July 21 article, reports that parts of the Park Police report have just been released, three weeks after the Fiske Report came out, but the pages of the report "offered little new." He doesn’t tell us that numerous sections of the Park Police documents have been inexcusably and very suspiciously "redacted" or blacked-out, but even so, there remained at least one Park Police document that offered something new that is highly significant. That is John Rolla’s contemporaneous report on his and detective Cheryl Braun’s death notification visit to the Foster home on the night he died. That report jumps out at the knowledgeable reader, but Johnston doesn’t even bother to tell us of its existence (nor did any other national reporter).

The Biggest Lie of All

Up to that point, the definitive word on the matter of the Park Police and the Foster residence had come from the following passage in a major front-page article in the July 30, 1993, Washington Post by Ann Devroy and Michael Isikoff:

Police who arrived at Foster’s house the night of the death were turned away after being told Lisa Foster and family members were too distraught to talk. Investigators were not allowed to interview her until yesterday. "That was a matter between her lawyers and the police," [White House counselor David] Gergen said, and the White House "had no role in it."

This echoed what Frank Murray had reported in The Washington Times on July 24:

"Park Police investigators had many questions about Mr. Foster’s final hours but deferred to his friends and family by delaying contacts with them until after yesterday’s funeral in Little Rock."

And to further make the point, Devroy and Isikoff say in their July 30, 1993, article that the widow, Lisa Foster, "yesterday was interviewed for the first time by police."

Lies all. Did Devroy and Isikoff know they were reporting lies? Isikoff surely did at least by August 15 when he wrote in The Post, adding an invention of his own about Foster’s mental state and the definitive nature of documents that he, but not we, had had the privilege to see: "Foster’s attempt to seek legal help is described in more than 200 pages of Park Police and FBI reports into his death that have not yet been publicly released...those reports leave no doubt that Foster was suffering from a worsening depression...." The Park Police documents that were finally released added up to a scant 100 pages, and they included, as we have noted, the Rolla report on his visit to the Foster home. Isikoff had to have read that, but he passes up this early opportunity to correct his earlier gigantic lie that the police had been turned away. At the same time he inadvertently tells us several months in advance that the 100 pages with its many redactions was only a small part of the written record withheld from the public. He also lets us in on something else that he probably didn’t mean to. The FBI was a participant in the investigation right from the beginning, and its initial report is still secret. It is as though another 100-plus pages have also been redacted in their entirety, blacked out, that is, as far as the public is concerned, but not as far as a journalistic player in the cover-up is concerned.

Even without these police documents in hand, it would have been a truly amazing thing if Devroy and Isikoff were in the dark about the visit by Park Police investigators John Rolla and Cheryl Braun to the Foster home on the night of the death. A very large number of people, after all, were there that night, as we later learn, and consider who they were. We can start with the man who sets the tone for the reign of the lie, himself, President Bill Clinton. In his written report Rolla curiously makes no mention of the president’s arrival at the house, but he broke the news a year later, shortly after the Johnston article about the police report appeared in The New York Times. He and Braun did so in their nationally-televised testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on July 29, 1994 (This time it was The Washington Post’s turn to report blandly that the testimony contained nothing new. The New York Times, for its part, neglected to report on the hearing at all.).

Did the government people simply withhold the information from the press? Anyone who could even entertain the idea has no notion of the cozy relationship that exists between the White House, especially Bill Clinton’s White House, and the national press, The Washington Post in particular. But there’s no reason to speculate. This passage comes from a very important op ed piece, "Vincent Foster: Out of His Element," by Arkansas native, Walter Pincus, in the August 5, 1993 Post: "Near midnight that Tuesday at the Foster home in Georgetown, I sat in the garden with a few of his Arkansas friends for half an hour." Pincus doesn’t say what time he arrived, but the police, on the record, were there from shortly after 10 to sometime after 11 (In fact, the police in all likelihood were there even longer, arriving sometime before 10. The later arrival time presumes they went to the morgue first to search for Foster’s car keys again in his pants, an almost certain untruth.). He surely would have known that the police were not "turned away," let alone by Foster family attorneys.

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Then we have this from White House attorney Jane Sherburne of Sherburne and Nemetz, prepared on May 16, 1996: "[Mickey] Kantor had been with Vernon Jordan and David Gergen at Ben Bradlee’s house when David got the news about Foster. They all wound up at Foster’s house."

As you might have suspected, Gergen, we see, wasn’t just repeating what someone had told him, he was simply lying when he agreed that the police were turned away. Not only did he know it, but The Post’s Bradlee very likely knew it as well, and notice how well this little gathering illustrates what we have just observed about the coziness between The Post and the White House.

So, the president, the police, and the press knew that the police did not wait nine days to talk to family members about Foster’s death, as had been widely reported as fact and was not contradicted for a year. What of it? Wouldn’t the loved ones have been too emotionally wrought up to have been of much help to the authorities? To be sure there are those who would want us to believe that, though even if it were true, it does not excuse the bald-faced lie told the public. True or not, it is what Clinton lawyer Jane Sherburne was peddling as late as May of 1996. Here she summarizes some of the doings of White House aide, David Watkins, that fateful evening:

It took ten or fifteen minutes to drive to the house. When they arrived, no one else was there. They walked up to the house; the police officers, who insisted on doing the official notification themselves, walked ahead, with Watkins right behind them. As they went up the steps, another group of people, including Webb Hubbell and Foster’s sister, came up behind them.

They entered the house and Mrs. Foster came down the steps. The male officer told them that Foster had committed suicide. Mrs. Foster became hysterical; she could not possibly have been interviewed.

Perhaps Ms. Sherburne can claim simple ignorance, thereby admitting incompetence. If not, what we have here is another conscious lie. The following is from Rolla’s public testimony almost a year before, on July 20, 1995:

Some people were not approachable. We tried to talk to different people. We talked to--I think we talked briefly to both sisters. I had more of a rapport with Mrs. Foster, so I talked to her. Cheryl talked to Laura, the daughter. The sons weren’t home. We talked to Mr. Watkins. Other than that, we didn’t talk to anyone else there.

Well, now, let’s try taking Rolla at his word on this. They talked only briefly with Sheila Anthony and Sharon Bowman, and only Ms. Braun talked with the daughter, while the only other person Rolla talked to was Lisa Foster, with whom he developed a "rapport." Yet he writes in his report that he was there for more than an hour. What was he doing all that time, eating hors d’oeuvres?

The first twenty-four hours after a crime has been committed are crucial. If it is not essentially solved within that period, the chance that it will ever be solved falls drastically. The Park Police obviously know that, which is why they did their proper police work and no doubt wrung as much information out of the immediate relatives of the victim as they could. Then why would they be party to this gigantic, apparently gratuitous lie that they did not? In "Dreyfus 1" I speculated that one reason might be that they didn’t hear what they wanted to hear from the family concerning Vince’s "depression," his inclination toward suicide. Rolla did say in his report, after all, that no one present could think of any reason why Foster would kill himself, and he also said in a later deposition that when he asked Lisa if Vince was taking any medication she said that he wasn’t. Upon further reflection and with the assistance of more public records, I have come to believe that the motivation behind the big lie that the police were turned away from the Foster home is much worse than I first thought.

Only for the most extreme reasons would the powers that be have resorted to such a blatant lie, one that they knew they would have to admit to in due time. The most likely reason is that the Foster family, or at least certain members of the family, didn’t just fail to go along with the depression thesis, they rejected the suicide conclusion as well. In all likelihood, they didn’t just reject it but they rejected it energetically and indignantly, as most people would who knew that a loved one had been murdered and it was being covered up. Time had to be bought while the recalcitrant family members were brought into line.

Those Missing Sons

And which family members might those be? The most likely candidates are the two mystery men in our little story, Vince’s two sons, 21-year-old Vincent, III, and 17-year-old John Brugh, who goes by his middle name, pronounced "brew." Oh, but didn’t we just read from the testimony of John Rolla that the sons weren’t home? That is, indeed, what he said, but then he and his organization went along with it, holding their tongues, when the newspapers told us that the police had actually been turned away. Their spokesman, Major Robert Hines, even embellished the lie a bit for me. Explaining my interest from having gone to college with Vince, I called him and asked how it would have been possible for a private lawyer to stand in the way of police carrying out an investigation. He told me that I was right, that he couldn’t, but that the newspaper had misreported the facts. He said that the police had left the residence upon determining that the widow, Lisa, was too broken up to talk to and that they had returned the next day for an interview. That version of events, like the one told by The Post, was also made "inoperative," to borrow a Watergate-era term, a year later by the released police report and the Senate testimony of Park Police investigators Rolla and Braun about their visit to the Foster home.

If we have learned anything it is that proven liars should not be trusted simply upon their word alone, which is really all that we have with respect to the absence of the sons from the Foster home on the fateful night. Later in their July 20, 1995, Senate testimony Braun and Rolla elaborate further:

SENATOR PAUL SARBANES: Now, there also was an effort made to find the Foster sons. Were they at the house?

BRAUN. No, they were not.

ROLLA. They were in Georgetown somewhere.

SENATOR SARBANES. They were somewhere in Georgetown. I take it that extended efforts were being made to try to locate them. Obviously this story, once it reached the media, would be a lead story on the television and on the radio; correct?

BRAUN. Yes.

ROLLA. Yes.

SENATOR SARBANES. That’s very clear. These intense efforts were being made to locate the family and, as I understand it, friends and so forth, colleagues, in order to let them know what had happened. You understood at least part of that by the time you left the Foster home; is that correct?

BRAUN. Yes.

ROLLA. Yes.

But at that point Sarbanes yields to Senator Christopher Dodd who changes to subject to the goings on in Foster’s office. One never learns in this exchange when the Park Police established contact with the Foster sons. And Sarbanes, like everyone else who has reported on the case, missed the real importance of why it was necessary to talk to the sons. They, much more so than the widow, Lisa, or the daughter, Laura, would have been likely to know about the make and model of any guns that their father might have had. Guns, as we all know, are primarily a masculine interest. If the police were really serious about determining whether or not the gun ostensibly found in Foster’s hand was his, the sons simply had to be interviewed as soon as possible. Yet, in that July 30, 1993, Washington Post article in which it was reported that the police were turned away from the house, we are told that Lisa had been interviewed for the first time only the day before, and there is no mention of the sons. The gun, the article tells us, is being sent to a "family member" in Arkansas for possible identification, while, from all indications, the sons have not yet been called upon for possible identification.

Not only is this strange, but it is not exactly true, either. According to Kenneth Starr’s report, the sister in Arkansas, to whom the Post is probably referring here, was only shown a photograph in which she noticed some similarities in the detailing at the base of the grip, but was not shown the actual gun until April of 1995. At that time she could not positively identify it.

The sons remain almost completely out of the picture during the period of the investigations by the Park Police/FBI and Robert Fiske’s FBI team. From the official record, we never know when or if they ever find them and talk to them except that Fiske has the following bland little note at the bottom of page 38 of his report: "Foster’s children did not recognize the gun as one they had seen in their home." We don’t know how he knows that, and we can’t help but wonder if the sons had been so bland and passive in their assertion of the fact. When Kenneth Starr in his report speaks of the vague and imprecise recollections of the two sons, whom he never even names, he documents the observations with still-secret FBI interviews of the sons done on April 7, 1995, more than eight months after the completion of the Fiske Report.

It’s very clear that they don’t want us focusing upon the sons, and that is probably for a reason. So let’s see what else we can find out about them. The Johnnie-come-lately White House lawyer, Jane Sherburne, is once again a good source because she apparently never learned the case well enough to do a good job of covering up.

Marsha [Scott] and Webb [Hubbell] found Sheila Anthony at home with Vince Foster’s other sister and her daughter, who was visiting from out of town. Marsha told them what had happened. They discussed the importance of finding Beryl Anthony, Sheila’s husband, who was out with Foster’s two sons, and also called Barbara Pryor. Eventually the group headed for the Foster house.

This, on the record, is before anyone has gone to the Foster home to make the death notification. Now let’s fast forward a few pages in Ms. Sherburne’s memorandum. The names in bold mean that that person’s account of the evening is being related:

Watkins—Between 10 and 11, the President appeared (at the Foster house) with [Mack] McLarty. At around 10:30, McLarty and Watkins, and possibly David Gergen, had a conversation during which McLarty asked if a suicide note had been found; someone said, maybe we should look for a note.

McLarty -- Stayed at the Foster house for about an hour. Senator and Mrs. Pryor, Sheila Foster Anthony, Beryl Anthony, several neighbors, a physician called by Senator Pryor, David Watkins and his wife, and Webb Hubbell were there.

So, earlier in the evening Vince’s brother-in-law, Beryl Anthony, had been out with Vince’s two sons, but, from McLarty’s account, by the time he and the president arrived at the Foster home Mr. Anthony was there. Does it not stand to reason that the sons would have been there as well?

Now let’s go back and look at some more of John Rolla’s testimony of July 20, 1995. This time he is being interviewed by the chief minority counsel of the D’Amato Committee, Richard Ben-Veniste.

BEN-VENISTE. Now, there was a point where there was so many people in the house. The President had come. There were, literally, dozens of people who had come to the home spontaneously to comfort Mrs. Foster and Vincent Foster’s two sisters, who were present there as well. Is that so?

ROLLA. There wasn’t dozens. We had Mr. Watkins and his wife with us, then there was Mr. Hubbell and the two sisters and maybe one of their husbands. I think there were four or five other people besides the four of us that originally got there and, at that point, about 10:50 p.m. or somewhere around there, the President walked in with one Secret Service agent.

That husband of one of the sisters would not be Sharon Bowman’s because he was in Arkansas. That leaves Beryl Anthony, but Rolla does say "maybe" when speaking of that husband’s presence.

Let’s look at another source. This is Webb Hubbell speaking.

The little living room was filling up fast. Senator David Pryor and his wife Barbara. Beryl and Sheila and Sharon. Bruce Lindsay. Mickey Kantor. Mac McLarty. My son Walter had heard and came to be with us. Cars were jammed in the tiny street outside. At about 11 P.M., the President arrived. Hillary was in Little Rock with her mother.

Rolla’s recollection, then, is probably correct. Beryl Anthony, the husband of Sheila Foster Anthony was there when Rolla was because Beryl was there before Bill Clinton arrived, according to this account by Hubbell.. The circumstantial evidence is growing quite strong that the two sons, with whom Beryl, for some unknown reason, had been out on the town, were also at the house. But the evidence, in the final analysis, is a bit more than circumstantial. Here Senator Barbara Boxer of the D’Amato Committee is questioning Hubbell on July 19, the day before Officers Rolla and Braun (with coaxing from Senator Sarbanes) told the committee that the sons were not there.

SENATOR BOXER. So you would say that--when you say that that night, although--there were how many people from the White House? I think you’ve testified, I thought, to about a half dozen. Were there at least that many?

HUBBELL. At least that many. I’m sure there were more, and the days blend together, but that night, I know the President came. Mr. Gergen came. Mack was there. David Watkins was there. Bruce Lindsey was there, but I’m sure there were other people there. We were--the room was full. Senator Pryor was there and Barbara, Beryl Anthony got there later, the kids got there. It was a typical scene and as I said, the phone was ringing off the wall. People were calling from Little Rock, had seen it on CNN in total disbelief, like the rest of us.

There you have it, Hubbell remembered "the kids," just as he recalled the presence of Beryl Anthony. Jane Sherburne must have been correct that they had been out together. Now here they were at the Foster house with the crowd, but no one on the Senate panel takes any note of it, and the fiction continues that they were not located. Senator Boxer follows with a leading question about the unlikelihood that anyone in that circumstance would have been concerned about searching for documents, and quickly yields the rest of her time to the minority counsel, Ben-Veniste, who continues with leading questions of his own on the subject of the handling of documents in Foster’s White House office. Hubbell had let the cat out of the bag, but these two quickly stuffed it back in, and apparently no one was the wiser.

Those who think they have followed this case quite closely might recall that there was a minor stink raised at the July, 1994, Senate Banking Committee hearings on Foster when Cheryl Braun said she had been pushed away from Sheila Anthony at the Foster house by Hubbell. In retrospect that looks like a #9, "confession and avoidance" and a #13, "create a distraction" in the Techniques for Truth Suppression. The real story, in all likelihood, is that the sons reacted quite spontaneously and naturally to the outrageous cock-and-bull story that their very stable and responsible father had committed suicide. They probably raised holy hell at the house that night. The fear must have been very great that they would blow the lid off the cover-up right off the bat if they continued in that vein. They might have even threatened that they would go to the newspapers, perhaps even to the great Watergate investigator, Bob Woodward, who was still at The Washington Post.

Somehow, the danger of the two sons had to be neutralized. It had to be demonstrated to them in no uncertain terms just how futile, how hopeless were their protests. They had to be shown just how strong and united were the treacherous powers ranged against them. What better object lesson could there have been than the Washington Post report, citing David Gergen, that the police had never even made it into the Foster home that night. The list is quite long of very powerful people, including the president and Gergen himself who knew that that was nothing but a bald-faced lie, but they let the lie stand. I later asked Gergen after a National Press Club panel discussion how he could make such a statement, which, by that time, had been revealed as untrue. He told me that he was just passing on what he had been told. I did not know at the time that Gergen was actually at the house that night and was lying once again to cover up the original lie. If intimidating the sons with their brazenness was what they were about, the choice of Gergen instead of regular White House spokesperson Dee Dee Myers to tell the original lie was appropriate because the sons no doubt knew that Gergen had been at the house that night. The choice of the powerful Post to tell the lie was a good stroke as well, because the reporter the sons were most likely to know, Walter Pincus, whose wife is from Little Rock, had also been at the house that night, and had no doubt been seen by the family.

Vincent Foster III, in the summer of 1993, was preparing to start his senior year in college. John Brugh Foster was as yet a year away. But in a span of less than two weeks they would learn more about this country than they would ever learn in an American college. They would learn that, in the United States today as it was in the old Soviet Union, the lie is king.

Post Script

I am not the only one to notice serious lying going on by key figures associated with the Foster death. Recall the reaction, discussed in "Dreyfus 5," of Detective Pete Markland of the U.S. Park Police upon hearing that White House Counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, had reported his office finding 27 pieces of a torn-up note in Foster’s briefcase:

"Bullshit! Either it didn’t come out of the briefcase, or Nussbaum was lying that he didn’t see the note."

Markland had been present on July 22 when Nussbaum had emptied out the briefcase and inventoried it. Since there could be no reason why Nussbaum would have lied about not seeing the note initially, the implication of the Markland remark is obvious. The provenance of the note, like the note itself, is a fabrication. Markland’s reaction is akin to the observation of a friend of mine upon learning the official initial details of the Foster death, "It was either a murder staged to look like a suicide or a suicide staged to look like a murder."

We have observed how this note, which for a number of reasons is as obviously fraudulent as was the Panizzardi telegram in the Dreyfus Affair, was first withheld so suspense could build about its contents and, since then, has been repeatedly referred to by the authorities and the journalistic community as virtual proof of Foster’s suicidal frame of mind. The most recent example comes from the pen of The Post’s famed Bob Woodward in his best-selling Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate 1974-1999:

Foster had singled out the Wall Street Journal editors as those who "lie without consequence" in his famous suicide note in which he had concluded that he was not meant for the spotlight of public life in Washington.

Notice how, contrary to the original cautious characterization, the strangely peevish, disjointed scribbling worthy of a high school sophomore has now become "his famous suicide note," with the penultimate sentence duly emphasized. All that is missing is the ballyhooed last line, "Here ruining people is considered sport." Woodward, once portrayed by the handsome, open-faced Robert Redford as a crusading, idealistic young reporter in All the Presidents Men, has now come down to squeezing the last bit of mileage out of a bald lie in the form of a government forgery. It kind of makes you wonder about the real role of this Yale graduate and former Naval intelligence officer in the Watergate episode, doesn’t it?

Even more important to the official suicide conclusion and the media-concocted suicide "consensus" than the bogus note is the bogus Foster autopsy. We have discussed its importance and the reasons for our characterization elsewhere. Finally, though, while lying is our subject, we must share with you this exchange of letters between Foster autopsy doctor, James C. Beyer, and the father of the late Tommy Burkett, Thomas D. Burkett. They are taken from the Burkett family’s web site at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html . They speak volumes about Dr. Beyer’s probity:

Department of Health
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
NORTHERN VIRGINIA DISTRICT
9797 BRADDOCK ROAD
SUITE 100
FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA 22032-1700

December 1, 1992

Mr. Thomas D. Burkett
13456 Muirkirk Lane
Herndon, VA. 22071

RE: Thomas C. Burkett

As I have attempted to explain in replying to your previous letters regarding photographs from the postmortem examination on Thomas C. Burkett, a photograph of the right side of his head was never taken. Therefore, I have furnished you with copies of all available photographs which you could have viewed on January 2, 1992.

Sincerely,

James C. Beyer
Deputy Chief Medical Examiner

* * * * *

13456 Muirkirk Lane
Herndon, VA 22071
Dec. 5, 1992

Dr. James C. Beyer
Deputy Chief Medical Examiner 9797 Braddock Road
Suite 100
Fairfax, VA 22032-1700

RE: Your responses to requests for information regarding the location of and custodians of photos of the body of our son, Thomas C. Burkett

In our letter of Nov. 29, we requested information regarding the present location of and the custodian of the photo I saw in your office on Jan, 2, 1992. The photo was of the right side of the head and the upper torso. The body was unclothed and lying on a table. You pulled that picture out after I asked why the injury to the right ear did not appear on the autopsy report even though both funeral directors and others who saw the body commented on it. On April 7, 1992, in my presence, our lawyer asked about other photos when you showed him the close-up of the face. In your answer you acknowledged the existence of other photos but said they were " police photos" and we couldn't see them. Now you say in your letter of Dec. 1 that there were no other photos and that I could not have viewed any others on Jan. 2.

You are lying.

Sincerely,

Thomas D. Burkett

_______________

Notes:

1. Letter to M. Felix Faure, president of the Republic (‘J’accuse’}, in L’Aurore, 13 January 1898. Reprinted in The Dreyfus Affair, J’accuse and Other Writings, Alain Pages, editor, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 51, 52.

2. Quoted by Robert Conquest in Tyrants and Typewriters, Communiques from the Struggle for Truth. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 53-54.

3. Zola, op. cit., pp. 51, 52.

4. "Report of the Independent Counsel In Re Vincent W. Foster, Jr.," Washington, D.C., June 30, 1994, p. 50. (Fiske Report)

5. "Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., by the Office of Independent Counsel in Re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association," Filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Oct. 10, 1997, (Starr Report) p. 59.

6. Fiske Report, p. 8.

7. "Fifteenth Report by the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Investigation of the White House Travel Office Firings and Related Matters," September 26, 1996, p. 667.

8. Ibid., p. 665. Ms. Sherburne is actually uncritically relaying the first-hand account of White House aide David Watkins here, so he is really the more culpable liar of the two.

9. "Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters (D’Amato Committee), Vol. I, The Inquiry into Whether Improper Conduct Occurred Regarding the Way in which White House Officials Handled Documents in the Office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., Following His Death," p. 175.

10. Ibid. pp. 205-206.

11. The role of the FBI in the original investigation has been downplayed by all concerned, including the putative critic of the government, Christopher Ruddy. Note, however, that when the initial suicide conclusion was reached on August 10, 1993, one of the people making the announcement and taking questions was Robert Bryant of the FBI. The FBI also sent investigators to the White House and the Old Executive Office Building in the days immediately after Foster’s death. Fiske’s primary investigators came from the ranks of the FBI and then, as we noted in "Dreyfus 3," Kenneth Starr kept Robert Fiske’s FBI men on the job. In essence, there have not been three investigations but only one big investigation/cover-up by the FBI from the beginning.

12. Starr Report, pp. 83, 84

13. "Fifteenth Report" op. cit., p. 659.

14. Ibid., p. 665

15. Ibid.

16. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 163.

17. Webb Hubbell, Friends in High Places (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), p. 250.

18. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 101.

19. In a previous article on the Foster case entitled "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," I made note of the fact that a surprising number of people involved in the Foster case cover-up had also been involved in Watergate and/or had gone toYale University. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to overlook David Gergen. He is not only a Yale graduate, but his tenure as White House adviser covers not only Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, but Richard Nixon as well.

20. Dan E. Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998), p. 104. In addition to Markland’s report contradicting Nussbaum, recounted in "Dreyfus 5," we have this from Moldea on p. 87, "Markland has a clear view of Foster’s briefcase through the opening in the late deputy counsel’s desk and observes Nussbaum each time he handles it. At one point, Markland watches Nussbaum as he tilts the briefcase back and forth while it’s still on the floor, apparently making sure that it’s empty.

21. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 303. Surveying the index we find that Woodward mentions the Foster death on 22 pages. It certainly deserves to be put on the list of major Foster cover-up books by prominent journalists. The quote we have given is quite representative. Here are some more:

p. 232, when he first mentions the discovery of Foster’s body: "...from all indications it was a suicide.

p. 249, "Clinton reminisced on Foster’s suicide."

p. 260, Pathologist Charles S. Hirsch, working for Robert Fiske, describes the case as a "...no brainer. The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a suicide."

p. 270, "[Kenneth Starr] would walk over every inch of ground to assure the public that Fiske’s findings had been correct."

p. 355, "In July, Starr announced that after an exhaustive investigation he had concluded that Vince Foster committed suicide."

p. 416, "On June 25...the Supreme Court closed off the last possible avenue for Starr to get new information on the Vince Foster suicide."

p, 435, "[President Clinton] recalled his mother’s reaction to Vince Foster’s suicide, "Every man has his breaking point. We just don’t know where it is."

Curiously, to those who have not yet figured out the deception that goes into America’s cover-up game, as of the date of this writing, the leading recommended book on Christopher Ruddy’s prominent "conservative" web site, http://www.newsmax.com , is none other than Woodward’s Shadow. Not far down the list is Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times, by Helen Thomas. This latter book, which routinely refers to the Foster "suicide" in at least two places, came out several months after Ms. Thomas has been personally presented the suppressed Knowlton addendum disproving the suicide thesis by my friend, Turley. Continuing his strange love affair with The Washington Post, Ruddy also touts Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, by perhaps the leading media conspirator in the Foster cover-up, Michael Isikoff. In the past, Newsmax has touted Spin Cycle, by The Post’s "media critic," Howard Kurtz, a book that belittles the reporting efforts of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London and buys in completely to the "Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" attributing all serious scandal inquiry to right-wing fanatics financed by Richard Mellon Scaife. Newsmax also used to list "conservative" Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors along with a blurb, "Chris Ruddy recommends this book." High Crimes has an entire cover-up chapter on Foster that begins with the observation that Kenneth Starr had laid to rest all doubts that the death was anything but a suicide. I like to think that my repeated reminders of that fact on the Internet had something to do with its removal from the site, but as we see from these other books being touted, a man bent on covering-up cannot be kept down.

Oh, by the way, now that Bob Woodward has finally jumped into the Foster cover-up with both feet, he, who did not yet qualify when I wrote "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," now moves to the head of the list of those people who have been players in both the Watergate and "Fostergate" episodes and are also graduates of Yale University.

Appendix

Here are two letters that I sent to Robert Anderson, the producer of the infamous October 8, 1995, Mike Wallace interview of reporter Christopher Ruddy on 60 Minutes.

November 10, 1995

Mr. Robert Anderson
CBS
555 W. 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Anderson:

I see that your man Mike Wallace has taken exception to some things said about your 60 Minutes program in Marlin Fitzwater’s book, even going so far as to accuse Fitzwater of telling "bald-faced lies." Speaking of which, in his by-now infamous, skillfully edited piece featuring journalist Christopher Ruddy as a sly, dishonest money grubber Mr. Wallace makes the following statement: "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger."

You surely must know that as lies go that one is a big time whopper, one of the most egregious ever told on prime time television, and worse, it is an intentional misrepresentation of the facts that goes right to the heart of the Vince Foster death case. The known forensic evidence does nothing of the sort. Without the bullet, which is still yet to be found, there is simply no way of connecting the apparent head wounds to the revolver found in Foster’s hand. All that could be said from Dr. Beyer’s autopsy is that there is a possibility that the wounds were made by a large caliber weapon firing a high-velocity bullet corresponding to the revolver with the spent shell casing found in Foster’s hand, and that the weapon’s barrel was deep in the mouth at the time the trigger was pulled. But there is much evidence, both within the autopsy and without, which doesn’t just fail to support that conclusion, but actually contradicts it.

A .38 caliber Colt revolver has a high sight and a large recoil. That combination almost guarantees chipped teeth if the gun was fired as Wallace so authoritatively says it was, especially if the gun and the hand are to end up all the way down by the side of the leg. No such chipped teeth were noted in the autopsy. Dr. Beyer did record the presence of powder burns in the soft palate of the mouth, but curiously, the Fiske panel of pathologists, who, ostensibly, relied exclusively on Dr. Beyer’s report, said there were no "flame burns," which is essentially the same thing, in the mouth. The gaping exit wound which Dr. Beyer depicted in his autopsy diagram is characteristic of the .38, but all other known evidence appears to contradict Beyer’s observations. No other person known to have seen the body has described such a wound. Chief Medical Examiner Donald Haut said the wound appeared to have been made with low velocity bullet. Others thought there was no exit wound at all. Still others thought they saw a small wound below the ear such as one might expect from the entrance of a small caliber bullet. The blown out skull and brain matter of the Beyer diagram were nowhere in evidence at the site where the body was found. To further confuse matters, one witness, known as CW, says there was no gun in the hand when he saw the body and another, emergency worker Richard Arthur, insists that the gun he saw was an automatic and not a revolver. He even drew a picture of the automatic for his Senate interviewers.

There is, as you surely must know, additional reason to question Dr. Beyer’s honesty. He checked on the gunshot wound chart that he took X-rays, while the attending policeman wrote that "Dr. Byer (sic)" reported that the X-rays showed no bullet fragments in the head (This is not a minor point. A bullet fragment of sufficient size might have been traceable to the gun which fired it.). Yet Dr. Beyer maintains that he took no X-rays, which is quite convenient for him if they, as seems likely from all the other evidence, contradict his diagram. In addition, his performance in two other recent autopsies, one of which apparently involves dastardly political corruption similar to the Foster case, seems at the very least criminally negligent.

The final assertion that the evidence shows that Foster’s thumb pulled the trigger is just silly. How did he handle the gun without leaving his fingerprints on it? And if there was an indentation on his thumb such as that which Rep. Clinger says he saw in the Polaroids, it could easily have resulted from rigor mortis setting in after the pistol’s trigger had been wedged against the thumb by someone else post mortem. In fact, that is the most likely explanation. The trigger recoil that some have hinted at simply doesn’t exist, and if it did, a livid thumb would quickly spring back to its original configuration.

So why, Mr. Anderson, would Mr. Wallace tell us such a bald-faced lie over a matter of such consequence to the nation, and when do you plan to correct it? Now that the most expert opinion available to date tells us quite confidently that the "suicide note" was not even a particularly good forgery, I would say the time for you people to salvage what’s left of your reputation is growing short.

Sincerely,

David Martin

P.S. I didn’t even get into the matter of the improbable, if not impossible, grip Foster would have had to have had on the weapon to produce the front cylinder gap powder smudges on his fingers that Dr. Beyer reported and photos apparently show.

* * * * *

Jan. 2, 1996

Mr. Robert Anderson
CBS
555 W. 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

I have been reflecting on our telephone conversation which you initiated as a response to my November 10, 1995, letter to you charging that in a 60 Minutes piece that you produced Mike Wallace made false statements concerning the forensic evidence in the Vince Foster death case.

Before my memory of the conversation fades I’d like to get the gist of it down in writing, both for the sake of the record and because I have found, after the fashion of Sir Francis Bacon ("...writing maketh an exact man..."), that it helps me greatly to clarify by thinking.

My recollection is that, rather than addressing yourself point by point to the issues I raise in my letter, you made two main points in your defense. You invoked the authority of the four pathologists whom Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske had employed, saying that they had provided to you incontrovertible evidence of suicide, and you wrapped yourself in the prestige of CBS News, saying that because you have no particular axe to grind, if, in your professional opinion a thing is adjudged to be true, we should all accept it as true.

Another, and perhaps the principal, reason for my deciding at this time to set pen to paper again was that I was suddenly struck by the consistency , not in the substance of your argument but in the technique you employ both in the 60 Minutes piece and in your oral defense of it. A few of the Foster case characters are there, but they are out of place, invoked as authorities outside their expertise or experience while much better authorities are passed up. If you had been the producer of The Wizard of Oz, I get the impression you would have cast Judy Garland as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ray Bolger as a munchkin.

Recall that I suggested to you that, because Fiske’s doctors had had to rely upon Dr. James Beyer’s autopsy report for the lion’s share of their analysis, eschewing, as they did, exhumation of the body, you would do better to cite Dr. Beyer as your authority. You responded that there would be a problem with that because Dr. Beyer had told "five different stories." You were admitting, it seems to me, that the man that most reasonable people would agree was in the best position to know about the nature of the wounds and their possible connection to Foster’s voluntary actions is wholly unreliable. This is a very serious concession, indeed, which I’m sure would interest the viewers of 60 minutes. You went on to say that you had seen persuasive evidence that the four doctors had come up with independently, but when I asked why they didn’t include such evidence in the Fiske Report you had no explanation that I can recall.

Though the Fiske doctors are not the best authorities on the nature of Foster’s wounds, their opinion might have carried weight on the significance of a groove or depression on the inside of Foster’s right thumb that Rep. William Clinger says he saw in the Polaroids taken by the Park Police. On 60 Minutes Rep. Clinger says that more than anything convinced him that Foster pulled the trigger. Yet, in their three and one half pages in the Fiske Report, the doctors have nothing to say about it and none are interviewed on the program. Could it be that a doctor might hurt his professional reputation making such a claim while a layman, albeit a ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives, can say whatever he pleases?

On your TV program we were also told that the numerous, many-colored carpet fibers found on Foster’s clothing came from new carpets installed in Foster’s Georgetown townhouse that he could have easily picked up merely by walking on them. And is it someone from a police laboratory who tells us this? No, it is the "Foster family lawyer," James Hamilton. Unmentioned is the fact that Hamilton was also an important member of the Clinton political transition team and the author of a memo to Clinton counseling stonewalling in the Whitewater case. His word, which is not only tainted, but is in this case obvious nonsense if you just think about it a little, is simply taken as final.

The criminal lawyer Hamilton is also cited by Mike Wallace as his authority that Foster was depressed, but when interviewed on screen Hamilton hardly corroborates the characterization, saying only that he "had been told" that Foster had been experiencing bouts of anxiety, or something to that effect. Was there no doctor in the house? Were you unable to interview Dr. Larry Watkins of Little Rock, Arkansas, the man who Fiske tells us prescribed an anti-depressant to Foster after talking to him on the phone, or are you as lacking in confidence in him as you are Dr. Beyer?

Then there is the matter of the impure motives, the profiteering which you strongly suggest is impelling the critics of the government. A couple of weeks ago I heard a blindly pro-Clinton local talk show host say that "the Western Journalism Center has made a half million dollars on the sale of its Foster case videos." I called him on it and he cited 60 Minutes as his authority. I had to remind him that your authority, in turn, was the lawyer for the U.S. Park Policeman, Kevin Fornshill, whose suit against Chris Ruddy and the WJC was thrown out by a judge because of the officer’s irrelevance to Ruddy’s assertions. You no doubt know that Jim Davidson, the editor of the newsletter Strategic Investment whose video was the actual one in question, has offered to pay Mike Wallace five times his independently verified profits on the video if Wallace will appear with him to defend his charges in a public forum. Wallace’s failure to respond tells us all we need to know about the truth of this particular charge.

Speaking of Officer Fornshill, he is your authority on the condition of the death (?) scene even though he was not a part of the Park Police investigative team, such as it was, and as the discoverer of the body (the second time), was so unobservant that he claims never to have seen a gun in Foster’s hand even thought the light would have been quite good shortly after 6:00 pm daylight time on July 20. Surely you could have found more reliable witnesses to query about the scene of the body’s discovery.

Continuing your pattern, when I reminded you of the three handwriting experts having declared the oddly-discovered, fingerprintless, torn-up note a forgery you told me that you would rather believe the widow who has ostensibly said she thought the note was authentic. By the standards which you have set for yourself, I should surely think you would.

When all else fails Mr. Wallace himself becomes the authority, as with his statement I noted in the earlier letter about the "proof" that the gun in the hand was the death weapon and his assertion of the great difficulty anyone would have transporting the body to its discovery site undetected. He can make that latter assertion only because he works out of New York and not Washington. If he were stationed here he would encounter every day people who could easily drive out to fort Marcy Park and see for themselves, as I have done many times, what a ridiculous statement he had made. Wallace also performs a pretty neat mind reading trick, explaining what Lisa Foster meant when she told The New Yorker that Vince was "feeling trapped." Wallace says that it was because he knew he had to go to a psychiatrist, but he feared for his career should people learn of it. Lisa does not explain what she means by the "feeling trapped" statement, but since she also says in the interview she was unaware of any depression, Wallace’s gratuitous interpretation is almost certainly erroneous as well.

Taken all in all what you have accomplished is exactly the opposite of what you set out to do. You tell me, implicitly, that I should go with the people who have no political agenda, who are politically non-partisan. They’re the ones to believe. Well, that’s me. Until November, ‘94, I had voted Democratic all my life, including for Bill Clinton in 1992. I also watch the CBS Evening News, and that’s another reason why I think I’ll just trust myself on this one. You obviously want the American people to believe that this was a simple suicide, but I can’t help telling myself that if this the best case CBS, with its vast, though deservedly dwindling resources, can make, then it surely must have been murder.

Sincerely,

David Martin