The Electronic Telegraph Sunday 31 July 1994 World News
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IT IS a year since the body of Vince Foster, White House Deputy Legal Counsel, was found in a wooded park not far from the CIA headquarters near Washington, but the controversy surrounding his mysterious death remains.
The radio talk shows - America's equivalent of the British tabloids - have challenged the official verdict of suicide. Some of the speculation veers off into conspiracy theory, some hits home.
Something that always seemed strange about the suicide was the posture of the body: drawn out as if ready for a coffin, according to the Fairfax County paramedic who first arrived at the scene. Foster's arms were stretched neatly by his sides. A .38 revolver, made up of different parts, was in his right hand. There was little blood.
To thicken the plot, it emerged that Foster was much more than Deputy Legal Counsel. He was a childhood friend of Bill Clinton and a law partner of Hillary Clinton. Above all, he was the keeper of the Arkansas secrets.
It was Foster who kept the documents on the Whitewater property deals that have bedevilled the Clintons. The files were secretly removed from his office, within hours of his death, by a top-level raiding party. The White House then fuelled suspicion by blocking the release of the police and autopsy reports for a year.
The matter should have been put to rest in June by the report released by Robert Fiske, the independent counsel appointed to investigate Whiterwater. This concluded there was no foul play. Foster was depressed: he shot himself. It was a perfectly normal suicide, no link with Whitewater. Case closed.
A Republican by background, Fiske could hardly be considered a White House stooge. In fact, a Republican Senator told The Sunday Telegraph that Fiske was one of the toughest prosecutors in the country.
"That guy is going to cut their balls off," he said. "If the Clintons thought they'd got some patsy who's going to roll over for them, they've made the biggest mistake of their lives."
Yet the Fiske Report has failed to satisfy. A number of Republicans have savaged the investigation, many more have expressed doubts. They tried to use the sanitised Whitewater hearings in Congress last week to look into the matter, but the Democrats were able to deploy their majority power on the House Banking Committee to ban all inquiries into the Foster case, arguing that it was offensive to keep dredging up the details of a tragic suicide.
Whenever Republicans strayed into the prohibited zone, the grizzled committee chairman, Henry Gonzalez, declared the gentlemen to be out of order.
The Senate was another matter. Republicans were given a chance to probe Foster's death, and they may have stirred up enough doubts to prolong the controversy for some time to come. The Parks Police officer handling the case, John Rolla, said that it had been his first death investigation.
From the beginning he concluded that it was a suicide and acted accordingly, even though it is usual procedure to treat violent deaths as a potential homicide until the evidence suggests otherwise. Yet there was no other evidence at that time.
Indeed, after talking to members of Foster's family the night of the death he wrote a report saying that "Mrs Foster, nor other relatives, or friends were able to provide any insight as to why Vince Foster would take his life". And why was the investigation left to the Park Police when the FBI had primacy of jurisdiction.
The Fiske Report said that there were no X-rays of the body. But Senator Faircloth pointed out that the X-ray box on the autopsy report was ticked "yes". The pathologist is quoted in the Park Police Report as stating "that X-rays indicated that there was no evidence of bullet fragments in the head". The Office of the Independent Counsel had "no comment" on this discrepancy.
An FBI lab test found blonde hairs and multi-coloured carpet fibres all over Foster's clothes. Yet an FBI agent, Lawrence Monroe, testified to the committee that no attempt was made to match the hairs with anybody in his family, or to check the fibres against the carpets in his home or office.
The list goes on. It was concluded that Foster was holding the revolver deep inside his mouth. How then did the weapon kick back out, landing neatly on the ground next to his thigh, without doing any damage to his teeth? The recoil on a .38 is usually fierce.
Foster's fingerprints were not on the gun, however somebody else's prints were.
Blood smears show that the head must have been in at least two positions after death, and probably four. How so?
An alleged suicide note was found in Foster's briefcase six days after his death. It had been missed during an earlier search. The note was torn into 28 pieces. There were no fingerprints. The Justice Department has released transcripts of the note, but has refused to release a copy so that the handwriting can be analysed. Why?
The passer-by who claims to have found the body in the first place, described as "confidential witness" in the Fiske Report, says that the body was lying in well-trampled brush with the palms of the hands facing up. He stood over the body and inspected it for two minutes. There was no gun.
He told three congressmen last week that FBI agents badgered him into admitting that the gun could conceivably have been hidden from view below the hand.
Finally, there is the Ruddy Memorandum, which has been circulating in Washington and could cause some headaches for the independent counsel. Written by a New York Post reporter, Christopher Ruddy, it draws on interviews with a number of witnesses at Fort Marcy Park in arguing that the Park Police falsely designated the spot where the body was found.
Given the botched job undertaken by the Park Police it may well be that Robert Fiske made the best judgment possible.
But it is hard to join the Washington Post in its conclusion that the Fiske Report must "satisfy all but the most cynical partisans".
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