Mr. Nussbaum has such venom for the Journal (which Foster's notes spelled WSJ) that later I called him at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He said that the paper's continuing insistence that Whitewater was on Foster's mind at the end struck him as am effort "to salve their guilty conscience." He said, "When the history of these events is written, the Wall Street Journal editorial page will have a lot to answer for, and a lot to be ashamed of."
The lawyer is not the only one to see an ugly cloud over the Journal. "I think amongst the rank and file here, there is some degree of feeling that we were a factor in his death," one news-side staff member at the paper told me. I had always felt that way myself, and then I got a copy of the June 30, 1994, report of the independent counsel on Foster's death, in essence the government inquest on the matter. It asserted that the Journal's harsh editorials about Foster were on of the two factors that "triggered" a depression that led the boyhood friend of President Clinton's to take his life.
Yet this official statement got almost no attention when it came out. The Journal never told its readers of the charge. Other news organizations also failed to detail it.
The question of the Journal's responsibility in Foster's death engages philosophical and psychological issues no one can really resolve. As Peter Doyle's recent New Yorker article about Lisa Foster makes plain, Vincent Foster was not made for the pressures of Washington and, unable to quit, chose a sure but desperate course. What's unquestionable is the Journal's free ride. If ever you wonder why the public has a cynical view of the press, just consider this case. A powerful newspaper insists - righteously, mockingly, unceasingly - that the White House comes clean on the smallest questions surrounding Whitewater. Yet when that newspaper faces one of the gravest matters journalists face, the charges that its unfair attacks on a man's reputation helped drive him to suicide, the paper prefers contradictory and evasive statements and isn't in the mood for questions.
No one in management returned my calls. Then the publisher's secretary told me to phone the corporate spokesman Roger May, "Very often, people want us to go back over things and mull over them", he said. "But we're in the newspaper business. We go forward, we don't mull over old stuff and do post-mortems."
"So you stand by your statements of Vincent Foster while he was alive?" I said.
"Oh yeah."
Before his death, the deputy White House counsel was little mentioned in the press outside of the Journal's editorial page. The paper was - justifiably to my mind - appalled by the Clintons' Arkansas style of highhandedness, particularly in the Travel Office imbroglio. It took boyish delight in exposing and ridiculing the White House staff who carried out Clinton initiatives. Five separate times in the weeks before he died, the Journal held up to scorn, most famously in the editorial titled, Who is Vincent Foster?
The portrait of Foster the Journal offered its readers was of a hick "crony" from a degraded firm, the Rose Law Firm. The casual swipes it took were plainly mean. Enraged by Hillary Clinton's efforts to maintain privacy for her health care task force, it put Foster in the same camp as Oliver North - a convicted felon who had lied to Congress - for what it all but said had was Foster's willingness to bend his law to let executive conduct matters "off the books." The paper had its greatest sport over the White House's refusal to provide the Journal with Foster's photograph. Now it rallied about the Administration's inability to handle critics about Foster's insensitivity to the Constitution. The Journal surely sensed that it was dealing with provincial who weren't used to its moves; its bloodlust came up. It called Foster a "mule" and instead of a trademark drawing, featured a generic outline of a man's head with a question mark inside it.
Some of the Journal's comments went beyond contemptuous, they went at Foster's capacities as an attorney. Of one of his arguments, it said he had, "cut some legal corners along the way." Later in the same editorial, it said of Foster and his former partners that they displayed "a lot of corner-cutting and casual abuse of power."
Those are serious comments on a lawyer's conduct. No evidence was offered. There's also no evidence that the Journal ever called Foster to get his side. "When we say something about someone we have to show our factual math," a Journal news-side staff member explained. "The editorial side does a lot of reporting but they don't have to show you how they arrived at something when they deliver a punch."
The fifth Journal attack on Foster appeared on July 19. It portrayed the attorney and other Rose partners as, in essence, political hitmen. It questioned their "mores." The next day Foster left his office after lunch, telling his secretary he'd be back. Sometime that afternoon, he drove to Fort Marcy Park on the banks of the Potomac in Virginia and, sitting on the ground beside a Civil War cannon, pushed the barrel of an antique revolver against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Suddenly, the man whom the Journal had bullyragged into the spotlight was now on front pages across the country. The manner of that publicity left the Journal sheepish. In defending its treatment of Foster, the editorial page now called him a "first-rate lawyer and steeled litigator." The "mule" was suddenly "sensitive."
The paper had never used such terms to describe him while he was alive.
Especially after Foster's note was discovered, many journals (including The Observer) took up the issue of the Journal's responsibility. Most forceful were Michael Kinsley in The New Republic, who called the editorials dishonest, and Jonathan Alter, who wrote in Newsweek that Journal editor Robert L. Bartley should have trouble sleeping at night. But maybe because contumely is part of a journalist's job description, journalists didn't press the Journal for answers. New York magazine stated flatly, "The Journal didn't kill Vincent Foster."
The independent counsel was more nuanced. Nearly a year later, on June 30, 1994, then-independent counsel Robert B. Fiske, Jr., issued a report concluding that Foster had indeed committed suicide. Fiske interviewed 125 people, he called on a panel of four distinguished forensic pathologists and enlisted a respected psychiatrist. The Fiske report went on for several pages about The Wall Street Journal editorials' impact on Foster - a fact that the Journal, The Times and The Washington Post (and doubtless most other periodicals) failed to discuss at any length. Those newspapers each devoted one paragraph in their coverage to the Fiske report's statement that the Journal editorials had made Foster "distraught."
The Fiske report actually went much further than that.
"Although it is impossible to determine precisely what triggered this depression [in the weeks prior to Foster's death], certain matters were cited repeatedly by those interviewed during this investigation." In Fiske's judgement, these triggering "matters" did not include Whitewater, which was "not on the screen at the time of Foster's death. No, those triggering matters were two: the Travel Office investigation, in which Foster felt that William Kennedy, also a Rose alumnus, was unfairly taking the rap; and the Journal editorials.
"Foster was distraught over these editorials, and told others that they were mean-spirited and factually baseless. He ... noted to his sister Sheila and to Kennedy that his friends and colleagues in Arkansas read the Journal, and voiced his concern that the editorials would damage his reputation. Foster told Sheila's husband, Beryl Anthony, that he had spent a lifetime building his reputation and that it was now being tarnished. Sheila Anthony tried without success to make Foster understand that this was "par for the course" in Washington politics. Colleagues at the White House made similar comments and attempted to joke with Foster about the editorials but Foster found no humor in them."
No, this joke was on Foster: When the Journal said that he was a cornercutting attorney whose mores were on a par with Oliver North's, he thought some people would believe what they read.
As Fiske showed, Foster was a high-strung man who felt, to a tragic degree, that a lawyer's reputation was everything. Two months before he killed himself, he gave the commencement address at the University of Arkansas Law School, from which he had graduated No. 1 in his class 22 years before. His speech was morbidly self-conscious: "The reputation you develop for intellectual and ethical integrity will be your greatest asset or your worst enemy ... Treat every pleading, every brief, every contract, every letter, every daily task as if your career will be judged on it ... I cannot make this point to you too strongly. There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity. Nothing travels faster that an accusation that another lawyer's word is no good ... Dents to the reputation in the legal profession are irreparable."
Following the release of the Fiske report, the Journal editorial page braved itself for a fresh round of criticism - a round that never came. In a July 1994 editorial, it sought to deflect the desire to "blame" it. "We are accustomed to controversy, but this obscures the central point that depression is a disease. It is not caused by travel office scandals, press criticism or the normal stress of public or private life. It is caused by biochemical changes in the brain, and while these are poorly understood they are treatable ... [W]e had in mind that posthumously [Foster] might do for depression what Betty Ford did for alcoholism. But advancing such understanding , we suppose, is not an independent counsel's writ."
Rid of the noxious sanctimony, this is a contention that at one level or another I think many of us agree with: A depressive is mentally ill, life is full of bumps, and if the depressive proceeds to kill himself, it's not necessarily a reflection on the bumpers.
But try and square that solemn biochemistry with the gleeful declaration from the Journal two months ago, on August 2, amid the Senate Whitewater hearings: "If any sentient being still doubts that Whitewater and the Clinton's [sic] personal finances were preoccupying the late Vincent Foster before his death, yesterday's testimony ... should settle the matter."
Side by side, these two claims are as plain a definition as you will ever find of intellectual dishonesty. Either he's got a diseased brain or he's making sense; the Journal can't have it both ways. Either the things that Foster complained about in the days before he died may only be cited by those trying to start a center for the treatment of depression, in which case whatever he did or didn't say about Whitewater is irrelevant, or his statements are meaningful ones, in which case, the paper itself stands accused.
That's the Journal's problem: Foster fingered the newspaper. The paper's efforts to locate a new smoking gun in Whitewater smack of a coverup. I sat through the Whitewater hearings this summer. Whitewater was plainly a "can of worms," as Foster wrote in notes on the Clintons' taxes well before July. But it wasn't clear and present when he took his life, as Lisa Foster makes clear in The New Yorker.
It turns out that White House officials aren't the only people who cover up; newspapers do, too. Last year, the Journal published a book called A Journal Briefing: Whitewater, wherein it presses again and again for the government to determine what really drove Foster to kill himself - "the purpose had to be reassurance that no major scandal lies hidden." Mr. Bartley, its editor, writes that his book includes "news articles and excerpts from documents, " so as to provide a "factual base" and "illuminate outstanding questions." Yet in all those nearly 600 pages of documents and illuminating facts and happy horsesh*t there is not one mention of a key finding in the most thorough government report on Foster's death: Wall Street Journal editorials helped trigger Foster's last depression.
Mr. Bartley was just as evasive in his paper's coverage of the Fiske report. "Our assessment of the mores of the Rose Law Firm has been confirmed by events," he said. But what about the specific statements he made about Foster? Has his view of Foster as a corner- cutting Ollie North been confirmed by events? Or do events confirm that he was a "first rate lawyer"?
I called Mr. Bartley to ask him which of those statements he believed and whether he had any regret about his editorials, but he didn't return the calls. Then I called Wall Street Journal publisher Peter R. Kann. What should a leading publisher do when a government inquest holds that a series of highly damaging editorials in his newspaper helped trigger the depression of a White House official who then took his own life?
Do you tell Bob to pull in his horns for a little while? Do you issue a policy that enterprising editorialists must henceforth try to call people whose reputations they wish to damage? Do you have a meeting of editors to discuss it?
Or do you allow your editor, a party with a distinct interest in the matter, to continue to rant and rave on the subject, a la Lady Macbeth, making contradictory and self-serving pronouncements?
But Mr. Kann stonewalled my requests for an interview, too. My mole on the news side said, "If they called a meeting, if they mustered forces, if there was a memo that went out, if went from Kann to Bartley or other higher-ups, and no one at the newspaper saw it." Albert R. Hunt, executive Washington editor of the paper, said, "I can tell you honestly that I have never participated or heard about a discussion or meeting at our paper of the sort you describe."
The best audit is one the Journal would share with its readers. Did management make any serious effort to assess the fairness of its editorials on Foster? Did anyone ask Mr. Bartley, What was your evidence for saying that Vincent Foster cut legal corners and had Oliver North-like mores? And having asked, did anyone think to air the matter fully in your pages and, perhaps, admit errors of judgement?
Ours is an era in which large news organizations are, by fits and starts, dealing with the issue of public accountability. The Washington Post devotes umpteen pages of self-flagellating reporting to the Janet Cooke fiasco; Ms. Cooke goes out the door. After it's discovered that NBC aired a fraudulent investigation of General Motors trucks, the network news president loses his job and several others are fired and demoted. When the Unabomber puts what seems a preposterous request to The New York Times and The Washington Post, those papers search their souls about their power and responsibility.
Which gets at the one true question for the Journal: When the shadow of a mortal personal tragedy falls full across your face, do you stop for even one minute to question your approach?
Postscript: in 1972, the American Enterprise Institute published a lengthy paper called "The Press: Adversary, Surrogate Sovereign, or Both," by Robert Bartley, then an editorial writer at the Journal. God knows what he's gone through since, but back then, Mr. Bartley lodged the following complaint against his calling: "Even the most professional reporter sometimes makes mistakes and, human nature being what it is, these mistakes are likely to be at the expense of his enemies rather than his friends. There is always temptation to spice up a story by sticking a few knives in someone, and the victim is always going to be someone the reporter dislikes." Hmmm.
The solution, ventured Mr. Bartley the scrivener, was for the press to become "more tentative, more self aware, more tolerant." Otherwise, he warned, its own credibility was at stake. "The credibility of the press for the common man would suffer far less damage ... it seems to me if [the press] attitudes carried with them a touch of scholarly uncertainty or plain humility, and were carefully scrubbed of the last trace of self righteousness."