Let him rest
Drop Vince Foster conspiracies
Iwas sitting on the front porch the other day, scoping out the news, when I came across an article about a friend and relative. It was not a nice article; it was so steeped in conspiracy theory and partisan political drivel and literary meadow muffins as to make me grimace.
In essence, the article was attacking Hillary Clinton. Why bother, I thought, She’s politically dead, an asterisk to presidential also-rans, someone who should have been president but who ran two of the worst presidential campaigns in history, the first against Barack Obama and then against Donald Trump.
But it wasn’t Hillary’s ham-handed blackwash that caught my attention: It was that she was “linked” to somehow being connected to the deaths of more than a dozen people, including my cousin, Vince Foster.
My grandfather and Vince’s grandfather were first cousins, making us fourth cousins, which in south Arkansas was close enough kin to just walk in their house and grab something to eat.
In Hope, Vince and I attended the same elementary school; I lived around the corner and across the street from Vince’s house. All the neighbor kids played in his backyard, which had a swing set and room to roam.
Years ago, I wrote a note to my kids about those days at a time when I needed to remember that “good” should never be forgotten when “bad” rears its ugly head.
It was 1953 and I was a child of the wind, with no worries about being kidnapped or shot or … anything bad happening. It was a gentler time, way back then, and I rode the streets of Hope on my flair-barred Schwinn Panther, often with Vince by my side.
We were inseparable for several years; we both attended elementary school in Hope, and several times played Cowboys and Indians in the community of Sutton, home of both of our grandfathers. Our grandfathers were first cousins and descendants of the same patriarch, Archibald Waddle, a pioneer settler of southwest Arkansas.
One cold winter day, we walked into an old dogtrot house that was built on 1870 by my great-grandfather and Vince’s great-aunt. Abandoned for years, the house was the perfect fort, and we fought a passel of Indians for hours. In the process of trying to get the best shot from different vantage points, we broke out all the windows, just like Allen “Rocky” Lane and Hopalong Cassidy did at the Saturday matinees at the Saenger Theater in downtown Hope.
When my grandfather surveyed the damage, he whipped us both with feeling and vigor. “Destroying something for nothing is taking the wrong path,” he said. It’s a lesson I never forgot. My cousin later confided in me that was the first—and only—whipping he ever received.
We two young boys grew up in different states but kept in peripheral touch over the years. I became a newspaper editor and publisher, and he became a lawyer and assistant attorney general of Arkansas. He later followed another Hope boy, Billy Clinton, to Washington as deputy counsel to the president.
After a couple of White House major missteps in which the Clintons fared badly in the press, Vince Foster, in a deep depression, took a .38-caliber pistol and went to Fort Marcy Park and killed himself. Two independent investigations—one by Clinton-hater Kenneth Starr—came to that conclusion. Anyone who knew Vince—his family, his friends—believe (no, know)—that he killed himself. Vince was a perfectionist, whose record (academically and in his professional life) was one of success. He was valedictorian of his high school class, tops in his college studies; everything he ever tried to do, he did.
When Clinton asked Vince to come to Washington with him after his election, his family and friends, to a person, begged him to forgo the opportunity. In a conversation we had a month before his move, I told him that Washington was a no-win situation. “They will eat you alive in that city because you care.”
But he heeded the siren’s call and ended up dead.
The Clintons have always been surrounded by controversy, and this sad, sad episode was no exception. The Clinton haters took a firm stance: The Clintons killed Vince Foster. End of discussion.
I am still shocked every time Vince’s name comes up and his death is connected to the Clintons. It is a sad commentary on our political system and on the news-reporting side of our society that it is perfectly acceptable to besmirch the memory of a good and decent man—who did nothing wrong except to take a coward’s way out of an untenable situation—just to please a herd of ignorant conspiracy followers.
I knew Vince Foster. And I know that if he had known the hysteria his suicide would cause years after he put that gun in his mouth, he would have taken that gun and thrown it in the nearby lake.
No way would he want his death to cause so much consternation and pain for those who knew him and loved him. Nor would he want his death to be used as fodder for the rumor mill aimed at chewing up two of his closest friends in the world: Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Vince was a problem-solver, a thinker. But this one time he should have thought a little more and tried a little harder to see the light at the end of his personal tunnel.
My plea? Let him lie in peace. He, his family and friends deserve that.