Fiske Rejects Foul Play in Foster Death

Special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. concluded in a report released Thursday that presidential counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide last summer after suffering previously undisclosed “panic attacks” as well as weight loss, sleeplessness and a decline in job productivity.

Fiske said Foster’s distress stemmed not from the Whitewater controversy but from the White House travel office affair, in which Clinton Administration appointees were criticized for improperly trying to initiate an FBI criminal investigation of travel office employees.

The report, an interim step in Fiske’s broader Whitewater investigation, also ruled out criminal prosecution of White House and Treasury Department officials who conferred with the Resolution Trust Corp. about the agency’s investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, a defunct Arkansas thrift.

Madison Guaranty owner James B. McDougal was a partner with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the Whitewater Development Corp., a real estate development begun in the late 1970s. At the time of the meetings, RTC investigators were trying to determine whether President Clinton had benefited financially from his association with McDougal or from campaign contributions laundered through the thrift.

Fiske’s report hinted that the contacts may have been improper but not illegal. The evidence “is insufficient to establish that anyone within the White House or the Department of the Treasury acted with the intent to corruptly influence an RTC investigation,” the report said. “We express no opinion on the propriety of these meetings or whether anything that occurred at these meetings constitutes a breach of ethical rules or standards.”

The portion of the report about Foster recounted the sad story of the demise of a successful man who had been the President’s boyhood friend and a former law partner of the First Lady. The Clintons were questioned by Fiske, but his findings shed no new light on their relationship with Foster.

The report appeared to lay to rest suspicions fueled by Clinton’s Republican critics that Foster was the victim of foul play or that his death was somehow related to the Whitewater controversy. Fiske said he found no evidence to contradict the original conclusion of law enforcement officials that Foster had shot himself.

At the White House, Lloyd N. Cutler, the President’s counsel, said: “We hope these rumor mongers and those parts of the media that published their rumors will now leave the Foster family in peace.”

Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists are likely to seize on a few omissions in Fiske’s investigation--particularly his failure to find the bullet that pierced Foster’s skull, his failure to pin down how Foster spent his last hours and his failure to identify the hairs of another person found on his body.

Nor did Fiske’s report settle one of the most compelling questions related to Foster’s death: whether White House officials obstructed justice by removing documents--including those related to the Whitewater controversy--from Foster’s office after his body was found.

Fiske promised to make a public report shortly on the handling of the documents, thus ending the so-called Washington phase of his investigation. After that, he will concentrate the inquiry on Whitewater-related events in Arkansas.

By concluding the Washington phase of the investigation, Fiske opened the way for Congress to conduct hearings on these issues. The House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee is scheduled to begin the first of those hearings July 26.

As detailed by the report, Foster’s death on July 20 last year resulted from a severe case of depression for which he had failed to seek adequate treatment.

Although Foster obtained a prescription for anti-depressants from his doctor the day before his death, Fiske said the White House official never contacted any of the three psychiatrists recommended to him by his sister, Shelia Anthony.

Foster’s wife, Lisa, told investigators that her husband was prone to what the report called “anxiety or panic attacks marked by heavy sweating and a strained voice.” At least two of his relatives also have suffered bouts of depression, the report said.

One such attack occurred on the night that Clinton’s first nominee for attorney general, Zoe Baird, withdrew her name from consideration. As the report explains, “he went to bed at about 2:30 a.m., sweating profusely and became sick; he told family members that he felt everyone was criticizing him.”

In the weeks and months leading up to his death, Foster showed numerous signs of stress, the report said. He was exhausted and unable to relax or laugh. He also lost weight and was unable to sleep, it said.

Foster’s boss, then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, said that his associate’s productivity had declined noticeably in the week preceding his death and that he had provided no assistance in the President’s decision-making on the choice of Louis J. Freeh as FBI director. His wife told investigators that Foster was getting no joy from his work during that period.

Fiske concluded that if any work-related matters were responsible for Foster’s depression, it was the travel office controversy and not the Whitewater case. Although Foster had been assigned to complete the tax reports for the Whitewater Development Corp., Fiske said he never expressed any concern about it.

Yet Fiske noted there is no way of knowing for certain what was in Foster’s mind.

“Obviously,” the report said, “the fact that Foster never expressed a concern about Whitewater or Madison to anyone does not mean that he did not, in fact, have such a concern. Thus we cannot conclusively rule out such a concern as a possible contributing factor to his depression.”

The report said Foster was obsessed with the travel office controversy, which began May 19, 1993, when seven employees were fired in the wake of an outside accounting report raising questions about the handling of money in the office.

Foster apparently felt personally responsible when a colleague in the counsel’s office--William Kennedy, also a former partner of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark.--was reprimanded for his handling of the matter after a critical report submitted by the FBI.

Kennedy’s reprimand caused Foster to suffer a panic attack, Fiske’s report said, and he told relatives that the FBI had lied about the meetings to “set up” the White House counsel’s office for criticism. Foster was said to have uncharacteristically raised his voice when he told Nussbaum that he wanted to take the blame for Kennedy.

Although Foster told relatives that he wanted to resign, Fiske said he and his investigators theorized that the White House lawyer was reluctant to do so because of the personal humiliation he would have felt in returning to Arkansas under those circumstances.

Foster sought limited medical treatment for depression, the report said.

He went to the White House medical unit to have his blood pressure checked on July 16, apparently because he felt his heart pounding. On July 19, he consulted his doctor in Arkansas, who prescribed the drug Desyrel.

But he was reluctant to contact a psychiatrist, apparently because he feared it would jeopardize his White House security clearance. The report said Foster called one psychiatrist twice on July 16 but apparently got an answering machine and left no message.

At 1 p.m. on July 20, Foster left the White House for the last time, saying: “I’ll be back.” Investigators were unable to determine where he went before driving to Ft. Marcy Park near Washington, where he killed himself with a gun believed to have belonged to his late father.

About 5:45 p.m., a passerby identified in the report as a “confidential witness” found Foster’s body in the park, the gun still in his right hand. An autopsy showed that the bullet entered the soft palate inside his mouth and that he died in a matter of minutes.

Although investigators found 12 bullets in the dense vegetation near the body, none was determined to be the one that killed Foster. Fiske said he decided against conducting a costly, time-consuming search of the entire park for the bullet.

Because there was no evidence of a struggle and because Foster’s thumb still carried the imprint of the trigger, his death was certainly a suicide, Fiske said.

In an effort to answer the mystery of why there was so little blood found at the scene, he noted that Foster died on a steep slope and that gravity caused blood to settle in the lower portion of his body.

Furthermore, he cited the lack of blood as proof that Foster was not--as some have suggested--killed elsewhere and carried to the park. As he put it, “had the body been moved to Ft. Marcy Park after his death, the Park Police would have found Foster’s body and clothing far more bloodied than they were at the scene.”