Did Washington Kill Vincent Foster?

By Hugh Sidey

On a luminous day earlier this summer, a small group clustered on the Truman Balcony of the White House for a get-acquainted ritual given by Hillary Rodham Clinton. A visiting choir was singing below in the Rose Garden to the President. The flowers were voluptuous, the iced tea tangy. Deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster moved through the group, hunching his shoulders so that he was closer to the shorter guests, a beaded chain holding his White House pass hanging outside his pinstripe suit -- a shackle perhaps. But that is an afterthought.

Vince Foster's gentle pug features were uplifted by a smile, his eyes those of a patient listener. Yet there was an impatience there too, more sensed than seen. How many of these events had he attended; what dark problems were left smoldering on his desk? Could he stop and see the beauty and savor the grand drama of history spread out before him?

Foster hurried out the front door of the White House with the guests, headed toward some secret rendezvous in the West Wing, where they run the world. "Takes some adjusting," I muttered, mindful of the problems over appointments and the firing of the Travel Office personnel. "You're telling me," he replied with a rueful laugh. Remember, he was reminded, that trouble is the main business of Washington. Without controversy the city is out of work. Keep laughing. But he didn't -- as we now know.

His plaintive note of frustration and doubt, the ripped-up pieces of paper found at the bottom of his briefcase after he killed himself, was released last week. His note acknowledged mistakes born of innocence and inexperience. But it also contained the very innuendo and suspicion that he so deplored finding all around him in his short residence in Washington. In his view, the FBI, the Republicans and the editors of the Wall Street Journal had all "lied." Harsh words from an innocent. A lawyer knows that there rarely is an absolute truth.

What Vince Foster seemed to be discovering was the old and tarnished coin of the realm. In a memorable description of Washington, William Manchester (The Death of a President) wrote 30 years ago, describing Lyndon Johnson, that he thought the shortest distance between two points was through a tunnel. Foster found the tunnel, but he did not like the shadowy creatures he found down there.

Big power, big money, big politics will always generate a degree of savagery in Washington. A distraught former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal threw himself to his death in 1949 out a 16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital; Robert McFarlane, National Security Adviser to Ronald Reagan, in 1987 attempted suicide over his implication in the Iran-contra scandal. He survived and recovered.

But Foster had not been hospitalized for depression, as Forrestal had, nor was he the focus of criminal proceedings, as McFarlane was. Foster's death illuminates how Washington rituals have become wretched soap operas played out on a media stage where people, with all their frailties, are mercilessly dissected more than the policies they propound. Personal tragedy can come swiftly and unexpectedly.

Walter Lippmann, the reigning pundit of the Forrestal era, was a stern critic of government, but he, and virtually all others then in his trade, was calm, civil and tolerant. One can only marvel at what might have been the result if today's weekend editorial broadsides and talk-show shouting had been directed at Dwight Eisenhower's cloudy syntax and John Kennedy's womanizing.

Much of Vince Foster's White House life was given to trying to understand and contain the explosions over the botched appointments of Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier. Those, and the firing of the White House Travel Office, loomed large on nightly screens -- but they were in fact small stuff. Foster was trapped in Washington's miasma of junk drama. Great for Crossfire but not much good for governing.

There is something in the Vince Foster story that we do not know. An episode long buried, an undisclosed fact? More likely there was a physical and emotional short circuit, an all too human case of personal depression, that made "the spotlight of public life in Washington" -- under which he said he was not meant to perform -- into a nightmare.

Most people around Presidents are talented, ambitious and forged in partisanship. Indeed they are among the creators of today's brass-knuckled media assaults. Remember Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Regan, Ailes, Atwater, Sununu? They hammered the adversary and were hammered themselves. None broke. There was an understanding that controversy in some form is at the heart of creative democracy, and it is a way of life along the Potomac River.

Vince Foster never had an apprenticeship in the capital. It might have made a difference had he been a congressional aide or served on a departmental staff. He might have been hardened -- or he might have decided to stay out of the tunnel forever.

Washington -- its politicians, media powers and special pleaders -- should ponder the last cry of this sensitive man. He felt some truths, even if he did not glimpse them clearly. "Here ruining people is considered sport," he wrote at the end of his sad list. That was no overstatement. In some quarters ruining people is considered the road to power and wealth, a rain dance rewarding irresponsible minds and tongues. Vince Foster has told us that we have gone too far in making despair a culture and degradation the password for entry.