Vince Foster's Suicide: The Rumor Mill Churns

YOU CAN'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING you read about Vince Foster. In some cases, you can't believe any of it. Last week rumors swirled from Washington to Wall Street and back again about the 1993 suicide of Bill and Hillary Clinton's White House lawyer. The tabloid New York Post claimed that after Foster's death, administration officials "frantically scrambled" to remove from his office safe a previously unreported set of files, some of them related to the Whitewater affair. A financial newsletter published an even more sensational-and equally unsubstantiated-report that Foster's body had been moved from an apartment in Virginia to the suburban park where it was found. On his radio show, conservative blunderbuss Rush Limbaugh embellished that report just a bit; he said the newsletter "claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton."

Foster's friends swatted down the rumors as fast as they could. One of his in-laws begged reporters to "back off. Get out of the zoo." But that didn't stop a flow of lip-smacking stories that left the White House on edge, and even unsettled the financial markets. Last Thursday, after Limbaugh's broadcast, stock and bond prices tumbled-the Dow dropped nearly 23 points-largely because of worries about Whitewater. Elaine Garzarelli, the highly regarded Lehman Brothers market analyst who predicted the 1987 crash, said that European traders were particularly spooked by the Foster case. "They were afraid Hillary Clinton was involved in a murder," she said. "They hate that."

No, Hillary Clinton was not involved in a murder. In fact, there's still no credible evidence that Foster's death was anything but the depression-induced suicide that his family believes it to have been. Then why all the garish speculation? Partly because of the clumsy behavior of Foster's boss, former presidential counsel Bernard Nussbaum, and other White House staffers immediately after the suicide: leaving his office unsealed and spiriting documents away. Partly because of the enigmatic note that Foster left behind-unsigned, addressed to no one, tom into pieces-lamenting his own "mistakes" and the poisonous atmosphere of Washington, where "ruining people is considered sport." Partly because the Whitewater affair, one of the items on his desk, has resurged so dramatically. And partly because many people in the news media simply won't let Foster rest.

Some of the stories are nothing more than the cut and thrust of responsible news coverage. But all along, others have seemed determinedly partisan. There is continued grumbling from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, whose stinging criticism apparently contributed to Foster's depression ("WSJ editors lie without consequence," he complained in his note). There's a steady stream of innuendo from conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, who implied at one point that "intelligence matters" might have had something to do with the suicide. And on another level entirely, there is the florid hype and fantasy of the tabloids, designed more to entertain than inform. Some of the most raucous of those excesses have come from overseas. In Britain, Rupert Murdoch's Sun claimed, three days after the suicide, that Foster bad a "deep personal friendship" with Hillary Clinton.

Blood loss:

Last week one of the more overwrought American tabloids, the New York Post, charged that investigators "never took a crucial crime-scene photo of Vincent Foster's body before it was moved" out of the park where it had been discovered. The tabloid, which has begun to put quotation marks around the word "suicide" in stories about Foster, also asserted that "little blood loss" was evident at the scene-which could be taken as a sign that the fatal shot was fired into Foster's head somewhere else.