AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR

In early July, 1997, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff once again reported that Kenneth Starr had wrapped up the Foster case and had agreed with Robert Fiske that Foster had killed himself. Finally, he was right, because on July 15 Starr's office did make such an announcement. The conclusion was predictable. Indeed, it had been predicted by almost everyone, including this writer. What was unexpected was his brazenness in not giving one word of explanation of how he arrived at his conclusion. If anyone ever had explaining to do, it was Kenneth Starr in this instance. Instead, the public was told by a spokesman that the long-delayed report on the underlying investigation had been duly submitted to the three-judge panel that appointed Starr, and the Office of the Independent Counsel could not say when or if the report would be made public.

The American people have become more and more disaffected with their government and have come to expect magisterial behavior in which they are treated by their leaders more as subjects than as citizens of a free republic. But those two little words "or if" constituted very nearly the most regally contemptuous act yet:

"Yes, we know that any independent-minded person who has taken any time at all to look at the Foster death case knows full well that the suicide-in-Fort-Marcy Park conclusion is full of holes, and, yes, we know that the almost four years it has taken for us to arrive once and for all at this conclusion has only heightened suspicion and increased the need for full public disclosure, but, no, we just might never give you any sort of explanation. Now go away. You bother us."

And the men and the women of America's Fourth Estate, Thomas Jefferson's last line of defense against tyranny, did precisely that. They went meekly away. With the exception of the West Coast business newspaper, Investor's Business Daily, no one noted that what Starr had really done was to turn back the clock to August 10, 1993, when the Chief of the Park Police, flanked by representatives of the FBI and the Justice Department, had given us a conclusion with no supporting explanation. We were back to square one, as though Captain Dreyfus had been given another secret trial and convicted again on secret evidence, and Starr's protracted proceedings, it would appear, had been little better than a Star Chamber. But the nation's press took little note, with most not even bothering to make editorial comment. The Washington Times gave the story the most coverage and went so far as politely to urge prompt release of the report, but as the leading "opposition" daily, it was also the most disappointing. Virtually folding its tent of skepticism and forgetting completely that it had once reported that three respected experts had found the Foster "suicide" note to be a forgery, it bought into the official suicide-from-depression theory using the text of the note, like James Stewart in Blood Sport, as major evidence of the depression, and expressed general satisfaction with Starr's work.

Left-Right Dichotomy Breaks Down

The Times' final cave-in was but one more indication that the complete role reversal from the Dreyfus Affair that I described earlier in the paper, with the left- internationalists now on the side of the government and the right-wing nationalists trying to expose the government scandal, was breaking down. While the right seemed to be losing its appetite for exposing the most serious of the misdeeds associated with the Clinton administration, there were signs that at least a few on the left were regaining their conscience. In the last year two writers of the left-liberal New York/Washington communities emerged as among the most prominent public doubters of the government's Foster-suicide case. Phillip Weiss, who regularly writes for the small-circulation but influential New York Observer, first appeared on the scene with a major article featuring Foster "document hound" Hugh Sprunt on the cover with an article entitled "The Clinton Crazies" in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The usual reader of that newspaper would have been given the superficial impression that the suspicions of high-level criminal conduct being expressed around the country were the product of little more than a deep-seated hatred of the President and the First Lady grounded in ideological differences. But Weiss, in the process, allowed a lot more of the facts about the Foster case to get before the American public than they had previously been permitted to see, whatever the spin he and the editors put on them, and he quoted the eminently sane, sensible, and persuasive Sprunt at some length. Had his acquaintance with Sprunt and the facts of the Foster case turned him into a closet American "Dreyfusard"?

The apparent answer to that question was soon forthcoming when he produced a series of articles for the New York Observer, each stronger than the one before, leaving the clear impression that he had lined himself up with the doubters of the government story. At the same time, a man well known and respected in Washington left-activist circles, the editor and publisher of the Progressive Review, Sam Smith, whose disillusionment with Clinton set in very early in the administration, began to add to his previously published bill of particulars against the President serious misgivings over the Foster case. The influence of his small-circulation magazine was magnified by the fact that he put out an on-line version of it that detailed many of the anomalies of the Foster case such as have been recounted in this article and elsewhere.

Most confounding of all to the thesis, heavily promoted in the press, that the most serious of the Clinton scandals were products of the fevered imaginations of ultra-right- wing, Clinton- hating partisans was perhaps the most devastating portrait yet in print of the first couple and their political milieu, Partners in Power, the Clintons and their America, by Roger Morris. Morris, respected liberal biographer of Richard Nixon and former member of the President's National Security Council under President's Johnson and Nixon touches only lightly on the Foster case--his focus is earlier--, but when he mentions it he doesn't just routinely call it the "Foster suicide" as many others have done but acknowledges that it is an unsolved case in which many legitimate concerns have been raised. And well he should, considering the background of profound personal and political corruption that he paints in his book.

The William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe) of Partners in Power is the product of a hard-gambling, party-loving mother whose first two husbands were married to someone else when she began dating them and a natural father, a charming traveling salesman with a million-dollar smile, who was killed in an automobile accident shortly before Bill was born. Bill's natural father met his glamorous nurse mother when he, a married man, took his sick girlfriend to the hospital where Bill's future mother worked, and she caught his roving eye. The mother was, herself, engaged to another man at the time. Young Bill's stepfather, Roger Clinton, Sr., was a ne'er-do- well alcoholic who abused Bill's mother, but the real power in young Bill's life was the stepfather's older brother, Raymond, who owned the Buick dealership in the wide open Arkansas resort town of Hot Springs, to which Bill's mother Virginia moved before young Bill started to school. Raymond, according to Morris, was also heavily involved in the prevalent illegal gambling business in the city and was widely believed to be connected to organized crime. Chicago's top mobster himself, Al Capone, could often be seen in Hot Springs in the winter months surrounded by his coterie of bodyguards.

The bombshell revelation in Morris' book, mainly ignored by the nation's press, is that the notorious draft-evading, war-protesting young Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton was, according to sources in whom Morris has a great deal of confidence, actually working undercover at Oxford all along for the CIA and spying on the anti-war movement for his CIA benefactors. That connection, Morris strongly implies, explains more than anything else young Bill's meteoric political rise, his charmed life with the nation's press, and his phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes after one disastrous revelation after another about his personal and political dealings. It is a connection that continued, according to Morris, when the tiny airport in the northwest Arkansas town of Mena was used as a surreptitious conduit for arms to the CIA-backed Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua and cocaine was brought back on the return flight to help supply our nations's illegal users. Bill Clinton's continued political success, to Morris, is a sad commentary on what this country has become as we approach the 21st century, hence his book's subtitle, The Clintons and their America.

"Dreyfusards" Clash

If the left-right role reversal of the Foster case versus the Dreyfus Affair was breaking down, so, too, was the parallel between the dogged young reporter Christopher Ruddy, first of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and then of Richard Mellon Scaife's less-well-known Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and the determined young reporter Bernard Lazare. Though there were many squabbles among the Dreyfusards--Emile Zola in particular was severely attacked when he exiled himself to England to avoid serving his one-year libel sentence--no one ever questioned the sincerity and dedication of Lazare to the cause of justice for Captain Alfred Dreyfus. After all, they were both Jews in a country in which solidarity against rampant anti- Semitism was very important, and Lazare was being financed by Alfred's dedicated older brother, Mathieu. But in 1997 serious questioning of Christopher Ruddy's motives was what was heard from within the heart of the American "Dreyfusard" camp.

The questioning, ironically, was set in motion by Ruddy's own questioning of the motives of John Clarke, the lawyer for the witness, Patrick Knowlton. Ruddy did not challenge the fact that Knowlton had been followed and harassed by a number of spooky and intimidating men on the streets of Washington, DC. He, in fact, was among those who had witnessed the intimidation and had reported on it (The remarkable and thoroughly depressing thing here for anyone who cares about freedom in America is that no one else reported on it. It was, however, well-reported in London.). But as the lawyer Clarke prepared a suit against the FBI (or, more precisely, individuals working for the FBI), whom he and Knowlton blamed primarily for the harassment (or were at least guilty as precipitators of a conspiracy to obstruct justice), Ruddy spread the word that Clarke was not to be trusted, making it very difficult for Knowlton to raise the funds necessary to push ahead with his suit. One of the people with whom Ruddy planted the seed of suspicion, in addition to this author, was the previously-mentioned document hound identified only by his E-mail address, hughie2u@aol.com (now "outed" in an electronic fit of pique by Ruddy as Hugh Turley).

Turley, though made wary by Ruddy's warning, was not deterred from lending assistance to Clarke and found to his satisfaction that Clarke's motives were pure, astonishingly so it would seem for a modern American lawyer. Turley found in Clarke a bright and promising young attorney with the rare courage to do the unthinkable, to risk his career and stand up and "fight City Hall." Having satisfied himself as to Clarke's motives, Turley then, quite naturally, turned a gimlet eye upon the one who had mounted a whispering campaign against him, and decided that he did not like what he saw. What were Ruddy's motives, he wondered, in his trying to undercut Clarke, and what did that say about Ruddy's motives overall in being the only American journalist to pursue the Foster case on a regular basis?

Turley's first concern was that Ruddy, working first for the New York Post, owned by Australian media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, and then for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, owned by Mellon heir Richard Mellon Scaife, had intentionally played into the hands of those who would paint the government critics in the case as mere political partisans. Scaife was a noted financier of "conservative" causes and organizations, perhaps the most notable of which is Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media (AIM). Irvine and AIM have taken the lead along with Ruddy in questioning the government's conclusions. Irvine is an unabashed partisan who had fiercely defended the Reagan and Bush administrations against almost all allegations of scandal, particularly those related to the Iran-Contra affair, and his organization continued to debunk any hint of government involvement in drug smuggling into Mena Airport in Arkansas. Ruddy did not help by implying that very nearly the worst thing about Kenneth Starr was that he had placed the Democrat, Mark Tuohey, in charge of the Washington Office of the Independent Counsel, as though a Democrat were inherently incapable of finding another Democrat guilty of a crime.

More serious was Turley's criticism of Ruddy in the area of the case that involved the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawsuit against the FBI. Ruddy, in a number of public appearances, mentioned that Knowlton had been the first to see Foster's car in the parking lot of Fort Marcy Park (He continues to do it in his book, but we'll have more about the book later.). The fact that the car was an older model Honda than Foster's and brown instead of silver-gray by Knowlton's very definite recollection meant that the car was not, in fact, Foster's. It was Knowlton's insistence on his recollection that, he is certain, got him harassed by people he feels he can prove were working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To downplay that fact is to cover for the FBI in Turley's view. Ruddy also continues to insist that the FBI as an organization was essentially kept out of the Foster death investigation, but it is a major contention of Knowlton's suit, which he supports with numerous documents from the record, that the FBI was, indeed, deeply involved in the investigation, which means it was involved in and very likely orchestrated the cover-up every step of the way.

Finally, Turley is concerned that Ruddy is giving too much attention to his assertion that Foster's body was really at an entirely different location from where the authorities said it was, a position he shares with no other serious student of the Foster case (except this writer up until an extraordinary new revelation which we shall soon discuss ). Somewhere there must be a textbook dealing with the black art of propaganda in which the techniques are laid out for gathering opponents of the propagandist's position all into a common boat. The boat is then either put on a voyage to nowhere or simply sunk. High up on the list of sinking techniques would be, "make the strongest charge on the weakest evidence."

Turley firmly believes that, though they have long traveled in the same direction and often together, the cause of justice in the Foster case is now better served by his abandonment of the Ruddy ship. Pursuant to that belief he has peppered the Internet with criticism of Ruddy, starting out with the observation that much of what Ruddy has concluded about the body site is based on something as elementary as his confusion over compass directions at Fort Marcy Park and following up with variations on the themes discussed above.

Finally, Ruddy responded, not with a direct posting to any of the public news groups to which Hughie has been sending his missives, but with E-mail messages to certain individuals interested in the Foster case (this writer was not one of them, but, of course, through the magic of electronic communication, a copy was not difficult to come by). After a point-by-point rebuttal to Hughie's charges, Ruddy concluded by revealing that "Hughie" is the professional "clown," Hugh Turley, and noting that he, as a journalist, had to adhere to higher standards of accuracy (Turley is, in fact, a very clever and successful children's entertainer). Turley quickly responded, congratulating Ruddy for that rarest of actions for an American journalist, defending his writings in a public forum; rebutting each of Ruddy's points in turn; and reminding him that in consideration of their performance with respect to the Foster case, America's journalists had earned for themselves a good deal less reason for respect than America's clowns. He closed with an invitation to Ruddy to keep up the public exchanges. That was some weeks ago, and Ruddy has had no further differences with Turley on the Net.

The other major document hound was busy as well. At the end of the same week in July in which Starr made his long-awaited announcement, Hugh Sprunt and the aggrieved witness, Knowlton, paid a visit to the National Archives in Washington to examine the latest hearing records of the Senate Whitewater Committee which were recently made available, and while they were at it, to see if there was anything that might have been missed in the earlier records of the Foster case. And, as luck would have it, there was. Dr. Donald Haut, Chief Medical Examiner of the Northern Virginia District had already had his 15 minutes of fame when he appeared on the 60 Minutes episode in which he contradicted Ruddy with respect to the amount of blood he saw on and around Foster's body at Fort Marcy Park. What reporter Mike Wallace did not say is that he also contradicted what he had previously said on the record and what he had told Ruddy in an interview that Ruddy had recorded. The controversy over what Haut, the official medical recorder of the scene and the only physician at Fort Marcy Park that night, did or did not see made it all the more noticeable that in the massive two volumes of Senate documents his official written incident report was missing. Well, Knowlton found it, and Sprunt, hesitant at first, quickly recognized its significance.

The first thing one would notice in reading the pre-printed form is that Haut hardly earned his money that night. In the 48 boxes under "Description of Body, " which includes spaces for noting incidence of blood, among a lot of other things, everything is blank. In the 10 blocks under "Fatal Wounds (Gunshot, Stab, etc.)," same thing. Finally, under "Manner of Death: (check one only) we hit some pay dirt. The choices are "Accident," "Natural," "Suicide," "Homicide," "Undetermined," and "Pending." No doubt here. The block by "Suicide" has an "x" mark. And there beside it in the "Cause of Death" block is a short narrative in all capitals: PERFORATING GUNSHOT WOUND MOUTH- [space] HEAD. (The odd blank space is not exactly as I have shown it. It actually starts a second line.) Turning to the second page of the two-page form we find more blank spaces: "Found Dead By." nothing; "Last Seen Alive By," nothing; "Witnesses to Injury or Illness and Death," nothing. Then under the concluding "Narrative Summary of Circumstances Surrounding Death" we have this:

"JULY 20, 1993 After anonymous call was received at 18:04 hours US Park Police officers found 48 yrs Caucasian male with self-inflicted gunshot wound mouth to neck on a foot path in Marcey (sic) Park. His car was parked in the parking lot but no note was found. MEDICAL HISTORY Unknown."

Mouth to neck!?!? But didn't he say mouth-head on the first page? Yes, but there was that curious space between the words. Oh, look! A four-letter word has been incompletely mechanically "lifted off" there, it would appear. Well, what do you know? The original word sure does look a lot like "NECK."

So there you have it. Kenneth Starr just got through telling us that the death was a suicide just like Robert Fiske said it was, and the autopsy doctor upon whom Fiske relied produced a diagram showing that the bullet came out through the crown of the head, but the doctor at the park saw a neck instead of a head wound. There's certainly no confusing the neck and the crown of the head. Somebody, to make the written record of the two doctors agree, went back and "corrected" "NECK" and put "HEAD" down beside it. But this was a government worker. He did a slovenly job on the first page and overlooked the words entirely on the second page.

Sprunt, as is usually the case when he is in the Washington area (It was often the case with reporter Ruddy, too.), was staying at Hugh Turley's home. Turley, who had actually organized and participated in the archives expedition that spanned several days, prepared a press release on the discovery and sent it around. As we have by now come to expect with any information that is particularly damning of the government, it was of course completely ignored by all the major news organs. Here is an excerpt from that press release:

The "Report of Investigation by Medical Examiner" authored by Donald Haut and available at the National Archives confirms that the Fiske Report was wrong and paramedic Richard Arthur was indeed right when he said under oath that there was a bullet wound to Vincent Foster's neck. This neck wound was absent from the official autopsy report. Dr. James C. Beyer's "Report of Autopsy" states that Mr. Foster shot himself in the mouth and that the bullet exited from the back of Foster's head. The bullet has never been found.

Paramedic Richard Arthur stated under oath that "...there was a bullet hole right here (in the neck)...right around the jaw line." The first Whitewater Counsel Robert B. Fiske in his report dismissed Arthur's testimony saying that "Arthur believed he saw a bullet wound in the right side of Foster's neck. These wounds did not exist. The autopsy results, the photographs taken at the scene...conclusively show these wounds did not exist." Much of the evidence, however, is inexplicably missing. Park Police officers stated under oath that many of the body site Polaroid photos vanished and all the 35mm pictures taken of the body were underexposed. The autopsy doctor James C. Beyer claimed his X-ray machine did not work even though his report shows X-rays were taken. (ellipsis in the press release).

That the new evidence would cause one to go back and look more seriously at the previous work of Robert Fiske and Drs. Haut and Beyer as well as at the autopsy and the curious missing evidence is certainly not surprising, but what's this about Richard Arthur, who first turns up as a significant witness in Hugh Sprunt's Citizen's Independent Report as we noted back on page 43? Arthur takes on new importance, not only because, as we see, this very compelling new evidence seems to bear out his sworn testimony about the neck wound, but also because it makes everything else he has said more credible, and that "everything else" sounded pretty incredible at first. The "confidential witness" (identified as Centreville, VA, construction worker, Dale Kyle by the Washington Times in the wake of the Starr announcement) who supposedly discovered the body had made the "incredible" statement that he saw no gun in the hand. But he wavered over that under intense adversarial questioning by Fiske's FBI agents, and his story about walking almost 300 yards uphill on a hot day to find a private place for an emergency urination doesn't, as they say, hold a lot of water. The now more credible Arthur is the only witness on that fateful night to say--and he said it with great certainty--that the gun he saw in Foster's hand was an automatic and not the old black Colt .38 caliber revolver that is the official death weapon. Arthur was so sure that he drew a sketch of the weapon he saw for Senate investigators.

Arthur was one of the earliest witnesses. The absolutely earliest witness after Kyle, Park Police officer Kevin Fornshill, the first of the official searchers to come across the body has, most incredibly, said he never got a close enough look at the body to determine if there was a gun in the hand. What an incurious police officer! Also, the earliest set of Polaroid photos are among those that have turned up missing. What is beginning to appear ever more likely is that someone put an automatic pistol (perhaps a 9 mm carried by the Park Police) in Foster's hand as a sort of placeholder until the silver revolver that Foster owned could be put there. Somewhere along the way the plan went awry, however, and somebody came up with the old drop gun as a sort of consolation.

A Richard Arthur who is thoroughly credible suggests a couple of more things, too. It suggests that the neck wound he saw was an entry wound and the killer came up behind Foster and popped him with a small-caliber weapon aimed up into his brain, gangland style. The bullet likely never exited. It would also mean that this writer was mistaken to support Christopher Ruddy on the question of the body site. I had known for some time that Arthur places the body in front of the second cannon, which is where it was officially, but I doubted his overall credibility in spite of his steadfastness in sticking to his story. He had even accompanied the British reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard out to Fort Marcy Park and showed him where he saw the body. I had believed otherwise, not only because of my general faith in Ruddy, but also because the leafy background in the leaked hand-with-the-gun photo does not match the barren ground directly in front of the second cannon. However, upon my most recent visit to Fort Marcy Park I observed that if the body had been only a couple of feet farther down the berm and to the right, the scene would not conflict with the photo, and that body location seems the most likely possibility in light of all that we now know.

Christopher Ruddy is now farther out on a limb, and he is more lonesome out there, than he was before, which might explain how he has reacted to the neck-wound discovery. His public position is that it was not the neck wound that Arthur said in sworn testimony that he saw on the side of the neck. Nor was it the wound on the side of the neck that both Ruddy and Evans- Pritchard had said they had seen in an enhanced Polaroid photograph shown to them by someone apparently connected to the Starr investigation. Rather, it was an exit wound in the back of the neck that Foster friend and fellow Little Rock lawyer, Joe Purvis, had told Ruddy back in 1994 that an unidentified mortician in Little Rock told him he had seen. This was what he was soon suggesting on radio talk shows and in his book, which came out not quite two months later, though both neck wounds are in the book, only in different places. As for Arthur's flat disagreement with him about the body site, in a section early in the book dealing with the body site question he has this to say: "Another Fairfax County rescuer, Richard Arthur, had concerns about the body's position." Here he manages to leave an impression precisely the opposite of what is true.

The Ruddy Book

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we start picking around the details in Ruddy's book we should first introduce it to the reader. The title is The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, an Investigation. It is published by The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. This fact is interesting in itself because Simon and Schuster published Blood Sport by James Stewart which, in its treatment of the Foster case-- pretending that the torn-up "suicide" note was authentic by ignoring the findings of the three handwriting experts, strongly implying that Foster's silver revolver was the same as the unmistakably black gun found in Foster's hand at Fort Marcy Park, and shamelessly reporting an amazing account to him by Clinton adviser Susan Thomases that the very private Foster had confided to her(of all people) in the evening privacy of her boudoir(of all times and places) that he was distraught over his being trapped in a marriage with a woman that he did not love, without telling us that it contradicted what she had told the FBI on the record--is easily qualified to be called America's leading Foster cover-up book.

Also interesting is that the book was first mentioned nationally in the September issue of the magazine, Vanity Fair, in the form of a brief favorable review by controversial on-line reporter, Matt Drudge. Drudge seems to be in the business of discrediting both himself and the Internet by reporting half-baked, gossipy rumors. Most recently he was sued for libel by new White House Assistant, Sidney Blumenthal. Before coming to the White House Blumenthal was a journalist for the New Yorker, in which capacity, as I reported at the beginning of this paper, he wrote probably the earliest national magazine article on how Foster's fatally thin skin ultimately did him in. The New Yorker, which also produced the suicide-reinforcing article based on the rare interview with Lisa Foster referred to earlier, is owned by S.I. Newhouse. One might fairly wonder if it is only simple irony that Newhouse also owns Vanity Fair, which is now praising Ruddy's book, or if something deeper might be at work.

The dust jacket is surprisingly economical with information about Ruddy's background, saying under his photograph only that "Christopher Ruddy is a correspondent with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University." The Hoover Institution is a noted conservative think tank. Irony lovers will note that of all the colleges to which she could go, the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea, picked Stanford. The dust jacket does not tell us about Ruddy's previous employment with Murdoch's New York Post, that he has been the only American reporter to write regularly and skeptically about the Foster case, nor that he is a college product of Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute of Arlington, Virginia (From their web site masthead: "The Leadership Institute has trained thousands of conservatives to be successful in politics. Now the Leadership Institute wants to train you.).

It is not clear who is intending to impart credibility to whom, here, and who needs it more, but Ruddy further wraps himself in establishment approval with a lone endorsement on the dust jacket by William S. Sessions, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Here it is in its entirety:

Christopher Ruddy has detailed a significant array of facts and issues involving the death of Mr. Foster. His work is serious and compelling. While enduring great criticism, he has tenaciously argued a persuasive case that the American public has not been told the complete facts of this case.

Mr. Ruddy has carefully avoided drawing undue inferences about the death. His reporting raises serious concerns about the handling of the Foster case. It is legitimate to question the process employed by authorities to make their conclusions.

Understatement, properly employed, is also a legitimate polemical technique, but considering what this book more than amply shows, that there has been a blatant and obvious, in- your-face cover-up by the President, the Congress, the FBI, and America's press of the very- probable assassination of a high White House official, the timid and defensive tone of this statement--the first thing that the book's potential buyer might see-- is simply inexcusable.

Certainly Ruddy's work is compelling. He was allotted 305 pages (not counting the index) to lay out the whole sickening story, and it is a compelling story. He tells most of it, much of which is compressed into many fewer pages in this article, but he also tellingly leaves out a good deal of what is in this article as well as that which has been reported by others like the British reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, researcher Hugh Sprunt, and that which had been turned up by the lawyer, John Clarke, as part of the Knowlton lawsuit against the FBI.

Yes, that lawsuit against the FBI that Clarke was working on for Knowlton has indeed been filed, but you would hardly know it from reading Ruddy's book. After first trying to discredit Clarke with whispered innuendo, then consistently misreporting that Knowlton saw Foster's car in the lot at Fort Marcy Park, which is the crux of Knowlton's differences with the FBI, and not showing up to cover the Washington press conference in which Clarke and Knowlton announced the filing of the lawsuit, Ruddy added the capper by avoiding the subject entirely in his text.

Intentionally Ineffectual?

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion, for one whose primary concern is that truth and justice ultimately prevail, that Ruddy, not just in this book, but also in his reporting, has been intentionally ineffectual. Consider the following: Stung by the public criticism from a man who has given him many a free hour of assistance, a man who has no doubt contributed in his own selfless way to Ruddy's prominence and to the attainment of the latter's Hoover Institution Fellowship, Ruddy recently called Hugh Turley and told him that he was in Washington and would like to get together to mend fences. Turley, wanting to let Ruddy know right off the bat how difficult mending fences would now be, asked Ruddy why he had said nothing about Knowlton's lawsuit against the FBI in his book. Ruddy's response was that the book was essentially completed in the summer of 1996 and that the editor was quite strict in what he would allow him to add to it.

This answer is quite revealing in a number of ways. First, the bit about the strict editor is utter and complete nonsense. Knowlton's lawsuit was filed on November 12, 1996. Ruddy's book came out in the second week of September, 1997. Mention is made in the text of Starr's "suicide" announcement in mid-July of 1997 and of the neck-wound discovery a few days later. The excuse that the news of the lawsuit came too late to be included in the book does not increase ones confidence in the candor of the man offering it.

I asked Turley if he had asked Ruddy why the publisher had essentially sat on the book for more than a year, or if Ruddy had volunteered a reason, and the answer in either case was negative. But in consideration of the pattern that Ruddy has established, one can make an educated guess about the reason. The string on the Foster case has now, it would seem, run out. The President signaled right off the bat that he was not going to do anything. First a Democratic Congress and then a Republican Congress have shown that they are not going to do anything. The press, also, has thrown in the towel, though it is probably correct to say that it never got in the ring, that is, on the side of truth and justice, and first Robert Fiske and now Kenneth Starr have given them all cover by closing the case. As I was reading the book I found myself thinking "Every American, every member of Congress ought to read this book." But then it occurred to me. It's too late. A year ago it might have brought some pressure on Starr and the Congress, but not now. The only avenue of citizens' redress left is through Patrick Knowlton's lawsuit, and Ruddy ignores it.

But wait! Appendix I, out of a total of seven appendices, is a chronology of events connected (sometimes very tenuously) with the Foster case. It cuts off with:

June 23 Supreme Court refuses to hear Clinton administration appeal on notes made by government lawyers during their conversations with Hillary Clinton.

Backing up ten items we find the following at the top of page 268:

November 12 Witness Patrick Knowlton files suit in federal court alleging the government violated his civil rights.

There it is in black and white, watered down and drained of meaning and impact, buried in a chronology that few will bother to read with any care or comprehension. It doesn't say that it is precisely the FBI that he is suing and it doesn't explain why he would do such a thing, but the text does talk about the harassment on the streets of Washington so the really astute reader possibly can figure things out. Still, at the very best he can only think it must be some kind of crackpot suit like we often hear about on the news, or surely Ruddy would have covered it in his text. But, as with so much in the book, what Ruddy has really covered is his rear end. He can say that he did mention it, but in this instance, quite embarrassingly so, he didn't even seem to know that he had.

But Ruddy doesn't just ignore the lawsuit, he also introduces a new interpretation of events on Vincent Foster's fateful day that would tend to undercut it. We turn to another appendix and another chronology, Appendix II, "Vince Foster's Last Day," where we see this entry:

Approx. 12:30 P.M. White House claims Foster eats lunch in office.

What's with this "White House claims" business? Linda Tripp, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum's assistant, says she brought a cheeseburger and French fries from the White House cafeteria for him, and clerk Thomas Castleton has even attested to having been sent after her to see what was taking her so long. Tripp, a holdover from the Bush administration now working at the Pentagon, would seem to be an unlikely person to make up a story to cover up a probable murder in the Clinton White House, but what Ruddy is clearly implying here is that Tripp and Castleton didn't tell the truth about Foster's lunch.

The line of reasoning is further developed in the text. Ruddy notes that the autopsy doctor, Beyer, did not clearly fix the time of death, but he said that Foster had recently eaten a large meal of meat and potatoes. Here Ruddy passes up the chance to drive one more nail into the "depression" coffin by failing to note that such a hearty appetite belies a man about to abandon his family and his responsibilities on account of his suicidally-tortured mental state. Rather, he uses the information to raise questions about Foster's time of death. The witnesses at Fort Marcy Park coming across Foster's body just after 6:00 pm describe a man freshly murdered, according to Ruddy (but not, by my reading, to the preponderance of the testimony), and the autopsy describes a stomach full of an only partially digested meal. Further, Ruddy relates, "CW's ("confidential witness" Dale Kyle) FBI statement also mentions a purple wine-colored stain that one of the investigators told me was clearly visible on Foster's shirt and was obviously not blood." "A source close to the Starr probe who examined the shirt agreed with CW that a stain consistent with a wine color was on the shirt. The source said that Fiske had made no attempt to analyze the stain."

This latter evidence is presented in the context of how Robert Fiske accepted some evidence from CW that supported his conclusions but ignored other things, because CW, alone, also said he saw a wine cooler bottle near Foster's body, but that fact is not mentioned by anyone on the official record. Ruddy apparently doubts the existence of the bottle and CW's overall credibility, but he has got on the public record here, buttressed by two anonymous sources, the existence of a wine-colored stain on Foster's shirt. A picture is beginning to emerge not only of some riotous banquet that Foster might have attended where he ate a hearty meal and spilled wine on himself, but a time of death too late for Patrick Knowlton to have been a witness to much of anything. The car that he saw didn't match Foster's because Foster, what with his late meal that his stomach had been working on for two or three hours, wasn't yet at Fort Marcy Park.

Red-Faced on Television

Chris Ruddy has been praised as an old-fashioned shoe-leather reporter who doesn't just rely on official reports and the public record but goes out and tracks down leads on his own. In this he can be contrasted with many a mainstream journalist. But his penchant for going beyond the official record--something you never see the document hound Hugh Sprunt do--has gotten him in serious trouble in the past, to the point of contributing to the suspicions, here expressed, that he is being intentionally ineffectual.

It is not lost on those who rule us that, lamentably, most Americans get all their news from the major national television networks. The only time that the Ruddy name has figured prominently on the networks, first on the ABC Evening News in March of 1994 and then again on CBS's 60 Minutes in October of 1995 a self-discrediting blunder of his has been exposed. In each case the blunder originated with an unattributed source. Let us look first at the ABC piece, which I discuss--much less critically of Ruddy-- back on page 25.

On March 7, 1993, he wrote an article for the New York Post that appeared under the headline, "Cops Made Photo Blunder at Foster Death Site." It begins as follows:

The U.S. Park Police never took a crucial crime-scene photo of Vincent Foster's body before it was moved during the investigation into the death of the White House deputy counsel, FBI sources told The Post.

The embarrassing blunder--corroborated by a Park Police source--was one of several routine crime scene procedures investigators neglected to follow in Fort Marcy Park in Arlington, Va., in the Foster case, FBI sources said.

The clearest impression left by this article, whose truth or lack of same rests entirely upon anonymous FBI and Park Police sources, is that nobody unsheathed even the first camera or took the first picture, a breach of procedure so serious that all trace of doubt is erased that a cover-up is going on. Now we learn later that a lot of monkey- business went on with the copious photos that were taken--the basic 35-millimeters were said to have been underexposed and two-thirds of the Polaroids mysteriously disappeared--but Ruddy, by overstating the case had handed the networks a propaganda coup and had partially inoculated the investigators from damage from the future revelations. He took great umbrage with me personally at my writing that he had made a mistake here. The spin he took with me and continues to take in his book is that he wasn't talking about photographs overall but simply the broad perspective shots that would have settled once and for all whether the body was nearer to the first cannon as he alleges or nearer to the second cannon, as the authorities have it. That he can make such an assertion and still keep a perfectly straight face certainly does not inspire great confidence in his general probity.

The Christopher Ruddy that Mike Wallace interviewed on 60 Minutes, whom Wallace credited as responsible, more than anyone else, for Americans' skepticism about the Foster death, certainly came across as sheepish and shifty-looking. I credited it at the time to skillful editing, lighting, and camera angles by the same people who had admittedly pulled Bill Clinton's chestnuts out of the fire during the Gennifer Flowers stink in the `92 campaign and to Ruddy's youth and inexperience. But maybe the camera doesn't lie. He looked his absolute stumbling worst when he tried to explain away the bold assertion of the video (that he had a major role in producing) that Foster was left- handed, when the gun was found placed in his right hand. His weak retort was that the video was not his, but was instead a product of James Dale Davidson's Strategic Investment Newsletter. "You edited it, didn't you," shot back Mike Wallace, and Ruddy was left with no defense.

Ruddy's defense with the faithful--and he continues to make it in his book--is that all the blame here lies with that tricky Mike Wallace. It was he, Ruddy, who told the 60 Minutes people in the first place that the "left-handed" assertion was wrong, that it had originated with the liberal Boston Globe, and that Strategic Investment had mistakenly gone with it in their video without checking it out. Then those underhanded Clinton- defenders at CBS turned around and used it against him.

Let us look at the record. After having been let go by the New York Post just in time to miss the opportunity to comment publicly on the Fiske Report, he told me that he was gambling his journalistic future on a major report on the Foster case. The resulting 17-page paper dated July 18, 1994, entitled "A Special Report on the Fiske Investigation of the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr." leads off with a long exposition of his differences with the Park Police over the location of the body. His conclusions depend heavily upon what he says he was told by lead paramedic Sgt. George Gonzalez and an anonymous Park Police officer, and his own confusion over compass directions. The report includes a map that is oriented with west at the top and it is described in the text as north. Ruddy acknowledges that Gonzalez told a different story to Fiske's investigators, but what he does not tell us and probably did not know is that Gonzalez also told the same story as the one he told to Fiske's investigators in the report he wrote for the record that night, a report that pre-dated his interview with Ruddy by several months.

Eleven pages into the report we find a numbered list of 10 "Other Problems in Fiske's Findings." Here, produced in bold as in Ruddy's report is number 3, (the underlined emphasis is mine):

Why was the gun in Foster's right hand if, as The Boston Globe reported and the Park Police confirmed, he was left-handed?

Whatever did happen to that Park Police confirmation by the time the 60 Minutes set-up rolled around?

Ruddy's erroneous directions and apparently erroneous assertion about Foster's left- handedness (I say "apparently" because the matter has never been cleared up to my satisfaction.) continued to circulate in a compendium volume of Ruddy's writings, available by mail order from The Western Journalism Center entitled Vincent Foster, the Ruddy Investigation for years afterward, perhaps up to the present.

Thanks I believe primarily to Hugh Turley and Hugh Sprunt, the very embarrassing directional errors are not in Ruddy's latest book, but the argument over the body site still occupies a prominent place, consuming most of Chapter 2. Still, we see no hint that what Ruddy tells us he was told by Sgt. Gonzalez is contradicted by what appears in Gonzalez's contemporaneous report and his later deposition. Now emergency worker Richard Arthur has been added falsely as a body-site ally to Ruddy.

If the body site claim is not the source of Ruddy's next national television embarrassment, perhaps it will come on another point. Now apprised of his record and on guard, the careful reader should be wary of any assertion that comes from an anonymous source or is not on the public record. We find one such assertion on page 53. The known evidence, most of which Ruddy recounts, is very powerful that the gun found in Foster's hand was not his and did not previously belong to his father, though we have been told by Fiske et al. that it did. Ruddy goes farther, however, saying, "Yet documents obtained by the Fiske investigators show conclusively that the gun was not owned by Foster's father and had not been part of his father's gun collection."

This is a very strong charge. I know of nothing to support it on the public record. Since the conclusion of suicide rests so heavily on the assertion that the gun found in Foster's hand was one given to him by his father, the willful withholding of evidence that would prove otherwise is nothing short of criminal conduct by the prosecutor. What will happen, should it become necessary, when the next Mike Wallace or Ted Koppel asks Chris Ruddy to put up or shut up?

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