Shreds Of Evidence

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

Chief of Staff Mack McLarty did not want to disturb the 27 little pieces of torn yellow paper carefully assembled on the table. And so last Tuesday, as Attorney General Janet Reno entered his corner office for a meeting, he gingerly took his seat at the head of the table. The day before, the scraps had come fluttering out of the briefcase of Vincent Foster Jr. as it was being packed for his widow. They may contain all that will ever be known about his final thoughts.

But the group gathered was concerned with a specific issue. Was there material in the note protected by Executive privilege? After a nearly 60- minute discussion, the group -- which included Reno's deputy Philip Heymann , -- decided that no such protection was involved. At 8 p.m. a U.S. Park policeman arrived and swept the scraps off the mahogany table into a White House envelope.

Filling the page, Foster's handwritten note has aspects of a legal argument, terse points that describe his overwhelming sense of having failed Bill and Hillary Clinton. According to one who read the note, Foster mentions both the President and First Lady by name and laments that he has let them down. Undated, the observations appear to have been written in one sitting and reflect Foster's sense that, as a top White House official paraphrased the note, "Washington is an unhappy place." An aide who read a transcript said, "If you didn't know what Vince had done, you would have thought at worst that he was going to resign."

A key source of Foster's gloom was an early July Wall Street Journal editorial that excoriated the White House for exporting a quadrille of lawyers from Hillary Clinton's old law firm in Arkansas. At the time, Foster commented to a colleague in the counsel's office that "maybe it would be better if I go back to Little Rock."

"Don't be crazy," responded the lawyer. "It wouldn't be better."

Foster shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

But the editorial's opprobrium -- and his role in the controversial White House travel office shake-up last May -- continued to eat away at Foster. According to a top White House official who read the note, Foster bemoaned "the meanness of the editorials in the Wall Street Journal, which has the ability to write whatever they want without consequence." He went on to point out that "no one violated any law or standards in the White House, yet they get accused of doing so."

According to one official, Foster did not mention the role of the counsel's office in several of Clinton's failed nominations, but only the fallout from dismissing the travel office's employees. He felt responsible for the mishandling of the firings and their aftermath. He had forcefully argued that the internal review of the fiasco name names, even though this meant that he would have to reveal that he had told the First Lady about the problems in the travel office and that his junior associate from Little Rock, Bill Kennedy, had called the FBI.

The secrecy surrounding the note and the delay in turning it over to authorities -- from Monday afternoon until Tuesday evening -- set off a frenzy of speculation that would rival anything John Grisham could make up. Foster was privy not only to the most important work of the White House but to the affairs of the President and First Lady, whose lawyer he had been right up until his death.

Mark Gearan, director of communications, said there was nothing sinister in the delay. "There was no discussion about not turning the note over. It was being examined for any protected material. And basic decency required that Mrs. Foster and the President be told of its contents first." It wasn't until late Tuesday afternoon -- after Lisa Foster returned to Washington for her husband's belongings -- that White House aide James Hamilton went to see her with a transcript of the unsigned note. The President was in Chicago until late Monday night and wasn't informed of the note's contents until Tuesday evening. Says a senior White House official: "He found it painful, emotionally painful." By Friday, the Park Police said the investigation should end in "days, as soon as a few loose ends are tied up."

But there had already been enough changes of direction to make the tragedy a subject of mounting interest. First, the Justice Department was in charge -- and then it wasn't -- of an investigation that was on, then off, then on again. There were no notes -- and then there were two (the second listed the names of two Washington psychiatrists). Then there was the fact that the week before, Foster was down and distracted, but not depressed -- and then he was. The President said he was unaware of Foster's distress, even if associates were. He explained he called Foster the night before his suicide to invite him to a screening of In the Line of Fire because Hillary and Chelsea were in Little Rock and he was lonely, contradicting the press office, which said Clinton telephoned partly because he knew his friend was "having a rough time" at work.

But in real life and death there is less intrigue than in fiction. As Foster's friends and family play an endless loop of their conversations with him, it is only natural that what at one time was unremarkable comes into focus as a sign that a loved one was in trouble. A videotape of Foster walking into the West Wing on Valentine's Day, his wife's gloved hand in his, shows, on second viewing, that his wife is radiating happiness while he holds a tight-lipped smile. He now emerges as a pleasant man, but not a happy one. "He was not a yuk-it-up kind of guy, although he appreciated the humor of others," says a friend. The most carefree thing Foster said to TIME in the course of several interviews was to correct the impression that Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell was a renowned Italian cook back home. "It is well accepted that I make the best pasta with white sauce in Little Rock," but that, he added, "was off the record.

Those who watched Foster operate in his shoe box of an office next to his boss, Bernard Nussbaum, thought he must be bristling inside at being No. 2 while shouldering so much of the work and internalizing all of the blame for the office's screw-ups. He came from a world in Little Rock, where he was on top, to the top of the world in Washington, in which he felt himself sinking. And it wasn't just outsiders that pointed fingers at the counsel's office for bungling the vetting of various nominees and for overstepping its authority in the investigation of misconduct in the White House travel office. This fell hard on a perfectionist who, Arkansas attorney Joe Purvis says, "never put out anything second-rate in his life."

Lisa Foster, like everyone who knew her husband, is beset by what might have been. Said a friend who spoke to her in Little Rock: "She wonders, like anyone, why. And why did he get through the day before but not that day, and was there something about that day that could have gone differently that would have saved him from himself?" Even the stoic McLarty has allowed himself to go back over that last day and wonder what might have happened if he and Foster had not agreed to postpone a meeting until the next day.

While Lisa Foster had accommodated herself to the move to Washington, she became unhappy about it when she saw how the job was hurting her husband. When a friend told her several weeks ago that she had found a job in the Capitol, Lisa Foster said, "You are making the biggest mistake of your life." By then, it seems, Vince Foster had begun to see the move as a mistake as well. Foster had asked an Arkansas physician to send him an antidepressant, which arrived shortly before his death. While the drug may have been a step in the right direction, such medication, says Dr. Frederick Guggenheim, chairman of the University of Arkansas' department of psychiatry, can initially restore one's energy without lifting the despair. It may have served only to give him enough life to take his own.

With reporting by Adam Biegel/Atlanta, James Carney/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Houston