My Little Rock

It's the photograph that lingers, one that he was reluctant to release to The Wall Street Journal. It was as if he feared the picture would reveal a shameful secret. In it, Vincent Foster--a handsome man by any standard--appears grim, unsmiling, guarded. He does not project the image of a man who is getting a great deal out of life. No question hindsight makes a contribution, but Foster's smile, even at a sunnier time--as he strolls, with the Clintons, through the lobby of his beloved Little Rock Repertory Theater--seems tight and controlled. Who is Vincent Foster? the Journal asked in a critical piece that appeared this past summer, a short time before the deputy White House counsel--and the president's personal lawyer--took his own life. Many speculate that it was the drumbeat of attacks from the Journal itself, so highly thought of in Arkansas corporate circles, that helped lead Foster to his decision. The attacks were certainly on his mind when he wrote his list of grievances. "Wall Street Journal editors lie without consequence."

Months after the tragedy, there are other parts of the tableau that endure--the uneaten candy, the ride in a Honda Accord to Fort Marcy Park, the Civil War cannon at the site, the ritual removal of jacket and tie (a man still in control), the gun placed in his mouth (a 1913 Colt revolver apparently inherited from his father, who had died 18 months before). The single shot that tore away his brain stem.

And then a fresh set of characters: the exotically named White House decorator, Kaki Hockersmith; Bernard Nussbaum, who had joked with Foster that as chief counsel, he ought to be getting more attention from the Journal; the U.S. Park Police, like Keystone Cops. Finally, William Safire's powerful questions in The New York Times, each ringing out like a gunshot, all still unanswered (Who tore up Foster's note? Where is the missing piece? Where is the middle-aged male driving a white van who reported to a parkway attendant that he found the body?).

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Rock musicians are fond of pointing out that you can't judge or predict behavior on the road. Washington, D.C. was the "road" for Vincent Foster. Would he be alive if he had stayed home in Little Rock? We're told that he had great misgivings about going to the capital in the first place and did so only at the behest of his longtime friends the Clintons. He was something of a golden boy in Little Rock, had never suffered a setback there and was able to live in great comfort on his $295,000 a year income at the Rose law firm. Harry Thomason, TV producer and player in the Travelgate mess that troubled Foster so greatly, is convinced Washington killed him. Foster himself, in his anguished final note, wrote: "I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington." It's known that he suggested to his wife--a week before he died--that they return home, and was encouraged by her to stay on until the end of the year. No one, of course, could have known his state of mind at the time. "Men are never convinced of the seriousness of your suffering," says Albert Camus' narrator in The Fall, "except by your death."

What about Little Rock? Is it the special place it's painted to be? As it happens, I had occasion to spend some time there several weeks before Foster's death, drawn by a curiosity as to what, if anything, makes the city unique. Clinton had spent most of his life in Little Rock--as had Foster. Was there something in the makeup of the city that helped the president--and those around him--survive the arduous and ultimately miraculous journey from watermelon-growing Hope to the mighty office he now occupies?

At first glance, and even at second, Little Rock is a city like so many others, with a river (the Arkansas) running through it to no particular purpose, a downtown area with pockets of life--but one that's been more or less abandoned to a few commercial interests--and the usual movement to an outlying, more optimistic district, the west side in this case, with its affluent homes, monster malls and spreading network of restaurants, both pricey and affordable. At every turn the visitor is told about the rise of Systematics Inc. and the miracle of Tyson Foods. Apart from food consumption, however, there doesn't seem to be a great deal going on. It would not seem possible for a city of 176,000 to support as many restaurants as exist in Little Rock. But support them it does, and new ones keep rolling in. There must be something in Stephen Crane's beloved piney air that explains the city's eating habits--and the president's celebrated appetite, as well.

Dutifully, I visited the State Capitol (a scaled-down version of the one in D.C.), listened to the band Copperhead at Juanita's, sampled the justifiably celebrated ribs at Sim's, wandered through the historic Quapaw quarter and sat beneath the Do not spit sign at a livestock auction at which the farmers spoke in country-music lyrics ("You buy those hogs, your daddy be proud of you"). I showed up at Ray Winder Field to watch the last-place Travelers ("Travs" to you, bud) win a ballgame from the Shreveport Captains. I'd been told it can get rowdy at these games, but I found it to be all Field of Dreams innocence and Take Me Out to the Ballgame: The most boisterous note was an occasional frail plea to the pitcher to "strike the bum out." I'd had my doubts about the women of Little Rock--heartbreaking faces, agricultural haunches--until I saw the Travelettes, with their silky hair and long lazy legs in lazy white shorts and what I took to be their languid dreams of the big city.

None of which brought me any closer to the spiritual heart of Little Rock. It's only when I visited the 168,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Super Center in Conway that I got my first clue.

A man sat alone in the deli, at a table for two, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee. At first glance he seemed to be wearing an African mask, one that had been left out in the sun and was now bleached white and had a corner chewed off. A closer look indicated that he was not wearing a mask at all, that I was looking at his face. I circled round a few times, at whatever a discreet distance is, coming up on him from different angles, hoping that I was wrong. But I wasn't wrong. It was his face all right. I felt a need to do something, to go up and ask him how he was getting along, but I decided not to. No one else in the Wal-Mart seemed to feel this call for action. No doubt they had concluded that the man might not want anything done, that he was doing just fine sitting there, drinking his coffee, watching people who'd come from as far away as Crumrod in the east and Booneville in the west to shop for bagel dogs, flop sticks, rib-wiches and black-tip shark.

They'd accepted him. He was a neighbor in a city of 176,000 neighbors, part of a state filled with 2 million more. You accept your neighbor, look out for your neighbor. I could think of places where this fellow might be scorned or hidden away in attics, and others where he might even be worshiped, but none where he would so casually be allowed to go about his business.

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So perhaps that was the secret. Little Rock is our most caring city. It's been said that Foster couldn't go back, couldn't rejoin the Rose law firm. How could he pursue new clients when he'd just "failed" the most important client in the country? How could he rejoin the country club when he'd quit to protest its discriminatory policies? But the evidence is that he would have been taken back warmly by this welcoming city of friendly porches, great drinking water, Depression-level rents and huge, modestly priced breakfasts. (At Wallace's Grill, the president's favorite, it's a struggle to spend two dollars.)

"It's the most egalitarian place you'll ever find," said Alan Leveritt, publisher of the bright and cheerfully opinionated Arkansas Times. "There's no rich, landed aristocracy. Everyone is a step removed from the farm. You're dead if you try to put on airs. Little Rock is Don Tyson, one of the richest men in the state, showing up for ribs at Sim's in a pickup, wearing a chicken suit like the guy who works at the filling station."

There's a somber side, too: the forlorn neighborhoods of the east side (you're encouraged to drive west), the cemetery where 50 crosses mark the graves of blacks who've been killed by other blacks in local drug wars.

A food and beverage man at the Capital Bar told me not to delude myself about the city's kind heart: "You're in a Third World country. Ninety percent of the money--and some of it is slave money--is in the hands of five percent of the folks. They're out there in Edge-hill and the Heights, and if you're not part of their old-boy network, you'll (continued on page 246)Little Rock(continued from page 186) never rise above the peon level."

So maybe the city isn't quite as caring as I wanted it to be. At lunch, Rose Crane, the girl-next-door to Clinton when he was a boy in Hot Springs and who served in his gubernatorial administration, summed up Little Rock this way: "It's a wonderful place to be poor."

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It's a place to be touchy, too. Built into the character of the city--and of Arkansas in general--is a sensitivity about its past and its reputation, in H.L. Mencken's phrase, as a "miasmic jungle." It was a place, according to lawyer Marion Hughes in 1904, where "the men drink moonshine whiskey, the women chew and dip, the big gals go barefooted, with tobacco in their lip." In the past several decades, Little Rock was a symbol of snarling racists, Governor Orval Faubus and the notorious standoff at Central High in 1957. Much of that self-consciousness has been erased by having a son of Arkansas in the White House--a Kennedy look-alike at that, with a steel-trap mind--but the Arkansas skin remains thin. Hillary Clinton is said to become infuriated when someone says "I'm just from Arkansas."

"For The Wall Street Journal to question our mores----" a leading Little Rock businessman said to me, and then couldn't continue the sentence. It was as if he had been shot in the stomach. Foster's office had been just down the street from this rock-ribbed conservative's. The White House deputy counsel came from a state that's touchy about its past, its politics and its image in general. The first joke Arkansans hear is that it's a good thing Mississippi exists--so Arkansas doesn't have to be last in everything. In this context, it's not difficult to imagine Foster, who obviously lacked the rhino hide his friend Clinton is blessed with, becoming increasingly dispirited as the Journal poured it on. The legal cronies from little rock. The Clinton Crew. The Rose Clique. Arkansas' Peculiar mores. Who is Vincent Foster?

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Had Foster made it back to Little Rock in July, he would have returned to a city in which the mood was one of mild hurt and abandonment. Half the world had descended on Little Rock on election night and for the Inauguration celebration, and it was not uncommon for a local resident to sip a cup of coffee opposite Peter Jennings, to trade niceties with Gordon Liddy or to watch Ivana Trump sail by in a stretch limo. Restaurants and hotels were filled to capacity, the money flew and there was a feeling that Little Rock was about to become Boomtown, U.S.A. But by June, Wolf Blitzer and the Secret Service were gone, Richard Dreyfuss was back home in Beverly Hills and the city seemed bewildered and shell-shocked.

"It's been three months now," an executive said to me at the Capital Bar, "and Clinton hasn't done a damned thing for us."

"What can he do?" his friend asked with genuine curiosity.

"We've got all that rice," the first man said, then muttered something about tax credits for small businesses, but it was all spoken without conviction.

"The real trouble with Little Rock," he continued despairingly, "is that we do not have a niche. Milwaukee's got beer, Chicago's got the Bulls and I do not have to tell you about Orlando...."

"What about hogs?"

"That's exactly my point. Hogs are not a niche."

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After Foster's death, I got back in touch with some of the people I'd spoken to in the City Without a Niche. Beth Arnold, a journalist and longtime resident, said that most of the people she knew were resigned to the fact that Foster took his own life, plain and simple. There were some, however, who took seriously a story circulating in Little Rock that Foster's death was linked to a series of alleged suicides in the military that he was investigating--suicides that were really cover-ups for murders related to drug smuggling through the armed services. Four of these "suicides" were Arkansans. Alan Leveritt, whose Arkansas Times covered the bizarre theory, personally discounts it. "I grew up in a right-wing family, so I'm not a stranger to conspiracy theories," he said. "But I don't believe there's anything to it. Foster was tremendously idealistic about the move to Washington. When Hillary made her farewell speech to the Rose law firm and told how they were going to make a better life for America, Vincent was the only one in the room crying. When he got to the White House and felt he'd let down a man who was not only his closest friend but also the president, he shot himself. That's all there is to it."

A man who was terribly shaken by the Foster suicide was the leading Little Rock businessman I'd spoken to, one of the three most influential in the city. He'd been to see Clinton three times in the White House and returned home leery of the "ozone" and the way it seemed to affect the people around the president. He received the news of Foster's suicide while he was vacationing in the Carolinas. Returning to Little Rock, he assembled his staff, and they all concluded it was something that could have happened "to any one of us." That night, atypically, he sat beneath the stars and drank a bottle of fine California wine and concluded: "This is what's important, not what The Wall Street Journal thinks of you."

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There are roughly 30,000 suicides in the U.S. annually (most of them white males in their 40s), yet the Vincent Foster death lingers. Few question that Foster was the "wonderful man in every way" that the president made him out to be, and the grief in Little Rock and across the nation was no doubt genuine as well. But as with every suicide, there were other more complex feelings attached. This was a White House suicide (the first since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the Truman administration). As such, it held out the promise of scandal and skulduggery in high places. Indeed, there were plenty of rumors--an aborted homosexual tryst at Fort Marcy, an affair with Hillary and something truly explosive that was about to be revealed in The Washington Times--yet none of them ever panned out. Possibly this left a cable-TV-hardened public frustrated, determined to hold on to the Foster story until given the tangier scenario it's been led to believe it deserves.

When we anoint our fellow Americans and send them off to Olympus, a.k.a. Washington, D.C., we assume they've shed their banal concerns and are ready to lead--on our behalf--a gilded, trouble-free existence. When it turns out that this hasn't happened, that they've fallen victim to the same concerns that we have to deal with--loneliness, overwork, feelings of failure--there's a sense of sadness, of course, but also of betrayal.

That the privileged Vincent Foster went to the White House and remained one of us is unacceptable. That he found a way out is even more so.

"The real trouble with Little Rock is that we do not have a niche. Hogs are not a niche."