There are two things about that moment I will not forget. One is the way the men looked, how they sounded and comported themselves. I watched one as he got ready to leave and was struck by the fact that the usual bearing of White House personnel in these crisis call/dinner party situations-studiously serious, a tad self-important, unconcealably proud to be called to duty while the rest of us wallow in our meal, an ever so slightly perceptible swagger to the exiting stride from the party-all this was totally absent. He looked forlorn, winded. My other observation was of the rest of us. Self-confident, gabbling people, hard to fluster or surprise or in fact touch in any other fashion when we are in this, our collective, Washington out-to-dinner mode, we dropped our defenses, at least temporarily. It was as if each of us summarily became, in that moment, whoever we really are. News of suicide does that. It is a starkly humbling experience. We are obliged to contemplate but cannot imagine this unconditional rejection of life and obliteration of self.
That was the immediate reaction not just of a group at dinner, but of the larger political-journalistic community of Washington as well. The death was a sudden reminder that this newly arrived fellow in town, known little to most of us and perceived, in our typical way, as an abstract composite of his job and his political importance, was in fact a vulnerable human being; and this, in turn, had the predictable effect of disturbing people’s own ritual, self-shielding enactment of wise-guy roles and absorption in the tiny details of the daily power and ratings competition. It reminded them of their own mortality and created a powerful feeling of empathy and regret.
But as I observed the reaction around town, I saw pretty quickly a second phase get started. We set about attempting our own acts of rejection and obliteration, rejecting and obliterating the threatening implication of the man’s action as it stood, as it had been originally reported. For what Vincent Foster’s improbable, mysterious, audacious act had implied couldn’t easily be accepted. His death had to be understandable in our own terms. People started trying to make it more familiar and less destabilizing to themselves and the established political order. They tried to tame it, demystify it, bring it down to daily, understandable, homely, political newsprint scale. A suicide like this by definition steps outside the framework of conventional concerns and responses. It blows up the rules with its gunshot and is a quintessentially private, excluding act. It says there is a dimension to this you will never understand. To which the survivors almost at once reflexively reply: Oh, no. It must have been the travel-office scandal and the attacks on him about it in the press. And, importantly, even though this could be said to be inviting the conclusion that the capital’s culture was responsible for Vincent Foster’s death-hounding, etc.-this is somehow accepted as preferable to not being in some way implicated in it. The latter conclusion threatens our perverse self-esteem, the conceit that this tiny political universe is the universe and that nothing that happens can be explained except in terms of it. So we got on with our speculations and suppositions and our search for a one-size-fits-all Washington rationalization of the act.
I need to be very specific here about what I’m not saying. I think it is both necessary and right that the death be investigated vigorously by police and justice Department officials, as is being done, and also that the press not ignore the questions raised by the unaccountable violent death or turn away from the pursuit of the answers to them. For there are clearly identifiable public questions yet to be answered, one hopes in a way that will not needlessly or clumsily intensify private grief And it is of course possible that some kind of story will come out either as to how Vincent Foster actually died, or why, that will completely reverse the present finding of unfathomable suicide. But even if this happens, nothing will alter the fact that these strong impulses to re-create his behavior in our own image have been at work.
Maybe, we speculate, there was a source somewhere of great shame. But we have pretty much lost the capacity to suppose shame could be an engine of suicide. The most shameful revelations about people here nowadays tend to lead, instead, to pyschobabbly public “confessions,” fat book contracts and life (after easy time at gent’s prison) as a talk-show host and an overpaid speechmaker. Shamed people in the modern ambience don’t kill themselves, they make a killing. Nor, though Vincent Foster was said to have been depressed, do the setbacks and criticisms he endured in his White House tenure rise, in the capital’s mind, to probable cause for this deed. So as it stands, as yet unexplained by the criteria political and media people in this city accept, the death continues to taunt and challenge. If there is uncovered, say, some fearful scandal that he expected and couldn’t face, the impulse that drives us here will be appeased. But if the state of knowledge stays at unexplained suicide, he will have had the outsider’s true revenge, forcing a little unaccustomed doubt and humility on a capital that can always use more of both.
