Book Review
Susan McDougal, with Pat Harris:
The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk
by Tamara Baker

Feb. 11, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL (apj.us) -- As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead; it is not even past." The impact of the 1990s' Whitewater flap still reverberates throughout the American political landscape.

The scandal-sniffing machinery that the Office of the Independent Counsel's Whitewater probe set in motion nearly led to President Clinton's impeachment and removal from office, even though three previous panels of inquiry concluded he had done nothing besides lose over $100,000 in a land deal gone bad.

It was the taint of scandal that began with Whitewater that caused the Democratic Party leadership to distance themselves from the man who is still the most successful and popular Democratic politician of the past thirty years, a distancing that may have hindered them in the 2000 and 2002 elections. And Hillary Clinton, herself sucked into the Whitewater whirlpool, rode the anti-OIC backlash all the way to a Senate seat.

Many books have already been written about Whitewater and the other "Clinton scandals". Some of them, such as Gene Lyons' Fools for Scandal, David Brock's Blinded by the Right, and the Gene Lyons-Joe Conason collaboration The Hunting of the President, will be the books future historians turn to in order to understand what happened in America during the 1990s. Other books, often expensively promoted by conservative groups who would buy copies in bulk to make artificial "best-sellers" out of them, wound up becoming remainder-table fodder within weeks of their releases.

This new book isn't like the others, in that it isn't a wide-ranging exploration of the Whitewater and OIC stories. Instead, it examines the story strictly from Susan McDougal's perspective. It is a measure of this book's quality that Helen Thomas, the renowed Queen of the White House press corps, consented to write the foreword to it. Ms. Thomas, herself an often-stinging critic of Bill Clinton, has nothing but praise for Susan McDougal and her story. And it's a riveting story indeed.

Susan McDougal's father was an enterprising man, a mix of daring and propriety. It was his daring that led him during World War II to woo and win an attractive French girl and bring her home to his parents; it was propriety that caused him to be a good father and provider, and to instill a reverence for truth and honor in his children. To these twin reverences Susan added the following: a passion for learning and study, and a disinclination to marry an "ordinary" man. It was this last item that caused her no end of grief over the last thirty years.

In the late 1970s, shortly after the twentysomething Susan had married him, the mercurial, brilliant, charismatic, and considerably older Jim McDougal sold shares in Whitewater, a real estate development that would later fail largely because of Jim McDougal's misdealings, to several prominent Arkansans. Among his clients were Bill and Hillary Clinton. Fifteen years later, nearly a decade after Susan had divorced Jim, that was enough to get the attention of Kenneth Starr.

As Susan McDougal relates in her book, Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel spent the better part of the 1990s on a $50 million fishing expedition, looking for a reason to remove then-President Bill Clinton from office. According to Susan, Starr was determined to keep the McDougals locked up until they told him what he wanted to hear, true or not, about the Clintons. Jim McDougal, by now an old man sick with heart disease and bipolar disorder, accepted the deal, and tried to say whatever he thought Starr would want to hear. But by this time, his tenuous hold on sanity, already weakened when Starr denied him his bipolar medication, meant that his testimony was so self-contradictory as to be unusable. Jim McDougal wound up dying in jail of a heart attack.

Susan McDougal took a different tack. She already knew, from what had happened to her ex-husband, that Starr didn't want the truth - not if it would exonerate Bill and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, she was afraid that the OIC would call her a perjurer for telling the truth. Therefore, she simply refused to testify. She became known as "The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk" - though, as her book makes clear, she did eventually testify, on her terms. She spent over two years being shuttled from lockup to lockup, and being jailed in hideous hellholes like LA's infamous Sybil Brand: places in which she, as a Federal prisoner, was not supposed to be held. Her lifelong back problems, always painful, got even worse during this time. Yet still she refused to testify. Not even the ordeal of the Nancy Mehta lawsuit - which, as she convincingly explains in the book, was brought as a result of pressure applied by Kenneth Starr's OIC - shook her refusal to follow in her ex-husband's footsteps. In large part, what sustained her were the friendships she made in prison, and the realization that she had to win free somehow, to try and fight for those women still locked inside, often women who, like her, were guilty of not much more than loving their boyfriends/husbands and wanting to protect them. Susan McDougal has now become a leading advocate of prison reform.

Eventually even Starr was forced to give up on both Whitewater and Susan McDougal. In fact, he actually quit the OIC in early 1997 to take a deanship at Pepperdine university, a conservative college subsidized by Starr's patron and fellow Clinton foe Richard Mellon Scaife, but changed his mind after it was made clear that the deanship would not be his unless he followed through with his "get-Clinton" assignment. But Susan McDougal hasn't forgotten the years she spent in various jails and prisons because of him. Now she's turning the tables on him with a fistful of subpoenas - and this new book.