Producer (21 page)

George began to tell me who Vince Foster was, when Mack stopped him. “She knows who Vince is,” he said. “They’re neighbors.”

I could not have been more shocked. Since our marriage, I’d been living with my husband in his town house in
Georgetown, and Vince Foster had lived across the street from us. The three of us had met at a White House dinner, and we
had struck up a neighborly conversation and had talked about getting together. That would never happen now. I knew that Bill
and Hillary had been close friends with Vince, and the idea of the president finding out about his friend’s death on the air
from a live caller was unacceptable. But it was also unacceptable to stop the show ten minutes in. If that wasn’t a clear
sign to the general public that an emergency had occurred, I couldn’t imagine what was.

“We don’t have to stop the show,” I said. “I can prevent the president from finding out on the air by screening calls. If
we only take overseas calls and skip the domestic ones, no one will find out until the show is over.”

I asked Dee Dee to go to the production truck with me and I spoke to the producer of the show. “Something very serious just
happened,” I told him. “We can’t report it yet, but the president’s aides want to stop the show. I talked them into continuing,
but we have to make very sure that the president doesn’t hear this piece of news from anyone before we tell him.”

He understood. But as I was walking back to the monitor in the control room, I heard Larry tell his viewing audience, “Well,
you’ve heard it now. The president has just decided to stay on for an hour and a half. We’ll have an extra half hour with
President Clinton.”

I literally ran back to tell George, Mack, and Dee Dee, who had not heard Larry’s announcement about the president staying
on for an extra half hour.

“He can’t do that,” George said. At the next break, George and I went into the library and George said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President,
but you can’t stay on for the extra half hour.”

“Why not?” he asked. “Larry just announced it.” The truth
was that President Clinton would have stayed on for two more hours if they would let him. He loved doing interviews.

“I know Larry just announced it,” said George, “but you can’t do it tonight. You can take a rain check. Just not tonight.”

The president looked at George more closely and said, “Oh, you know something I don’t. Right?”

“Well,” George said, “we have some things we have to do after the show.”

When they went back on the air, Larry announced that they would not be doing the extra half hour. “The president has something
to do at ten,” he explained, “but he’ll come back again.”

The White House press room was full of reporters covering the president’s appearance on
Larry King Live
. When they heard the announcement that the extra half hour was being canceled, they knew something was up. When the show
was finally over, President Clinton stood up and said, “C’mon Larry, get your whole gang and we’ll give them a tour. Has everyone
seen the Lincoln bedroom? Let’s go upstairs and take some pictures.”

George stepped in and said, “We can’t do that tonight. Really sorry,” and he whisked the president away. I called my husband,
Ralph, to say I’d be late and then I got ready for a long night of work. But fifteen minutes later, Ralph called me at the
White House. “What’s going on, Wendy?” he asked me. “I think the president is on our block. There are all these unmarked cars
at Vince’s house. Something’s happening.”

While Ralph walked across the street in his sweats to see what was up, I let him know what had happened since Dee Dee was
about to announce it. By now, I was in the press room with all the other reporters. Several of them asked me, “Something is
going on. What is it?”

I confirmed their suspicions by saying, “If I were you, I’d stay right where you are. If you leave and go home, you’ll just
have to turn right around and come back.”

Eventually, Dee Dee came to the press room to tell the reporters that the President’s special counsel and friend from Arkansas
had taken his own life. Apparently, Vince had been diagnosed with clinical depression months earlier, and it was obvious how
much the Travelgate scandal was taking out of him, a man who was a stickler for integrity. It was clearly more than he could
bear, and the police found a draft of a resignation letter doubling as a suicide note, torn into twenty-seven pieces. The
authorities also found a list of complaints in Foster’s briefcase, including a note that said,

The
Wall Street Journal
editors lie without consequence… I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining
people is considered sport.

Vince Foster’s death, piled on top of Travelgate, was weighing down the Clintons. Their integrity was in question, and many
believed it signified the end of optimism among much of the White House staff. Not much had been resolved in Travelgate when,
on November 7, 1995 (I was working with Larry by then), an article appeared in the
Washington Post
by journalist Toni Locy. Here are excerpts:

Some of the people from whom Billy R. Dale allegedly stole $68,000 testified yesterday in his defense, saying they trusted
him when he ran the White House travel office and still trust him today. Dale, 57, is charged with embezzling money the news
media paid to cover costs of traveling
with the president from 1988 to 1993 by putting it into his personal bank account.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Wendy Walker Whitworth, a vice president for CNN and senior executive producer of “Larry King
Live” who formerly was assigned to the White House. “Billy is not an e-mail kind of guy. He doesn’t have a lot to do with
computers. If he was doing this, he was doing it to run the kind of operation he had to run [as] efficiently [as he could].”

The defense is expected to call other journalists, including Sam Donaldson of ABC, to give similar testimony… Whitworth testified
that Dale’s job was not easy, especially when presidents decided to travel on short notice, a frequent occurrence…

On December 7, 1994, I was distressed to learn that Billy Dale had been formally indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts
of embezzlement and criminal conversion. He was charged with wrongfully depositing into his own bank account the sum of $68,000
in checks from media organizations, while traveling with the president between 1988 and 1991. If convicted, he could serve
up to twenty years in prison. But Billy’s attorneys insisted that he had used the deposited monies for substantial tips and
off-the-book payments that the job required, especially when we traveled to foreign countries.

The trial lasted thirteen days during the latter part of October and the beginning of November 1995, and a group of us testified.
ABC’s Sam Donaldson and
LA Times
reporter Jack Nelson both appeared as character witnesses for Billy, as did I. We knew that all these gentlemen, particularly
Billy, were honest and their function had been critical to the well-being of the entire press corps. I was glad for the opportunity
to stand up
for Billy and there was a moment when my testimony proved pivotal in this terrible ordeal.

Here is an excerpt from the transcript during my direct examination:

Q: Does the fact that he [Billy Dale] put those fifty-five checks into his personal bank account cause you to change the opinion
that you have developed over the ten years that you have dealt with him?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because it doesn’t surprise me if that were the case. I mean it wouldn’t—Billy is not an e-mail kind of guy. He doesn’t
know a lot—he doesn’t do—he doesn’t have a lot of computers or things like that in his office. He—if he was doing this, it
is probably something that he was doing for a long time.

At this point, there was an objection from opposing counsel that was overruled. A few minutes later, during cross-examination,
I gave the following testimony:

Q: Ms. Walker, did you ever put checks that belonged to CNN into your personal account?

A: Yes.

Q: And those belonged to CNN?

A: Yes.

Q: The money belonged to CNN, and you used it for your personal purposes?

There was an objection made that was sustained, but I had made my point.

We went on:

Q: The travel office didn’t ask you to come in and look at those [documents], and you never asked to look at them, did you?

A: No.

Q: You trusted the travel office employees, didn’t you?

A: That is right.

Q: You said that the fact that these checks were in Mr. Dale’s personal account wouldn’t change your opinion about them, right?

A: Right.

Q: You are aware that this case involved charges of embezzlement, right?

A: I am aware that is the charge, yes.

Now everyone knew that both he and I kept a large amount of cash on hand, and while we didn’t do the same job, we both had
to be prepared for any kind of emergency. Like Billy, I had deposited certain CNN checks into my account for easy access.
Billy’s accounting was harder to track than mine, though, because of his old-fashioned bookkeeping practices.

When the jury went out, they deliberated for less than two hours before they acquitted Billy on all charges on November 16,
1995. The other suspects were acquitted as well, and on January 16, 1996, Larry had the seven travel office officials on the
show. Here are some excerpts:

DALE:
I would like for her [Mrs. Clinton] or for anyone at the White House to prove that I mismanaged one dollar of funds. If she
wants to look at mismanagement, let’s look at the Energy Department, those were government funds. I want
to make it clear to the American people right now, not one dollar of government funds are we talking about. This is money
that I collected from the press corps and paid out on their behalf.

KING:
Did you spend your own funds on your defense?

DALE:
I have spent $105,000 of my own funds. All my life savings.

KING:
Gary Wright, you are the assistant former deputy director. Mrs. Clinton has stated that there was expressed concern over financial
mismanagement. Was that fiction?

WRIGHT:
As far as I am concerned it was fiction. I’d like to know who she heard it from. I believe that the people that she was hearing
it from perhaps had an agenda of their own, or a reason for taking over the White House travel office, that was giving her
this information. At no time, before or after the Clintons took office, did they ever send any top level senior administrative
types to our office to ask us what our job was, how we did it.

KING:
Barney Brasseaux, are you saying that Mr. Watkins, Vince Foster, none of them ever came to see you?

BRASSEAUX:
They never came to see me. You may want to check with Billy, because I know Billy made several attempts to meet with some
of the staff there at the White House just to discuss how he ran his office and what they expected of him and his office.

KING:
Billy?

DALE:
That’s correct. The day after the inauguration I went to George Stephanopoulos’s office, who I assumed was the press spokesman,
that was my understanding, and it was tradition for us to introduce ourselves to the people that we were going to be working
closest with. I was told by
his assistant that they would get back to me as soon as they could arrange an appointment. In the next few days, in three
attempts to see him with no success, I turned to Dee Dee Myers and I met with the same luck there. So, up until the time that
we were fired, I never had the pleasure of meeting George Stephanopoulos or Dee Dee Myers.

The travel people were all acquitted, but the wounds had cut deep. No one got their jobs back, and since Billy was close to
retirement age, he retired early, a sad ending to a bad experience. It remains something to ponder: When integrity is called
into question, how do you want to be remembered?

HOW DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED?

There are people in this world with great attributes, they contribute to charities and help elderly women, but they are not
necessarily people of integrity. Are you? Ask yourself the following questions:

•   If you could get away with stealing a million dollars and nobody would ever find out, would you do it?

•   If you could get away with cheating on your spouse and he or she would never know, would you do it?

•   If you could tell people that you graduated with honors from Harvard and nobody would ever know you went to Middle Nowhere
State, would you do it?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, ask yourself, “What if my children found out? Would that be okay with me?
What if my husband or wife knew? And then, would my boss be impressed to know who I really am?”

All we can really count on is our integrity in this life, and what you do in your professional life bleeds over into your
personal life as well. Think Tiger Woods who, unfortunately for him, became the poster child for lack of integrity. So did
Bernie Madoff when his billion-dollar scam became public.

You can be a really good president or the best golfer in the world, but if you have no integrity, that is what people will
remember about you. Tiger Woods may be able to repair his golf game, but his reputation is forever soiled. You just can’t
get that back. He should have kept in mind that no matter how subtly you sacrifice your integrity, it will come back to haunt
you. Someone will find out, and the world at large will discover who you truly are from the inside out.