Vincent Foster

BILL Clinton's friend Vincent Foster died July 20, apparently by his own hand. Foster's death was a tragedy. It wasn't a disgrace.What has happened since, however, has been the worst kind of disgrace, a disgrace perpetrated by us, the news media and the public, in a quest for information that we don't need and shouldn't want.But here we are, from prestigious news organizations such as the Washington Post to the cheapest, sleaziest talk shows on radio, trampling Foster's grave, defiling his memory, brutally dissecting his life.

ALMOST three decades ago, the body of a talented artist was found along the Georgetown canal towpath, a bullet in her head. Because she had for years been an intimate friend of President Kennedy, counterspy James Jesus Angleton was immediately notified and searched her home before police arrived.When her diary came into his hands, that Kennedy loyalist destroyed it, as he later indicated to me, "to protect the presidency." A suspect was tried and acquitted; the prosecutor was justifiably furious when it was revealed that the CIA destroyed the murder victim's diary.

I don't really believe that deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster was driven to suicide by a series of viciously unfair editorials in the Wall Street Journal. But it would be easy enough to make the case, if one were willing to use the same dishonest techniques that the Journal used against Mr. Foster in recent weeks.The Journal's basic theme was that Mr. Foster and three other alumni of Arkansas's Rose law firm, including Hillary Clinton, formed a sinister cabal within the Clinton administration.