Who Was Vince Foster?

For those too young to remember, “Vince Foster” was Vince Foster, a close friend of the Clintons and law partner with Hillary Clinton who came to Washington with the First Couple to work in the White House Counsel’s office. Foster’s tragic suicide only a few months after the inauguration was taken up by DC Republicans and used as a political cudgel with a series of conspiracy theories about how the Clintons had allegedly had him murdered. If you’re looking for a modern analogue, think of Birtherism. Washington Republicans were able to get multiple independent counsel investigations to reinvestigate his suicide, all concluding that it was a suicide as it obviously was from the beginning. It is in short a horrifyingly shameless tale of political exploitation of a very sad story, one man’s death, the shattering of a family which we’re apparently about to relive once again.