    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [July 21, 1993]
    [Pages 1148-1149]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Excerpts of Remarks in a Meeting With White House Staff on the Death of
    Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr.
    July 21, 1993

        First of all, I want to tell you how very glad I am to see all of
    you here today. I thought it was important that we come together for a
    few minutes. Forty-two years ago, when I met Mr. McLarty in
    kindergarten, I lived with my grandparents in a modest little house
    around the corner from Vince Foster's nice, big, white brick house. And
    our backyards touched. Yesterday, last night when I finished the Larry
    King show and I was told what happened, I just kept thinking in my mind
    of when we were so young, sitting on the ground in the backyard,
    throwing knives into the ground and seeing if we were adroit enough to
    make them stick.
        When I started my career in Arkansas politics, he was there to help
    me. When I decided to run for attorney general, he was the first lawyer
    in Little Rock I talked to about supporting me. When the Rose law firm
    hired Hillary after I moved to Little Rock, Vince Foster and Webb
    Hubbell became her closest friends. I have two things to say about that:
    One is, he was a perfectly wonderful man on whom I relied and on whom I
    put a lot for a very long time. The second thing is, for all of you who
    are especially younger, you will find the longer you live, the more you
    mark the shape of your life by the people you have truly loved who, for
    whatever reason, aren't around anymore.
        And so, I want you to think about the following: In the first place,
    no one can ever know why this happened. Even if you had a whole set of
    objective reasons, that wouldn't be why it happened, because you could
    get a different, bigger, more burdensome set of objective reasons that
    are on someone else even in this room. So what happened was a mystery
    about something inside of him. And I hope all of you will always
    understand that.

        And the last thing I want to say is that all of us who loved him
    also did a little bit of laughing last night. Just as it is wrong to try

    [[Page 1149]]

    to explain or understand something that cannot be grasped, it is very
    wrong to define a life like his in terms only of how it ended. And
    anybody in this room could be proud to have raised the children, done
    the work, been the friend that he was. God bless you.

    Note: These remarks follow the text as released by the Office of the
    Press Secretary. A tape was not available for verification of the
    content of these remarks.