[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.