“I’M A DEAD MAN,” whispered Jerry Parks, pale with shock, as he looked up at the television screen.It was a news bulletin on the local station in Little Rock. Vincent Foster, a childhood friend of the President, had been found dead in a park outside Washington. Apparent suicide.
He never explained to his son Gary what he meant by that remark, but for the next two months the beefy 6′ 3″ security executive was in a state of permanent fear. He would pack a pistol to fetch the mail. On the way to his offices at American Contract Services in Little Rock he would double back or take strange routes to “dry-clean” the cars that he thought were following him.
At night he kept tearing anxiously at his eyebrows, and raiding the valium pills of his wife, Jane, who was battling multiple sclerosis. Once he muttered darkly that Bill Clinton’s people were “cleaning house,” and he was “next on the list.”
What Happens When Bill Clinton is loose without his chains?
Two months later, in September 1993, Jerry and Jane went on a Caribbean cruise. He seemed calmer. At one of the islands he went to take care of some business at a bank. She believed it was Grand Cayman. They returned to their home in the rural suburbs of Little Rock on September 25. The next day Jane was in one of her “down” periods, so Jerry went off on his own for the regular Sunday afternoon supper at El Chico Mexican Restaurant.
On the way back, at about 6:30 PM, a white Chevrolet Caprice pulled up beside him on the Chenal Parkway. Before Parks had time to reach for his .38 caliber “detective special” that he kept tucked between the seats, an assassin let off a volley of semi-automatic fire into his hulking 320 pound frame.
Parks skidded to a halt in the intersection of Highway 10. The stocky middle-aged killer jumped out and finished him off with a 9 mm handgun–two more shots into the chest at point blank range. Several witnesses watched with astonishment as the nonchalant gunman joined his accomplice in the waiting car and sped away.
It was another three months before news of the murder of Jerry Luther Parks reached me in Washington. The U.S. national media were largely unaware of the story, which surprised me because Parks had been in charge of security at the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock.
Washington–Linda Tripp told Starr’s grand jury this summer that she had significant reasons to question official claims about former White House Vincent Foster’s July, 1993 “suicide.”
Tripp, one of the White House Counsel’s Office secretaries, and among the last people known to have seen Foster alive, told the grand jury she knows that top White House officials committed perjury in their accounts of Foster’s death.
Tripp indicated to the grand jury Foster’s death was only one reason she feared for her life as she gained knowledge of Monica Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton.
Tripp also detailed, cryptically, to the grand jury her heightened concern after the murder of Jerry Luther Parks, the former head of security at the Clinton-Gore 1992 Little Rock headquarters. Parks was murdered just two months after Foster’s death, in September of 1996 while driving through a Little Rock intersection. His car was intercepted and stopped and a lone assassin fired seven shots at Parks. At least three bullets were believed to be fatal.
Parks was found reaching for his gun. His wife and son have both stated that Parks feared for his life in the aftermath of Foster’s death. They claimed Parks said Foster had been murdered. Other sources have confirmed that Foster and Parks knew each other on a personal and business level. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated Foster’s death and ruled it a suicide. Starr rebuffed attempts by the Parks family to investigate Parks’ death and a possible connection with Foster’s. The Little Rock Police have never solved the case.
The following is the verbatim grand jury testimony of Linda Tripp from her July 28 appearance before the grand jury:
Juror: To save your job, you went public and that in turn would probably cause you not to continue in the career that you had?
Tripp: It was far more than that… It was for me really far more than that. It was a question of I am afraid of this administration. I have what I consider to be well-founded fears of what they are capable of. I believe that I have had a far more informed perspective than most people in observing what they are capable of and I made a decision based on what I felt I knew to be the possibilities that could befall me.
Juror: Could you give some examples of what’s happened in the past to make you feel as if your life might be threatened?
Tripp: There was always a sense in this White House from the beginning that you were either with them or you were against them. The notion that you could just be a civil servant supporting the institution just was not an option. I had reasons to believe the Vince Foster tragedy was not depicted accurately under oath by members of the administration. I had reason to believe that – and these are, remember, instances of national significance that included testimony by — to my knowledge also Mrs. Clinton, also in Travelgate. It became very important for them for their version of events to be the accepted version of events. I knew based on personal knowledge, personal observations, that that they were lying under oath. So it became very fearful to me that I had information even back then that was dangerous.
Juror: But do you have any examples of violence being done by the administration to people who were a threat to them that allowed you to come to the conclusion that that would happen to you as well?
Tripp: I can go – if you want a specific, a personal specific, the behavior in the West Wing with senior staff to the President during the time the Jerry Parks came over the fax frightened me.
Juror: Excuse me, Jerry Parks?
Tripp: He was one of the – if not the head of his [Clinton’s] campaign security detail in Arkansas, then somewhere in the hierarchy of the security arrangements in Arkansas during the ’92 campaign. And based on the flurry of activity and the flurry of phone calls and the secrecy, I felt this was somewhat alarming.
Juror: I don’t understand.
Tripp: I don’t know what else to say.
Juror: Meaning that you were alarmed at his death or at what people [in the White House] said? Or did you have knowledge that he had been killed or -
Tripp: He had been killed. I didn’t even at this point remember how but it was the reaction at the White House that caused me concern, as did Vince Foster’s suicide. None [sic] of the behavior following Vince Foster’s suicide computed to just people mourning Mr. Foster. It was far more ominous than that and it was extremely questionable behavior on the parts of those who were immediately involved in the aftermath of his death. So – I mean I don’t know how much more I can be specific except to say I am telling you under oath today that I felt endangered and I was angry and I resented it and I still do.
Juror: [Questions about her current job.]
Tripp: I am still being paid at the GS-15 level. I was demoted from my position and assigned administrative tasks which are now under discussion with the Pentagon. Quite beyond that, Mike Isikoff made a very good point early on [to Tripp] which was you will protect yourself and your job far better if your name does surface because once you’re out there as a known source of information they will be less inclined to have something happen to you. . . .
Juror: I’m sorry. We were talking the incident that happened and how the people were acting at the White House and you said they were acting strange. Can you give us some examples of what you saw to draw that conclusion? What are some of the examples? You said they were not acting as if someone had just passed or whatever, something was strange. What were the strange things?
Tripp: It replicated [referring to the Parks murder, apparently] in my mind some of the behavior following the death [sic] of Vince Foster. A fax came across the fax machine in the counsel’s office from someone within the White House, and I think it was from Skip Rutherford, who was working in the Chief of Staff’s office at the time [September 1994]. At the same time the fax was coming, phone calls were coming up to Bernie Nussbaum which precipitated back and forth meetings behind closed doors, all with – you know, we have to have copies of this fax and it was – an article, it came over the wire, I think, I can’t remember now, but I think we actually have that somewhere, of this death, this murder or whatever it was [referring to the Parks death]. And it created a stir, shall we say, in the counsel’s office which brought up some senior staff from the Chief of Staff’s office up to the counsel’s office where they, from all appearances, went into a meeting to discuss this. It was something that they chose not to speak about. One of our staff assistant’s asked what is going on and it was never addressed. Which was primarily the same way that the Vince Foster death — in the aftermath of the Vince Foster death things proceeded as well. So, for people not in law enforcement, for people just government workers it was – it was behavior that was considered questionable, cause for concern.
Juror: Just because they were having meetings behind closed doors?
Tripp: Because of the flurry of activity, because it was hush-hush, and that a fax could cause that level of activity. The White House is a very busy place, it’s generally short-staffed, but there is pretty much a constant flow. It starts in the morning, it never really ends, you go home, you sleep, you come back. There are times as I am sure you can imagine during the Vince Foster thing that the pace changed somewhat and this was another such time. Maybe you had to be there. I know. I left and I will say under oath with the same sense that this was something they wanted to get out in front of. There was talk that this would be another body to add to the list of 40 bodies or something that were associated with the Clinton administration. At that time, I didn’t know what that meant. I have since come to see such a list. So -
END”
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