Now She's Talking
A pretty, small-town woman is accused of protecting a philandering president. She refuses to testify and goes to prison. It sounds like a trashy novel, but it's the real-life triumph of Susan McDougal.

ARKADELPHIA, Ark.-- Susan McDougal thinks back to the first time she was put in handcuffs and leg irons, and it makes her smile.
There she was, shuffling along with chains taut between her ankles, cuffed hands strapped to her hips and two burly male prisoners behind her, the three of them linked by waist chains.
"It was this long, empty corridor, just going on forever; it felt like the Bataan Death March," she says. "And I thought, 'Thank God no one's going to see this.' Then the door opened."
A bolt of light blinded the prisoners, followed immediately by voices and jostling. McDougal almost toppled over as reporters and cameramen pushed forward, all yelling, "Susan!" "Susan!" "Susan!"
The sudden scuffle surprised and scared the two prisoners behind McDougal, and one of them blurted: "What the fuck did you do?"
Six years later, the woman long considered the linchpin in an effort to bring down a U.S. president can't help but laugh at the memory. "They thought I was a serial killer," she says, propped carefully in a chair at the home of friend Claudia Riley. "They were really freaked out. In a situation like that, you hate to say, 'All I did was not testify.'"
***
Of course, that's not all Susan McDougal did. She took on the most powerful prosecutor in the country -- one of the most powerful of all time -- and fought him to a standstill over five years. Their battle in many ways shaped the American political landscape in the 1990s.
Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating President Bill Clinton, took his case against McDougal to the courtroom, accusing her of fraudulently obtaining a loan to help Clinton pay off campaign debts and, with then-husband Jim McDougal, of giving the future president a sweetheart deal in a real-estate project that went bad. Caught off guard, McDougal took her case against Starr to the public -- to Diane Sawyer and Larry King and finally to bookstores with a new memoir called “The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk” (Carroll & Graf, $25).
It hardly seemed like a fair fight. Starr graduated from Duke University School of Law and clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger. He worked in the Reagan Justice Department and served as the first President Bush's solicitor general. As independent counsel, he had unlimited resources.
McDougal was a small-town girl from Arkansas whose worldly experience barely extended beyond attending a little-known religious college in Arkadelphia. And she was broke. Her lawyers, Bobby McDaniel in Arkansas and later Mark Geragos in Los Angeles, took her on pro bono. Her greatest ally was supposedly the president of the United States, whom she knew through her ex-husband. But she hadn't spoken to Bill Clinton in a decade.
For years, it looked like Starr had come out on top. McDougal, after all, was convicted of fraud and spent nearly two years in prison for civil contempt of court when she refused to testify before Starr's grand jury. Rumors that she slept with President Clinton -- and made a deal with him to keep her mouth shut about it -- swirled through the media. At water coolers across the country, Americans called her a liar and a slut.
But it's not as clear-cut as that. By the time McDougal finally got out of prison in 1998, she had become a heroine to many Americans -- and had found a peace and contentment behind bars that she never had outside them.
We still don't really know what Starr thinks about his battle with McDougal. He prefers to let his record as independent counsel speak for itself, refusing requests from the media to talk about her.
But we do know McDougal's story now -- and she isn't coy about her feelings toward Starr. "I hate him," she says firmly, holding onto the arms of her chair as it they were a cliff face, her eyes suddenly turning to slits. Once, in the heat of her legal battles, she even told a reporter that she wanted Starr "dead. I want his children dead. I want his dog dead. I want his house burned to the ground."
She says now that she was joking, just quoting from one of her favorite movies, “The Untouchables.” But she doesn't deny that the sentiment very much appealed to her. "Yeah, I wanted his house to burn down," she says coolly, four years after it all ended. "Oh, yeah."
Hatred, say her family and friends, does not come naturally to her. "She always looks for the best in people," says Riley, a close friend for 30 years and the widow of a former Arkansas lieutenant governor, Bob Riley.
"She is such an open and kind and caring person," says her sister, Danielle Dickinson, who was once serenaded by phone on her birthday by "Susan and a bunch of inmates -- murderers!"
But hatred surely came in handy.
***
It's surprising that Susan Henley McDougal has so far refused all offers to make a movie about her life, and not just because her story seems like such a natural for the big screen, or at least the USA network.
It's surprising because she loves movies; they're her favorite topic of conversation. "What's your favorite movie?" is one of the first things she asks when she meets someone new, and she instinctively drops movie references into her anecdotes and personal stories.
That goes for describing her late ex-husband (think Peter O'Toole in “My Favorite Year”) and her notion of the ideal life (“Mr. Mom”) -- and it most especially goes for the subject of Kenneth Starr.
"You know ‘Broadcast News’?" she asks. "It's one of my favorites. Albert Brooks says in the movie, 'Do you think Satan's going to come back with a pitchfork and horns? No, he's going to be this amiable, bumbling, nice guy and everybody's going to like him.' That's Kenneth Starr!"
McDougal amuses herself with a bad Albert Brooks imitation, but when she's told that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once used the very same movie scene to describe Bill Clinton, she shrieks.
"Really?" she exclaims, leaning forward. Then she cocks her head and ponders the implications. Bill Clinton, after all, is the man millions of Americans thought she was keeping quiet for. Her ex-husband, Jim McDougal, even publicly declared that she'd had an affair with him.
McDougal denies the affair -- finds the very idea funny, actually. Clinton was a friend, and she sure loves his politics. But she can almost understand where Dowd is coming from. Almost.
"Well, to some people, I guess it would depend on your viewpoint," she says. "But when someone talks to me about Republican politics or a conservative viewpoint, I always say, 'You're not going to change my mind on this, because I think I can tell you that they tried to kill me.' "
McDougal does not mean that figuratively. She is convinced that the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) tried to destroy her mind and body to gain her cooperation -- and she has won many converts to that point of view, such as longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who wrote the introduction to her book.
During McDougal's 21 months of incarceration for contempt of court, she was treated like Hannibal Lecter. She was moved around to seven different prisons, she believes to prevent her from establishing friendships with other inmates. She spent nearly two months, 23 hours a day, in a soundproof Plexiglas pod that caused severe sensory deprivation. And she did a tour of duty at one of the most notorious women's prisons in America, Sybil Brand in Los Angeles, where she was housed on "Murderers' Row."
"Her confinement included punishment which can only be deemed 'cruel and unusual,' " Thomas points out. All to punish a woman simply for refusing to testify.
"I have no respect at all for Kenneth Starr or the techniques he used," says Bobby McDaniel, McDougal's lawyer in her first trial. "It was the most abusive use of governmental power that can be imagined. If a private lawyer used the same tactics Starr used, he'd have been disbarred and thrown in jail. I know that sounds harsh, but now that it's all over I can express my honest opinion."
***
Susan Henley never thought she would write a book. Or appear on television. Or even have her name in the paper. She was born and raised, after all, in tiny Camden, Ark., where her father ran a gas station and Susan, the fourth of seven children, dreamed of marrying a minister. She left home at 18 in 1973 to attend Ouachita Baptist University, a small religious school an hour away in Arkadelphia. There was no drinking allowed at Ouachita, and students had to be in their dorms by 9:30 each night. It was a familiar, comforting environment for Susan.
Then she met Jim McDougal -- "and life changed immediately," she says. Jim was a balding, 35-year-old golden boy of Arkansas politics who was temporarily teaching at Ouachita -- and who had an eye for the coeds.
Susan was 19, beautiful and at that brief stage of late adolescence when Jim McDougal's old-school solicitousness and grandly told political war stories would appeal to her. They married less than two years later, with Jim, always the dandy, wearing a mint-green Yves St. Laurent suit.
Life with Jim, who would be found to have manic depression in the late '70s, was a never-ending whirlwind. Susan met important people, like Sen. William Fulbright (for whom Jim had worked). She tagged along as Jim did important things -- like scouting land for big real-estate deals or buying a savings and loan on a whim. Instead of being a minister's wife (the very reason she chose to attend Ouachita), she found herself hanging out at the Capitol in Little Rock in the miniskirts and unbuttoned blouses Jim liked to see her in.
For Jim, Susan's youth and attractiveness were "a marketing tool," in Susan's words. He would send her to see state legislators and other high-powered folks "just to make them feel better," she says. "Jim would say, 'So-and-So is kind of down today, why don't you go say hello.' And I'd go in and sit on their desk and we'd talk and tell jokes and laugh."
Nothing more was expected of her during these flirting sessions, but she admits Jim wouldn't have minded if more did happen.
"It was the '70s and people thought different then," she says. "I wanted to not be small-town; I wanted to be sophisticated. In Jim's world, that meant you didn't have small-minded mores."
That's where Bill Clinton entered the picture.
Clinton immediately took to Susan, telling Jim to bring that "long, lanky girl" along any time. Clinton, on his way to becoming Arkansas' attorney general, met Jim in 1968, and a friendship was immediately forged. "People just loved Jim," Susan remembers. "He would walk in the door at a party, and people would yell, 'Jim McDougal!' and everyone would grab at him."
Clinton was no exception. "I never saw Jim with Bill Clinton when Bill didn't practically pick him up off his feet in an embrace," Susan says.
For his part, Jim McDougal knew star quality when he saw it -- and he saw it (and himself) in Bill Clinton. Jim brought the Clintons into his latest real-estate project -- a 50-50 partnership between the McDougals and the Clintons that was set up to buy, subdivide and sell 230 acres of land in northern Arkansas. Jim would handle the project himself -- and make them all a tidy little profit.
"Jim thought it was a sure thing," Susan says of the Whitewater development. "It wasn't."
***
Susan remembers that Bill Clinton was around a lot in those early days, talking about all the things he and Jim were going to do for their state and for the country. She says that what she saw was a vain, sometimes even ridiculous, man, just like her husband. But, boy, he could talk.
"Jim and Bill Clinton could talk about their ideals until you wanted to parade in the streets and yell, 'Hey, we've got to do this,' " Susan says. "It was very noble, when we would just be sitting around talking, and it would be from the heart. I loved that."
In 1982, Jim decided to run for Congress. He and Clinton, who was running for governor, often campaigned together. Susan says she was never happier than during that campaign.
"Believe it or not -- this is embarrassing -- I used to cry at Jim's speeches," she says. "I would listen and I would think, 'He's just got to win. He's got to.' "
He didn't, and it was just as well. Because Jim's life was about to take an unexpected turn. It could be argued that both Bill Clinton and Jim McDougal got too big for their britches. But Clinton stuck with what he knew -- politics. In a newly deregulated environment, Jim bought a savings and loan and set about running it -- even though he had no banking experience and no tolerance for paperwork.
Jim's main business outside of politics was real estate, and it was a profitable diversion for him. But the savings and loan opened up too many possibilities, especially with Jim's manic depression starting to rule his life.
That's when things started to go wrong. The McDougals' Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan collapsed in the mid-'80s, at the height of the national S&L crisis. This led to the 1989 indictments of Jim and two of Susan's brothers, whom Jim had hired, on multiple felony counts.
A jury decided the S&L's failure had to do with stupidity and lack of experience rather than criminal intent, and Jim and the Henleys were acquitted. But a few years later the independent counsel decided to dig a little deeper. What he found was Whitewater.
The Office of the Independent Counsel charged that Whitewater was a sweetheart deal for the Clintons -- that the McDougals brought the Clintons into the deal solely to curry favor with Bill Clinton, a rising political star in the state. And when the lots didn't sell, according to the OIC, the McDougals defrauded their own savings and loan and the federal government to staunch the losses.
The Clintons lost about $50,000 on Whitewater. But the McDougals lost three times what the Clintons lost, even though the Clintons and McDougals were 50-50 partners.
The McDougals' explanation for this was a simple one: Jim was embarrassed that Whitewater was failing, and he didn't want to face the Clintons. So he took on more and more of Whitewater's debt himself.
In March 1996, Jim and Susan -- and sitting Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who had represented Jim McDougal when he was in private law practice -- went on trial.
Susan says she didn't know what to make of the charges. She insists she was nothing more than Jim's "flunky" at Madison, in charge only of making the promotional commercials. She points out she wasn't even there during the S&L's death throes, having separated from Jim in 1985 and moved to Los Angeles with new boyfriend Pat Harris.
The OIC's chief witness was David Hale, who owned a lending company accused of illegal business practices. Hale agreed to testify for a reduced sentence. On the stand he claimed, among other things, that Clinton, then Arkansas' governor, pressured him in the mid-'80s to give a $300,000 Small Business Administration loan to Susan McDougal as an illegal way to pay off some of Clinton's campaign debts. The prosecution's case rested almost solely on Hale's testimony.
Clinton, in videotaped testimony on April 28, 1996, denied this. Hale, he said, was simply lying. For their part, Jim and Susan McDougal, now divorced, insisted that the loan was for another unsuccessful land deal unrelated to the Clintons.
Susan's strategy for the trial was to not say anything. "I had no confidence," she says. "I had so relied on Jim my whole adult life for decision-making. Jim kept telling me, 'I'm going to explain it. There's no wrongdoing here.' "
Jim did explain it, getting on the stand and jousting cavalierly with OIC lawyer Ray Jahn. But his snarky attitude backfired, and when Jahn caught his witness in contradictory statements, Jim began to backpedal furiously.
In the process, he sold out his ex-wife, saying he had told her everything, every detail about every project.
"Our defense was essentially that Susan did not know or understand the documents she signed," says McDaniel. "Many wives sign documents, mortgages and house notes, and never read them; it's not unusual. But when Jim McDougal took the witness stand and realized he was going down the tubes, he decided he was going to take everyone else with him. And he did."
***
The convictions of Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker set off a chain reaction -- which was exactly what Kenneth Starr wanted.
The independent counsel was pursuing a bottom-up strategy that they expected would take them, step by step, to Bill and Hillary Clinton. The first to flip had been Hale. But the problem with Hale was that, as Salon magazine put it, he was "a tainted witness" who allegedly took "money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists with ties to Starr himself."
The OIC needed a better witness -- and they turned to Jim and Susan.
Susan says that at first she was willing to cooperate, but "in the first meeting I had with them I told them that I didn't know anything that the Clintons had done that was illegal. I mean, I would've been glad to tell them, but I just didn't know of anything."
That was the wrong answer, and Jim didn't make the same mistake.
"Susan is just a simple girl from Arkansas who doesn't have a dishonest bone in her body," says her former lawyer, Bobby McDaniel. "But she was married to Jim McDougal, who was quite the manipulator."
Jim was plainspoken about the reason he changed his story and became a witness for Starr. He was facing the possibility of decades behind bars for his multiple convictions, and he was angry and hurt that his old friend in the White House was not coming to his aid. "There was not one word of sympathy or friendship toward me or Susan," he told The New Yorker in 1996. "There's no reason to do anything for the Clintons, for they're not going to do a damn thing for us."
Almost immediately, "he just started making up stories" to implicate the Clintons, Susan says.
At the time, Jim was living in a trailer at the bottom of Claudia Riley's property, while Claudia and Susan stayed in the house above. "He would come up after his meetings with the FBI," Susan remembers, "and he would say, 'How does this sound? Let me try this out on you. How about if we say this. . . .' "
"His story for the day," affirms Riley. Riley had been close friends with Jim since the 1960s, when Jim worked with her husband. "Jim became an alien," she says. "If there's one thing you could be assured of, it was that Jim's word was his bond. Not anymore."
One of his lies, Susan says, related directly to the loan that brought about her conviction. "They wanted to know when the plot was hatched to borrow the money for Clinton, and Jim said, 'I think I'm going to tell them that the day I went down to the legislature' -- and he had this specific date -- 'and Bill and I were standing there in the hall talking and that was when he said he needed some money for the campaign. Doesn't that sound good?' That's what he would do: He would take what they wanted and plug it into real events so all the surrounding details would be true."
One day, Susan had finally had enough. "I said to him, 'You know you're scheming against the president of the United States. Let's just get into reality here, Jim. They've got all the money in the world. They've got all the attorneys in the world. You're making this stuff up. You're going to get on the stand, and [the president's lawyers] aren't going to be able to show that most of this is just bull that you're coming up with?'
"And he looked at me just as serious as death and said, 'They're giving me the documents.' "
***
That simple statement threw Susan into a panic.
"That's when I became 100 percent certain that the OIC knew that Jim McDougal was weaving those crazy stories," she says. "He showed me the documents."
They'd give him documents from Madison, where paperwork under Jim's chaotic leadership was often incomplete and misleading, she says, and "he'd weave his stories around them. I knew I could never contradict him now."
This continued for weeks, she says -- and it involved Starr himself. "I would see them arrive down there at the trailer, and they would open the door for Starr and he would step out of this big car and he would have gifts in his hand. And I would think, 'You are so corrupt.' "
She also saw how untenable her position had become, and she agreed to hear them out.
In the summer of 1996, Susan spoke with the OIC's Ray Jahn via speakerphone. Jahn asked for a proffer -- a written statement of what she would testify to -- and said that if it was acceptable, he would recommend probation rather than jail time for her. He said he could also help make some other charges filed against her in California go away.
"Exactly what is it you want from her?" her lawyer, McDaniel, asked.
Jahn's answer: "She knows who this investigation is about. And she knows what we want."
Even now, six years later, McDaniel gets angry. "It was clear that this wasn't about the pursuit of justice," he says. "It was about the pursuit of the Clintons. The only way Susan could have avoided jail would be if she perjured herself. They had David Hale to say X-Y-Z, and now they had Jim McDougal. If she told the truth, they could've gotten the grand jury to indict her for perjury. She was in a Catch-22 of the worst kind."
"They were telling her to lie, and she wouldn't do it," says Riley. "That took a lot of courage."
Susan's family and friends couldn't take it anymore, begging her to cooperate. But Susan had made up her mind: She was not going to testify. "Mark Twain said it takes two to tell the truth," she says. "One to tell it and one to hear it."
The OIC responded by asking for a 13-year prison sentence for her fraud conviction, far stiffer than they were asking for anyone else, despite the fact that she was a secondary figure even by the OIC's standards.
Which was the last straw for Susan. It had become personal. She immediately barred her lawyer -- first McDaniel, later Mark Geragos in Los Angeles -- from even talking to the OIC. Her hatred for Kenneth Starr was heading for an all-time high.
"I remember he would come out during the trial at these press brief-ings and say these things," she says. "Once he said, 'I stopped at a red light on my way to the court and sang a hymn.' I thought, 'I may have to physically intervene.' It was galling that he could be ruining my life, ruining other people's lives, and use the guise of his Christianity to say, 'Oh, I'm such a nice guy.' It's the hypocrisy I couldn't stand more than anything else."
It comes up time and again from those involved with Susan's defense: that Starr's team acted like religious zealots on a mission from God.
"They felt like the end justified the means; they felt so self-righteous and holier-than-thou, so much better than the Clintons," says McDaniel. "They were willing to do anything they could."
***
Susan says that her decision to fight Starr never had anything to do with Bill Clinton. It had to do with being able to live with herself. For everyone else, however, it was entirely about the Clintons.
America's conflicted reaction to Clinton was, as Jonathan Franzen put it, "the double vision of a people whose hearts don't like what their desires have created."
Somebody had to pay for that. So Susan McDougal went to prison. And found herself.
"I promised myself I would never be the same again," she says of her time in prison. "I was going to stop living this life of things. I had a bottle of shampoo and a black comb and sometimes a clean uniform. And life was good."
"Good," of course, being a relative term. Prison officials consistently singled her out, and she spent much of her time in solitary confinement despite good behavior. She also had scoliosis, and the often-painful spinal condition became debilitating in prison.
But she became a jailhouse leader, demanding rights for herself and her fellow inmates that included everything from privacy while bathing to clean drinking water.
Sending Susan McDougal to prison also ended up being the beginning of the end for Starr. He had enjoyed high public approval ratings during the early years of his investigation, until Whitewater led nowhere and his investigation of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky very publicly turned ugly.
"Who can forget the attractive tall brunette woman handcuffed and shackled as she was led away by law enforcement officers?" writes Helen Thomas in the book's introduction. She adds: "Parading Susan in shackles was actually one of her adversary's biggest mistakes."
In 1998, Jim McDougal died of a heart attack in federal prison in Fort Worth before he could testify, making it all the more important for the OIC to get Susan's cooperation. But once she went to prison, things started to go her way.
Starr tried to extract another pound of flesh, this time trying Susan for criminal contempt of court and obstruction of justice for her refusal to testify. Even though it was undeniable that she had in fact refused to testify, the jury acquitted her of the obstruction charge and hung on two contempt charges -- an outcome that was widely viewed as a major blow to the independent counsel's credibility.
Susan finally completed serving her civil contempt time on March 6, 1998, and the next day began serving her two-year sentence for the Whitewater conviction. But on June 25, Judge George Howard unexpectedly released her after a hearing on a motion for early release, mainly for medical reasons.
When Starr finally brought his impeachment report to Congress that fall, it was almost entirely focused on the Lewinsky affair, not Whitewater.
***
For years during her court battles, Susan McDougal had sought out the cameras and the reporters to tell her story. She had become famous for her provocative statements and aggressiveness, once insisting that they were going to kick a certain prosecutor's "butt up between his shoulder blades." At the lowest point of her life she was at the height of her fame. And she wanted no more of it.
When she got out of prison, she says, "People were saying, 'You're going to do TV shows, you're going to do a movie and a book.' And I said, 'No. I'm just going to go home.' "
And that's what she did, back in Camden, where she lives in the house where she grew up. After years of trying to get away from small-town life, she now embraces it.
"I get hugged a lot," she says. "It's very comforting to be in a secure environment. Big places are a little scary."
So are the expectations of fame.
"It wasn't like I was an astronaut; it's not like I became famous because of some great accomplishment and I could say, 'Gee, look what I've done.'
"I live out in the woods. Nobody knows where to find me. Reporters call Claudia, because they don't know where I am."
Her decision to finally write a book, she says, was simply to set the record straight. Nothing more, nothing less. Like her refusal to testify, she says, it isn't about the Clintons. On his last day in office, Clinton surprised her by giving her a pardon, and Susan says she "loves them for doing that." But she hasn't talked to him since she visited the White House in 1996 for his videotaped deposition.
She says she's like Clinton only in that she's a survivor.
"I guess I'm kind of like Rocky," she says, returning to her love of movies to explain herself. "I just decided, 'They're not beating me. They're never beating me. I'll take all their punches, and I'll be all right.' And I was."
– By Douglas Perry, published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 2003
There she was, shuffling along with chains taut between her ankles, cuffed hands strapped to her hips and two burly male prisoners behind her, the three of them linked by waist chains.
"It was this long, empty corridor, just going on forever; it felt like the Bataan Death March," she says. "And I thought, 'Thank God no one's going to see this.' Then the door opened."
A bolt of light blinded the prisoners, followed immediately by voices and jostling. McDougal almost toppled over as reporters and cameramen pushed forward, all yelling, "Susan!" "Susan!" "Susan!"
The sudden scuffle surprised and scared the two prisoners behind McDougal, and one of them blurted: "What the fuck did you do?"
Six years later, the woman long considered the linchpin in an effort to bring down a U.S. president can't help but laugh at the memory. "They thought I was a serial killer," she says, propped carefully in a chair at the home of friend Claudia Riley. "They were really freaked out. In a situation like that, you hate to say, 'All I did was not testify.'"
***
Of course, that's not all Susan McDougal did. She took on the most powerful prosecutor in the country -- one of the most powerful of all time -- and fought him to a standstill over five years. Their battle in many ways shaped the American political landscape in the 1990s.
Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating President Bill Clinton, took his case against McDougal to the courtroom, accusing her of fraudulently obtaining a loan to help Clinton pay off campaign debts and, with then-husband Jim McDougal, of giving the future president a sweetheart deal in a real-estate project that went bad. Caught off guard, McDougal took her case against Starr to the public -- to Diane Sawyer and Larry King and finally to bookstores with a new memoir called “The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk” (Carroll & Graf, $25).
It hardly seemed like a fair fight. Starr graduated from Duke University School of Law and clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger. He worked in the Reagan Justice Department and served as the first President Bush's solicitor general. As independent counsel, he had unlimited resources.
McDougal was a small-town girl from Arkansas whose worldly experience barely extended beyond attending a little-known religious college in Arkadelphia. And she was broke. Her lawyers, Bobby McDaniel in Arkansas and later Mark Geragos in Los Angeles, took her on pro bono. Her greatest ally was supposedly the president of the United States, whom she knew through her ex-husband. But she hadn't spoken to Bill Clinton in a decade.
For years, it looked like Starr had come out on top. McDougal, after all, was convicted of fraud and spent nearly two years in prison for civil contempt of court when she refused to testify before Starr's grand jury. Rumors that she slept with President Clinton -- and made a deal with him to keep her mouth shut about it -- swirled through the media. At water coolers across the country, Americans called her a liar and a slut.
But it's not as clear-cut as that. By the time McDougal finally got out of prison in 1998, she had become a heroine to many Americans -- and had found a peace and contentment behind bars that she never had outside them.
We still don't really know what Starr thinks about his battle with McDougal. He prefers to let his record as independent counsel speak for itself, refusing requests from the media to talk about her.
But we do know McDougal's story now -- and she isn't coy about her feelings toward Starr. "I hate him," she says firmly, holding onto the arms of her chair as it they were a cliff face, her eyes suddenly turning to slits. Once, in the heat of her legal battles, she even told a reporter that she wanted Starr "dead. I want his children dead. I want his dog dead. I want his house burned to the ground."
She says now that she was joking, just quoting from one of her favorite movies, “The Untouchables.” But she doesn't deny that the sentiment very much appealed to her. "Yeah, I wanted his house to burn down," she says coolly, four years after it all ended. "Oh, yeah."
Hatred, say her family and friends, does not come naturally to her. "She always looks for the best in people," says Riley, a close friend for 30 years and the widow of a former Arkansas lieutenant governor, Bob Riley.
"She is such an open and kind and caring person," says her sister, Danielle Dickinson, who was once serenaded by phone on her birthday by "Susan and a bunch of inmates -- murderers!"
But hatred surely came in handy.
***
It's surprising that Susan Henley McDougal has so far refused all offers to make a movie about her life, and not just because her story seems like such a natural for the big screen, or at least the USA network.
It's surprising because she loves movies; they're her favorite topic of conversation. "What's your favorite movie?" is one of the first things she asks when she meets someone new, and she instinctively drops movie references into her anecdotes and personal stories.
That goes for describing her late ex-husband (think Peter O'Toole in “My Favorite Year”) and her notion of the ideal life (“Mr. Mom”) -- and it most especially goes for the subject of Kenneth Starr.
"You know ‘Broadcast News’?" she asks. "It's one of my favorites. Albert Brooks says in the movie, 'Do you think Satan's going to come back with a pitchfork and horns? No, he's going to be this amiable, bumbling, nice guy and everybody's going to like him.' That's Kenneth Starr!"
McDougal amuses herself with a bad Albert Brooks imitation, but when she's told that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once used the very same movie scene to describe Bill Clinton, she shrieks.
"Really?" she exclaims, leaning forward. Then she cocks her head and ponders the implications. Bill Clinton, after all, is the man millions of Americans thought she was keeping quiet for. Her ex-husband, Jim McDougal, even publicly declared that she'd had an affair with him.
McDougal denies the affair -- finds the very idea funny, actually. Clinton was a friend, and she sure loves his politics. But she can almost understand where Dowd is coming from. Almost.
"Well, to some people, I guess it would depend on your viewpoint," she says. "But when someone talks to me about Republican politics or a conservative viewpoint, I always say, 'You're not going to change my mind on this, because I think I can tell you that they tried to kill me.' "
McDougal does not mean that figuratively. She is convinced that the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) tried to destroy her mind and body to gain her cooperation -- and she has won many converts to that point of view, such as longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who wrote the introduction to her book.
During McDougal's 21 months of incarceration for contempt of court, she was treated like Hannibal Lecter. She was moved around to seven different prisons, she believes to prevent her from establishing friendships with other inmates. She spent nearly two months, 23 hours a day, in a soundproof Plexiglas pod that caused severe sensory deprivation. And she did a tour of duty at one of the most notorious women's prisons in America, Sybil Brand in Los Angeles, where she was housed on "Murderers' Row."
"Her confinement included punishment which can only be deemed 'cruel and unusual,' " Thomas points out. All to punish a woman simply for refusing to testify.
"I have no respect at all for Kenneth Starr or the techniques he used," says Bobby McDaniel, McDougal's lawyer in her first trial. "It was the most abusive use of governmental power that can be imagined. If a private lawyer used the same tactics Starr used, he'd have been disbarred and thrown in jail. I know that sounds harsh, but now that it's all over I can express my honest opinion."
***
Susan Henley never thought she would write a book. Or appear on television. Or even have her name in the paper. She was born and raised, after all, in tiny Camden, Ark., where her father ran a gas station and Susan, the fourth of seven children, dreamed of marrying a minister. She left home at 18 in 1973 to attend Ouachita Baptist University, a small religious school an hour away in Arkadelphia. There was no drinking allowed at Ouachita, and students had to be in their dorms by 9:30 each night. It was a familiar, comforting environment for Susan.
Then she met Jim McDougal -- "and life changed immediately," she says. Jim was a balding, 35-year-old golden boy of Arkansas politics who was temporarily teaching at Ouachita -- and who had an eye for the coeds.
Susan was 19, beautiful and at that brief stage of late adolescence when Jim McDougal's old-school solicitousness and grandly told political war stories would appeal to her. They married less than two years later, with Jim, always the dandy, wearing a mint-green Yves St. Laurent suit.
Life with Jim, who would be found to have manic depression in the late '70s, was a never-ending whirlwind. Susan met important people, like Sen. William Fulbright (for whom Jim had worked). She tagged along as Jim did important things -- like scouting land for big real-estate deals or buying a savings and loan on a whim. Instead of being a minister's wife (the very reason she chose to attend Ouachita), she found herself hanging out at the Capitol in Little Rock in the miniskirts and unbuttoned blouses Jim liked to see her in.
For Jim, Susan's youth and attractiveness were "a marketing tool," in Susan's words. He would send her to see state legislators and other high-powered folks "just to make them feel better," she says. "Jim would say, 'So-and-So is kind of down today, why don't you go say hello.' And I'd go in and sit on their desk and we'd talk and tell jokes and laugh."
Nothing more was expected of her during these flirting sessions, but she admits Jim wouldn't have minded if more did happen.
"It was the '70s and people thought different then," she says. "I wanted to not be small-town; I wanted to be sophisticated. In Jim's world, that meant you didn't have small-minded mores."
That's where Bill Clinton entered the picture.
Clinton immediately took to Susan, telling Jim to bring that "long, lanky girl" along any time. Clinton, on his way to becoming Arkansas' attorney general, met Jim in 1968, and a friendship was immediately forged. "People just loved Jim," Susan remembers. "He would walk in the door at a party, and people would yell, 'Jim McDougal!' and everyone would grab at him."
Clinton was no exception. "I never saw Jim with Bill Clinton when Bill didn't practically pick him up off his feet in an embrace," Susan says.
For his part, Jim McDougal knew star quality when he saw it -- and he saw it (and himself) in Bill Clinton. Jim brought the Clintons into his latest real-estate project -- a 50-50 partnership between the McDougals and the Clintons that was set up to buy, subdivide and sell 230 acres of land in northern Arkansas. Jim would handle the project himself -- and make them all a tidy little profit.
"Jim thought it was a sure thing," Susan says of the Whitewater development. "It wasn't."
***
Susan remembers that Bill Clinton was around a lot in those early days, talking about all the things he and Jim were going to do for their state and for the country. She says that what she saw was a vain, sometimes even ridiculous, man, just like her husband. But, boy, he could talk.
"Jim and Bill Clinton could talk about their ideals until you wanted to parade in the streets and yell, 'Hey, we've got to do this,' " Susan says. "It was very noble, when we would just be sitting around talking, and it would be from the heart. I loved that."
In 1982, Jim decided to run for Congress. He and Clinton, who was running for governor, often campaigned together. Susan says she was never happier than during that campaign.
"Believe it or not -- this is embarrassing -- I used to cry at Jim's speeches," she says. "I would listen and I would think, 'He's just got to win. He's got to.' "
He didn't, and it was just as well. Because Jim's life was about to take an unexpected turn. It could be argued that both Bill Clinton and Jim McDougal got too big for their britches. But Clinton stuck with what he knew -- politics. In a newly deregulated environment, Jim bought a savings and loan and set about running it -- even though he had no banking experience and no tolerance for paperwork.
Jim's main business outside of politics was real estate, and it was a profitable diversion for him. But the savings and loan opened up too many possibilities, especially with Jim's manic depression starting to rule his life.
That's when things started to go wrong. The McDougals' Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan collapsed in the mid-'80s, at the height of the national S&L crisis. This led to the 1989 indictments of Jim and two of Susan's brothers, whom Jim had hired, on multiple felony counts.
A jury decided the S&L's failure had to do with stupidity and lack of experience rather than criminal intent, and Jim and the Henleys were acquitted. But a few years later the independent counsel decided to dig a little deeper. What he found was Whitewater.
The Office of the Independent Counsel charged that Whitewater was a sweetheart deal for the Clintons -- that the McDougals brought the Clintons into the deal solely to curry favor with Bill Clinton, a rising political star in the state. And when the lots didn't sell, according to the OIC, the McDougals defrauded their own savings and loan and the federal government to staunch the losses.
The Clintons lost about $50,000 on Whitewater. But the McDougals lost three times what the Clintons lost, even though the Clintons and McDougals were 50-50 partners.
The McDougals' explanation for this was a simple one: Jim was embarrassed that Whitewater was failing, and he didn't want to face the Clintons. So he took on more and more of Whitewater's debt himself.
In March 1996, Jim and Susan -- and sitting Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who had represented Jim McDougal when he was in private law practice -- went on trial.
Susan says she didn't know what to make of the charges. She insists she was nothing more than Jim's "flunky" at Madison, in charge only of making the promotional commercials. She points out she wasn't even there during the S&L's death throes, having separated from Jim in 1985 and moved to Los Angeles with new boyfriend Pat Harris.
The OIC's chief witness was David Hale, who owned a lending company accused of illegal business practices. Hale agreed to testify for a reduced sentence. On the stand he claimed, among other things, that Clinton, then Arkansas' governor, pressured him in the mid-'80s to give a $300,000 Small Business Administration loan to Susan McDougal as an illegal way to pay off some of Clinton's campaign debts. The prosecution's case rested almost solely on Hale's testimony.
Clinton, in videotaped testimony on April 28, 1996, denied this. Hale, he said, was simply lying. For their part, Jim and Susan McDougal, now divorced, insisted that the loan was for another unsuccessful land deal unrelated to the Clintons.
Susan's strategy for the trial was to not say anything. "I had no confidence," she says. "I had so relied on Jim my whole adult life for decision-making. Jim kept telling me, 'I'm going to explain it. There's no wrongdoing here.' "
Jim did explain it, getting on the stand and jousting cavalierly with OIC lawyer Ray Jahn. But his snarky attitude backfired, and when Jahn caught his witness in contradictory statements, Jim began to backpedal furiously.
In the process, he sold out his ex-wife, saying he had told her everything, every detail about every project.
"Our defense was essentially that Susan did not know or understand the documents she signed," says McDaniel. "Many wives sign documents, mortgages and house notes, and never read them; it's not unusual. But when Jim McDougal took the witness stand and realized he was going down the tubes, he decided he was going to take everyone else with him. And he did."
***
The convictions of Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker set off a chain reaction -- which was exactly what Kenneth Starr wanted.
The independent counsel was pursuing a bottom-up strategy that they expected would take them, step by step, to Bill and Hillary Clinton. The first to flip had been Hale. But the problem with Hale was that, as Salon magazine put it, he was "a tainted witness" who allegedly took "money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists with ties to Starr himself."
The OIC needed a better witness -- and they turned to Jim and Susan.
Susan says that at first she was willing to cooperate, but "in the first meeting I had with them I told them that I didn't know anything that the Clintons had done that was illegal. I mean, I would've been glad to tell them, but I just didn't know of anything."
That was the wrong answer, and Jim didn't make the same mistake.
"Susan is just a simple girl from Arkansas who doesn't have a dishonest bone in her body," says her former lawyer, Bobby McDaniel. "But she was married to Jim McDougal, who was quite the manipulator."
Jim was plainspoken about the reason he changed his story and became a witness for Starr. He was facing the possibility of decades behind bars for his multiple convictions, and he was angry and hurt that his old friend in the White House was not coming to his aid. "There was not one word of sympathy or friendship toward me or Susan," he told The New Yorker in 1996. "There's no reason to do anything for the Clintons, for they're not going to do a damn thing for us."
Almost immediately, "he just started making up stories" to implicate the Clintons, Susan says.
At the time, Jim was living in a trailer at the bottom of Claudia Riley's property, while Claudia and Susan stayed in the house above. "He would come up after his meetings with the FBI," Susan remembers, "and he would say, 'How does this sound? Let me try this out on you. How about if we say this. . . .' "
"His story for the day," affirms Riley. Riley had been close friends with Jim since the 1960s, when Jim worked with her husband. "Jim became an alien," she says. "If there's one thing you could be assured of, it was that Jim's word was his bond. Not anymore."
One of his lies, Susan says, related directly to the loan that brought about her conviction. "They wanted to know when the plot was hatched to borrow the money for Clinton, and Jim said, 'I think I'm going to tell them that the day I went down to the legislature' -- and he had this specific date -- 'and Bill and I were standing there in the hall talking and that was when he said he needed some money for the campaign. Doesn't that sound good?' That's what he would do: He would take what they wanted and plug it into real events so all the surrounding details would be true."
One day, Susan had finally had enough. "I said to him, 'You know you're scheming against the president of the United States. Let's just get into reality here, Jim. They've got all the money in the world. They've got all the attorneys in the world. You're making this stuff up. You're going to get on the stand, and [the president's lawyers] aren't going to be able to show that most of this is just bull that you're coming up with?'
"And he looked at me just as serious as death and said, 'They're giving me the documents.' "
***
That simple statement threw Susan into a panic.
"That's when I became 100 percent certain that the OIC knew that Jim McDougal was weaving those crazy stories," she says. "He showed me the documents."
They'd give him documents from Madison, where paperwork under Jim's chaotic leadership was often incomplete and misleading, she says, and "he'd weave his stories around them. I knew I could never contradict him now."
This continued for weeks, she says -- and it involved Starr himself. "I would see them arrive down there at the trailer, and they would open the door for Starr and he would step out of this big car and he would have gifts in his hand. And I would think, 'You are so corrupt.' "
She also saw how untenable her position had become, and she agreed to hear them out.
In the summer of 1996, Susan spoke with the OIC's Ray Jahn via speakerphone. Jahn asked for a proffer -- a written statement of what she would testify to -- and said that if it was acceptable, he would recommend probation rather than jail time for her. He said he could also help make some other charges filed against her in California go away.
"Exactly what is it you want from her?" her lawyer, McDaniel, asked.
Jahn's answer: "She knows who this investigation is about. And she knows what we want."
Even now, six years later, McDaniel gets angry. "It was clear that this wasn't about the pursuit of justice," he says. "It was about the pursuit of the Clintons. The only way Susan could have avoided jail would be if she perjured herself. They had David Hale to say X-Y-Z, and now they had Jim McDougal. If she told the truth, they could've gotten the grand jury to indict her for perjury. She was in a Catch-22 of the worst kind."
"They were telling her to lie, and she wouldn't do it," says Riley. "That took a lot of courage."
Susan's family and friends couldn't take it anymore, begging her to cooperate. But Susan had made up her mind: She was not going to testify. "Mark Twain said it takes two to tell the truth," she says. "One to tell it and one to hear it."
The OIC responded by asking for a 13-year prison sentence for her fraud conviction, far stiffer than they were asking for anyone else, despite the fact that she was a secondary figure even by the OIC's standards.
Which was the last straw for Susan. It had become personal. She immediately barred her lawyer -- first McDaniel, later Mark Geragos in Los Angeles -- from even talking to the OIC. Her hatred for Kenneth Starr was heading for an all-time high.
"I remember he would come out during the trial at these press brief-ings and say these things," she says. "Once he said, 'I stopped at a red light on my way to the court and sang a hymn.' I thought, 'I may have to physically intervene.' It was galling that he could be ruining my life, ruining other people's lives, and use the guise of his Christianity to say, 'Oh, I'm such a nice guy.' It's the hypocrisy I couldn't stand more than anything else."
It comes up time and again from those involved with Susan's defense: that Starr's team acted like religious zealots on a mission from God.
"They felt like the end justified the means; they felt so self-righteous and holier-than-thou, so much better than the Clintons," says McDaniel. "They were willing to do anything they could."
***
Susan says that her decision to fight Starr never had anything to do with Bill Clinton. It had to do with being able to live with herself. For everyone else, however, it was entirely about the Clintons.
America's conflicted reaction to Clinton was, as Jonathan Franzen put it, "the double vision of a people whose hearts don't like what their desires have created."
Somebody had to pay for that. So Susan McDougal went to prison. And found herself.
"I promised myself I would never be the same again," she says of her time in prison. "I was going to stop living this life of things. I had a bottle of shampoo and a black comb and sometimes a clean uniform. And life was good."
"Good," of course, being a relative term. Prison officials consistently singled her out, and she spent much of her time in solitary confinement despite good behavior. She also had scoliosis, and the often-painful spinal condition became debilitating in prison.
But she became a jailhouse leader, demanding rights for herself and her fellow inmates that included everything from privacy while bathing to clean drinking water.
Sending Susan McDougal to prison also ended up being the beginning of the end for Starr. He had enjoyed high public approval ratings during the early years of his investigation, until Whitewater led nowhere and his investigation of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky very publicly turned ugly.
"Who can forget the attractive tall brunette woman handcuffed and shackled as she was led away by law enforcement officers?" writes Helen Thomas in the book's introduction. She adds: "Parading Susan in shackles was actually one of her adversary's biggest mistakes."
In 1998, Jim McDougal died of a heart attack in federal prison in Fort Worth before he could testify, making it all the more important for the OIC to get Susan's cooperation. But once she went to prison, things started to go her way.
Starr tried to extract another pound of flesh, this time trying Susan for criminal contempt of court and obstruction of justice for her refusal to testify. Even though it was undeniable that she had in fact refused to testify, the jury acquitted her of the obstruction charge and hung on two contempt charges -- an outcome that was widely viewed as a major blow to the independent counsel's credibility.
Susan finally completed serving her civil contempt time on March 6, 1998, and the next day began serving her two-year sentence for the Whitewater conviction. But on June 25, Judge George Howard unexpectedly released her after a hearing on a motion for early release, mainly for medical reasons.
When Starr finally brought his impeachment report to Congress that fall, it was almost entirely focused on the Lewinsky affair, not Whitewater.
***
For years during her court battles, Susan McDougal had sought out the cameras and the reporters to tell her story. She had become famous for her provocative statements and aggressiveness, once insisting that they were going to kick a certain prosecutor's "butt up between his shoulder blades." At the lowest point of her life she was at the height of her fame. And she wanted no more of it.
When she got out of prison, she says, "People were saying, 'You're going to do TV shows, you're going to do a movie and a book.' And I said, 'No. I'm just going to go home.' "
And that's what she did, back in Camden, where she lives in the house where she grew up. After years of trying to get away from small-town life, she now embraces it.
"I get hugged a lot," she says. "It's very comforting to be in a secure environment. Big places are a little scary."
So are the expectations of fame.
"It wasn't like I was an astronaut; it's not like I became famous because of some great accomplishment and I could say, 'Gee, look what I've done.'
"I live out in the woods. Nobody knows where to find me. Reporters call Claudia, because they don't know where I am."
Her decision to finally write a book, she says, was simply to set the record straight. Nothing more, nothing less. Like her refusal to testify, she says, it isn't about the Clintons. On his last day in office, Clinton surprised her by giving her a pardon, and Susan says she "loves them for doing that." But she hasn't talked to him since she visited the White House in 1996 for his videotaped deposition.
She says she's like Clinton only in that she's a survivor.
"I guess I'm kind of like Rocky," she says, returning to her love of movies to explain herself. "I just decided, 'They're not beating me. They're never beating me. I'll take all their punches, and I'll be all right.' And I was."
– By Douglas Perry, published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 2003
Above image: Bill Clinton and Susan McDougal in the 1970s.