Dolly Kyle, Vince Foster, and the Ku Klux Klan

Chapter 20 of Hillary the Other Woman, the fascinating, and very important memoir of Bill Clinton’s paramour of longest standing, Dolly Kyle, is entitled, “Witness Protection Program and the KKK.” It begins this way:

If there were a witness protection program for people who are afraid to tell what they know about the Clintons, there would be a groundswell of new information. As it stands now, however, the KKK (the Klinton Krime Kartel) is still able to operate at will because most people are afraid to speak against the mob in public.

Her use of the KKK term led her quickly to this interesting digression:

When I was a student at Hot Springs High School, I wrote a paper about the other infamous KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. I talked to men who were members of the KKK, who didn’t seem to mind telling a harmless teenage girl about the notorious exploits of the Klan in Arkansas.

I researched obscure newspaper references and all sorts of odd bits and pieces of credible reports that I could find about the Klan in Arkansas in the 1960s. I had a shoebox full of index cards with a different quote or incident on each one. It was certainly a lot harder to do this kind of research before the Internet!

Ultimately, I sorted, organized, and outlined my 3 x 5 cards, and then wrote what I (an “A” student since the first grade) thought would surely be an “A” paper. My teacher, however gave me a great big “C-“ at the top of the page, and added this comment:

“The Ku Klux Klan does not exist in Arkansas.”

That was my first big slap in the face for telling the truth that someone didn’t want to hear. In retrospect, I’m guessing that the teacher may have been a member of the Klan!

Reading about that episode put me in mind of a similar student slap down that I write about in Part 4 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.” This one has a much more direct connection to Kyle’s main subject than does her own story (with links added):

Another argument that might be made [for their failure to address the issue] is that, dependent as they are upon the printed word, academicians have had difficulty learning anything about the Foster case. Following on the heels of the writers of the first draft of our history, as journalists are often called, the compilers and interpreters in academia have been very poorly served by the draft writers. There is certainly no doubt about that, as we have made clear in this essay. Until the recent publication of the books by [Christopher] Ruddy and British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, there was simply no information available in the usual opinion-molding sources, either books, journals, magazines, or newspapers. The highbrow magazines usually read by college professors and equivalent professionals have been the absolute worst, as we pointed out earlier, in playing down the Clinton scandals.

Still, this is a poor excuse for the degree of ignorance that exists. College professors are supposed to go beyond such secondary sources. I have interviewed a community college criminal justice major in the Washington, DC area who did just that, writing a first-rate research paper disputing the government’s conclusions on the Foster death using government documents available in the George Mason University library. He did it, furthermore, without any assistance from the Foster researchers in the area, being unaware at the time of our existence. In the process he also demolished the argument that academicians might use for avoiding the subject, that is, that this is a topic of little general interest. In the last presentation in his public speaking class the assignment was to give a speech to persuade. With the topic already in hand from the paper he had written for another class and with what he figured was already an assured “A” in the course from his accumulated record, he decided to risk trying to persuade the class that Vince Foster was murdered. Actually, as he told me, the risk was not with the fellow students, whose vote would determine half his grade, but with the teacher, whom he had pegged as a “liberal” who wouldn’t like the topic. He didn’t know how right he was on both counts. The students not only gave him an “A” for his presentation, but also chose his as the best speech given, while, as he put it, the teacher distracted him with her look of absolute disgust throughout his speech. “You could almost see the smoke coming out of her ears,” he said, and as he took his seat she said, “You know I don’t agree with any of that.” She then put her grade where her mouth was, giving him a “C” on the presentation. That combined with the student assessment, fortunately, still gave him a “B” on the speech and an “A” for the course.

We have heard so many stories in recent years of the sort of ideological purity being enforced on campuses these days, one could imagine this little scene being played out almost anywhere in the country. In fact, one might more readily expect it at one of the elite universities instead of at a suburban community college. By happenstance there was more than ideological blindness at work in this instance, and I tell it because it is one of those cases where truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, not because of any larger point that it supports. In the small world that is metropolitan Washington, the speech teacher happened to be the wife of Robert Bryant, currently second in command (at the time of the writing ed.) in the FBI and their spokesman at the joint Park Police, Justice Department, FBI press conference in which the initial Foster “suicide” conclusion was announced on August 10, 1993. The student had not been aware of the fact, and I took some pleasure in breaking the news to him.

I had been put in touch with the student by Beth George, the mother of college student, Tommy Burkett, whose obvious murder had been covered up by the police with the help of Dr. James Beyer’s autopsy, the corrupt autopsy doctor in the Foster case. George was a colleague of Ms. Bryant at Northern Virginia Community College in Fairfax County. That’s how I knew who Ms. Bryant was and her student still didn’t until I told him. The late Dr. Beyer, I think, would have been right at home in the virtually lawless illegal gambling center of Hot Springs where Bill and Dolly grew up, and you readers can well see why the Clintons are so much at home in Washington, DC.

David Martin

July 15, 2016

Home Page    Columns Column 5 Archive  Contact