By SALLY BEDELL SMITH

Last updated at 00:23 15 January 2008

On a Monday night in July 1993, a 48-year-old lawyer called Vince Foster was found dead in a park near Washington DC.

He had died from a gunshot wound to the mouth and his father's .38-calibre revolver, dating from 1913, was at his side.

It was the same method of suicide used by a Marine officer in the film A Few Good Men - which Foster was known recently to have watched.

In the movie, the officer had killed himself because he was distraught about testifying against his commanding officer.

In real life, Vince Foster was distraught at the prospect of being grilled about the shady affairs of Hillary Clinton.

A clear case of suicide, then. Or was it? As the months passed, wild rumours began to grow that a hitman had murdered him because he knew too much.

Tall and handsome, Vince Foster was one of Hillary's closest colleagues and best friends.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, they were partners in a law firm while Bill Clinton was governor of the state. And, naturally, when the Clintons moved to the White House, Vince Foster came, too.

It was unusual for Hillary to have such a close friendship with a man. Since her school days, she had operated most easily among women; and when it came to appointing her own staff at the White House, she chose 29 women and one man.

Her subordinates - who called her "The Big Girl" or later "Big Mama" and wore badges saying "Hillaryland" - had a starry-eyed devotion that was almost cult-like.

One of Hillary's friends said: "They were all afraid to say no to her."

She was a hard taskmaster and would call her staff at home after hours to make trifling requests.

Scroll down for more ...

According to White House chronicler Bob Woodward, she "frequently reduced her personal travelling aide to tears" when the assistant failed to produce something Hillary needed.

She had a temper, but instead of "making nice" afterwards, as Bill did, Hillary withdrew in cool silence.

"One time, Hillary said: 'Mel, your problem is you just aren't mean enough,'" recalled her friend Mary Mel French.

"I couldn't work for her and keep our friendship. She is too dogmatic. She gets so into it that she ends up being mean. That is why she has to have such a young staff. They take it, and they bow and scrape."

According to one commentator, the reason Hillary surrounded herself with women was because she found men too complicated. Indeed, she once told former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who owed her appointment to Hillary's support: "We both know what a**holes men can be."

The one man who was definitely not an a**hole was Vince Foster. Hillary used to say he reminded her of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird - reserved, upright and dependable.

"People gravitated to Vince because he was a world-class listener," recalled a former Little Rock lawyer. "Women were drawn to him not just because he was smart and handsome, but because he seemed to keep secrets."

At the funeral for Hillary's father, who died during the Clintons' first term at the White House, it was on Foster's shoulder that the First Lady rested her slightly over-large head.

Inevitably, this intimate gesture added fuel to rumours that they were - or at least had been - romantically involved. After all, Bill Clinton had been seeking his pleasures elsewhere - so why not Hillary?

Aware of all the talk even before his arrival in Washington, Foster himself raised the subject in his first meeting with the man who would be his immediate boss, White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum.

There was no truth in the rumour, said Foster. And when his wife, Lisa, was asked about it later, she insisted: "I don't think Hillary would do it. I think, in a lot of ways, he felt sort of protective of her."

Hillary had long relied on Foster as a confidant, telling him before Bill's inauguration that, despite being an unelected spouse, she was going to "take command" and be "involved in this presidency" - a conversation he recorded in a journal. In turn, he idolised her.

Did that admiration make him cross a line that would normally have stopped him short? In the weeks before the inauguration, he had worked intensively with another Arkansas lawyer to expunge Bill and Hillary's financial records of a shady land deal - a scandal later known as the Whitewater affair.

Later, there were several official investigations into the Clintons' complex web of financial and real estate dealings, which culminated in criminal convictions for some of their associates, though Hillary and Bill were never prosecuted themselves.

Whitewater was later seen as symptomatic of the culture that existed in Arkansas during Bill's governorship, when the Clintons' connections helped them to enrich themselves.

For example, to augment her $110,000 salary, Hillary had earned large sums from seats on local corporate boards, including Wal-Mart.

One company chairman explained Hillary's presence on his board as "making sure he was in good grace with the people in power."

In that atmosphere, Bill and Hillary developed a sense of entitlement, borrowing from banks operated by political friends and accepting favours from individuals and corporations, such as the free use of private planes.

Was some of this weighing on Vince Foster's mind when he became both White House deputy counsel and attorney for both Bill and Hillary? What is certain is that he was unsettled by the First Lady's increasingly uncompromising demands.

In March 1993, he told a colleague that she had "snapped at him" - a rebuke that "hurt him deeply."

Scroll down for more ...

It was clear that Foster was having difficulty being ordered around by the woman who had recently been his equal.

One of his first jobs in the White House was to try to make sense of the Clintons' false tax returns concerning the Whitewater land investment. A note in his hand-writing, found much later, warned that Whitewater was "a can of worms you shouldn't open."

Another "can of worms" that landed on his desk concerned the collapse of a bank called Madison Guaranty. To his consternation, allegations were being made that funds from the bank had been illegally diverted to Bill Clinton's campaign for governor in the mid-Eighties - and that Bill and Hillary had intervened with state regulators to help keep the bank solvent.

Foster was also fretting over the "excessive" sums Hillary was lavishing on redecoration of the White House.

In the end, though, it was the firing of seven staff - following pressure from the imperious First Lady - that "drove Vince batty," according to White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum.

Hillary had become convinced that the staff in the travel office that served the White House press corps were guilty of "financial mismanagement and waste." Foster was asked to help get rid of them.

In a meeting with him on May 13, 1993, Hillary asked him if he was "on top of" the travel office situation. He assured her that his team was working on it.

Afterwards, Foster noted that Hillary's mood was "general impatience ... general frustration."

Other White House aides later confirmed that she wanted her own "people" in the office, and that everyone felt "there would be hell to pay" if her wishes were defied.

On May 19, the travel office's seven employees were fired - and there was immediate uproar. Allegations of cronyism hit the headlines when it emerged that a distant cousin of Bill was to be put in charge of the office, while a friend of a friend was being promoted to take over some of the White House's air-charter business.

Worse still, none of the charges against the original travel office employees stood up, and their precipitous dismissals became a damaging test of Hillary's honesty.

She now insisted that the firings were not her fault. Others had misconstrued an "off-hand comment": she had meant only to suggest that the staff should "look into" questions about mismanagement.

Hillary also insisted she didn't know the "origin of the decision" to remove the employees, and that she "did not direct that any action be taken."

An official report issued seven years later concluded that her statements had been "factually false."

At the time, Vince Foster felt deeply responsible for the imbroglio and was worried that Congress might investigate. White House aide David Watkins remembers Foster saying to him "My God, what have we done?" and expressing concern that Hillary's role in the firings would come to light.

He urged Watkins to protect "the client" at all costs.

Foster knew that in shielding Hillary, he might have to mislead congressional investigators under oath - a grim prospect for a man who took pride in being a straight arrow.

By mid-July, he had lost more than a stone in weight and seemed unusually subdued. He twice told his wife that he felt under pressure and was thinking of returning to Arkansas.

Talking to a colleague about his dealings with Hillary, he said: "It's not the same." On one matter after another, he confided, she would bark "Fix it, Vince!" or "Handle it, Vince!" and leave him to pick up the pieces.

On July 16, Foster and his wife drove to an inn in Maryland for the weekend. At dinner that night, Foster cried when Lisa asked him "if he felt trapped." Three days later, he called his doctor, who gave him a prescription for the antidepressant Desyrel.

The following night, July 20, he was found dead.

Hillary burst into tears when she was told. But her behaviour, as well as that of staff and associates, in the days following Foster's death was to haunt the administration for years, raising questions about what the Clintons had to hide - about Whitewater, "Travelgate," the failed Arkansas bank and more besides.

The night after the tragedy, White House staff - including Hillary's Chief of Staff - searched Foster's office for a suicide note. Under the noses of the police and FBI, they took away a number of sensitive files.

Later, it was alleged but never proved that the Clintons had combed through these files during the five days before they were handed over.

Other key papers - records for Hillary's legal work on the failed Arkansas bank - appear to have gone missing, too. Although later the subject of a subpoena, the records were not retrieved for more than two years.

Whatever the truth behind all the activity that followed Foster's death, the appearance of concealment was enough to trigger five separate federal inquiries.

There were also three official investigations into Foster's death, all of which concluded that he had committed suicide.

After Foster's funeral in Arkansas, Hillary had difficulty getting out of bed for several days. Her friend's death had "ripped a hole" through her, according to Ann McCoy, a friend from Arkansas.

On the day she returned to her office, a torn-up note on yellow paper was found at the bottom of Foster's briefcase. It was a list of grievances and concerns about life in the White House that he had jotted down in the days before his death.

Nussbaum went to Hillary's office to tell her he'd "found something Vince wrote that may help explain why he did what he did."

Hillary "looked startled," Nussbaum recalled. She glanced at the note, said "I can't deal with this," and abruptly left the room.

The contents of Foster's note were tantalising. At one point, the man who knew so many of the First Couple's secrets had written: "The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff."

It was a comment that can be interpreted to mean that he believed the Clintons were blameless - or that he was worried about some unspecified information that could destroy Bill and Hillary's reputation.

At the very least, the note revealed just how hard working for Hillary had become.

"I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington," Foster had written. "Here, ruining people is considered sport."

• Extracted from For Love Of Politics: The Clintons In The White House by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published by Aurum Press on February 4 at £25.

To order a copy for £22.50 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.