It began, like most Washington tales, with a leak. On Jan. 27, Foster’s name surfaced in The Washington Post as a “leading contender” to replace Joycelyn Elders, fired by Clinton last December for musing publicly about the virtues of teaching masturbation to schoolchildren. A soft-spoken obstetrician-gynecologist and acting director of Nashville’s Meharry Medical College, Foster looked like a sure thing politically: an African-American who stressed abstinence to teenagers in a program to discourage pregnancy. His work earned him recognition in 1991 as one of President George Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light.”
Foster’s three decades as a practicing gynecologist should have been a warning to the White House. It was to Kansas Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, a pro-choice Republican experienced in the treacherous crosscurrents of abortion politics. After learning of Foster’s impending nomination from an administration official at the Jan. 28 White House welfare summit, Kassebaum, who chairs the Labor and Human Resources Committee that will hold confirmation hearings, quickly asked how many abortions Foster had performed. The official didn’t know, but promised to get back to her.
The task of vetting Foster fell to the White House Counsel’s Office. With lawyers in charge, the inquiry never focused on a political strategy to deal with a contentious issue. Instead, a White House attorney named Marvin Krislov pursued narrow legalisms, like how many abortions Foster performed, if any, before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalized the procedure.
In retrospect, the White House made two blunders. It overestimated the appeal of Foster’s teen-abstinence message and underestimated the willingness of congressional Republicans, preoccupied by budget issues, to engage over abortion. “They didn’t realize that anytime this issue comes up, it’s a battle,” says a lobbyist for a pro-choice group. “You don’t just slip it through like a fix in an appropriations bill.”
The White House had help in bungling the nomination. Aides to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala (the surgeon general works for the HHS) held their own vetting sessions with Foster. Asked how many abortions he’d performed, Foster recalled instead one especially troubling procedure, involving a woman who was HIV-positive. Incredibly, the HHS staff construed this to mean that he had done just one abortion. Aides passed their findings on to Shalala, who told Kassebaum.
Oblivious to the misinformation it had circulated, the administration pressed ahead and unveiled Foster. Minutes after Clinton and Shalala introduced him in an Oval Office session on Feb. 2, reporters jumped on the abortion issue. Now it was Press Secretary Mike McCurry’s turn to shrug his shoulders. He said he didn’t know how many abortions Foster had performed, but would try to find out. On Capitol Hill, cautious Republican support for Foster began to crumble. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said Foster “sounded like a good replacement” for Elders. When told that the nominee was a supporter of abortion services, Dole smiled and said, “Well, I think I’ll leave.”
The next day the HHS staff grilled Foster and issued a statement over his name attempting to clarify the abortion question. But the wording was Clintonesque – technically accurate but with vague, coded qualifications. In 30 years as a “private” physician, he said, “I believed that I performed fewer than a dozen pregnancy terminations.” He added that during his career as chief of medicine at two hospitals, “a wide variety of medical procedures and research” were performed.
Pro-choice and anti-abortion groups dug in for a Bork-style war of attrition. The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League announced plans for a nationwide effort to “prevent opponents of choice from isolating and demonizing doctors” who provide abortions. Early last week The National Right to Life Committee released a partial transcript from a 1978 hearing that quotes Foster as saying he has “done a lot of amniocentesis and therapeutic abortions, probably near 700.” Foster denies making the statement.
The White House finally sensed that another nomination was heading over the cliff. It summoned Foster on Monday evening to the Roosevelt Room for a crisis-management meeting led by deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Their mission: clear up once and for all just how many abortions Foster had performed. They assigned a group of Meharry officials to examine Foster’s records.
By Tuesday, the administration had decided it could ill afford another Lani Guinier episode – to be seen walking away once again from a heavily contested nominee. Chief of staff Leon Panetta announced at the morning senior-staff meeting that Clinton intended to stick with Foster regardless of the tally the Bowles team developed.
While presidential aides were long ago hardened to the incivilities of confirmation politics, the rules were new to Foster. Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist, a physician and friend who ran for office last year bragging about his Washington outsiderhood, demonstrated a mastery of the D.C. duck-and-cover. After praising Foster and joining him in the Oval Office the previous week, Frist announced that he would wait for an FBI report before deciding how to vote. White House Communications Director Mark Gearan braced Foster. “Your house is going to be staked out,” he warned him. “The tempest is just beginning.”
On Wednesday, Meharry officials reported back: Foster had performed 39 abortions in private practice and oversaw 55 others while managing clinical trials of an experimental vaginal suppository. Armed with what it believed to be a reliable census, the administration launched a counteroffensive. It began by offering Ted Koppel a White House interview with Foster. By the standards of Washingtonology, it was a peculiar choice, carrying the whiff of endgame. From Baird to Bobby Ray Inman, “Nightline” has become a burial ground for collapsed Clinton appointments.
Tensions over the nomination spawned the usual finger-pointing. As Foster fielded mock “Nightline” questions from White House aides on Wednesday evening, HHS officials also present turned “snippy,” according to one source, when Foster blamed them for bullying him into his inaccurate “less than 12” statement. On the air that night he said: “I should have refused, Mr. Koppel, to answer that question until I knew the exact number.” Clinton was also ready to blame aides. On Thursday, while preparing for his joint appearance with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he asked McCurry for the latest on Foster. McCurry told him he had been talking to reporters about the poor staff work. “Good,” the president replied.
By the end of the week, crucial allies started to fall away. A New York Times editorial called on Clinton to pull the nomination. Democratic Sen. Joe Biden announced he would oppose Foster. He said unabashedly that his decision was based “not on the merits,” but on his anger with the White House for giving “no obvious deep thought” to Foster’s selection. (He retreated later and said he would withhold judgment.) The administration had to scramble to respond to new disclosures – that Foster performed hysterectomies to sterilize six severely retarded women between 1963 and 1973. Foster tried to save himself with visits on Capitol Hill and a speech at George Washington University. “I am standing strong,” he told the audience, and talked about his Tennessee anti-teen-pregnancy campaign. The program is called “I Have a Future.” In Washington, Henry Foster’s future may soon be history.
