McDougal Speaks Out
Whitewater figure Susan McDougal said she didn't expect a last-minute pardon from President Clinton, adding she will never forgive Kenneth Starr for prosecuting her in the first place.
A former friend and business partner of Bill and Hillary Clinton, McDougal was pardoned by the outgoing president just hours before he left office on Saturday. She spent nearly two years in prison for refusing to testify against the Clintons before a federal grand jury investigating the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas.
On CBS News' The Early Show on Monday, McDougal recalled her initial reaction to seeing the news about the pardon on TV.
"You could have heard a pin drop. I don't think anyone said a word for a while and then, you know, it just hit like a ton of bricks," she said.
Yet during the last days of the Clinton presidency, McDougal doubted whether she'd see a pardon.
"I kept thinking there was some bitterness or some resentment by the Clintons after the years of the Whitewater investigation, she explained. "I haven't talked to them in so many years. I don't know how they feel, you know. So, no, I didn't expect it. I wanted it badly, but I didn't expect it."
"Everyday I woke up, I knew I had done the right thing," McDougal added. "I never regretted it once. But, you know, I never knew how the president felt about that. You know, it could have been that he didn't agree with my actions on that."
As for Kenneth Starr, McDougal told The Early Show that she holds "tremendous bitterness" toward the former independent counsel to this day.
"I will never forget the day that he asked me to lie to save myself," she said of Starr. "That day, I had the choice of going down a road that was pretty easy and walking away, but it was lying about someone else - or I had the road of going to jail, which was pretty tough and I will never forgive that. I will never forgive that."
Starr's Whitewater investigation was ultimately expanded to include Mr. Clinton's affair with one-time White House intern Monica Lewinsky. That probe led to the president's impeachment by the House in 1998 and his acquittal by the Senate the following year.
McDougal's pardon was among 140 issued by Mr. Clinton on his final morning in the Oval Office. That batch of pardons came one day after the president admitted to making evasive and misleading statements about his relationship with Lewinsky in the Paula Jones case. Mr. Clinton's admission was part of a deal that his lawyers reached with Starr's successor Robert Ray, bringing an end to the independent counsel's investigation without an indictment or a disbarrment of the now ex-president.
As for McDougal, the former Clinton friend said she overcame a lot of bitterness and isolation about prison by helping fellow women inmates learn to read while she was behind bars, but noted that a psychological hudle remained after her release.
"I was innocent and I was wrongly convicted and ... I don't know of a worse thing that can happen to someone," she said.
"If you're guilty, you can carry that with yourself and say you'll go forward, but I was an innocent person and I carried that every day of my life, no matter what happiness was going on," she added. "That was a weight on my shoulders and that was absolutely lifted the day I got the pardon."
Now, McDougal feels relieved and ready to move on, thanks to Mr. Clinton's pardon.
"I would love to thank him. I'm sure that he knows how grateful I am," she said. "I told my mother, it must be the feeling Miss America gets when she gets the crown, because this is no greater feeling in the world than having that lifted off of you."