On the afternoon of 20 July 1993, the body of Vincent Foster, Deputy White House Counsel and close childhood friend of President Bill Clinton, was discovered in Fort Marcy Park, a former Civil War fortification up the Potomac River from Washington DC. Foster was lying on an embankment behind a Civil War cannon with a shot to the head and a revolver in his hand, making him ‘the highest-ranking White House official who had ever taken his own life’, as the Baltimore Sun described it. Only six months into the Clinton administration, Foster's death was a devastating shock to the Foster and Clinton families. It was also an opportunity for the president's adversaries to argue that something was deeply wrong in the White House, even when the FBI and an independent council concluded that the cause of death was suicide. Conspiracy theories were rife over the following months, including the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who suggested, without evidence, that Foster was murdered in Hillary Clinton's apartment and then carried to Fort Marcy Park.

The reality was both more tragic and more mundane. Vince Foster had worked in Clinton's transition team in late 1992 and moved to the White House following the January inauguration, leaving his family behind in Little Rock for schooling. Foster felt burdened by work pressures, leading to bouts of insomnia following long days of administration; he lost weight and his concentration wavered, took the antidepressant Desyrel and may have consulted a psychiatrist in his final days. Occupational health reforms of the late twentieth century did little to address the pressures faced by federal workers, and Foster, a trained Arkansas trial litigator, struggled with the political and media scrutiny of Washington DC. Right-wing critics sought to discredit a torn-up suicide note found in Foster's briefcase six days later in an effort to expose ‘the Clinton crowd’, even though the fragments of Foster's letter confirmed the workplace as the source of his depression – ‘I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport’ – and in spite of independent experts concluding that this was an act of suicide.