VINCE FOSTER `GOT OUT' IN SORROWFUL WAY

Of the many things there are to find strange about the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., counsel and confidant to the president, I found this the most striking.

President Clinton's comment after his friend's shocking death was that he had called Foster the night before his suicide, chatted about 20 minutes and set up an appointment to talk again later in the week.

A man kills himself with an appointment with the president of the United States still on his calendar?

For me, this one detail tells me a lot then, ultimately nothing about the life and bizarre death of Vince Foster. Who among us 250 million Americans gets an opportunity to meet with the nation's leader, much less influence him on some matter?

And availed of this chance, called by the chief executive at times to pal around in the White House, Vince Foster expunged the appointment by driving to a park overlooking the Potomac River, taking in hand a vintage Colt revolver and putting a bullet into his brain.

He was 48, with a wife and three children.

Pulled along with his boyhood pal from Hope, Ark., Foster found himself in the corridors of American power, a legal craftsman in the nation's most prestigious building of government. In the end it mattered not at all ... or maybe too much.

News of Foster's death developed about the time I finished reading Calvin Trillin's latest book, "Remembering Denny," an account of the life and suicide of one of Trillin's college classmates.

Denny, the nickname for Roger Hansen, was the golden boy of the Yale University Class of 1957. Gifted product of a California public school at a time when Ivy League universities were attempting to shed their Eastern private school-only image, Hansen had it all: athleticism, intellect, personality and, as stated by everyone who knew him in those glory days, a "winning smile."

He was a varsity swimmer, a member of the most select fraternity on campus and ultimately was chosen Phi Beta Kappa. On his graduation day, just before he left for Oxford to accept a Rhodes Scholarship, he was the subject of a Life magazine feature, which was photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

The parents of other students gravitated to Hansen, who was charming in return. He challenged Yale professors, who marveled at his academic arguments.

Every class in every school at all times has a student like this, someone who carries a prosperous glow about them. They usually ended up in the yearbook as the person most likely to succeed.

In Hansen's case, his classmates joked about the cabinet posts they would assume once this talented man became president of the United States.

Hansen, however, went on to lead an accomplished yet fairly ordinary life. A professor of international studies at a university in the nation's capital, he steadily withdrew from all those who knew him during his "Denny" days, when his potential was limitless.

In 1991, Hansen arranged to stay in a friend's beach house, one with a garage. It was carbon monoxide he chose to take him from this world.

Trillin spends 210 pages examining Hansen's life and searching for some reason why he would end it. His conclusion is no more satisfying than one any of us can come up with in the death of Vince Foster. In other words, there is no good answer.

As much as any city, Washington resembles a Darwinian field case, Galapagos on the Potomac. Denny Hansen and Vince Foster weren't among the survivors. Further, they found themselves moving in opposite directions in Washington's savage arena, with Hansen the forgotten whiz kid and Foster the fresh whipping boy.

Foster, the best lawyer in the best law firm in Little Rock, found his new-found infamy hard to swallow. In Arkansas, the editorial pages didn't use his name accompanied by invectives. Back home, law partners weren't called "cronies" or considered part of a cabal.

On the night before he took his own life, Foster, his wife in Arkansas, turned down an invitation to watch a movie at the White House. The doomed man agreed he would talk to the president later in the week. The Colt and some unspecified anguish intervened.

Those of us who make modest incomes wonder, as a matter of our nature, about the lives of the affluent. Those of us with limited influence are curious about the lives of the powerful. And when a wealthy, intellectually gifted man with access to the leader of the free world takes a pistol to his own mouth, we scratch our heads and mistake his success for his peace of mind.

We can't stop the question: What gave him the right to slip into the province of the less fortunate? Heck, we practically resent the guy, ending a life of clout and privilege that most people wouldn't dare dream of.

Who knows what demons drove Vince Foster to his final act at Fort Marcy Park? Who knows what he expected of life, what ultimately wasn't fulfilled? In early May, he returned, the triumphant alum, to the University of Arkansas Law School, where he gave the commencement address. "Those of you who do not have your life planned out, don't worry," the president's lawyer told the graduates. "It wouldn't turn out the way you planned it in any event."

Washington, where survivors achieve that status by finishing off the wounded, doesn't change much with the years. Harry Truman, in the White House when Foster was in diapers, said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Vince Foster got out in a big, sorrowful way. And we are all a bit discomforted by the mystery of his exit.