Rating: 
Summary: This is what taking responsibility is truly about
Review: Susan McDougal's book is neither as political, nor as pro-Clinton, as some either expect or want you to believe here.Primarily, it's a narrative of personal growth through unjust incarceration. She spends a good deal of time telling her life story - how, as the middle child in a large family started by a WW II vet and his Belgian war bride, she grew up to fall under the influence of not one but two overbearing and eccentric individuals ... first, her husband James and then her boss, Nancy Mehta. Her first marriage and her employment would sow the seeds for her time of trial later in her life. Mehta, a somewhat scary control freak whom Susan is nicer to in her narrative than I would be, retaliates for her departure by filing bogus criminal charges against her. She only finds out about these from the FBI agent who first contacts her about Whitewater. Thus begins six years of purgatory during which, she realizes, she is truly in control of her own life for the first time. After being convicted of four fraud charges in Whitewater because of her unwillingness to follow her lawyer's advice and shift blame to her former husband (purely her fault, she admits), she is then subpoenaed by Ken Starr's Whitewater grand jury with the implicit understanding, tell us what we want to hear and you can write your own ticket. They don't believe her when she says she knows nothing. She realizes, from talking to her ex-husband, that they are simply using people like her to try to get dirt on Bill Clinton by enticing them to lie. Particualrly if she says she had an affair with him. So she decides she will not validate the process by answering any of the grand jury's questions, fully prepared to accept the reality that she will be imprisoned for contempt. And she is. As one of the few people in American history to serve the full 18 months allowed by statute, she gets diesel-therapied through seven facilities and at one point put in 23-hour isolation lockdown to the point that it starts affecting her mental health. The many women she met in jail moved her, and she they, to the point that she has become an activist on their behalf later. After the 18 months, she still won't talk, and is later acquitted of both criminal charges arising from this and the Mehta allegations. Today, she has been pardoned and can live her life again. If anyone did more to expose the hypocritical political agendas of the Starr team, it was her. We talk a lot of how Americans have died face down in the mud in foreign countries to preserve freedom and democracy. Equally important, though, is our willingness to pay back that debt by standing up for those principles in peacetime, in our own backyards. Susan McDougal did exactly that. While conservatives may try their best here and elsewhere to paint her as some sort of lying thief (and is it just possible, reader from Texas, that she didn't tell because she had nothing to tell? Has anyone, other than the highly suspect David Hale, ever found any evidence she did know that loan was fraudulent?), she took a principled stand. God knows what the increasingly lawless Starr would have been able to get away with if she hadn't drawn a line in the sand.
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Summary: Ken Starr's and the OIC's obiturary
Review: Susan McDougal, a truly remarkable woman, has written a remarkable book. One is not often treated to examples of moral heroism in this day of "what's in it for me", but McDougal's story deserves to be read by every person in America who has ever wondered why they should do the right and painful thing in the face of powerful enemies and overwhelming temptation to save one's self at the expense of another. This is a tale of heroines and heroes, of good friends and false friends, of villians and the lowest scum to ever stride a court room. Ken Starr and his cronies, and those in various jails and federal prisons who tried to assist him in breaking the spirit of this courageous and honest woman, have much for which to answer. If there is a god who metes out punishment and reward at the end of our days, I would not want to occupy Ken Starr's, or any number of other OIC prosecutors' and FBI agents' coffins. Buy this book and read it. Read it to your children and your grandchildren. It will make you all better people, and it is a hell of a good read and a lot of fun!
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Summary: Great book by a true hero!
Review: Susan went to jail for 21 months rather than play ball with a crooked monster named Ken Starr. She knew doing the right thing
would put her in prison, but she stuck to her guns. This book reads like she's sitting there talking to you. Get this book! Read about a real hero who doesn't throw or catch a ball. Read about the meaning or courage, and standing up against the biggest bully on the planet - the out-of-control US federal government.
Susan - great book! You rock! bart bartcop.com
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Summary: Integrity is Not for Sale
Review: The medias depiction of Susan McDougal was way off! This book really opened my eyes to the ultra-conservative movement (powered by the ultra wealthy) that has muscled it's way into power in our country. I was really moved by Susan's story, not only by being blindsided by those she respected and trusted, but also for her ability to take so many negatives and turn them positive. Her effect on fellow inmates was really inspirational.
Rating: 
Summary: A Woman Who Knows the Score
Review: The most ridiculous complaint ever are those made by both men and women who fail to recognize the importance of gender discrimination in a world long acquainted with it, but who would self righteously ignore it, when it comes to the defense of other women and their vulnerable position in life. The fact that marriage exists in the first place is evidence of the fact that men seek control over all women in their lives, not just those who might threaten their authority and privacy. There has never been a time that women have had full control of their own lives so that they could either defend themselves, or that provides the opportunities that come standard on men. Women are always in defensive positions and that leads to bizarre results when women are placed in these awkward situations, neither able to defend principles of justice, nor to defend themselves in a world of overwhelming odds. That reality makes for the strangest of bedfellows, politically, or economically, and results in many women defending dumb and even cruel men for what the world would like to pronounce as no reason, but which, in fact, most know in their hearts. There has never been a time when women were as safe as men, regardless of their status, or position, public or private. For many women, it means a life of endurance as "sufferers," (a term long forgotten, but well applied to women with regard to public status), and often equally applicable in their private lives, for far too many. If the feminist movement or the women's suffrage movement means anything, its underlying basis reflects this desire of women to have the freedom to shed that yoke of compliance in order to be able to address the world as they see the men in their lives do, and with the gusto that is characteristic of those seductive commercials that claim that territory. That has never, and, in the foreseeable future, will never be the case for women, the crippled and handicapped creatures that God provided who so unwillingly fulfill that role to maintain male authority, and prominence. Since prominence and authority often project the territorial domain of males, it is not surprising that the author would willingly put herself in greater danger, intuitively, than she already feels in these high class power circles. Instead, she should be credited with knowing the substance of her situation, and having the courage to endure it, as most women have since time began. After all, boys will be boys, right? and we allow them that wide berth, at the expense of most women.
Rating: 
Summary: A great book for closed minds
Review: The only reason Susan McCrook wouldn't talk was she was afraid she'd end up taking an ADN (Arkansas dirt nap). Case closed.
Rating:
Summary: The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk
Review: The writing in this book is lucid and devoid of exaggeration or self-pity. It is honest and sane, while covering a truly dishonest and insane period of American history. Through the painful experiences of author, Susan McDougal, Whitewater is revealed to have been a shameful witch-hunt, a ruthless attempt to bring down a popular American president. Susan describes her life with Jim McDougal, her early friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton, the uncomplicated facts of the Whitewater land deal, and her ensuing persecution by the Independent Council, Kenneth Starr. Her descriptions of life in prison are disturbing, yet there is light and hope on every page in this book. Susan is a woman who has been "stoned in the square" for refusing to bear false witness against another human being, yet she has retained her decency, softness, intelligence, and even her sense of humor. Read this book!!!
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Summary: Interesting human insight into the Whitewater trial
Review: This book is an autobiography of McDougal, tracing her family life, her 8-year marriage at 20 to then 35-year-old Jim McDougal, her divorce, her ongoing conflict with the Office of the Independent Council in the investigation of Whitewater, her time in jail, her trial in California for theft from Zubin and Nancy Mehta, and the brief aftermath of her court- and jail-oriented life.
Whatever the reader believes McDougal's guilt to be in Whitewater, Madison Guaranty and the Mehta cases, she seems to have a bigger problem of attaching herself to people who need her, but don't care about her. Her husband, an untreated manic-depressive for his adult life, was an entrepreneur, mostly, it seems, because he couldn't keep his attention on anything long enough to settle into a long-term endeavour. He was constantly starting up businesses, real estate deals and companies, banks and financial institutions, losing interest and committing himself to something else just when it was crunch time. Leaving Susan in charge against her will, and apparently against her natural abilities, the businesses would fail due to lack of attention and follow-through. According to the book, the Clinton investment in Whitewater, was a partnership in just such an undertaking. The $300,000 small business loan she signed for from David Hale, she writes, was another example of what she usually did: she did what Jim McDougal told her to do and believed it was the right thing to do. With Nancy Mehta, she writes, she again attached herself to someone needy and mercurial, and who would, when it suited her, turn on and betray the author out of spite and malice.
The book traces the Whitewater investigation in some detail and Jim McDougal's part in the issues at hand, and I am not going to do that here. Where this book resonates is in how she seemed to be maliciously prosecuted by Starr and the OIC. They insisted that she offer them information on the Clintons, and if she did, they would give her "blanket immunity," which included the Mehta charges in California. Though she considered giving them what they wanted to hear, others had and had been paid "walking around money," etc., and had many of their crimes forgiven, a friend told her, "Susan, if you do this, you will be lying for the rest of your life." And that's why she went to jail for civil contempt for 18 months and then withstood a trial on criminal contempt after the impeachment trial of Clinton was over.
The interesting thing about this book was highlighted to me when I told a friend about what I was reading, and he said, "Why would she testify against her friends?" People seem to have an idea that she was staunchly protecting the Clintons, who were her close friends, but that is not the case, according to her book. She knew them through Jim McDougal, who'd been an Arkansas political operative, but she was not close to either Bill or Hillary. She does not maintain contact with them after her marriage, and, frankly, never got along that well with Hillary, whom she found to be withdrawn and perhaps cold at times. She heard about her presidential pardon for the Whitewater guilty verdicts on television. She refused to testify, not to help them but because she felt it would be wrong for her to lie to the OIC to save herself, because she didn't know anything that the Clintons had done wrong, and because she had seen what the OIC did to people who didn't testify in the way that they wanted (perjury charges, etc.).
The time that McDougal spent in jail is well detailed and focuses on the women in jail and their sad situations. She found most of the women to have come from violent and sexually abusive situations, where they had left home or been taken from their homes and had become a kind of detritus of humanity. She writes movingly of the sad case of an Arkansas woman who was convicted of killing her children and was executed, presenting a human and loving picture of the mother, that reminded me of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking.
This is all an underlying theme to McDougal's book, her religious beliefs based on love and charity, rather than heavy "justice" and judgment. The religious hypocrisy of the OIC attorneys and associates sickens her, as they make "the walkin' around folks'" lives miserable and then speak in press interviews about how they pray whilst jogging, etc. Whatever you think of McDougal, that she was a serial grifter, that she hooked on too hard to people who weren't worthy of trust and was manipulated, that she is "spinning" her own part in all these issues, a lively and compelling portrait of a woman who cares for "the least among us" surfaces in this book in an amazing way.
Because I live in Arkansas, I found the book to be loaded with "local color" and information. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: A suprising story
Review: This book is an incredible description of a woman living in the prison system. I thought this was going to be a political rant and I found this book to be fascinating. I could not put it down. It is extremely readable and matter of fact. A must read
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Summary: This book should be compulsory reading
Review: This book is one of the most important books I've read in years and I urge everyone to read it. What Susan McDougal tells us about the right wing zealots who threw her in jail because she refused to lie about Bill Clinton is truly a story that needs to be heard loud and clear throughout our land. Surely there is a special section of hell reserved for Ken Starr and his henchmen and women. McDougal's voice rings true and clear, and she is laugh-out-loud funny. Clearly, her sense of strong humor was one of the many great character traits that helped her survive in the various prisons that the Office of the Independent Council dragged her through in their quest to make her tell lies to suit their own self interests. And the stories she shares of the women she met while encarcerated are truly heart-rending and equally deserving of your attention. Most of all, this is the story of a woman who finds her own strength in the most harrowing of circumstances. Even if you're not interested in politics one way or the other, you should read this book
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