A Vast Conspiracy Read online

One of the ironies of Linda Tripp’s emergence as a conservative heroine was that, in truth, she represented one of the archetypes that the right wing most despised. She was the civil service lifer, whose mastery of the arcana of job rights, seniority, pay levels, and retirement bred in her a sense of entitlement that scarcely existed anymore in the private sector. She could figure out her pension benefits to the third decimal. By the time she injected herself into the story of the Clinton presidency, she, like so many people in this saga, had already had a difficult and unhappy life, and she had learned that she could rely on no one except herself.

  Tripp liked to refer to herself as a “hick from Morris County,” a largely rural part of New Jersey where she was born in 1949. Linda Carotenuto’s father was a high school teacher who married a German woman he met during his service in World War II. Tripp’s adolescence, like Lewinsky’s, was marred by her parents’ acrimonious divorce, which was precipitated by her father’s adulterous relationship with a coworker. In 1971, she married Bruce M. Tripp, a career Army officer. They spent two decades together, raising two children near a string of Army bases. Tripp had a series of what she called “jobettes,” mostly secretarial, as her husband worked his way up to colonel. In 1990, when their children were teenagers, they divorced.

  The following year, Tripp found a job at the White House as a secretary for a group of people on the communications staff, and she quickly earned a reputation for diligence and competence. She was kept on after Clinton’s victory, but her attitude toward her employers changed. As with Aldrich, her complaints ran more to the cultural than the political changes she saw at the White House. (In fairness, the arrogance of many members of the new Clinton team alienated even some potentially sympathetic members of the permanent White House staff.) Aldrich later told an interviewer, “Linda Tripp and I and about two thousand other permanent White House employees shared a scorn for what we were seeing.”

  Under Clinton, Tripp was assigned to the counsel’s office, which proved to be a magnet for controversy in the early days of the administration. The turning point in her career came with Vince Foster’s suicide. Tripp would sometimes boast that she was the last person to see him alive—“I served him his last hamburger,” she said—and she was an eyewitness to the panic and chaos that followed his death. In a series of e-mails that were disclosed during the many investigations of Foster’s death, Tripp was withering about her superiors. Tripp called her boss, Bernard Nussbaum, and two of his colleagues “the three stooges” and wrote in another message, “So it took until Monday to figure out if [the briefcase] should be looked at? Christ. And we’re the support staff?”

  Notwithstanding her distaste for many of the Clinton staffers, Tripp made it her business to learn as much as she could about their personal lives, especially if they intersected with the president’s. According to Tripp’s grand jury testimony, no fewer than three women at the White House confessed to her that they had had sexual contacts with Clinton. Two of them, Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey, became well known, but Tripp enthusiastically shared news of the third with the grand jury as well. Debbie Schiff had parlayed a job as a flight attendant on Clinton’s 1992 campaign plane into the position of receptionist in the West Wing of the White House.

  “One day,” Tripp said, in a particularly breathless moment in her testimony, Schiff “came up to me and said, ‘I won.’ And I said, ‘What did you win?’ And she said, ‘I have my twenty minutes every morning.’ I said, ‘With who?’ She said, ‘With the president.’ And I said, ‘For what?’ And she said, ‘You figure it out.’ Subsequently, she said they had a sexual relationship.… She was so comfortable in his presence that she would, for instance, come in and wear his shoes and traipse around the Oval Office complex and out in the lobby wearing his shoes. And she’s tiny, just a little tiny girl, and he is a big man, and it was obvious right away that she was wearing gunboats on her feet compared to her little feet. So—” At this point, the prosecutor from Starr’s office finally cut in and ended the bizarre monologue. But Tripp’s meticulous recounting of Schiff’s purported activities showed how much attention she paid to the president’s sex life. (For her part, Schiff denied to Starr’s prosecutors that she had had a sexual relationship with Clinton.)

  In time, though, Tripp felt the need to escape the White House, and she arranged an advantageous departure. In the spring of 1994, Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel who had been her direct supervisor, was forced to resign, and Tripp had to look for a new job. There was an opening for a political appointee in the press office at the Pentagon. The job involved scheduling interviews with the then secretary of defense, William Perry. Following the usual policy for political appointees, the supervisor of the position, a fellow named Willie Blacklow, sought a “priority list” of candidates from the White House. When he got the list, Blacklow was astonished to see it contained only one name—Linda Tripp. Blacklow had seen many such lists, but he had never before seen a job-seeker preemptively eliminate all competition. Blacklow wanted someone else for the job, and he protested about the one-name list to his own boss, Cliff Bernath. “The White House is trying to shove somebody down my throat, and I am not going to take it,” Blacklow said. But Bernath pointed out that anyone who possessed the bureaucratic skills to put herself on a list of one was going to get hired.

  Willie Blacklow could have been Linda Tripp’s Doppelgänger. Before he was hired as a deputy assistant secretary of defense, the last time Blacklow had visited the Pentagon was when he and several thousand others had tried to levitate the building, in a famous anti–Vietnam War protest of 1967. He spent most of the intervening decades as a press secretary to various liberal congressmen. Not surprisingly, then, his first meetings with Tripp were inauspicious. Within a week of arriving, she told Blacklow that she wanted a private office, which no one at her level received at the Pentagon. He told her no. She went over his head to Bernath, who told her the same thing. Officials in Secretary Perry’s office began to complain about Tripp’s peremptory manner. Tripp also had a great deal of trouble getting along with the woman with whom she shared a cubicle, Susan Wallace. The two women had screaming fights, and their desks soon had to be separated.

  But worse was to come. Tripp accused Wallace of listening in on her conversations. Much later, when Tripp’s name became synonymous with the surreptitious whir of a tape recorder, some Pentagon colleagues would shake their heads at the memory of one particular Tripp outburst. “She’s eavesdropping on my phone calls!” Tripp screamed about Wallace. “I’m going to sue that woman!”

  Blacklow recognized that he had to make a change. He shifted Tripp to another job, where she ran a program that each year allowed a group of prominent civilians to tour military installations. She succeeded in this difficult job, and she and Blacklow even developed a friendship of sorts, based largely on their shared need to sneak cigarettes in “pigeon alley,” a small airspace between the D and E rings of the Pentagon. For the most part, Tripp kept her political opinions to herself, but Blacklow would sometimes bellyache about the difficulties of getting a decision out of the president’s people. “It’s crazy over there at the White House,” Blacklow sighed.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Tripp replied.

  When Aldrich’s book was published, in the summer of 1996, Tripp had already been gone from the White House for almost two years. But the former secretary couldn’t resist investigating whether she, too, might cash in the same way. She told her idea to Tony Snow, a journalist who had served with her in the Bush White House. Snow said Tripp needed a literary agent. “You ought to talk to Lucianne Goldberg,” Snow said. “She’s a piece of work.”

  Lucianne Goldberg seemed to emerge from a virtual space somewhere between the Republican National Convention and the bar scene in Star Wars. She had banked a lifetime of obsessions—about sex, gossip, secret tape recordings, tell-all books, and conservative politics—as if in preparation for her moment in this case. She acted throughout with a kind of
joyous malice, pretending at every moment to be outraged by one thing or another (usually the behavior of Bill Clinton), but in truth she was thrilled to be, finally, at the center of the action. Like Norma Desmond descending the staircase at the end of Sunset Boulevard, with her heart full of murder and longing, Goldberg was ready for her close-up. But unlike Desmond, the silent-screen diva who was left behind in a changing world, Lucianne Goldberg reflected the new face of American politics—personal, petty, and mean.

  Born in Boston in 1935, Lucianne Cummings dropped out of high school at sixteen and claims to have had fifteen jobs before she was twenty-one. Since then, she has had nearly that many careers. She was a clerk at The Washington Post, ran a one-woman public relations firm (the sign on the door boasted of nonexistent offices in London and Paris), and served as a Democratic campaign worker and low-level White House staffer under Lyndon Johnson. After an early marriage and divorce, she married Sid Goldberg, a Republican who worked for a newspaper syndicate. In 1972, a friend of Sid’s, the right-wing columnist Victor Lasky, introduced Lucianne to Murray Chotiner, a veteran political operative for President Richard Nixon. Chotiner hired Goldberg at $1,000 per week to be a spy on George McGovern’s campaign plane as the representative of the fictional Women’s News Service. After Watergate, she ghostwrote Maureen Dean’s bestselling novel, Washington Wives, wrote a couple of less successful novels on her own, and began work as a literary agent, mostly for conservative authors with incendiary tales to tell. (Goldberg’s most recent novel, Madame Cleo’s Girls, published in 1992, featured a literary agent who “was known for her representation of sensational nonauthors and their ghostwritten stories.”)

  In 1985, Goldberg materialized at the second trial of Claus von Bulow for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. The literary agent was trying to sell a book by one David Marriott, who was, among other things, a male prostitute, a drug dealer, and an acquaintance of several people involved in the case. Marriott had hidden a recorder in his jockey shorts and made tapes of von Bulow and others. Marriott’s tapes turned out to be less than dispositive, and he never wrote a book, but at the trial in Providence, Rhode Island, Goldberg became friendly with the writer Dominick Dunne. For the next thirteen years, they spoke almost every morning; they hashed over the tabloids and Goldberg listened to Dunne’s tales of life on the A-list dinner circuit.

  Virtually all of Goldberg’s projects appeared to involve, in one way or another, tell-alls and tapes. Madame Cleo’s Girls concerned the efforts of a celebrated madam to recite (on tape) and then sell a sensational memoir about her famous clients. The story mixed soft-core sex (“It got better and better until he stopped counting the orgasms”), nose-against-the-glass voyeurism (“The black Super Puma helicopter hovered above the Mosby Media office tower”), and breezy contempt for the famous in general and politicians in particular (“The Connecticut lawyer who paid to watch Sandrine masturbate while he sat on the couch chewing the ear of a teddy bear was running for Congress and had gone back to his home district to campaign”). There wasn’t much of a theme to the novel—“Everyone is for sale” was about as close as it came. Nor was there a clear pattern to Goldberg’s life. As she often said, she hated being bored, and she loved “dish.”

  That, more or less, was the picture Goldberg presented of herself. A political thrill-seeker. A good-time girl. With her cigarette holder and her booze-and-nicotine-ravaged voice, Goldberg made herself into a caricature, a kind of joke—the “Auntie Mame of politics,” as one former client described the image. Yet this picture served to free Goldberg from any real responsibility for her actions. This, too, was a pattern in her life. In fact, in addition to crazy stories and many laughs, Goldberg left a trail of wreckage behind her.

  Goldberg’s literary agency was more of a hobby than a business. She operated it out of her home and never made much of a living from it. One advantage of Goldberg’s preference for one-shot sensational authors was that few people wanted to do business with her for a second time. Her best-known client, the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, sued Goldberg for breach of contract and fraud and won a judgment of $41,407. (Goldberg’s lawyer in that case then sued her for not paying his bill; Goldberg never contested the suit, and the judge entered a default judgment against her, which she never paid.) Goldberg used to tell friends that she had two sons who were killed in an automobile accident—a made-up story. Her marriage was often troubled; a friend was surprised to discover, after she lent Goldberg her apartment several times so she “would be closer to the theater,” that she was using it for private afternoons with a prominent Washington writer.

  Once Goldberg emerged as a national figure, many people who knew her well were astonished to hear the strict, moralistic tone she took toward the president’s behavior. “He’s such a weak man, such a bad man,” she said any number of times. In one interview, she said, “We’re all saying ‘blow jobs’ at dinner parties. I mean, I’m old enough to be shocked by that.… He is the president of the United States. He sets the moral tone for this country.” Like many of Clinton’s critics, Goldberg displayed contempt for the president’s roots in Arkansas. “Borderline trailer trash,” she called him—which recalls Aldrich’s dismissal of the president and his friends as having Berkeley values “with an Appalachian twist.”

  Yet Goldberg’s books abounded in blow jobs—and phone sex and bondage and more—and she often told a story about herself that resembled the one Monica Lewinsky would tell Linda Tripp. On any number of occasions, Goldberg told friends that when she worked in the White House—that is, when she was just a few years older than Lewinsky was in 1995—she had had an affair with President Johnson. There is, of course, no way to verify the claim now; and Goldberg, after she became famous, took to denying that she had ever said she had slept with Johnson. Still, the irony—her outrage at an affair that seemed to duplicate one she had claimed as her own—was extraordinary.

  In any event, Goldberg was only too happy to chat with Linda Tripp about her book idea. From the moment they first spoke in 1996, Lucianne Goldberg took on the role of Linda Tripp’s id, always pushing her to do what she, Tripp, really wanted to do anyway—that is, destroy the president and make some money in the bargain. After all, as Goldberg wrote of her fictional alter ego, this agent “prided herself on being a ‘closer.’ ”

  “This is going to be bigger than Gary Aldrich,” Goldberg confided on the telephone. “She was right in the center. They can’t get anything on her. We need to do it fast. I just can’t tell you her name yet. Let’s call her ‘Joan Dean.’ ”

  Goldberg was talking to Maggie Gallagher, a conservative columnist for the New York Post. After a few conversations with Tripp, Goldberg was ready to move. Gallagher agreed to talk to Tripp on the telephone, hear her story, and then prepare a book proposal. All through July 1996, Gallagher and Tripp would speak almost every night—a total of fifteen or twenty hours of conversations. In their talks, Tripp told Gallagher that she was worried that the financial payoff for the book would not justify the risk it would present to her career. She was a political appointee at the Pentagon, so she no longer enjoyed civil service protections. Tripp told Gallagher she was earning about $80,000 a year, more than she had ever expected she would make in her life. Still, she plowed ahead, with Tripp rambling into the night and Gallagher scribbling notes. Tripp’s paranoia prompted her to impose one condition for their conversations—a rather extraordinary one, in light of what was to come. Tripp refused to allow Gallagher to tape-record their conversations.

  Gallagher shared Tripp’s rather starchy and proper demeanor, and they convinced each other that their book was not really about Clinton’s sex life. It was, they said, a more generalized exposé of the shoddy operations at the White House. Goldberg, in contrast, had no such illusions. She knew the appeal of the book lay in what Tripp could say about what she called “the graduates”—women employees at the White House who purportedly owed their careers to their sexual relationships with Bill Clinton. (At
the time of Tripp’s 1996 book proposal, her list of graduates did not include Monica Lewinsky, who had not yet confided in Tripp.) Goldberg knew the sex would sell the book, and she boasted to Alfred Regnery, the head of the right-wing publishing house that had scored with Aldrich’s memoir, that she had another hot one in the pipeline for him.

  The trio of women—Goldberg, Tripp, and Gallagher—decided to title the book Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw at the Clinton White House, and Gallagher’s proposal eventually ran to fifty pages. The chapter on the “graduates” was entitled “The President’s Women.” On August 6, Gallagher traveled to a restaurant in New Jersey, near Tripp’s mother’s home, to meet Linda in person for the first time. Tripp had only minor changes to make on the proposal, and Goldberg prepared to begin circulating it. Then, just a few days later, Tripp called Goldberg and pulled out of the project. She felt that the financial risks did not justify the rewards, especially since Gallagher was going to receive a third of the proceeds. Gallagher was miffed. She had put in all the work on the proposal for no compensation, and now there was not going to be any payoff at the end. But Gallagher’s anger paled next to Goldberg’s. In part, her concern was simply financial; no book meant no money for the agent. But it was more than that, too. For Goldberg, Tripp’s book represented a passport to the action, the deal flow, and a chance to embarrass a president she despised. On the telephone with Tripp, Goldberg scoffed at her misgivings. “Who do you think you are,” Goldberg asked her putative client, “the queen of England?”

  With the Tripp book project on what turned out to be a temporary hold, another chronicler of Clinton’s personal life was getting back into business. A few days after Jones filed her lawsuit against the president, Isikoff had quit The Washington Post and signed on at Newsweek, where he served as the in-house expert on Clinton’s sex life. As Bob Bennett and Lloyd Cutler had figured when the suit was filed more than two years earlier, the press had lost interest when the case bogged down in appeals on legal issues. But shortly before the 1996 election, Stuart Taylor, Jr., had written a widely read piece on the case in The American Lawyer, suggesting that the case deserved to be taken seriously. The election, the Taylor article, the presence of an expert like Isikoff, and, of course, the inherent sex appeal of the story pushed Newsweek to revisit the Jones case as 1997 began.