A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Even before the courtroom cleared, Cammarata approached Mitch Ettinger with an urgent question: “Is the insurance gone? Is it gone?” Clinton’s lawyers said that it probably was. Cammarata knew that under the terms of Clinton’s Chubb and State Farm policies the companies were technically obligated to pay for Clinton’s defense only on certain counts against him, and now the judge had dismissed the pertinent part of the case. As Cammarata expected—and as Bennett confirmed with the insurance companies shortly after the hearing—both companies now refused to contribute to a settlement, or even to pay Bennett’s future fees. Bennett would later persuade the insurance companies to remain in the case, but Wright’s order only dimmed whatever lingering chance of a settlement had remained.

  After the hearing, Davis and Cammarata made several more fruitless phone calls to Paula and Steve, asking them to reconsider their opposition to the settlement. On August 29, the two lawyers sent another long and detailed letter to Jones. It began by noting that “serious differences have arisen between us” and announced that “we believe these differences are so basic as to make it necessary for us to withdraw as your counsel as a consequence of your refusal to agree to a settlement.” They warned that “our opponents may portray your refusal as a money-grubbing attempt to further develop this story for profitable book rights, and portray you as inspired and under the influence of right-wing Clinton-haters.” This, indeed, summed up Davis and Cammarata’s own view of their client at this point. “A perception of greed and hatred on your part will lose the public relations battle for your good name which your lawyers have worked long and hard to build up.”

  In September 1997—three years after the case was filed and nine months before it was scheduled to go to trial—Paula Jones had to find herself new lawyers. Susan Carpenter-McMillan took charge of the search.

  “Hello?”

  Linda Tripp answered the phone at 10:23 P.M. on September 18, 1997.

  “Linda?” asked Lucianne Goldberg.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, dear, how are you?”

  “Thanks for calling,” said Tripp.

  “That’s all right,” Goldberg answered.

  “I, uh, number one, didn’t expect you to, necessarily, and I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t.”

  “Oh, why not?” the agent asked.

  “Oh, I know that it was an awkward situation,” Tripp replied, “and then I, in retrospect, feel very badly about it.”

  It had been more than a year since Tripp pulled out of her book project with Goldberg. Tripp had already started taking notes of her conversations with Lewinsky, and she knew what a sensational story she had. Sheepishly, she had approached Tony Snow once again and asked him if Goldberg remained too mad at her to resume their plans for a book. Snow’s call to Goldberg prompted this call to Tripp—which Goldberg taped.

  Goldberg and Tripp spoke three times in September 1997—the agent taped two of the calls—and the transcripts rank among the most extraordinary documents in the entire saga of the Clinton scandals. In many ways, these conversations built a template that the rest of the scandal followed.

  First, though, Tripp had to explain why she had gotten back in touch. “I wanted to chat with you about something that is—is completely ridiculous,” Tripp began. “Um, last September, a young lady who shall remain nameless for the time being took me in as her confidante, and, as it turns out, she had been a, quote, ‘girlfriend of the Big Creep.’ ”

  “Mmm,” Goldberg purred.

  “For—and still is,” Tripp went on.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Uh, she was twenty-one and an intern when it started.”

  Tripp then gave a brief summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship, noting, “I’ve just written down dates, times, phone calls. He’s heavy into phone sex.” She explained that the pair generally met on Sundays in the White House, after the unnamed woman was cleared in by Clinton’s secretary. (Goldberg was fascinated by the details, saying at one point, “Do you think there’s a taping system in the Oval Office?… The slurping sounds would be deafening.”)

  Regarding the former intern, Tripp said, “This is so explosive, it makes the other thing [her previous book idea] pale.”

  Goldberg understood the stakes, but she seems to have had a brief pang of conscience, if only for the benefit of her tape recorder. (Much later, Goldberg jauntily dismissed criticism about the ethics of her tape-recording a friend, writing in an article in Slate, “Note to anyone who calls me after closing time: Expect to be taped. It’s legal and it saves me pawing around my night table for paper and a pen.” All true—except that it was Goldberg who called Tripp.) “The publicity might destroy her and you,” Goldberg told Tripp. “I mean, I love the idea. I would run with it in a second. But do you want to be the instrument of this kid, really, um—”

  The answer was vintage Tripp. “Well, let’s—let me give you some history. She is from Beverly Hills. She, uh, had a very privileged upbringing. She’s not a naïve. I mean, she’s definitely sophisticated. Um, she was not a victim. Um, she’s had affairs with married men before.” In other words, who cared if Lewinsky was destroyed if it would help Tripp’s book project?

  For a moment, it seemed, Goldberg forgot that she was a book agent as well as a political provocateur, and she proposed, “Is there any way to have, uh, this Ms. X … shall we say reached by the Paula Jones people?” Even though Tripp hadn’t said anything about sexual harassment, Goldberg knew that “Ms. X” could prove to be an asset to the Jones lawyers. No, Tripp said, Lewinsky wouldn’t agree to help the Jones team, and anyway, Tripp reminded Goldberg to keep her eye on their book project—which was, after all, the reason she had resumed contact in the first place.

  “I had just scrubbed my whole Maggie [Gallagher] product and started from scratch and come up with a whole different spin”—this one centered around Lewinsky, Tripp explained. But Goldberg was worried that Tripp would look like a “nut case” if she went public before the unnamed woman did. So she suggested leaking the story to Mike Isikoff and then writing the book.

  This was where the stories, in all their gothic complexity, began to merge. Responding to the suggestion that she leak to Isikoff, Tripp said, “Oh, I could do that in a minute.” His story about Willey had just run a few weeks earlier. But there was a problem with this strategy. “But then he’d write the book,” Tripp explained. “He’d write the whole thing.”

  Goldberg, thinking of Newsweek, interjected, “No, he only has a certain amount of space.”

  “Oh, no,” Tripp replied. “He’s working on a book deal. He’s doing an all-the-president’s-women kind of deal.” Isikoff was using Tripp as a source for the project he had started with Glenn Simpson of The Wall Street Journal, who had by this point dropped out of the project. Isikoff had apparently even shared the working title of his volume with Tripp, as he had with others. Tripp had to factor into her plans that Isikoff was a potential competitor in the Clinton sex book market. (Of course, this Tripp-Goldberg-Isikoff scheming about book projects was taking place at the same time as Susan Carpenter-McMillan was courting publishers with promises that Paula Jones would deliver the precise dimensions of the president’s penis.)

  What to do amid this tangle of motives? For the moment, Tripp and Goldberg resolved to give Isikoff enough of the story to cloak it with the respectability of Newsweek, but they would omit enough so that Tripp could write her own book. Goldberg could scarcely contain her excitement, saying, “I’m very interested in this, needless to say …”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Tripp answered

  “… my tabloid heart beats loud,” Goldberg concluded.

  A few days later, in a conversation that (ironically) Goldberg did not record, she first suggested that Tripp tape her own telephone conversations with the still unnamed young paramour of the president’s. Tripp’s notes were fine, Goldberg said, but the only way anyone would believe that the relationship actually took place would be if the woman said so in
her own words. In a third conversation, on September 29, which Goldberg did tape, the agent raised the issue once again. “I checked that out. One-party taping is fine … it’s fine. There’s no problem with that,” Goldberg said. The agent had received bad legal advice—she said later it came from a journalist friend. Unlike in New York, one-party taping was not legal in Maryland, where Tripp lived. But Tripp, who had a lawyer at the time, did not think to ask anyone except her literary agent, and after this talk, she went out and bought a voice-activated tape recorder at Radio Shack. (Later, when Tripp became a reviled public figure because of her taping of Lewinsky, she justified her behavior by asserting that she was just “protecting herself” in the face of Lewinsky’s demands that she lie under oath. The tapes of Tripp’s conversations with Goldberg demonstrate just how preposterous Tripp’s explanation was. In the fall of 1997, Tripp had not been subpoenaed for anything, so Lewinsky couldn’t have asked her to lie under oath. The Goldberg tapes showed that Tripp taped Lewinsky for simple reasons—to gather material for a book and to help destroy a president she despised.)

  As Goldberg and Tripp weighed their next steps in this third conversation of September, the problem of the competing Isikoff book remained, and the Newsweek reporter seemed aware of it as well. Tripp told Goldberg that she had hedged when Isikoff asked whether she was writing a book. According to Tripp, Isikoff suggested that they could be teammates of a sort in pursuing their respective studies of the president’s sex life. Quoting Isikoff, Tripp said, “And he said, ‘Well, in the present climate, I doubt you’d find a publisher.… But if I were to, uh, work with you and, you know, allow some of this to get out into the mainstream media, then that would set you up for a’—which is precisely what you and I had talked about.”

  “Right,” Goldberg agreed. They had indeed discussed just this plan in their first conversation of the month.

  If events unfolded as Tripp said they did, this was dubious ethical territory for the reporter. If Isikoff and Tripp were both stoking the story so they could profit from it in the form of book deals—and not disclosing that fact to Isikoff’s readers, as he had not in his August story—that would have been inappropriate, to say the least. Likewise, it would have been wrong for him to advise Tripp on how to position herself in the marketplace of Clinton sex books. In the book that he did write on the case, which was entitled Uncovering Clinton, Isikoff claimed that Tripp “invented” this conversation with him. If she did, it is curious that Tripp knew the precise title of Isikoff’s planned book; moreover, Tripp was obviously not lying about her own interest in writing a book. Tripp told me that she did not invent the conversation and that she stands by her account of her dealings with Isikoff.

  And Goldberg, for her part, continued to behave as if Tripp and Isikoff were in cahoots. She also wanted a few more details about the sex between Clinton and the former intern. (G: “It’s just blow jobs?” T: “It’s not just. It’s also been, to the extent that both of them are exposed totally,… he’ll like press it to almost penetration.” G: “This poor woman. She must be going out of her mind.”) Finally, Goldberg asked Tripp to set a meeting so both of them could dribble out a few details to Isikoff and launch Lewinsky’s name into the mainstream news media. Tripp agreed. “It does twist me in knots,” Tripp explained. “And every day that I have to listen to her, I keep thinking, ‘The bastard should be exposed.’ ”

  Tripp set up the meeting between herself, Goldberg, and Isikoff in cloak-and-dagger fashion. She gave Isikoff the code name “Harvey” and Goldberg the moniker “New York.” At six o’clock on the evening of October 6, the trio assembled at the Washington apartment of Lucianne’s son Jonah. In his book, Isikoff—who at this point had spent a half decade investigating Bill Clinton’s sex life and who was about to learn the name of the former White House intern who was the president’s lover—asserted that he regarded this meeting as no big deal. “The issue that was much more on my mind at that moment,” Isikoff wrote, “was the latest on the campaign finance scandal.”

  The October 6 meeting marked the third important moment in the case when Clinton’s enemies used Isikoff to launch attacks about the president’s purported sexual behavior. First, Cliff Jackson had given him the exclusive with Paula Jones; second, Joe Cammarata had set the reporter on the trail of Kathleen Willey; now, finally, Tripp and Goldberg were giving him the biggest story of all. In each of these cases, Clinton’s accusers could have made the charges themselves; but as the ill-fated Jones press conference of February 1994 showed, the news media tended to discount direct accusations. Better, instead, to launder the charges through an interested reporter. This did carry a risk. Some politically savvy journalists might have discounted the allegations, or, more likely, they might have exposed the motives of those who had tried for so many years to use sex to bring down this president. But Jackson, Cammarata, Goldberg, and Tripp had invested wisely in Michael Isikoff.

  For the meeting in Jonah’s apartment, Tripp had brought two samples of her tapes along with her. She volunteered to play them for Isikoff, who was somewhat rushed because he had to appear on CNBC’s talk show Hardball. But the reporter had a fair question: “What good is it going to do to hear a voice if I don’t know whose it is?” This was the question that Isikoff had been asking Tripp since April, when she first told him about the former intern. “Tripp hesitated,” Isikoff recounted. “She looked at Goldberg, who seemed to nod.”

  “Okay,” Tripp said. “Her name is Monica Lewinsky.”

  Isikoff started taking notes as Tripp began giving him the outline of Lewinsky’s relationship with the president. The idea that the president had promised Lewinsky a job back at the White House interested Isikoff. Could he call some sources there to check it out? Tripp said no. She feared that Isikoff’s snooping would get back to Lewinsky, who would then realize that Tripp had betrayed her confidences. Isikoff could not follow up at all on the leads that Tripp and Goldberg were giving him.

  So what about the tapes? Tripp said there was no “smoking gun” in these conversations, but did Isikoff want to hear them? All of those present agree that Isikoff did not listen to the tapes, although they remembered his reasons differently. Goldberg asserts that Isikoff had to make a television appearance and simply ran out of time. Isikoff himself says the fact that Tripp taped Lewinsky without her consent troubled him, and that he feared becoming “part of the process” of her ongoing taping of her young friend. Tripp recalls that Isikoff refused to listen for “ethical” reasons, but adds that Isikoff “suggested” that she make more tapes. Moreover, Goldberg promised Isikoff that he could see courier receipts of Lewinsky’s gifts to the president—because the agent had arranged for Tripp to propose that Lewinsky use a company that was run by one of Goldberg’s relatives. In any event, the meeting ended with everyone agreeing to stay in touch.

  But something important had occurred as well. Up to this point, the three important narratives of the story—the Starr investigation, the Jones case, and the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship—had existed separately from one another. But now two of them were about to be joined. As the fall of 1997 wound down, Tripp would continue taping, Isikoff would keep monitoring her progress, and Lucianne Goldberg would make sure that the lawyers for Paula Jones knew all about Monica Lewinsky.

  8

  “Good Strong Christian Men”

  On the morning of September 8, John Whitehead opened The Washington Post on his Virginia estate and discovered that Paula Jones needed new lawyers. A darkly handsome man of Bill Clinton’s age, Whitehead never read newspapers out of idle curiosity. When he saw the right kind of story, Whitehead jumped.

  Whitehead represented a fusion of the diverse forces that had shaped his unlikely life. A working-class kid from Peoria, he drifted through the sixties with a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. He wrote for alternative papers, shrugged his way through the University of Arkansas Law School (where he met a young professor named Clinton), and graduated from pot to cocaine and LSD
. He played Sgt. Pepper every day. Then, in 1974, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior and turned his life around—mostly.

  From the day he was born again, Whitehead devoted his professional life to the burgeoning Christian-right political movement, but he never entirely abandoned his antiestablishment roots, either. In 1982, he founded the Rutherford Institute, a conservative public interest law firm based in Charlottesville, Virginia, named to honor an obscure seventeenth-century Scottish cleric who had argued for the primacy of God’s law over man’s. By the mid-nineties, Rutherford had a staff of fifty, a budget of more than $4 million a year, and a network of cooperating attorneys around the country. (The model was Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP Legal Defense Fund.) The institute never made its name on one big case, but Whitehead attached himself to scores of smaller fights for his favorite causes—against evolution in schools, for prayer in schools, and for home schooling. (For his part, Whitehead didn’t belong to any church and instead conducted religious observances for his family at home.)

  Whitehead once worked for Jerry Falwell but, more recently, had feuded with Pat Robertson. Whitehead’s agenda seemed more personal than political. Except for the cases it actually litigated, the Rutherford Institute appeared to exist mostly to promote its founder, who was paid nearly $200,000 a year. Rutherford paid to broadcast Whitehead’s radio commentaries (Freedom Under Fire) and to promote his speeches, and the institute even distributed copies of the United States Constitution with Whitehead’s picture on the cover. Whitehead never lost his taste for rock and roll, and the institute published a slick glossy magazine called Gadfly, edited by his son, which included decidedly nonsectarian articles on people like Frank Zappa and Patti Smith. Whitehead wasn’t above recalling a little counterculture poetry to make his points. For example, Whitehead shared many Clinton critics’ abiding interest in the distinguishing-characteristic issue, and the lawyer took to announcing that the president would have to submit to a physical examination to settle the issue. “Someone is not telling the truth in this case,” he said. “And, you know, it’s like the Bob Dylan song when he says, ‘Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.’ ” In truth, Whitehead was as much publicity hound as partisan. (He did, however, come to share the obligatory fear of being murdered that came with being a Clinton adversary; after taking the Jones case, Whitehead bought a remote-control starter for his car, to detonate bombs before he got too close.)