A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  In a conversation taped on the afternoon that she and Goldberg would later meet with Isikoff, Tripp called Monica at the Pentagon and told her that she had no chance of ever returning to the White House. Tripp’s friend “Kate” at the NSC had made it clear: Monica would remain persona non grata. Lewinsky later testified that this news from Tripp was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Tripp stoked her friend’s anger and insisted that Clinton be made to pay for all the disruption he had caused in her life. On the telephone that evening, Tripp helped Lewinsky draft a letter to the president in which she demanded that he help her find a job, preferably in New York, where Monica’s mother was moving. On the telephone, Lewinsky read a draft of her letter to the president: “ ‘I’d like to ask you to secure a position for me.’ ”

  “Right,” Tripp said.

  “Okay, fine … but you know, I don’t know,” Lewinsky jumped in, suddenly irritated. “Maybe I’m being an idiot. I don’t want to have to work for this position.”

  “Say that again,” Tripp replied.

  “I want it to be given to me,” said Lewinsky, displaying her sense of entitlement.

  “Right,” Tripp agreed. “You don’t want to go through the whole interview process.”

  This conversation captured the first moment in what would become an important new chapter of the story—the president’s role in Lewinsky’s job hunt in New York. Indeed, in his impeachment trial, one of the main charges against Clinton was that he tried to buy Lewinsky’s silence with a job in New York. Yet the record in the case shows that Tripp instigated this entire episode under false pretenses: Tripp had lied to Monica about her conversation with “Kate.” In interviews with Starr’s investigators, Kate Friedrich of the National Security Council denied ever telling Tripp that Lewinsky would never get a job at the White House; indeed, Friedrich had never even heard of Lewinsky until the story broke in 1998. Tripp had fabricated this “last straw” in Lewinsky’s White House job hunt so that her young friend would start making new demands for the president to find her a different job. Had Tripp told Lewinsky the truth, the former intern might never have reached out to Vernon Jordan, Bill Richardson, and, of course, Bill Clinton in an effort to find a job in New York.

  And as Tripp nudged Lewinsky to increase her demands on her former paramour, she made certain that the young woman continued to use the Goldberg family courier service. Apropos of nothing in particular one day, Tripp volunteered, “You’re using a very reliable and reputable courier service.” In the middle of October, Tripp called Isikoff with a message to call “New York.” Isikoff did call Lucianne Goldberg, who, in turn, instructed him to call Jeff Harshman, the proprietor of Speed Service. At Goldberg’s urging, Harshman showed Isikoff the receipts from the occasions when Betty Currie or her designee had signed for Monica Lewinsky’s letters to the White House.

  As her dream of a White House job faded, Lewinsky’s hold on reality seemed to go with it. She would call Betty Currie and Bayani Nelvis, one of Clinton’s Navy stewards, as many as a dozen times a day to ask about the president’s whereabouts. By this means, Lewinsky kept almost minute-by-minute tabs on Clinton’s activities—all in the hope that there would be time for a phone call or visit between them. When she couldn’t see him, Lewinsky would materialize in crowds at the White House and even plant herself along the routes of his motorcade, including his trips to church on Sunday mornings. Much later, during Clinton’s impeachment trial, the question of whether Lewinsky was a stalker or a girlfriend became important. But that was a false choice. Lewinsky was both—a genuine, if occasional, sexual partner as well as an obsessed, unhinged fan.

  In her dealings with the president, Lewinsky alternated between haughty presumption and abject whining. On October 16, she sent a package by courier to the president with a letter about her job prospects. “I am open to suggestions that you may have on work that … may intrigue me,” the twenty-three-year-old wrote to the president. “The most important things to me are that I am engaged and interested in my work. I am not someone’s administrative/executive assistant, and my salary can provide me a comfortable living in New York.” She suggested a handful of advertising agencies, public relations firms, and media outlets (“anything at George magazine”) that she regarded as acceptable. Earlier, when she had said she wanted to move to New York, Clinton had thought of finding her something with Bill Richardson, the ambassador to the United Nations. Betty Currie passed the idea to John Podesta, then the deputy chief of staff, who spoke to Richardson. After she had expressed some initial interest in the UN, Lewinsky changed her mind, writing in the same letter to Clinton that “I want a job where I feel challenged, engaged, and interested. I don’t think the UN is the right place for me.” Following up on the letter, Lewinsky also mentioned that she thought his friend Vernon Jordan might be able to come up with something for her in New York. Lewinsky later testified that Tripp had given her the idea of mentioning Jordan to Clinton.

  Richardson, not knowing that Lewinsky had cooled on the idea of working for him, called her to set up an interview. To her surprise, the interview with Richardson, which took place at the Watergate Hotel, went well. (The night before the interview, Clinton called Lewinsky and, she later testified, “we talked about some of the different issues at the UN, and he gave me some suggestions of things I could say.”) Thanks to a tip from Tripp, Isikoff arranged for the dining room of the hotel to be staked out by another Newsweek reporter, so he could see how the president was setting up his girlfriend with a job, but he missed Lewinsky as she walked to the elevators. For Monica, the good interview with Richardson was bad news. She took to wailing to Tripp about the injustice of Clinton’s having forced her to apply for a job she did not want. In response, Tripp gave Lewinsky word-for-word instructions on how she should ask Clinton for help. “Well, when you do speak to him and he tries to snow you about the UN,” Tripp said one day, “I think you just have to say, ‘I really don’t want to be seen as unappreciative. That’s not the case. But I—I cannot work for the government anymore.… My experience with the government has been hellacious. It’s been enough to last two lifetimes.’ ” Starr’s transcripts of their conversations barely do them justice.

  LEWINSKY: I’m so frustrated and I’m so—I was trying to keep so many things in check. (Crying.)

  TRIPP: I know.

  L: And it’s too hard. (Crying.)

  T: I know. But if it’s any consolation …

  L: (Crying.) But, Linda, you have no idea how hurt I am that I’m not going back.

  T: I know.

  L: (Crying.) You have no idea.

  T: It’s the worst. It’s the worst. I know that … but your—your situation was grossly unfair. It was horrible, horrible. And then to think for a year that you’re coming back, and then to find out, no, you’re not. I mean, you’ve been a trouper through all this, Monica.

  L: (Crying.)

  Lewinsky’s tears could scarcely have had time to dry before Tripp picked up the telephone and relayed the contents of these calls to Isikoff and Goldberg. All of Tripp’s plans—political, financial, literary—depended on being able to prove that the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky had taken place. Then, in the midst of Lewinsky’s distress, Tripp was invited to her home at the Watergate, and she recognized a perfect opportunity to make her case.

  Lewinsky had saved the blue dress from the Gap that she had worn during the sexual encounter in February, on the day when Clinton presented her with Leaves of Grass. According to Tripp, Lewinsky had proudly displayed what she thought were stains from Clinton’s semen. The next morning, Tripp called Isikoff with news about the dress—and offered to steal it for him. After first noting the evidentiary problems with such an approach—where, the reporter wondered, would he get a copy of Clinton’s DNA for comparison?—Isikoff wisely chose not to be party to any crime by Tripp.

  Undeterred, Tripp then took news of the dress to Lucianne Goldberg. Her call prompted a strange moment of scandal convergence
, because, as it happened, another one of Goldberg’s clients happened to be visiting. The client was Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced former Los Angeles police detective who played a central role in the investigation of O. J. Simpson. Fuhrman, who had been introduced to Goldberg by Dominick Dunne, was writing a book about an unsolved murder in Connecticut. Remembering that DNA evidence had played an important part in the Simpson case, Goldberg put Tripp’s question to Fuhrman, without mentioning the names of the people involved. Could months-old semen stains on a dress still be tested for forensic purposes? Fuhrman said (correctly) that they could, and Goldberg passed the information back to Tripp.

  A few days later, Lewinsky, who regularly consulted Tripp about clothes, mentioned that she was thinking about wearing the dress over the upcoming holidays. “Then I’m gonna wear the navy dress I wore to the radio address that has the [deleted] on it for Thanksgiving,” Lewinsky said.

  Noticeably startled, Tripp stammered, “Well, how—you’re—gonna get it cleaned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It’s about time,” Lewinsky explained. “Out with the old, you know?”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Tripp said, and then, knowing her friend’s obsessions, told Monica that her other clothes made her look thin.

  The conversation meandered to other topics, but the two women picked up the subject of the Gap dress the next day. Tripp had obviously carefully thought through what she wanted to say and even offered a little introduction. “Okay, so one other thing I want to say to you that you can do what you want with,… but I want you to think about this—and really think about it, instead of always just dissing what I say, okay?”

  “I don’t always dis what you say,” Lewinsky said cheerfully.

  “Well—”

  “But sometimes you’re such a—”

  Tripp jumped back in with her prepared remarks. “You’re very stubborn. You’re very stubborn.” (“Sigh.”) “The navy-blue dress. Now, all I would say to you is: I know how you feel today, and I know why you feel the way you do today. But you have a very long life ahead of you, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Neither do you. I don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything. I mean, the future is a blank slate. I don’t know what will happen. I would rather you had that in your possession if you need it years from now. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

  Lewinsky was amused. “You think that I can hold on to a dress for ten, fifteen years with [deleted] from—”

  “Hey, listen,” Tripp answered. “My cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit, and during O. J. Simpson, I questioned all the DNA, and do you know what he told me?” (This was a lie, of course.)

  “I will never forget this,” Tripp went on. “And he’s like a Ph.D. and blah, blah, blah. And he said that on a rape victim now—they couldn’t do this, you know, even five years ago. On a rape victim now, if she has preserved a pinprick-size of crusted semen, ten years from that time, if she takes a wet Q-Tip and blobs it there … they can match the DNA with absolutely—with certainty.” (Fuhrman had specifically mentioned the Q-Tip test to Goldberg.)

  “So why can’t I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?”

  “You can’t scratch it off. You would have to use a Q-Tip.” Exasperated, Tripp moved on to her larger point. “Believe me, I know how you feel now,” Tripp resumed. “I just don’t want to take away your options down the road, should you need them. And believe me, I know better than anybody probably, other than your mother, that you would never, ever use them if you didn’t have to. I know this. Believe me. I—I just—I don’t trust the people around him [Clinton], and I just want you to have that for you. Put it in a Baggie, put it in a Ziploc bag, and you pack it with your treasures, for what I care. I mean, whatever. Put it in one of your little antiques.”

  “What for, though? What do you think—”

  “I don’t know, Monica. It’s just this nagging, awful feeling in the back of my head.”

  “What if I didn’t have it?”

  “Well, I know that. I’m just—I think it’s a blessing you do,” Tripp said, reaching toward a kind of peroration. “It would be your only insurance policy down the road. Or it could never be needed, and you can throw it away. But I—I never, ever want to read about you going off the deep end because someone comes out and calls you a stalker or something and … some, God forbid, awful like that. And in this day and age, there’s nothing I don’t—I don’t trust anybody. Maybe I’m being paranoid. If I am, indulge me. I’m not saying you should do it if you don’t want to. I’m just saying I think it would be a smart thing to do. And then put it somewhere where no one knows where it is but you. And you don’t label it, obviously.”

  At that point, Lewinsky steered the conversation toward safer ground. But Tripp had made her point, and Lewinsky did ultimately remove the dress from her apartment at the Watergate and ship it to her mother’s new home in New York for safekeeping.

  Tripp behaved so odiously during this period that it is tempting to write off all of her conduct as that of an irredeemable conniver. For good reason, few Americans have been tempted to forgive Tripp’s surreptitious taping of a vulnerable friend, especially given her coarse political and commercial motives. But Tripp must be given this: she was right about the dress. Many of Clinton’s own friends regarded him as so untrustworthy on sexual matters that they believed the president would never have admitted his relationship with Lewinsky if she had not kept genetic proof. Without the dress, the subsequent investigation of the relationship might have come down to a he said/she said contest between Clinton and Lewinsky. In such a fight, Clinton’s advocates would not have hesitated to attack Lewinsky’s credibility, and her unstable behavior would have provided them plenty of ammunition. But the dress made Lewinsky bulletproof. Of course, preservation of the dress served Tripp’s purposes; but it also served Lewinsky’s, and for that, if little else, she has her erstwhile friend to thank.

  So, as winter approached, Tripp, Goldberg, and Isikoff knew where all the evidence was—the dress, the tapes, the courier receipts, and the witnesses. All that was left now was to get it all in the hands of Paula Jones’s new lawyers—and the reading public.

  9

  “Draw the Penis for Me”

  “Would you state your full name for the record, please?”

  “Dennis Kirkland.”

  “And Mr. Kirkland, for the record, I am Bill Bristow, and I’m the lawyer representing Danny Ferguson, the Arkansas state trooper who has been sued by Paula Jones in this matter. I have issued a subpoena for you to appear here today for a discovery deposition.”

  In October 1997, almost three and a half years after Paula Jones filed her lawsuit, the lawyers on both sides began taking depositions from witnesses. In an ordinary civil case, lawyers conduct this form of questioning in order to gather evidence to use in motions for summary judgment—which is the trial judge’s most important pretrial ruling on whether the case should proceed. So it was in the Jones case. But the inherently political nature of this lawsuit transformed the depositions as they did every other part of the case. The witnesses called, the questions asked, even the lawyers doing the questioning—all were chosen by both sides with an eye toward the public as much as toward Judge Susan Webber Wright.

  Clinton’s team had had its collective eye on Dennis Kirkland since he lunched at McDonald’s with Mitch Ettinger, of Skadden Arps, just weeks after the case began. He was the original “blow-job boy,” in Bob Bennett’s felicitous phrase, and he was a critical weapon in the defense effort to tar Jones’s reputation and intimidate her from pushing ahead. This legal strategy, however, presented a political problem. Bennett’s client had run for office as a champion of women’s rights and, indeed, had spoken out in favor of Anita Hill, who had endured these kinds of attacks after she accused Clarence Thomas of making unwelcome advances toward her.

  In public, Bennett had to avoid character assassination. This hadn’t always been e
asy. Earlier in the year, in a brief appearance on the ABC News program This Week, Bennett had said, “If she insists on a trial, we’ll have a trial. And, as my mother once said to me, be careful what you ask for, you may get it. I had a dog like that, who just wanted to catch cars. And he successfully caught one one day, and I have a new dog.” Bennett’s remarks were widely interpreted as a threat against Jones. The following day, the National Organization for Women issued a strongly worded statement saying, in part, “Women who file sexual harassment complaints should not face personal attacks designed to intimidate them into silence.” (According to Susan Carpenter-McMillan, Jones wept when she heard Bennett’s comments, thinking that Bennett had called her a dog.)

  Bennett hastened to Nightline to offer a clarification. “I did intend to sound tough, because we will be tough,” he told Ted Koppel. “But, Ted, I want to make it absolutely clear—absolutely clear—that in being tough we have absolutely no intention of dragging out Paula Jones’s prior sex life or invading her privacy. And the reasons for that are several. One, I have a wife and three daughters who would kick me out of the house. Second, I represent a client who has done more for women than any president in the history of this country, and even if I were inclined to do that, which I’m not, he wouldn’t permit me.”

  How, then, to square this approach with Bennett’s zeal to make use of the blow-job boys? Bennett’s answer was to use a surrogate. Danny Ferguson was the largely forgotten codefendant in this lawsuit, and Billy Bristow the forgotten attorney. Back in May 1994, just before the complaint was filed, Davis and Cammarata had thrown Ferguson’s name in as a kind of afterthought. He was a defendant on only two peripheral counts in the case—that he conspired with Clinton to deprive Jones of her civil rights and that he defamed Paula by telling David Brock that she had asked to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend. But this sloppy drafting of the complaint came back to haunt the Jones team. The tort of defamation addresses injuries to reputation, so a plaintiff in a defamation case puts the state of her reputation at issue. As the defendant in a defamation count, Ferguson had the legal right to examine Jones’s reputation.