Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [196]
During the Reagan years, Linda Tripp had passed up a job in the White House working as a personal assistant for Vice President George Bush; with small children at home, she just “couldn’t do the hours.” By 1990, her children were more self-sufficient. After earning a civil service position in the Pentagon and moving up the ladder with top-notch reviews, she was asked to serve as a “senior executive secretary” in the West Wing of the White House during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Tripp took the $45,000-a-year position, filled with “reverence for the White House and history in general.” She also admired what she perceived to be President Bush’s high personal, professional, and moral standards. When Bush lost the 1992 election to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp (a registered Independent) was permitted to stay in the White House as a nonpolitical, career civil servant. Seated outside the office of George Stephanopoulos, occupying a station just beside the Oval Office, Tripp had a bird’s-eye view of the new president. “Initially, my impression was that he was incredibly charismatic, amazingly outgoing, and friendly, completely approachable,” she said of Clinton. Most of all, he was “a fun guy.”
Tripp had been divorced in 1992—she preferred not to discuss the details. She was now a single forty-three-year-old mother. After a brief post outside the Oval Office, she found herself moved upstairs in the West Wing, where she was assigned to the White House counsel’s office. Tripp would say, years later, that she was convinced First Lady Hillary Clinton played a role in engineering that move. The First Lady, Tripp explained, was extremely wary of attractive females working in such proximity to the president. “In 1993,” Tripp said, “I looked significantly different than you’ve ever seen me.… I was very tiny. I had long blond hair.” Tripp was fairly certain that “Hillary approached Vince Foster and said, ‘Don’t you need her upstairs?’” pointing to Tripp. In Tripp’s view, it was part of a pattern of moving temptation away from the president. To put it bluntly, Tripp believed she had been “whisked upstairs to the Office of Counsel for the President” in an office adjoining Hillary’s so that the president did not hit on her.
Linda Tripp enjoyed working for White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum and his associates Vince Foster and Bill Kennedy. Yet Foster’s death in July 1993 and the questions surrounding the removal of documents from his office all left Tripp feeling wary and vulnerable. (She had been the last person to see Foster alive.) By early 1994, when Robert Fiske’s Office of Independent Counsel began interviewing staff members, Tripp made no bones about telling investigators that the White House’s handling of the matter had been a “debacle.” She also felt that those surrounding the president were indirectly encouraging her and West Wing coworkers to “evade and avoid any forthcoming answers.”
It was in this context that Linda Tripp first contacted the gossip-loving Manhattan literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, to discuss writing a tell-all book. Tripp had made a connection with Goldberg through Tony Snow, who was a former speechwriter for President Bush, a friend of Goldberg’s from the good old days, and then a television correspondent for Fox News. Snow had listened to Tripp’s account and declared, “You should write a book!” Snow even volunteered to reach out to Goldberg, a “dear friend,” who could