Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [197]
Goldberg was not just any literary agent. A former gossip columnist who specialized in sex scandals, she had spied for the Nixon dirty-tricks operation against George McGovern in 1972. Goldberg wore short blond hair and dressed with a flair. Tripp herself later described the flamboyant Manhattan agent: “She was sort of the Tallulah Bankhead of literary agents. You just wanted to picture her with a long cigarette holder kind of thing. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is what an agent looks like and this is how an agent behaves.’”
With Goldberg’s assistance, Tripp was hooked up with a “conservative” ghostwriter who began cranking out a book proposal covering the Vince Foster affair, the Travel Office scandal, and Bill Clinton’s frisky behavior with women other than Hillary. When Tripp saw the first installment of the draft, she got jittery. The draft chapters were “extremely over the top” and “very sensational,” so she pulled the plug on the project.
In this never-published draft, which would surface years later, Tripp declared darkly through her ghostwriter: “I don’t know who killed Vince Foster. I don’t know why he committed suicide. I just know that everything that happened after his death was strange and suspicious. President Clinton’s senior staff kept saying it was a straightforward suicide, an open-and-shut case. But they didn’t act that way. They acted like they had something to hide.”
Linda Tripp’s view of the Clinton White House overall had become extremely suspicious. “I never hated Bill Clinton,” she said later. “I was never out to get Bill Clinton.” But she believed that he was built with “a moral compass that’s somewhat askew.” She didn’t like how Clinton’s followers from Arkansas, like lemmings, blindly fell in line behind the president and First Lady. Nor did Tripp like the monkey business that she believed was taking place between the president and a stable of females (other than Hillary) in the White House. These extracurricular frolics, she later insisted, were “common knowledge. There is no doubt it was occurring with multiple partners. Yes, no doubt.” Although she did not disagree “that these sorts of personal exploits were [Clinton’s] business,” she also thought “it was completely off base for a president to behave this way.” Said Tripp, “I also started to question my own value system, thinking that ‘I am sort of straightlaced.’” She was especially disgusted that Clinton was engaging in these liaisons in the White House.
Lucianne Goldberg, speaking from her literary agency in Manhattan, would later say of Tripp: “She had enormous patriotism, enormous sense of duty, enormous sense of right and wrong. It was not political, and I think outrage is what motivated her.”
Those who worked around Tripp in the West Wing, however, viewed her as a frustrated and irritable “woman with an attitude.”
It was obvious that the situation had deteriorated. In May 1994, Linda Tripp was informed by her supervisors that she would “have to leave” the White House and that she “had no choice.”
So Tripp accepted a position in the Pentagon, where she had previous experience. She received a substantial pay hike to $69,427 and was given duties in Public Affairs. Yet her new colleagues looked at her sideways, as if she had been “foisted upon them at an elevated position.” Tripp was shuffled around until she was placed in charge of organizing a conference for the secretary of defense. Her office was a windowless cubicle in the basement of the Pentagon. It was here that, in April 1996, Tripp met a young former intern who had also been moved from the White House to the Pentagon, reporting directly to Assistant Secretary of Defense (for Public Affairs) Ken Bacon. This young, chatty woman, whose job involved worldwide travel and regular trips with the secretary of defense and handling highly classified information, was named Monica Lewinsky.
As Tripp surmised the situation, in observing the bubbly Lewinsky: “So one day, here comes twenty-three-year-old