Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [198]
Lewinsky’s assigned space was a stone’s throw away from Linda Tripp’s, as if destiny had placed them in such proximity. Here, Tripp observed that the attractive, dark-haired Lewinsky was getting shunned by other workers “probably ten times more severely than I had, because I think there was a lot of resentment that this young gal sort of achieved this plum, excuse the pun, position.”
The chatty, chain-smoking Tripp quickly became a workplace mother figure for Lewinsky. Monica loved to hang out in Tripp’s office; she did so routinely. When Tripp was relocated during renovations, she moved into a suite containing jumbo posters of President Clinton on aircraft carriers and posing with troops—props for large Pentagon events. As Tripp recalled with a sardonic smile, “And, of course, this immediately created an interest on her [Monica’s] part.” When Monica asked for one of the jumbo posters, Tripp just shrugged her shoulders. “And I gave her one.”
Tripp liked the ebullient Lewinsky. “She was such a groupie. I felt sorry for her,” the older woman said. Yet it soon became too much. “The Department of Defense was not anything she was prepared for,” said Tripp. “The acronyms were Greek to her. She made no real effort to educate herself to make her position more viable.” Instead Lewinsky “just chatted and chatted and chatted” while Tripp tried to produce work. What baffled Tripp most was that the banter always seemed to revolve around Bill Clinton. “I didn’t have time for her stories and her ‘groupieness’ and her ‘I’m going to Radio City to see the president on his birthday,’ and ‘What should I wear and blah, blah, blah.’ I mean, it was just so bizarre.”
Although Monica did not reveal the true details at first, facts soon dribbled out hinting at the true nature of her relationship with “Handsome.” As Tripp would recall: “And then it started, and it started and it started and it started, and it was sort of like watching a train wreck.” Linda Tripp considered herself to be “an extremely intuitive person.” In fact, she was convinced she had a sixth sense. “Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I [have that gift]—my grandmother had it as well.” Although Lewinsky tried to hide the precise nature of her relationship with the president, “I knew. And she hadn’t even told me.”
At first, Tripp assumed that Lewinsky had engaged in only mildly inappropriate conduct with Clinton. “I really gave him more credit.… I had never known him to go that young,” she later said, taking a puff of a cigarette. In the fall of 1996, however, while they were in the Pentagon cafeteria and Tripp was encouraging Lewinsky to return to the White House because she “was the kind of girl the president would like,” Monica blurted out that she had a fling with Clinton. Tripp was “stunned” and “shocked.” Hearing that the emotionally fragile Lewinsky had engaged in oral sex with President Clinton, and that they did it in the White House, was a jolt—even for a born pessimist like Tripp.
As Monica spent more time in their daily chats describing “the next note she was going to write, or her next letter she was going to write” to Clinton, Tripp tried to maintain a distance. She explained, “I had just sort of been thrown there [into the Pentagon]. And while I worked my fanny off and got incredible performance ratings, I always felt that I could be gone with a flick of the switch.” As a single mother, Tripp felt “lucky to have the job, lucky I had been promoted, but I also knew I could be axed at any