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By Root 1720 0

was nothing if not a survivor. She had survived being pilloried in the press and being terminated from the Pentagon. She had endured a serious bout of breast cancer and a prosecution by the state of Maryland for illegally tape-recording her conversations with Monica. She had cut her hair, dyed it black, undergone cosmetic surgery to fix her nose and to sharpen her facial features. A big-boned woman who maintained a close relationship with her two grown children, Tripp had done her best to leave this period of her past behind. In this remote enclave of horse farms and antique shops, she had hidden from the outside world. She had married her former sweetheart (an architect from Germany named Dieter Rausch) from youthful summers visiting grandparents in Europe and now worked in the quaint business district of historic Middleburg in a tiny specialty shop. Of all the horrible aspects of the Clinton-Starr-Lewinsky debacle, the one that most disturbed Linda Tripp—as she reflected upon it—was the notion that she set out to profit by publishing a book on this tawdry subject.

Tripp leaned forward in a wingback chair and defended herself: “Monica Lewinsky had been talking to me for a year and three months, and I had never written a thing down, I had never documented anything, I had never taken a note.” It was only after her head was on the chopping block, Tripp said, correcting the record, that she took action to protect herself. “So this notion that this was about a book, or about self-aggrandizement or self-enrichment, it was just silly. It wasn’t about any of that.”

Tripp’s biggest fear was that she was now at the top of the White House enemies’ list. “I’m now dangerous to the Clintons, and I knew that,” she recalled. “I also know how they operate, and having seen how they operate, I knew I was in some physical danger. And you may think that’s just a complete hysterical comment with no basis in fact. Whether or not that is true, I felt that I was in danger.”

In terms of her decision to seek advice from Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp asked rhetorically, “When did writing a book become, you know, a mortal sin? Particularly when you’re a civil servant and can’t exactly call a press conference to share what you know.” Going to Goldberg and then constructing a plan to deliver the story to Michael Isikoff, Tripp insisted, was her best insurance policy to make sure that she was not run over by a truck in the middle of the night. Going public, she believed, was her only hope.

Tripp did not deny that she recognized the potential harm to Monica. Still, she felt that a little tough love might be needed to snap the young woman out of her delusional world. “Monica Lewinsky is a bright young gal, but she can be one thousand percent tunnel-visioned,” Tripp explained. In this case, “the tunnel was Bill Clinton.” There were times, Tripp said, when “I wanted to shake her until her teeth would rattle just to shake some sense into her.” Yet Tripp knew that would do no good. “This is a girl who thonged the president of the United States,” she noted sarcastically. “She’s not going to stop because you say, ‘It’s probably not a good idea.’”

As far as the insinuation that her own actions were driven by the lust for a juicy book deal, Tripp shook her head. “To this day, I’m still the only one that’s never taken a penny ever,” she said. “And, you know … years have gone by, I should get some credit.”

Yet the tapes of Tripp’s conversations with Lucianne Goldberg in the fall of 1997 seem to undermine her protestations. In another taped conversation, later turned over to the FBI and at odds (somewhat) with Tripp’s own grand jury testimony, the discussion between the two is laced with references to book deals, tabloids, and not-so-nice jabs at Monica Lewinsky. Lucianne Goldberg is captured on tape stating: “What is good for you … in the fullness of time, is a book.” The agent told Tripp to “maintain [her] virginity” by letting Isikoff write the first account with sketchy details, then “stand back and wait until the moment is right” to publish her own account.