Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [202]
Tripp quickly agreed: “I would have absolutely no qualms going that way. The tabloid stuff.… There is a definite advantage to going that way. It gets it out, it gets it out quick.” Tripp also pooh-poohed Isikoff’s assertion that he alone knew how to write a book like this. “It’s not exactly brain surgery,” Tripp told her agent.
In suggesting that Tripp should go to Manhattan to meet with Isikoff, the agent counseled her to insist that “Newsweek’s got to pay for you to come to New York,” perhaps putting her up at the Plaza or some other five-star hotel. Tripp seemed to like the idea.
She also joked about Monica, reminding her agent that the former intern had told her on the first day at the Pentagon: “I don’t even know how I got this job. I don’t even know how to type.” Tripp next drifted into an account of how Clinton and Monica would totally disrobe in the bathroom outside the Oval Office and he would “press it to the—almost penetration.” Lucianne Goldberg interrupted: “This poor woman. She must be going out of her mind.” Tripp corrected her: “This is a girl. This isn’t a woman.”
Linda Tripp sought to explain the attraction to Clinton by comparing Monica to another of Clinton’s would-be conquests: “She has lots of hair of the color of Paula Jones.” The two women burst out laughing, as if tickled pink by the absurdity of the comment. Tripp, meanwhile, was wading deeper and deeper into a plan from which there was no exit.
WHEN it came to her decision to tape-record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp later insisted that this idea came about naturally. “It was Lucianne who suggested it to me, and I immediately thought it was a fantastic idea because I had no other way to document [Monica’s statements]. And, for the record, I would do it again.”
A number of things caused Tripp to reach this conclusion. First, “I had been called essentially an untruthful person in a national publication by the president’s attorney [Bob Bennett],” after the Newsweek story relating to Kathleen Willey. So “I knew that my word against the machine that is the White House public relations center would be completely annihilated. I knew that I would have absolutely no voice.” Additionally, Tripp sensed “that Monica was in jeopardy. I knew that she would be destroyed through this if there was no documentation, if there were no evidence.” She concluded that tape-recording Monica’s verbal gushings was her best option. “My primary focus was in being able to prove that I was a truth teller,” explained Tripp. “That this was not a figment of my imagination or, worse, a gossip-mongering reach for some sort of fame on my own part. I’m the last person who would want fame. I’m the last person who would want notoriety. I like the private life, peaceful life. And I think I’ve shown it over the years.”
There was also a motivation, confessed Tripp, linked to raw fear. “I was fearful on an ‘out-there’ level that a truck would hit me on purpose. I was fearful on an ‘out-there’ level that something would happen to my children. I knew I’d lose my job, and that was an enormous fear because I was a single parent. And I also knew that my name would be destroyed, and the one thing I did have going for me until the Clinton saga was a sterling reputation for professionalism and integrity. And I knew that they would take that away, and they did.”
Additionally, Tripp was keenly aware that the Paula Jones litigation was heading into the discovery phase, on a fast track toward trial. It was now or never.
“Aber…” Tripp said, slipping into German, the preferred language these days when she was hanging around the home with her husband. Yet Tripp admitted that she felt, inexplicably, that fate had selected her for this mission. “I need to be clear on one thing. I wanted this to come out,” she said with eyes fixed forward. “I was going to do anything I could to help facilitate that. I felt that it was something that the country needed to know.… I always wondered ‘Why, why do I have this information? What serendipitous thing put me, the only nonpolitical [appointee]