Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [203]
Tripp also emphasized that she had telegraphed her intentions loud and clear to Monica. She had told the young coworker that, if deposed in the Paula Jones case, she would be forced to tell the truth about Clinton’s sexual misadventures with the young woman. In her view, by passing along that message to Monica, she had given Bill Clinton every possible chance to save his own neck. “Had he told the truth, he would have walked into no perjury trap,” she said, gazing out the window at horses lolling in the pasture.
“I mean, could I have done it better? Sure. I suppose I could have, but I had no one to turn to. I had no guidance. I mean, who do you go to when you’re up against the president of the United States?”
So Linda Tripp had driven to a Radio Shack in Columbia, Maryland. For a hundred dollars, she had purchased a gadget that she could hook up to her home phone to begin tape-recording her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. According to the salesman’s later deposition, he had explicitly warned Tripp that it was illegal to engage in nonconsensual recordings of telephone conversations in Maryland, after she blurted out that she wanted to tape phone calls. According to Tripp’s version, however, she had simply communicated to the salesman her budget and told him, “I just need it to really work.”
With the little black box hooked up to the phone in her study, Tripp would lie back on her sofa, chain-smoke cigarettes, and record conversations as Monica poured out her soul. The young coworker had begun calling Tripp more often—sometimes dozens of times each evening—so there were ample opportunities. After each conversation, Tripp would throw the finished tapes into a basket that she kept nearby on the floor. The basket filled quickly.
In order to get the goods on audiotape, Tripp had to coax Monica to “recap” the highlights of their most juicy past discussions by saying, “Wait—I don’t remember how this happened.…” Employing this sneak tactic was nothing to be proud of. “Yes,” she later admitted. “It felt disingenuous.”
On the other hand, Tripp justified these surreptitious recordings by telling herself it was the “right thing to do” for both herself and Monica. As soon as depositions were taken in the Jones case and the truth spilled out, she told herself, Clinton’s spinmeisters would brand Monica “a stalker, a maniac, and a woman of loose morals.” Of Tripp, they would say, “She’s ugly, she’s fat, she’s a gossip.” Tripp described her predicament, her eyes narrowing with anger, “Well, you can’t disprove a negative; you can’t say ‘Well, I’m not a gossip, excuse me.’ And the pictures [of me] did the job for them. I looked like a villain, and they were able to make me a villain.”
For that same reason—mutual self-preservation—when Tripp learned that Monica had a blue dress from the Gap stained with Clinton’s semen from one of their final sexual encounters, she took action. Tripp counseled Monica not to dispose of the dress, which was still lying in a heap on the floor of her closet in the Watergate apartment, because it was critical evidence. “I encouraged her to keep the dress,” Tripp admitted. In fact, she had also advised the young woman not to have it cleaned. “Why? Because it was her only tangible proof that this had occurred. That it wasn’t a figment of her sordid imagination, that she wasn’t a kook.”
By December 1997, with Monica’s deposition in the Jones case approaching, Tripp began experiencing a sensation akin to suffocation. One day when she arrived for work at the Pentagon, someone had dropped on her chair a list of people associated with the Clinton administration who had met “violent and questionable deaths,” along with a note: “Linda, thought you might find this of interest.” Tripp took this not-so-subtle warning “very seriously.” There were people “very close to the Clintons working in the Pentagon.