Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [345]
Asked whether First Lady Hillary Clinton knew of these goings-on, Tripp hedged her bets. She admitted that it was unclear if Mrs. Clinton “personally” knew about her husband’s extramarital flings. However, it was clear that “her people knew.” Also, said Tripp, it was “well known in the White House and respected and understood that Mrs. Clinton didn’t much care what he did as long as it wasn’t discovered.” As the grand jurors listened with puzzlement, Tripp recounted how she believed that she herself (Tripp) had been moved out of her position in the West Wing early in the Clinton administration because Hillary Clinton viewed her as “threatening” and a possible temptation to Bill. Tripp quickly added that this suspicion was unfounded because “I was [not] at all romantically interested in the President.”
Tripp next knocked the grand jurors back in their chairs when she related that even when Monica and the president were physically separated and unable to “mess around” in the White House, they shifted to having “phone sex.” The president, on these occasions, would typically call from his private quarters and announce that he was wearing his usual outfit—“a T-shirt and blue underwear.” Since the calls came late at night, Monica would chat in her bedroom and tell Clinton that she was wearing something sexy—“underwear that he liked” or some provocative outfit—even though usually she was really wearing “sweatpants and a sweatshirt.”
Telephonically, there were no bounds to the “sexual activity” in which Clinton and Monica would partake, said Tripp, spinning out her titillating tale. In contrast, when they messed around in the flesh, the president always stopped short of the final act. Monica would demand to know the reason: “Why won’t you have intercourse with me?” she would ask, sexually aroused, confused, and upset. Clinton would heave a sigh of regret: “When you get to be a certain age,” he would say, “you realize that every action you take … has a consequence.”
Tripp also acknowledged that Monica herself repeatedly made clear that she did not consider oral sex to constitute “having sex.” As Lewinsky told her older friend in one conversation captured on tape and played to the grand jury, “having sex is having intercourse.” In Monica’s sexual dictionary, engaging in oral sex just amounted to “fooling around.”
As Linda Tripp’s testimony entered its second and third days, filled with more and more hair-curling details, a number of grand jurors openly questioned her motives in exposing this deeply personal information. After all, Tripp had professed to be worried about Monica’s “mistreatment” at the hands of Bill Clinton. One grand juror asked: “Did you feel by continuing the relationship [with Monica] that you would be able to take some sort of action or help her do something to correct that mistreatment?” Tripp replied that she had given Monica “the same guidance I’d give my own daughter” until the situation had become “too dangerous” to handle. The grand juror shot back: “But some of that was self-inflicted.” Another juror jumped in: “Why didn’t you just cut her off? Just say, ‘Look. I’ve had enough. Don’t ever call me again. Period. I’m going to end this right now.’”
A third grand juror noted that Tripp’s odious portrait of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship was based solely on Monica’s version of events: “Have you thought about [the fact that] you’ve only heard one side of the story? Have you talked to Betty yourself?… Have you talked to the President himself?” Duly chastened, Tripp replied, “That’s a good point.”
The grand jurors were both intrigued