The Tale of Tripp’s Tapes

Lewinsky: “I’m sorry. I wish I’d never told you.”

Tripp: “You know what, Monica? It’s going to work out. It’s going to work out because I have--I have true faith that you’re going to go up to New York, you’re going to get a wonderful job, this is all going to go away.”

--Telephone conversation on Dec. 12, 1997, between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, as recorded by Tripp

*

They had not talked in a year. The last chat had ended rather badly. “Who do you think you are, the queen of England?” the literary agent snapped at her prospective author after she had aborted their budding book deal.

Now it was time to kiss and make up. Linda Tripp was calling and, for the moment, Lucianne Goldberg was willing to let bygones be bygones.

The travails of a functionary in Washington’s bureaucratic trenches would normally hold no fascination for an aggressive literary merchant like Goldberg. But Tripp knew things from her stint as a White House secretarial floater, details about the inner workings of the Clinton administration that could have amounted to a juicy tattle of a book had she not backed out, afraid of being cashiered from her government job. Now, Tripp told a mutual friend that she needed to reach Goldberg again. “Something,” the agent was told, “had come up.”

Goldberg was entertaining guests in her Manhattan apartment on the night of Sept. 18, 1997, when the phone rang. She had a habit of taping calls, and on her end of the line a recorder clicked on automatically, just as Tripp’s own Radio Shack would soon roll night after night.

“Um,” Tripp began after an awkward apology, “last September, a young lady, um, who shall remain nameless for the time being. . . . “

“All right . . . “ Goldberg interjected.

” . . . Again, took me as her confidant, and, as it turns out, she has been, a, quote, girlfriend of the Big Creep.”

“Mm-hmm. . . . “

” . . . and is still. . . . “

Oddly Symbiotic Friendship Unravels

The mid-September call from Tripp marked the unraveling of the oddly symbiotic friendship between her and Monica S. Lewinsky, two White House refugees who could not have been less alike. The bureaucratic Valkyrie, then 48, and the 24-year-old Beverly Hills political groupie had fallen in together in a strange, shifting union in which Tripp played older sister, surrogate mother, gossip mate and manipulator, all to Lewinsky’s volatile ingenue. It was a pairing nurtured by a mutual obsession with Oval Office court intrigue, a shared exiles’ bitterness that they deserved better than they got.

The lifeblood of their friendship was Lewinsky’s devastating secret. Once broached, it seeped into every nook of their lives, as intoxicating as it was toxic. Its hidden details became a daily source of amusement, annoyance and paranoia, a fixation that prompted Lewinsky to call Tripp dozens of times a week and at all hours of the night, whether giddy with bliss or aching with rage.

Ultimately the secret grew too heavy--and too tempting--for Tripp to keep. She unburdened herself to Goldberg bluntly that September night, her complex motivations poking through the blase phone banter.

Clinton’s behavior, Tripp said, was “appalling.” It was time for Lewinsky, whom she admired in one breath as a “beautiful young girl” and dismissed in the next as “someone’s pet rock,” to “move on.”

Perhaps the book deal might be revived. Perhaps details could be leaked to the media. There were so many to tell. The president, Tripp confided, had “left tapes on [Lewinsky’s answering] machine.” And Tripp had “written down dates, times, phone calls.”

Goldberg, who networked with conservative lawyers, journalists and financiers, wondered if Lewinsky might be “reached by the Paula Jones people.” Tripp demurred: “Absolutely no way.” Tripp could act alone, Goldberg warned, but she would have to be “ready to lose [Lewinsky] as a friend.”

“Oh, I’m--that--that--I have already made that decision,” Linda Tripp said.

Finally, she had emerged from the basement.

Since moving over from the White House in August 1994, Tripp had let her new Defense Department bosses know in no uncertain terms that a subterranean cubicle was not adequate for the new director of the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference.

Tripp had made it plain that on top of her $88,000 annual civil service salary, she expected her own office and parking privileges--rare perks in the Pentagon’s crowded outer “E” ring. Her boss, Clifford Bernath, a public relations deputy, told the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury that Tripp was complaining by her second day on the job: “You know,” he quoted her as saying, “I’m involved in a lot of things and I know a lot of things and that’s why I need privacy.”

In April 1996, Tripp got her wish. New hires were coming on. To make room, Tripp was given the office she wanted. The hectic annual conference of VIPs she organized to win friends for defense programs had just ended. The only chore left was to comb through 800,000 photo negatives, then parcel them out as gifts to the VIPs. Photo proofs littered her office the day a dark-haired young woman passed by.

The new hire, a former intern just in from the White House, bubbled over when she eyed Tripp’s photo “jumbos” of Clinton eating aircraft carrier chow and addressing sailors. Could she please have one of the photos? Government property, Tripp answered. But she caved before the younger woman’s effusiveness. “She was so happy to get it,” Tripp testified later.

Comparison Made to ‘Elvis Groupie’

When Lewinsky discovered they had the White House in common, she began showing up often in Tripp’s office, boasting about Rose Garden events she had attended. Tripp wrote her off “as a girl with a crush, much like an Elvis groupie.”

Tripp had seen the type around the White House since she went to work there during Bush’s presidency in 1990. Tripp began as a secretary moving between offices, but soon impressed. Tony Snow, a speech writer for Bush who later served as intermediary between Tripp and Goldberg, found her “formidably efficient.”

Tripp prospered even when the young Clintonistas took over. She worked with close Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and his deputy, Vincent Foster. Tripp served Foster his last meal, hamburgers and M&Ms;, before he committed suicide in July 1993.

When Nussbaum was replaced by Washington eminence Lloyd N. Cutler in 1994, Tripp and Kathleen Willey--another administrative aide on the White House staff whose claim of a pass by Clinton would vex the president months later--both asked to run the office secretarial pool. Neither got the post. Tripp, said a senior member of the counsel’s staff, became “enormously resentful, uncooperative and difficult to deal with.”

The White House found her a job at the Pentagon, where she told her new colleagues that she was kicked out of the White House because “she knew too much” about Whitewater and Foster’s death. She got a pay raise of nearly 50%.

At the Pentagon, as at the White House, Tripp was pegged as an office virago. That was partly, a Tripp intimate explained, because Bush-era holdovers mistakenly suspected her of being a Clinton plant. To some co-workers, her self-absorption mirrored a common affliction--a tendency for civil servants to imagine themselves at the nerve center of life in the capital.

Whenever Tripp visited Lewinsky, said one of Lewinsky’s colleagues, “it was like you could feel a cold chill in the office.” Tripp appeared to view “everybody around her as basically a clerk, and she was something more.”

Tripp’s partisans insist she took care to avoid that rut. “She was always conscious,” a friend said, “of functioning in a support role and avoiding taking on the importance of senior people.”

Tripp told the grand jury she found that she and Monica had “lots in common.”

“Monica, in my opinion, just always seemed on one level like a much older person and on one level like one of my kids,” she said. (Tripp has two, of college age.) “She’s worldly. She and I share a weight problem. . . . We tried countless diets.”

“I think I look at you as a mom,” Lewinsky told Tripp in one taped passage. In another: “We really have a unique relationship, you know.” It was only after the betrayal that Lewinsky’s feelings changed. “I hate Linda Tripp,” she told Starr’s grand jury.

Two Versions of How Affair Was Revealed

One morning in September 1996, Tripp testified, Lewinsky asked her to sit down for coffee before work. As they approached the cafeteria, Lewinsky looked “ready to pop.”

In Tripp’s account, Lewinsky blurted out that “she had been having an affair with the president, it was ongoing, but there were problems because of the [presidential election] campaign.”

To Tripp, “it just made sense.” From the moment Lewinsky had cooed over Clinton’s photos, Tripp had “the sense that she was someone’s protege of some sort.”

In Lewinksy’s account, Tripp had been goading her to return to the White House and attempt a fling with the president.

“Tripp advised Lewinsky,” a Starr investigator wrote, “that she was the type of woman the president would like and an affair with the president would be a neat thing to tell her grandkids. Tripp kept hounding Lewinsky and Lewinsky finally said: ‘Look, I’ve already had an affair with him. . . .’ ”

From then on, at all hours of the night, they chattered about the affair’s peaks and valleys. Tripp consoled Lewinsky when Clinton warded her away, egged her on when he saw her again. When Lewinsky wanted to dry-clean her semen-stained blue dress to wear to a Thanksgiving dinner in 1997, Tripp counseled hanging onto it. It was an “insurance policy,” she explained, useful in case the fling became public and someone “calls you a stalker.” Lewinsky followed the advice.

They giggled over the demarcations of Clinton’s anatomy made scandalous by the Jones lawsuit. They cooed over the gifts he lavished. On good days, Lewinsky described the president as “handsome.” On dump days, he was the “Big Creep.”

Tripp pumped her young friend for details. In May 1997, she began scribbling down Lewinsky’s confessions in a steno notebook. Tripp later claimed the younger woman wanted her to take notes. Lewinsky once showed her a “matrix,” Tripp recalled, crammed with dates and times of her couplings with the president. Lewinsky denied to the grand jury ever asking Tripp to document her relationship with Clinton. The older woman did it, she said, behind her back.

“Linda always told me she would always protect me and she would never tell anybody and keep my secret,” Lewinsky testified.

Secrets, like water, seek their own level. Just as Tripp later betrayed Lewinsky to Goldberg and then Starr, the younger woman herself took liberties with one of Tripp’s confidences. In July of 1997, Lewinsky told the president an unnamed friend had been caught up in a gathering scandal over Willey’s assertion that Clinton had groped her. It was Tripp, who had been approached by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff to tell what she knew.

A week later, Lewinsky testified, the president guessed it was Tripp. Lewinsky said Clinton urged her to persuade Tripp to contact Lindsey. After hesitating, Tripp finally hooked up with Lindsey by phone. The conversation, she told the grand jury, left her in fear for her life.

Lindsey and Tripp had been on informal terms during her White House days. But on the phone, he sounded stiff and abrupt, a demeanor that sent “chills up my spine,” Tripp said later. She did not tell Lindsey all she knew about Willey, hesitating, she testified, “because I’d figured I’d be fired or killed.”

Even to Starr’s grand jurors, the idea of murder played like the florid paranoia of a drama queen. As tough as the White House sparred with its enemies, there were no glimmers of that sort of hardball. Yet Tripp spun her black fantasies to justify her notes--and later, her taping--of Lewinsky’s ramblings.

Tripp’s initial rationale for taping her young friend was Clinton lawyer Robert S. Bennett’s public swipe that she was “not to be believed” about Willey’s groping accusation. Bennett--who based his remark on intelligence from Cutler and other White House staffers who knew Tripp--has reportedly scoffed at any linkage between his comments and Tripp’s decision to tape.

Even if Tripp’s worries were mostly imagined, friends say, the danger remained real to her. “She perceived threats to be many and varied and of a nature that should be taken seriously,” a Tripp intimate said.

When she worried aloud to Goldberg that “they’re going to poison me,” the agent doubted. But Tripp’s sacking, Goldberg conceded, was a possibility. “Bubbula, you blow the whistle on the Big Kahuna and you ain’t going to be working for the government.”

Tripp never did lose her government job. But panic was not Tripp’s only reason to betray her friend. In her unguarded phone chats with Goldberg, Tripp spelled out other motives: the kiss-and-tell book about Clinton, and revulsion at Clinton’s betrayal of his family.

Tripp saw a chance to avenge Clinton’s “sterling example of family values.” Lewinsky’s “prime focus in life is not to expose him,” Tripp told Goldberg. “And you know what? I--I respect her feelings. But on the other hand, he plays to the--to the world audience as being a protector of women’s rights.”

All that was left was to find the proper insurance policy. Tripp testified she was hesitant about taping, suggesting to Goldberg that “I can take notes.” Goldberg advised her that she needed something stronger to protect her from a “perjury trap” at the deposition. “I told her it was OK to tape,” the agent said later.

In her two-story colonial house in Maryland, Tripp installed her Radio Shack recorder on a phone in her study. The recorder ran off and on from October until late December, filling more than two dozen tapes before Tripp handed most of them over to FBI agents.

Lewinsky Described as ‘Berserk on the Phone’

The last time the machine ran before Tripp went to Starr’s investigators was Dec. 22, 1997. By that time, Tripp had been subpoenaed to testify about Lewinsky to Jones’ lawyers--who had been tipped off to the tapes’ existence by Goldberg through a back channel of conservative attorneys. And Tripp had told Lewinsky that she planned to expose Clinton’s affair with her.

When Lewinsky received her own summons on Dec. 19, she phoned Tripp in an oddly cheery voice and said cryptically: “You know, I got roses like your roses.” By Dec. 22, the younger woman was growing desperate to persuade Tripp not to testify; in Tripp’s words, Lewinsky “went berserk on the phone.” In another week Lewinsky called again, cajoling, pleading, playing on the older woman’s fear that the White House would destroy her if she exposed the affair.

But Tripp had already made up her mind. She had unburdened herself to far too many people to retreat. The legal juggernaut was creaking forward. Her young friend was losing control. The Spode bowl by the couch in her study was filling with cassettes.

“You don’t think there’s a possibility, do you,” Tripp asked before they hung up the final time, “that someone . . . overheard our conversations on the phone?”

“Even if they did . . . “ Lewinsky replied, “if I needed to, I would say, ‘Well, I never--you know, I--I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”