Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  On the morning of October 6, Monica was at her desk at the Pentagon when Tripp, who was at home that day, called her with a piece of news that literally stunned her. Tripp said she had spoken the previous evening with her friend Kate Friedrich, Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor. During their chat, Friedrich had said that she had heard startling rumors about Monica Lewinsky. Apparently, there was a permanent black mark against her name, which meant that she was never going to be allowed to work at the White House again. Monica was now persona non grata, and the best advice Friedrich could offer her was “to get out of town.”

  Monica was devastated. She wept and began to hyperventilate, becoming so distressed that she had to leave work early. “It was one of the most painful days of my life,” she remembers. Tripp’s call finally tipped the balance: by turns miserable and angry, Monica decided once and for all to make a new start in New York.

  During the course of that day, she had several conversations with Tripp, during which they chewed over the implications of Friedrich’s information. In fact, though, Tripp’s account of the fateful phone call was a lie. Kate Friedrich did indeed speak to Tripp on the evening of October 5, but she had never, as she emphasized in her subsequent testimony to the Grand Jury, so much as heard of Monica Lewinsky in the context of the White House or of the NSC.

  Linda Tripp’s lie was yet another strand in the web of deceit she was spinning around Monica. In truth, Tripp was now involved in a conspiracy to snare the girl she had befriended and thereby, it was hoped, entrap the President. For on that day she secretly met with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Lucianne and Jonah Goldberg at Jonah’s Washington home. Her betrayal of Monica was about to take on a new and more explosive dimension as the unlikely quartet plotted and schemed.

  Tripp’s treachery began in earnest after she had warned Monica in August that she intended to write a “tell-all” book about Clinton and his women. In September, she had again contacted Lucianne Goldberg, and had expressed her concern that, because of her connection with Kathleen Willey, she might be forced to testify in the Paula Jones case; she was worried that, given hostility shown to her previously by Bob Bennett, the President’s attorney, no one would believe her. They also discussed Isikoff’s approaches to Tripp that summer regarding Willey, as well as the fact that he wanted to talk to her further about Monica Lewinsky, although at that time he apparently did not know the “young intern’s” name.

  Linda Tripp claimed she faced a serious dilemma. If she was subpoenaed in the Jones case, she feared she would be asked if she knew of other women who had had sexual relations with Clinton. She did not wish to perjure herself, but she was scared that if she told the truth—that she did indeed know of such a woman—she would lose her $80,000-a-year job and face another attack on her integrity from Bennett.

  Hearing all this, Goldberg, according to her FBI deposition, suggested that Tripp record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, so that she would have independent corroboration of her story (although Tripp denies receiving such advice from her). The secret, and probably illegal, recordings, made with a $100 tape recorder Tripp bought from Radio Shack, were to be her proof and her protection. In reality, however, Tripp was the architect of her own dilemma; the only protection she required was from herself and her actions.

  This particular well had originally been poisoned in early 1997, thanks to a tip-off to Paula Jones’s attorneys about Kathleen Willey and her allegations of sexual harassment by the President. Tripp, a longtime friend of Willey, was the suspected source. Whether or not she actually was, it was undoubtedly Tripp who had confirmed, on the record, Newesweek’s story about Willey, and it was also she who, in March 1997, had originally hinted to Isikoff about Monica’s affair with Clinton. Tripp had deliberately avoided meeting Bob Bennett, even though she was a political appointee and could not therefore claim disinterest where the President was concerned. And, according to Jonah Goldberg, it was Tripp who, in October, anonymously alerted Paula Jones’s lawyers to the existence of Monica Lewinsky.

  On October 3, 1997, Tripp, began secretly to tape her friend’s calls—an illegal act in the state of Maryland, where Tripp lives—so that she would have independent evidence of events, some of which she herself had helped to set in motion. Both she and Lucianne Goldberg insist that the recordings were made for Tripp’s protection, and not as means of providing material for a “tell-all” book—in other words, she was not acting as an agent provocateur.

  If her story is taken at face value, Tripp was taping Monica Lewinsky solely in order to provide corroborative evidence if she were asked to testify in the Paula Jones case. Even in that eventuality, the tapes would be used only if her testimony were challenged by Clinton’s lawyers, and for no other reason. Until then, the recordings should have remained strictly confidential, their content not to be revealed except as a last resort, and then only in a courtroom.

  As with her story about Kate Friedrich’s phone call, however, Linda Tripp’s reasons for taping her friend’s calls were clearly bogus. If she had been sincere about not using the illicit tape recordings unless she had to testify in the Paula Jones case, she would have kept their contents confidential. Yet within hours of having started to record them, she was telling Lucianne Goldberg about her chats with Monica. On Sunday, October 5, for example, after she and Monica had joked briefly about the President’s supposed drug-taking—which had no relevance to the Jones case—Tripp reported the conversation to an excited Goldberg. She also ascribed to Monica comments she herself had made about the President, trying to make it seem that he was indeed taking drugs. In fact, exaggeration and embellishment were to become the hallmarks of her modus operandi, not just with the Goldberg and Isikoff, but also later with the FBI and the Office of the Independent Counsel.

  Furthermore, although this did not become clear until much later, Linda Tripp did indeed intend to write a “tell-all” book and, despite the assurances she had given her friend, it would contain details of Monica’s affair with the President. For her own reasons, Lucianne Goldberg, secretly recorded conversations she had in September with Tripp, in which the latter talked about writing down “dates, times and phone calls” relating to an affair between the President and a “young friend of mine . . This is so much more explosive, it makes the other little thing [the Kathleen Willey story], you know, pale.” In answer, Goldberg, who had become increasingly interested as the conversation progressed, suggested that Tripp make a deal with Isikoff, the aim being for Newsweek to publish an article by him as advance publicity for Tripp’s book. In her Grand Jury testimony, Tripp denied that she had had any intention of “putting Monica in a book,” something to which the transcripts of Goldberg’s secret tapes give the lie.

  It is significant that there is no record of Tripp’s conversation with Kate Friedrich, nor of her call to Monica during which she passed on Friedrich’s “information.” The skeptical may be forgiven for thinking that the reason there is no record of either call is because they would clearly demonstrate Tripp’s duplicity. The omission of key conversations between Tripp and Lewinsky was to become more important in the coming months.

  What Tripp reported from her conversations with Monica did not long remain at the level of idle tittle-tattle. Three days after she began taping, she, Isikoff, and the Goldbergs held their meeting at Jonah Goldberg’s Washington apartment—it was on that very day that Tripp had told Monica the cock-and-bull story about her being blacklisted by the White House. Tripp brought with her to the meeting two tapes which she intended to play to Isikoff.

  Undoubtedly there had been discussion before this summit meeting, a conference deemed important enough for Lucianne Goldberg to fly down from New York. Indeed, Isikoff—who used the code name “Harvey” in his dealings with Tripp—has admitted that he spoke to Tripp about Monica Lewinsky beforehand. This affirmation is critical, because it provides evidence that Tripp already had a sense of what Isikoff needed before she spun Monica the yarn about being
banned from the White House.

  In her previous discussions with Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp had rejected as too “sleazy” the agent’s suggestion that she sell her story to the tabloid media. She wanted to retain her credibility by seeing the story published in Newsweek. But, as Isikoff had made clear time and again, his magazine would not print a mere sex story. It had to have an ingredient of public importance, an angle that would link it to matters of legal, political or constitutional consequence. The Paula Jones case was a perfect fit.

  If, as seemed likely, Monica was not going to get a job—any job—at the White House, wouldn’t it make a better story if the President got his girlfriend a government job in New York at a higher salary? That would dovetail nicely with the central charge in the Paula Jones case: that Clinton harassed women employees for sex in return for job benefits. Jones’s lawyers would be able to argue that, just as Jones had allegedly suffered because she spurned his advances, Monica Lewinsky prospered by accepting them. This, of course, begs the question whether Jones’s lawyers, who later claimed that during October they received three separate anonymous phone calls from a woman about Monica Lewinsky, were involved in discussions at an earlier stage than they have hitherto admitted.

  Certainly that scenario explains much about Linda Tripp’s behavior in the fall of 1997: her sudden and bewildering about-face with regard to Monica’s job prospects at the White House, the false blacklist story, and her hostility towards Monica, something which Monica now sees as Tripp’s way of coping with her guilt at her treachery.

  At the meeting in Jonah Goldberg’s apartment, Isikoff, fearing that he would become part of the process of entrapment if he listened to the tapes, apparently heard a verbal description of their contents. Before he dashed off to appear on a TV show, he again emphasized that the story must be linked to something official, and that it must have more sources. Even so, where Tripp and her three fellow schemers were concerned, everything was beginning to come together: once details of Monica’s affair with Clinton came out, Paula Jones’s lawyers would have their case, Isikoff his story, Goldberg. a liberal President in the dock, and Tripp . . what would Tripp have?

  A book, certainly, although at the time of writing it has yet to materialize. It may be, also, that she was driven by something more—revenge for all those years of slights and insults at school and home, retribution against the White House, which had called her a liar and sidelined her career, and the satisfaction of chastening a girl who represented everything, deep down, she loathed.

  For in Linda Tripp’s eyes, hadn’t Monica Lewinsky committed the greatest sin of all, that of being born on the right side of the tracks? She was young, pretty, well-educated, sexually liberated, and enjoyed the love of sophisticated and well-to-do parents, the support of caring friends, and the patronage of influential movers and shakers. They all needed to be shown who was really in control, and Monica perhaps most of all. During their September discussions about Tripp’s book, Goldberg warned her client of the effect her publishing such a book would have on Monica. “This will destroy her,” she said, later adding, “You have to be ready to lose her as a friend.” Linda Tripp’s reply was unequivocal: “Oh, I’m [ready for] that. I have already made this decision.”

  Whatever Tripp’s true motivation, when she pressed the “record” button on her Radio Shack tape machine she began a process of entrapment that would lead to the humbling of a President, and the near-destruction of his lover.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Everyone Gets a Job with a Little Help”

  CALL AND VERY IMPOSING, Vernon Jordan is every inch the urbane Washington insider, a lawyer who counts presidents—including Bill Clinton—and potentates among his friends. Everything from his custommade shirts to his way of speaking exudes class and style. Even self-confessed style-cop Monica Lewinsky was impressed. Indeed, when, on November 5, 1997, she first met Jordan, to discuss her job prospects, she found him more intimidating than the President.

  Jordan had first appeared on Monica’s radar a month earlier, on that fateful day, October 6, when Linda Tripp had dropped her bombshell about the White House blacklisting her. When the two women subsequently discussed Monica’s ambition to move to New York, Jordan’s name came up as a Mr. Fix-It who, besides being a partner at the Washington law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, sat on the board of numerous big-shot companies.

  At that time, Monica was still confiding constantly in Tripp, and the latter was still playing the part of the concerned and supportive friend. “I want you with a life,” she told Monica, urging her to leave Washington. She encouraged her to demand that the President find her a job that paid better than her Pentagon one, ridiculing her friend’s aim of $60,000 a year as way too low. When, in a note to the President, Monica suggested that she would accept a government job with a G12 or G13 rating—junior level—Tripp told her that she could do much better.

  Monica wanted two things from the President, an apology and a job. He ought to “acknowledge that he helped fuck up my life,” she told Tripp during a phone conversation. “If I ever want to have an affair with a married man again, especially if he’s the President, shoot me.”

  Besides confiding in Tripp, Monica’s first instinct when she was told that she would never work at the White House was to call Betty Currie and demand to speak to the President. Unfortunately, he was hosting a dinner for the President of Israel and was unable to take her call. So, with Tripp’s approval, she wrote him a note, one of a series she sent him that fall expressing her anger and unhappiness and the hopes she had had for their relationship, which had promised so much but delivered so little. In the note, she said it was now clear that there was no way she was coming back to the White House in the near future, and asked to see him to discuss her job options. Sadly, she said, “Handsome, you have been distant the past few months and shut me out. I don’t know why. Is it that you don’t like me any more or are you scared?”

  She sent the letter by courier the next day, October 7, and then called Betty Currie to ask when she could see the President. When Currie told her she could offer only the prospect of a phone conversation with him, Monica flipped her lid. “I’ve had enough of you two,” she said furiously. “I never want to speak to you again. You’ve strung me along for a year and now I’m giving you the easy way out.” Currie listened calmly, and later in the afternoon called Monica back and said that he would call her that night. She stressed that if he wanted to see Monica in person Currie herself would come to the White House, however late, to clear the girl into the building.

  “I didn’t know if he was going to call,” Monica remembers. “It was real do or die. Even before the relationship was over I would always go to sleep not knowing if he would call. I would wake up all the time and look at the clock and sometimes I would start to cry. It was so torturous. It wasn’t his fault; he never had any idea how much pain I was in. I was such a glutton for punishment—it’s scary not being clear-headed enough or having the strength to get out of an emotional situation.”

  For once the President did call, at two-thirty in the morning of October 10. Even at that time of night she wanted to dash over to the White House to see him, but he turned her down, saying it was just too late that evening. “You don’t always get your own way, so don’t go getting angry with me.” That was the prelude to the fiercest and longest argument of their affair, a ninety-minute “huge screaming match,” as Monica puts it. “He got so mad at me he must have turned purple.”

  She cried, he yelled at her, dismissing her complaints about her job and arguing that her time at the Pentagon had been a good experience for her. Worse still, during the shouting match he told her, “If I’d known what kind of person you are, I would never have gotten involved with you.” For Monica, that was the most wounding thing he had ever said. “It really hurt,” she recalls.

  At one point she told him that when she found out that she was going to be transferred to the Pentagon in April 1996, she had despera
tely wanted him to intervene so that she could stay. But, she said, “I didn’t want to put you in that position. I knew the election was more important. If there was trouble I just needed to be patient so I never asked. I was a good girl and I believed your promise.” Her remark cut little ice. The President snorted and again hit back hard: “If I’d known it was going to be this much trouble, I would have stopped it in the first place.”

  Then, speaking in a loud whisper, as he always did when he was angry, he continued, “All I think about is you and your job. I’m obsessed with you and finding you a job. I wake up in the morning and it makes me sick thinking about it. My life is empty except for you and this job search. All I have is my work and this obsession. I’m on your team.” Monica took these surprising sentiments to mean that he was on her side in her quest for a job at the White House, and that it was not his fault that it had not come to fruition. In the usual rhythm of their conversations, once they had vented their frustrations they both calmed down. Moreover, before he hung up—at four in the morning—the President agreed that he would, help her find a job in New York.

  Since that day, Saturday, October 11, 1997, was the Clinton’s twenty-second wedding anniversary, Monica was surprised to receive a call from Betty Currie asking her to go over to the White House. As it was still only about eight-thirty in the morning, she immediately postponed her plans to meet her brother in New York, and went to see the President, arriving a little after nine-thirty. She was shown into the Oval Office, to find that calm had returned after the storm: the President said rather sheepishly that when he got off the phone he had realized that he didn’t know what she wanted to do.

  Monica, who stood across from him at the dining-room table, told him that she wanted to move to New York, where her mother now lived, and, since the Watergate apartment was to be sold, she would have to move out of it before the end of October. This was not strictly true but, given her experience of his dilatoriness in finding her a job at the White House, she didn’t want this to turn into a long-term project. She went on to mention that she would need a job reference from someone in the White House, and then outlined various employment possibilities—the United Nations, or else maybe his friend Vernon Jordan could help her find something in the private sector. “Good idea,” replied the President to the latter suggestion (which had in fact arisen only a few days earlier from Monica’s conversation with Tripp).