A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  As part of his reporting for the story, Isikoff called Joe Cammarata. In the long time since the case had been filed, Cammarata had had relatively little to do on behalf of his client. The briefs were mostly drafted by the “elves”—especially Jerome Marcus in Philadelphia and George Conway in New York. (Marcus and Porter had recruited Conway after they read an oped piece he wrote about the case.) Cammarata answered press queries and sorted out the curiosity seekers and other peculiar callers who gravitate toward people in the news. As it happened, Cammarata had gotten one of those strange phone calls right before Isikoff telephoned.

  The woman had actually called several times but refused to leave a name or a number. Finally, Cammarata took the call. The story she told was extraordinarily detailed—and potentially very helpful to Paula Jones’s case. The woman said that she and her husband had been fund-raisers for Clinton during the 1992 campaign. After the election, she had worked as a volunteer at the White House and then been hired as a clerk in the counsel’s office. In November 1993, when she was still a volunteer at the White House, she had gone to see the president about getting a paid job. While they were in Clinton’s private office, the president had touched her breasts and placed her hand on his penis. They were separated only because the president was interrupted by a phone call.

  Though she refused to give her name, the woman gave Cammarata more details that would make her easy to identify. She said that her husband, who had been suffering business reverses, had killed himself on the very day she was groped by Clinton. His death had been mentioned in several right-wing-conspiracy publications that often referred to the “mysterious” deaths of people connected to Clinton. She even mentioned one of these outlets—something called the Guarino Report. After her husband’s death, the woman said, she had been given a White House job and had even attended several overseas conferences with the American delegations, including one to Jakarta and another to Copenhagen.

  The call presented Cammarata with several choices. In light of all the detail she had supplied, it wouldn’t be difficult to track her down himself. But Cammarata didn’t have a lot of resources for private investigators, and, more important, simply learning the woman’s name wouldn’t give him any leverage to win a settlement with the president. For that, the woman’s name would have to become public. Her story would have to embarrass Clinton—and serve as a warning of the disclosures that were likely to come at trial. It would be better, then, for Cammarata if someone else tracked her down and then made her name public, especially someone at a credible national publication. That would help his case—and it would be free.

  Such were Cammarata’s thoughts when he received Isikoff’s call. An intrepid reporter like Isikoff could easily find the woman, and then he’d have a nice scoop. So the lawyer told Isikoff about the call. Their recollections differed about the terms of the exchange. Cammarata said that Isikoff promised to supply him with the name before he published it. Isikoff recalled no such promise. But the gist of the agreement was the same. Even if Cammarata had to wait to read her name in the magazine, he would eventually get what he wanted—an advantage in his lawsuit against the president.

  Cammarata’s leak to Isikoff was analogous to the last important leak the reporter had received about Clinton’s sex life. Cliff Jackson had learned from his disastrous press conference with Jones that he could not hope to gain political leverage simply by making the charges himself. He needed the sanction of a national publication. Cammarata faced the same dilemma. If he simply learned the woman’s name and then disclosed the story himself, the news undoubtedly would have been greeted with skepticism. That’s why Cammarata, like Jackson, needed Isikoff—to invest his damaging information about the president with the prestige of Isikoff’s employer.

  There was nothing extraordinary about this strategy. No one leaked more, or better, than the Clinton White House. But the business of leaking illustrates an important difference between covering crime (which Isikoff had done for most of his career) and covering politics (which he found himself doing in the treacherous waters of the Jones case). In crime, leaks generally come only from law enforcement, and a reporter must assess on his own whether the charges have merit. (After all, it’s difficult to call, say, the Gambino crime family for its side of the story.) But in politics, leaking often represents a strategic choice for a candidate or a cause, and sophisticated reporters inform their readers not just of the facts, but of the context in which the story was developed—that is, which side is leaking and why. That was Isikoff’s challenge as Jackson, Cammarata, and soon others tried to use him for their personal or political advantage.

  Based on Cammarata’s information—fund-raisers for Clinton, husband suicide, job in the White House—Isikoff quickly identified the woman as Kathleen Willey. (After hearing and seeing Willey much later, Cammarata was certain that Willey herself had called him. Willey denied calling the lawyer.) Willey met with Isikoff for an off-the-record interview in her lawyer’s office and related what had happened between her and the president in what Isikoff later called “gripping and microscopic detail.”

  Willey and her husband had first met Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. After Clinton won the election, Kathleen had come to work as a volunteer at the White House. But in the first few months of the Clinton presidency, the Willeys’ life began to disintegrate. Ed Willey’s law business was failing because he had been caught embezzling funds from a client. Kathleen could no longer afford to work for free, so on November 29, 1993, Willey told Isikoff, she had obtained an audience with the president in order to ask for a job on the White House staff. After Willey told the president of her family troubles, Clinton told her how sorry he was—and then kissed her. This was no social kiss; according to Willey, he put his hands in her hair and up her skirt.

  “What else?” Isikoff wanted to know. “Did he put your hands on his penis?”

  “Yes, he did,” Willey replied.

  “Was it erect?” the reporter wanted to know. Indeed it was.

  Continuing her story, Willey told Isikoff that she had emerged, shaken and upset, from the meeting with Clinton, and when she returned home to Richmond, she learned that her husband had killed himself earlier that day.

  Isikoff immediately looked for a way to corroborate the story of Clinton’s pass at the job-seeker. Had she told anyone right away? As a matter of fact, she said, she had told a friend of hers who was working at the time in the White House counsel’s office. A woman named Linda Tripp.

  Isikoff did two things after he heard Willey’s tale. He was now convinced, he wrote later, that “Clinton was far more psychologically disturbed than the public ever imagined.” So he started writing up a book proposal. He and his friend Glenn Simpson, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, came up with an idea for a book that would explain all of the Clinton scandals. The theory was that Clinton was a sex addict, and that virtually everything that had gone wrong in his presidency—from Whitewater to Paula Jones to the health care debacle—could be explained by the crippling effects of Clinton’s obsessive pursuit of sex. (Health care failed, the theory went, because the president had no ability to control the first lady because he feared that she wouldn’t defend him in the sex scandals.) Working together during adjoining weeklong fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Isikoff and Simpson told friends that they had even come up with a tentative title: All the President’s Women—almost word for word the same as the title of Tripp’s projected chapter on Clinton’s sex life.

  The other thing Isikoff did was try to find Linda Tripp and see if she would back up Willey’s claim about what had happened between her and the president. On the morning of March 24, 1997, Isikoff went to the Pentagon and located Tripp’s office. The imperious bureaucrat initially shooed the reporter away from her desk, but agreed to meet him when she took a cigarette break a few minutes later.

  Isikoff outlined Willey’s charges and asked Tripp if it was true. Tripp wouldn’t answer, not until she
spoke to Willey herself.

  Tripp had one more thing to say, as Isikoff was about to leave. “There’s something here, but the story is not what you think it is,” she said cryptically. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.” By this time, unknown to Isikoff, Linda Tripp had a new friend.

  The president’s attempt, in February 1996, to cut off his relationship with Monica Lewinsky had been less than fully successful. The frequency of their contacts never approached the halcyon days of the previous month, but their encounters didn’t stop altogether, either. On the Sunday afternoon of March 31, Clinton summoned Lewinsky to the study for the first time since their breakup a little more than a month earlier. (It was on this occasion that they made erotic use of one of the president’s cigars. Lewinsky told her biographer, Andrew Morton, that after the experience with the cigar, “she realized she had fallen in love.” One FBI interview with Lewinsky on this subject included a revealing disclosure about the real taboos of the Clinton era: “The president did not smoke the cigar because smoking is forbidden in the White House.”)

  On the following Friday, April 5, 1996, Lewinsky was fired from the White House staff. Her departure was the work of Evelyn Lieberman, a deputy chief of staff who made it her business to monitor White House staffers (especially women) for inappropriate behavior around the president. Lieberman regarded Lewinsky as a “clutch” who tried too hard to be around the president. But Lewinsky was also let go because she wasn’t very good at her job. Lewinsky and her boss, Jocelyn Jolley, were terminated on the same day. The two women were responsible for directing routine correspondence from Capitol Hill to the correct office in the White House. According to Lieberman and others, they did it slowly and inaccurately, and a change was needed regardless of Lewinsky’s behavior around the president. As Timothy Keating, Clinton’s director of legislative affairs, told the Starr investigators, Lewinsky “spent too much time out of the office and not enough time doing what she should have been doing.” Neither woman was thrown off the government payroll, however. Jolley was given a temporary job in the General Services Administration, and Lewinsky was dispatched to the public affairs office of the Pentagon.

  By almost any standard, Lewinsky’s new job was better than her old one. It came with a raise, the opportunity to travel, and increased responsibility. Still, Lewinsky was shattered by the change. She devoted the next year and a half to finding a way to return to the White House and proximity to Clinton. Notably, in all of these efforts, Lewinsky displayed no interest in what she might actually do at the White House. This is not entirely surprising, since she admittedly had no interest in politics or the workings of government. (Indeed, it suggests that the decision to fire her was a pretty good one in the first place—and that she was lucky to get the job that she did.) Two days after her transfer, on Easter Sunday, April 7, Lewinsky made a teary appeal for a stay of execution in an audience with the president in his private study.

  Lewinsky later described this meeting with Clinton in one of the conversations that Tripp surreptitiously taped. “He called me at six o’clock and he said, you know, ‘Hi,’ and I said, ‘Hi.’ And this was, like, the Ron Brown thing.” (The secretary of commerce, who was a close friend of Clinton’s, had just been killed in an airplane crash.) “I said, ‘How are you doing?’ He was like, ‘Oh, I’m okay. It’s so bad, da, da, da.’ I said, ‘I know.’ ” Following this moment of shared grieving, Lewinsky told the president, “Well, I have more bad news for you.… Guess whose last day is tomorrow.… Can I please come and see you?”

  “So I went to see him,” Lewinsky went on, “and he—you know—and I was so upset, and he said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do,’ you know. He said—he says, ‘Why do they have to take you away from me? I trust you so much,’ you know. And then—then he said, ‘I promise you … if I win in November, I’ll have you back like that. You can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. You can do anything you want.’

  “And then,” Lewinsky continued to her friend, “I made a joke, and I said, ‘Well, can I be the assistant to the president for blow jobs?’ He said, ‘I’d like that.’ ”

  Before this conversation with the president ended, Lewinsky again auditioned for that position (this time while the president was on the telephone with his adviser Dick Morris). Their interlude was interrupted when Clinton’s aide Harold Ickes arrived in the Oval Office to see the president. Lewinsky scurried out a side door. They didn’t see each other privately for the rest of 1996.

  Lewinsky’s title at the Pentagon was confidential assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Kenneth Bacon. She was, in essence, the secretary to the press secretary. For most twenty-two-year-olds, it would have been a dream job—full of glamorous travel with high-level delegations to the best hotels in the great capitals of the world. But Lewinsky didn’t see it that way. She was consumed by a single interest in life: waiting for the president to call her for phone sex, a visit, or best of all, a job (any job) back at the White House. She moped, ate a great deal, and did this job rather badly as well, especially under time pressure. (She was supposed to do transcriptions for Bacon, and she did not type well.) On her Day-Timer at work, Lewinsky kept track of the days since her last sexual encounter with the president and the days until the election, when, she hoped, she would return to the White House.

  A small bright spot in Lewinsky’s otherwise grim existence came shortly after she started at the Pentagon. She noticed that one of her colleagues in the public affairs office had decorated her work space with “jumbos” of President Clinton—the large-format photographs that are displayed throughout the White House. Lewinsky wondered if the owner of the photographs had also worked at the White House. As Tripp later testified in the grand jury, “I had the jumbos and she begged me for one of the jumbos.” So on the basis of this aspect of their shared past, Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp struck up their friendship.

  Despite the difference in their ages—Tripp was twenty-four years older than Lewinsky—the two women had more in common than just their prior place of employment. They both loved to gossip, and they shared an intense interest in clothes, hair, and dieting. Tripp recalled later that she always knew that Lewinsky was a big fan of the president’s, but she never noticed anything unusual about her interest in him until August 1996, when the young woman traveled to New York to attend a gala fund-raiser on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. At this event, Lewinsky contrived to place herself near the president, and then, in the words of one of her FBI debriefings, “LEWINSKY reached behind herself to fondle and squeeze the President’s penis.” Lewinsky didn’t share that detail with Tripp at the time, but she began to hint that she had a big secret in her recent past.

  At first Lewinsky would say only that she had had an affair with “someone” at the White House. She called him “Handsome” or “the Big Creep”—the latter because of the way he had ended the relationship—and finally she admitted her lover was the president. (Lewinsky had already shared the news with her mother, her Aunt Debra, a therapist, and a handful of friends—in all, eleven people.) Tripp, who had just dropped her book project with Gallagher and Goldberg, was as interested in listening as Lewinsky was in talking.

  As the presidential election approached, Lewinsky was racked by nervous tension over whether she would finally be allowed to return to a job at the White House. (She also had an abortion in this period, the result of a brief relationship with a Pentagon colleague.) After Clinton’s victory over Bob Dole, the president never delivered on the promise of a job, but he did agree to see Lewinsky again. After her departure from the White House, she had begun cultivating the president’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, who came to serve as Lewinsky’s conduit for messages to, and occasionally from, Clinton.

  On February 28, 1997, Currie invited Lewinsky to watch the taping of the president’s weekly radio address. When the couple retreated to his private office after the speech, Clinton gave the former intern a pair of belated Ch
ristmas gifts—a blue glass hat pin and an edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. For the first time in nearly eleven months, Monica began performing oral sex on the president, but this time their encounter would end differently from all the others. As Lewinsky later testified to Starr’s prosecutors, “I finished”—and she was wearing a blue dress from the Gap. (There was only one more sexual contact between them. On March 29, with the president still on crutches from his knee injury at the golfer Greg Norman’s house in Florida, Lewinsky once again performed oral sex “to completion” while, as she put it to Starr’s prosecutors, Clinton “manually stimulated me” to four orgasms. Still consumed with her White House job hunt, Lewinsky left the president with a copy of her résumé on this day.)

  By this time, Lewinsky was keeping Tripp apprised moment to moment on the progress of her relationship. The two women gave somewhat contradictory accounts of Tripp’s behavior in response. Tripp asserted that she gave no advice on how Lewinsky should sustain the relationship, but Lewinsky said Tripp goaded her to keep it going. Lewinsky’s account is far more persuasive. If Tripp had really disapproved, she could have simply cut off contact with Lewinsky; indeed, if that had been Tripp’s attitude, Lewinsky probably would have wanted nothing to do with her. Instead, the pace of their contacts only accelerated. It was, for example, in the spring of 1997 that Tripp suggested that Lewinsky use the Excel spreadsheet software on her computer at the Pentagon to make a grid of all her contacts with Clinton. That way, the older woman said, Monica could identify the “patterns” of the relationship. This, however, was a plainly bogus pretext for Tripp to secure documentary evidence of the subject that had long obsessed her—the president’s extramarital sex life.