Chapter Sixteen

“THE BASTARD SHOULD BE EXPOSED”

WHEN LINDA TRIPP PICKED UP the ringing telephone on the night of September 18, 1997, it was almost 10:30 P.M. Right away she recognized the distinctively deep female voice, roughened by cigarettes and whiskey, even though she hadn’t heard from Lucianne Goldberg for well over a year. She had asked Tony Snow to contact the agent on her behalf again. Still embarrassed over their earlier aborted book deal, Tripp spoke haltingly at first.

“I’ve thought about you various times over the past year and …” She sighed. “I wanted to—to chat with you about something that is—is completely ridiculous. Um, last September a young lady, um, who shall remain nameless for the time being …”

“All right,” said Goldberg patiently.

“ … again, took me in as her confidante and, as it turns out, she has been a, quote, girlfriend of the big creep …”

“Mmm,” muttered Goldberg.

“ … and is still.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Uh, she was twenty-one and an intern when it started.”

“After he was at the major address,” Goldberg prompted.

“Uh, yeah, this was only two years ago … . It’s been going on for two years.

“All right.”

“She was given a job there, things got hot after six months in terms of others’, uh, comments, and uh, one of the female head honchos, not the big one—but one of her people gave him an ultimatum: basically, get her the hell out or else.” Tripp sighed again. “So he got her out—he put her in an agency, um, with a promotion, and it was still going on all this time. It’s still going on, but he’s in a state of paranoia. Uh …” Another sigh. “ … and it’s so sickening to me.”

“But,” asked the literary agent, trying to frame the scene in her mind, “where did they do this?”

“In—in, again, the same location, in the office,” replied Tripp, evidently assuming that Goldberg still remembered Kathleen Willey’s story, as recounted in Tripp’s 1996 book proposal.

“Yikes.”

Without revealing Monica Lewinsky’s name, Tripp went on to describe the affair between the former intern and the president of the United States: its furtive Sunday-afternoon trysts in the Oval Office, its late-night phone-sex sessions, its exhausting emotional turbulence. Tripp had been keeping careful notes for months, she told Goldberg, about everything the younger woman confided.

As she listened, Goldberg was calculating how this stunning information could best be used. “Well, have you talked to her about going forward with this?” This young woman would never do that, Tripp explained, because “she doesn’t want him harmed.”

“Well, then what can you do with it?” asked Goldberg. No matter how many notes and records Tripp might produce, the agent warned, the press would “destroy” the young woman and portray Tripp, already known for her roles in the Kathleen Willey and Vince Foster cases, as “some kind of, uh, you know, nutcase.”

Despite those caveats, Goldberg was hooked. “My tabloid heart beats loud,” she laughed as she pondered Tripp’s options. “Is there any way to have, uh, this Ms. X that we’re talking about here, have her be, um, shall we say, reached by the Paula Jones people?”

Tripp didn’t think so, but then she mentioned another potential avenue of exposure: “Listen, Mike Isikoff has been on my tail about this one for months.”

Had Linda Tripp known Lucianne Goldberg a little better, she might have suspected that the literary agent was taping their conversation—a habit Goldberg had acquired during a long career of intrigue and gossipmongering (and one that, however obnoxious, was perfectly legal in New York, where Goldberg lived). While Tripp had happened upon Goldberg by chance through their mutual friend Tony Snow, she could hardly have selected a more dedicated companion in a scheme against the president. With her bitter determination and self-serving righteousness, Goldberg in many ways epitomized the professional Clinton adversary. She had much in common with Larry Nichols and Sheffield Nelson. But she also had a degree of wit and media savvy displayed by very few of Clinton’s enemies.

Politically, she was a hard-bitten conservative of Nixonian vintage, with the same inclination to fight dirty that had always identified the late disgraced president and his circle. Her resentment sometimes sounded quite personal, less perhaps because Bill Clinton was a Democrat than because he represented the succession to power of the antiwar, pot-smoking generation that had rejoiced at Nixon’s resignation. Clinton had demonstrated against the Vietnam War and worked in the McGovern campaign, while his feminist wife had researched impeachment for the Democrats on the Senate Watergate committee. For the aging, haunted Nixonites, Clinton’s presidency renewed a desire for vengeance that had never been satisfied.

It also presented an attractive opportunity to make a buck. The sixty-two-year-old Goldberg had long been a player in the market for a certain kind of political literature. Her bestsellers in this popular genre included Teddy Bare, an expose of the Chappaquiddick incident, and former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman’s version of the O. J. Simpson murder investigation. In the literary agent’s entanglement with Tripp, the boundary between business and politics became blurred. Goldberg would later proclaim that her motives had been purely patriotic, saying she had been “interested in a Clinton-bashing book since the day I laid eyes on him.” But then there had always been a mercenary aspect to her activism.

 

Lucianne Goldberg’s first brush with the art of the dirty trick came in a sideshow to the Watergate affair. In the sizable domestic-espionage apparatus set up by the Nixon White House, she played a very minor role, so insignificant that she is omitted from most histories of the great scandal.

Posing as a journalist and using the code name “Chapman’s Friend,” Goldberg spied on George McGovern’s presidential campaign from August to November of 1972. She was paid $1,000 a week from a Nixon campaign slush fund to provide gossip about what she later termed “the really dirty stuff” going on among campaign staffers and reporters covering the Democratic nominee, “like who was sleeping with who, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane—that sort of thing.” On the campaign trail there was enough “dirty stuff” to pique Nixon’s voyeurism, although little that was of any practical use.

The White House spies had recruited her through her second husband, Sidney Goldberg, a news syndicate executive with ties to the Nixon entourage, notably with Victor Lasky, an unsavory right-wing journalist who specialized in red-baiting liberal Democrats. Lasky introduced Lucianne Goldberg to Murray Chotiner, the veteran California GOP operative whose pedigree dated back to Nixon’s first congressional campaign in 1950, when Chotiner engineered the smearing of Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas as “the Pink Lady.”

Hiring journalists to spy on his political opponents was a favorite Chotiner tactic. (Chotiner’s first operative in the McGovern campaign, a freelance reporter named Seymour Freidin, abruptly lost his cover during the summer of 1971, when the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson revealed that he was actually a CIA agent.) At Chotiner’s urging, Lucianne obtained campaign press credentials with the Women’s News Service, a feature agency which had occasionally published her articles. She convinced the McGovern people that she planned to write a book about the election. What she really did was phone intelligence reports every few hours to Chotiner, who promptly had them transcribed and sent over to the White House.

Goldberg was also involved in another of Chotiner’s little stunts during the 1972 campaign, which involved the dissemination of a letter smearing a distinguished Greek journalist as a Communist agent. Elias P. Demetracopoulos had fled the Greek military coup in 1967 and devoted his considerable skills to the restoration of democracy in his country. As was later revealed during the Watergate investigation, the Greek junta was funneling hundreds of thousands in illicit cash to Nixon’s campaign coffers. In a “Dear Elias” open letter to Demetracopoulos, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern announced that if elected, he would cut off U.S. aid to the military government that he flatly termed a “dictatorship.”

With Greek American vice president Spiro Agnew on the ticket, the Nixon campaign was portraying the junta as the only alternative to Communism in Greece. The Democratic mayor of Savannah, Georgia, John P. Rousakis, wrote an open letter to McGovern that was widely publicized in the Greek American press. Rousakis pronounced himself “shocked and appalled” not only by McGovern’s position on military aid to Greece, but also by his having chosen to announce that policy through “an obscure Greek communist journalist.”

Demetracopoulos, whose anti-Communist credentials could hardly have been better—the ultraconservative magazine Human Events once described him as “the foremost political editor in Greece”—demanded and belatedly got a retraction and apology Later still, investigators for the Senate Watergate committee determined that the letter had in fact been written as part of a dirty tricks operation by Lucianne Goldberg.

Goldberg’s cover as a member of the Women’s News Service was part of the same game. The Women’s News Service was a subsidiary of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a news agency whose top editors included Sidney Goldberg—and therein lies a curious coincidence. Like Forum World Features, the London-based news agency which was fronted and financed by Richard Mellon Scaife until 1975, NANA was exposed as a media conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency. (Among the columnists whose work it distributed was Goldberg’s pal Lasky, a former employee of the CIA’s Radio Liberty operation in Eastern Europe.)

So while Scaife and the Goldbergs moved in entirely different circles—and there is no evidence that they have ever met—it is nevertheless striking that during the early seventies they were simultaneously involved with the Nixon campaign and with CIA-connected press organizations. Such was the political milieu from which, twenty years later, two of Clinton’s most dogged opponents emerged.

 

She was born Lucianne Steinberger, grew up in a middle-class Washington, D.C., suburb, dropped out of public high school, and married young and unwisely to William Cummings, her teenage sweetheart. For a while she drifted from one dull job to another, including a three-year stint as a clerk in the Washington Post’s promotion department. Her fortunes improved when, after separating from Cummings while still in her early twenties, she joined Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign as a press assistant. Following the 1960 election, the fun-loving Lucy Cummings landed a job in the Kennedy White House press office despite her educational handicap. As she once remarked of her early career, “when you’re tall, thin, blonde and have big boobs, you can have any job you want.” That was certainly the impression she made on a former Lady Bird Johnson aide, who vividly recalled the low-level press staffer as “a very flashy blonde who wore short skirts, tight tops, and made goo-goo eyes at all the guys.”

As a single woman in sixties Washington, the young Lucianne wasn’t quite the stern moralist America later came to know through her televised scolding of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. “Lucy would claim that her entire social life took place Monday through Friday, because she only went out with married men,” a former friend told Newsday in 1998. “On weekends they had to stay with their wives. She’d watch TV Saturday and Sunday”

With the change of administrations after President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, however, her bouncy sexuality may have been her undoing. According to Goldberg, she was frozen out of the White House in 1964 because of an adulterous romance with Dale Miller, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson. Miller’s wife, a close friend of Lady Bird Johnson, evidently grew suspicious when she discovered that Lucianne possessed several “unexplained items” that had been billed to the Millers’ account at Garfinckel’s, a local department store. (Both Millers are since deceased, but their daughter told Knight-Ridder reporters Frank Greve and Ron Hutcheson that she believed there had been no affair and that the department store charges were “fraudulent”; Goldberg claimed that the Garfinckel’s merchandize were gifts from her lover, who had given her “permission to charge:”)

 

Among the items Lucianne took along as she departed the White House was a handwritten personal note sent by Jacqueline Kennedy to Lady Bird Johnson in 1960. That historic document caused a brief stir in 1965, after Mrs. Johnson’s staff learned that Lucianne had brought it to a New York autograph broker for valuation. Unfortunately, not everyone believed her subsequent explanation that she had simply discovered it in a carton of “general debris” from the ’60 Kennedy-Johnson campaign. The Secret Service ended up retrieving the note and returning it to the first lady.

While trying to set herself up as a public relations flack at the National Press Club building in Washington, she was first drawn into Republican circles after meeting Sidney Goldberg. In 1966, she married him at the Plaza Hotel and moved to Manhattan, where she worked briefly for a public relations firm run by the old Nixon hand William Safire.

 

By the time Goldberg’s role as a Nixon spy was disclosed by the Washington Star in 1973, she was, like her husband, a confirmed Republican partisan. Publicly disgraced, both Goldbergs offered their resignations to the management of the Women’s News Service. Lucianne’s was accepted, and she soon embarked on a new dual career: as a literary agent specializing in politically tinged, sensationalized nonfiction, and as an author of cheesy contemporary fiction. What she once told an interviewer about her lifelong addiction to gossip could also be regarded as her professional motto: “I love dish. I live for dish.” (She also later established a sideline selling items for a fee to publications owned by conservative press lord Rupert Murdoch, including the New York Post.)

Certainly she was no prude. Her most successful novel, Madam Cleo’s Girls, was a soft-core tale of international prostitution. Her first nonfiction work, a leering critique of feminism titled Purr, Baby, Purr, suggested that every woman should consider herself “a switchboard with all sorts of lovely buttons and plug-ins for lighting up and making connections.”

For several years her one-woman, low-overhead agency thrived, if mostly at the lower end of New York’s literary hierarchy. But in 1982, Goldberg transformed an important asset into a controversial liability that almost drove her out of the book business. Her client Kitty Kelley, the celebrity biographer, had recently published Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star, which was destined to become a major international bestseller. According to Kelley, however, she was puzzled when Goldberg seemed unable to sell foreign rights to the Taylor biography. It was only by luck, when her observant husband was traveling in Europe, that Kelley learned the book was in fact already being sold abroad without her knowledge or consent.

For more than a year, the frustrated author attempted to obtain royalty payments and straight answers from Goldberg. Finally, she was forced to file a lawsuit against her own agent in federal court in Washington, where Kelley lives. Her attorney charged Goldberg with civil fraud, breach of fiduciary responsibility, and failure to pay royalties. The jury didn’t take long to find the defendant guilty, although the judge overturned both the fraud verdict and an award of punitive damages. In a recent interview, Kelley said that Goldberg wrote her a check for the full amount, about $50,000, before they left the courthouse. (In an ironic epilogue, Goldberg’s lawyer soon found himself suing her to try to collect his fee; he won a judgment, but in 1998, twelve years after winning, still hadn’t collected what Goldberg owed him.)

 

Lucianne Goldberg was not, to say the least, without her own history of peccadilloes. Her motivations as well as Tripp’s would be questioned, as she seemed to know; and when that moment came, she would deny repeatedly that she and her client had even considered selling a book about Clinton and Lewinsky. Amazingly, Goldberg would tell FBI investigators working for Kenneth Starr that “there was no book deal mentioned during this time period,” meaning the fall of 1997. She insisted that their sole aim was to protect Tripp from being labeled a nut or, worse, a perjurer.

Nobody would have known otherwise—except that the two tapes Goldberg made of her own telephone discussions with Tripp show that a book deal was their central concern in determining whether to cooperate with Isikoff. Many other matters came up, too: the gifts Clinton and Lewinsky had exchanged, their failure to consummate the relationship, Lewinsky’s obsession with other alleged girlfriends of the president, Clinton’s sexual proclivities, Isikoff’s “manipulative” treatment of sources, and a strange invitation Tripp had received from a Clinton friend. What was barely mentioned on those tapes was any concern Tripp felt about being subpoenaed to testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit.

Clearly, something more personal than pure opportunism animated Linda Tripp’s anger at the president. According to a New Yorker profile by Jane Mayer, Tripp’s father repeatedly betrayed and finally left her mother. Tripp’s own marriage had also ended in divorce. She was especially outraged by Clinton’s lustful behavior toward the “beautiful young girl” (whose name she didn’t mention to Goldberg during those initial September conversations).

“He plays to the world audiences as being a protector of women’s rights,” she complained.

“Oh, I know, γeah,” said Goldberg.

“As being this—this sterling example of family values and—other than the fact that he’s known to be a philanderer. But, I mean, beyond that, he’s got a daughter five years younger than that …”

“Yeah,” said Goldberg.

“I have a daughter five years younger, and I have a son her age.”

“Right;” said Goldberg.

“I—I find it appalling—and I think parents would find it appalling.”

The literary agent wanted to talk business.

“Do you—um—how do you see your using this information, in a book or—”

“I don’t know,” Tripp replied. “I mean, I was working on—right now, my attorney has virtually all my files, but prior to that I had scrubbed the whole Maggie [Gallagher] product and started from scratch and had come up with a whole different spin … Tripp was already contemplating another book project about her White House experiences.

“Now, um, have you considered going to Isikoff and going off the record with him?” Goldberg asked.

“Oh, I could do that in a minute. But then he’d write the book, or he’d—he’d write the whole thing.”

Goldberg thought not. “No. Uh, he only has a certain amount of space.”

“Oh, no,” Tripp fretted. “He’s—working on a book deal. He’s doing an all-the-president’s -women kind of thing.” Although Isikoff later tried to minimize his effort to sell a book in 1997, there is no doubt he tried to put together a book proposal on Clinton’s scandals during that spring and summer.

Goldberg wasn’t worried. “Well, then we make a deal with Isikoff that here’s—here’s the information we’ll give you. Here is just enough documentation for you to do the story, but—but the rest of it belongs to Linda because she’s doing a book. He would have to honor that if he wanted the story … . Um, the trick would be to get it out there, just enough of it to titillate the public.”

Tripp explained that first she wanted to get a new job, one that wouldn’t be vulnerable to an angry president. In leaving the White House for the Pentagon, she had given up the protections of the civil service for a more lucrative political appointment. A job change might take some time, but by early spring 1998, she told the agent, she could be ready for a book deal.

Again, Goldberg reassured her jumpy client about talking to Newsweek. “I think—just hearing it for the first time … I think we can make a deal with Isikoff that protects you totally, that gets the surface of this out, and then you stand back to fill in the pieces, and I get you a publisher that will be happy to do that.”

“All right. Well, let’s talk again,” said Tripp. “I—my reservation about Isikoff is that he is known to her, uh, because of my involvement with him before.”

There was no point in worrying about that, Goldberg pointed out. “If you’re ready to go ahead with this, you have to be ready to lose her as a friend.”

“Oh,” said Tripp. “I’ve already made this decision.”

In that case, Goldberg said, “Isikoff should not pose a problem.” And, she added, “There’s nothing wrong with going to Isikoff soon, and the deal that we would cut would be, ‘You write nothing, but here’s background so you can start piling up stuff.”’ Before hanging up she instructed Tripp to “think about going to Isikoff and write a list of what demands you want to take to him … and then you and I will collude on it … .”

Then, she chuckled, they could all meet at her new and better “safe house” in Washington, a duplex apartment the Goldbergs had recently bought for their son Jonah.

 

The next time they spoke, about a week later, Goldberg and Tripp apparently discussed the possibility of cutting out Isikoff and selling their story to the Star or the Globe, supermarket tabloids where the down-market agent was already well connected. That conversation wasn’t recorded by Goldberg, but she has acknowledged that she raised another sensitive subject that evening. Only by taping the constant calls from Lewinsky about her affair with Clinton, Goldberg insisted, would Tripp be able to compile sufficient proof that it was true.

A few days later they spoke again, and this time Goldberg’s tape recorder was running. Their agenda was still how to break the story in Newsweek without spoiling Tripp’s value as a tell-all author. Ever mindful of the aborted 1996 book deal, Tripp apologized for putting Goldberg “in a sore spot.”

“It’s not a sore spot,” the agent said. “My ultimate goal in this is that the information become public, with you being protected—and your being able to step forward and tell an extraordinary story.” She scoffed at Isikoff’s doubts. “When he says no—[that] in this climate no publisher will touch it—I’m sorry, but the attitude in publishing now is ‘We don’t give’—even the liberals that were pro-Clinton—‘We don’t give a shit.’ Nobody cares about him anymore … . The climate is extremely good for this kind of information.”

“I would have absolutely no qualms going that way,” said Tripp, referring to “the tabloid stuff.”

“Yeah, but the problem with that,” warned Goldberg, “is that you’ve gotta really rat and that you’ve gotta tape.”

That night Goldberg placed Tripp in serious legal jeopardy. Evidently they had already discussed the legality of taping phone conversations with only one party’s consent, as Goldberg herself was doing at that very moment. Now she told Tripp, “I checked that out. You can—one-party taping is fine. You checked it out too, but—it’s fine. There’s no problem with that.”

There was a big problem, however, with one-party taping in the state of Maryland, where Tripp resided. There and in eight other states, it was illegal. Recording even one such tape could bring a felony conviction, with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

They decided to ask Isikoff to a meeting where both women would be present. “Tell him that we, the three of us want to sit down, and I don’t want him to be wired,” instructed Goldberg. “’Cause I’ll be wired,” she joked. “Tell him … that I’ve been your agent for a long time … . And I am also keenly interested, as you are, in doing something with this information that protects you, but eventually leads to you doing a book about your entire experience.”

“Okay. All right. I’ll do that tomorrow morning.”

Several months later, Tripp would testify before the OIC grand jury in Washington about her September 1997 conversations with Goldberg. When associate independent counsel Stephen Binhak asked whether she and the literary agent had talked about “putting together a book, another book proposal,” Tripp said, “We both realized right away that this was coming to a head and this wasn’t particularly what could be a book.” Instead, she insisted, the “whole premise” of her renewed contact with Goldberg was her fear of being called to testify in the Jones case. “[A book] was not what we were looking to do and I say that with all candor. When I threw away the book idea in August of ’96, I was completely finished with it.” If Binhak ever listened to the Goldberg tapes—which were in the OIC’s possession—he would have realized that her sworn testimony was false. Ostensibly terrified at the prospect of telling less than she knew in a civil deposition, Tripp appeared to have no difficulty at all lying to a federal grand jury.

 

Within days of Goldberg’s suggestion that she tape Lewinsky, Tripp visited a nearby Radio Shack store and purchased a $100 recorder. (Reportedly, employees of that store later testified that they had advised Tripp about the illegality of one-party taping in Maryland, following a company policy that was reiterated in a warning on the tape recorder’s packaging.) She set up the device on a little-used phone line in her study, and inaugurated her home wiretap on the evening of October 3 with a call to Lewinsky.

That maiden tape produced little useful dialogue. The two women fell into an argument over whether Lewinsky had been “having sex” with Clinton or whether they had just “fooled around.” Lewinsky insisted that “blow jobs” were far less intimate than intercourse, a distinction Tripp mocked. “You’ve been around him too much.”

Perhaps Tripp had been around Lewinsky too much, as Lewinsky’s biographer, Andrew Morton, later theorized. Listening to Monica moaning about her heartaches with the “big creep” had grown tiresome. Over the course of a year, the sheer tedium of Lewinsky’s whining may have hardened her “friend” for the manipulations Tripp used to gradually trap her.

On the morning of October 6, Tripp began to play on the emotions of the younger woman, informing her that “Kate”—a White House friend of Tripp’s who worked for the National Security Council—had said there was no chance Lewinsky would be brought back into the White House. A successful job interview at the NSC and a strong recommendation from Tripp couldn’t mitigate rampant rumors about her misbehavior. Deflecting Lewinsky’s furious questions, Tripp would not say how “Kate” supposedly knew this. (Tripp’s friend, NSC staffer Kate Friedrich, later testified that she had never discussed Lewinsky’s bad reputation with Tripp—but Tripp can be heard on tape telling Lucianne Goldberg about the same alleged conversation with “Kate”)

Lewinsky had known for months that her chances of going back to the West Wing were not good. During the summer she had met with presidential aide Marsha Scott to plead her case, and had broken down in tears when Scott said that her reputation as a “stalker” had made her unemployable there. Scott would later explain to the grand jury how she had tried to counsel Lewinsky that returning to the White House would do her career more harm than good. A strikingly attractive woman whom the American Spectator had called Clinton’s mistress, she had become furious when Monica had responded by naming a list of White House employees suspected of sleeping with the president whose careers were prospering. “I thought she seemed rather pathetic,” Scott explained, “ … but I was also very angry that she was going down this road. I thought it was very self-centered. It was like a little spoiled kid.”

Nevertheless, it was Tripp’s account of what “Kate” had supposedly said that finally ended Lewinsky’s fantasy From that moment, she became increasingly receptive to Tripp’s insistence on an alternative course: She should demand that Clinton find her a suitably “substantive” and well-paid job in New York City. It was the least the big creep could do.

 

A few minutes after hanging up with Lewinsky, Tripp’s phone rang again. It was Lucianne Goldberg calling from her son’s apartment in Washington’s Adams-Morgan neighborhood. She had arranged a meeting with Michael Isikoff, and had come down from New York the night before.

“What I have on tape is very little,” Tripp cautioned. “I mean, I’ll get more. Because this isn’t over, in terms of what she’ll want to rehash over and over again. But there are dates. She says some dates on there, and, you know, when he called her from the road and—”

“Well, that’s enough,” replied Goldberg. “You know, all you need is a snippet to—”

“Oh, I got snippets.” Did Jonah have a cassette recorder so Tripp could play the snippets for Isikoff? He did.

“It’s telling that in, I think, three conversations I went through a hundred-and-twenty-minute tape, and I think one side of [another], and, actually, what I’m trying to do is stall here, because I think she’s going to call me from the Watergate and let me know what she’s decided to do … . And I want to hear, if she’s flipping out, I want to get that on tape.”

 

Isikoff stopped off at Jonah Goldberg’s apartment for an hour that evening on his way to appear on Hardball with Chris Matthews, a CNBC evening talk show. Sitting in the living room, he listened as Tripp told him she had been surreptitiously taping her recent conversations with the president’s paramour. She had brought along a tape for him to hear.

First, said Isikoff, “I need to know this woman’s name.” Tripp glanced over at Goldberg, then replied, “Her name is Monica Lewinsky.” As the reporter scribbled, Tripp gave the details on Lewinsky’s background and family, her entree to the White House through a Clinton contributor named Walter Kaye, and her current job at the Pentagon.

It was an interesting story, especially the parts about a presidential girlfriend on the public payroll. But when Tripp started to play the tape cued up on Jonah Goldberg’s coffee table, Isikoff stopped her. As he explained in Uncovering Clinton, he felt queasy about hearing a tape made under such dubious circumstances. And something else bothered him too, he later wrote. “If I started to listen in on her conversations as she was taping them—as opposed to when she was finished—then I inevitably would have become part of the process.” He didn’t want to influence conversations that would become part of his story. (According to Tripp’s testimony, however, the fastidious journalist “encouraged me to continue my taping.”)

He needed more “documentation” than the tapes anyway, he told Tripp and Goldberg as he prepared to leave. “I had nothing particular in mind when I made this point.” Yet he did say that he was particularly intrigued by Lewinsky’s search for a new job.

When Tripp arrived home later that night, she dialed Lewinsky’s number. The voice-activated recorder switched on automatically before Lewinsky answered. After chatting awhile, Tripp subtly guided her into a discussion of potential employment opportunities in New York. Whenever she grew despondent over Clinton’s lack of attention to her, Lewinsky thought about joining her mother in Manhattan and finding a job there, perhaps at the United Nations. Months earlier, Lewinsky recalled, Betty Currie had spoken with Clinton about that idea on her behalf. According to Currie, the president had said, “Oh, that’s no problem. We can place her in the UN like that.” Now she and Tripp together composed a letter to Clinton, imploring him to make good on that implied promise by December 1.

“You don’t have to limit yourself to the UN. There are a bazillion options in New York,” urged Tripp, who also offered advice about how to send the letter. The quickest way would be delivery via a safe, bonded courier like Speed Service. Lewinsky hesitated, worrying that a messenger might open her letter or draw unwanted attention, but Tripp convinced her that no such danger existed. “Courier it tomorrow morning from work. What is more natural than something being couriered from the Pentagon to the White House?”

A mature woman trusted by Lewinsky almost as much as her own mother, the authoritative, experienced Tripp didn’t have much difficulty directing the action. Lewinsky sent the letter to Betty Currie by courier from the Pentagon the following day, and continued to use Speed Service to deliver packages and letters to Clinton.

She couldn’t have conceived the real reason Tripp had insisted on that particular Washington courier firm. Speed Service was managed by a relative of Lucianne Goldberg—and he had been instructed by her to keep the routing slips of every letter and package the young woman sent to the White House.

Goldberg later admitted that conning Lewinsky into using Speed Service had been her idea, although she also told the FBI she had suggested the firm to Tripp “in an offhanded way, with the only intention of steering some business” to her family. (Very considerate of her, even if the total was well under $50.) Within a few weeks, Tripp and Goldberg provided Isikoff with several routing slips from Speed Service as documentation of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship.

 

On October 11, responding to Lewinsky’s courier-delivered letter asking to see him, the president called her at home around 2:30 A.M. Her feelings of rejection and his mounting impatience quickly erupted into a “huge screaming match” that went on for well over an hour. She later recalled his saying that night, “If I’d known what kind of person you are, I would never have gotten involved with you.” At these moments of emotional release, his relationship with Lewinsky sounded like a pairing of equally immature teenagers; and when the weeping and yelling subsided, he characteristically tried to reassure her that he really did care. He would prove it by helping her find a good job in New York.

Several hours later, Currie invited her to see the president in the Oval Office. In a warm and friendly Saturday-morning mood, they talked over her move to Manhattan, her mother’s new apartment there, and her career possibilities at the UN and elsewhere. Giving her a farewell hug, he asked her to send him an employment “wish list.”

It was either during that meeting or on the telephone the night before that Lewinsky first raised the name of Vernon Jordan, the suave Washington attorney, Clinton golf buddy, and adornment of various corporate boards. Would the president ask his influential friend to help her find work? “Good idea,” Clinton agreed.

Good or bad, that idea had originated with someone else, as Lewinsky told Kenneth Starr’s investigators after she received immunity and began talking. According to the transcript of her initial OIC interview on July 27, 1998, “Linda Tripp suggested to Lewinsky that the President should be asked to ask Vernon Jordan for assistance.” Tripp told Starr’s grand jury that it was neither she nor Lewinsky but the president who had proposed contacting Jordan. The tapes she provided offer no clue as to who told the truth.

Yet there is little question that Tripp was guiding Lewinsky’s job search toward a snare. Toward the end of October, UN ambassador Bill Richardson invited the ex-intern to an interview with him at his Washington quarters, in the same Watergate complex where Lewinsky then lived. On the pretext that there was something improper about Lewinsky going to Richardson’s hotel room, Tripp frantically tried to persuade her to insist that the meeting take place in Acquarelle, a restaurant downstairs. Lewinsky herself didn’t feel altogether comfortable going to the ambassador’s suite, and Tripp shrewdly played on her fears by suggesting that it was all “a setup” engineered by Clinton aide John Podesta, who had arranged the interview.

“Monica, please promise me you will not meet this guy in the hotel room,” Tripp wheedled. “What if John Podesta thinks a good way to neutralize you is to put you in a compromising situation? Then if ever you decide to become a crazy woman, they can say, ‘Oh please, she propositioned Bill Richardson at the Watergate.”’

Beneath this pulp-novel scenario lay another Tripp trap. She wanted Lewinsky to meet Richardson in a public place so they could be observed, and perhaps photographed, by Newsweek. Tipped off by Tripp, Isikoff knew that Lewinsky was scheduled to meet Richardson at the Watergate on the morning of October 31. According to Isikoff, one of his colleagues staked out the complex for several pointless hours. As Newsweek’s bored sleuth flipped through newspapers at the restaurant downstairs, Lewinsky and Richardson chatted briefly and demurely upstairs, in the presence of his assistants. But having already decided she didn’t really want to work at the UN, she declined the position Richardson offered her a few days later.

Instead Lewinsky decided to rely upon the extensive contacts of Vernon Jordan, with whom she met for the first time on November 5—an appointment she had been trying to arrange through Currie for nearly a month. Offering him the “vanilla” version of her departure from the White House and her reasons for leaving Washington, she showed the charming attorney her employment “wish list” of New York firms. He looked it over, suggested a few additions, and assured Lewinsky he would line up some interviews soon. “We’re in business.”

 

While Tripp continued to tape Lewinsky on more than two dozen occasions in October and November, she was beginning to feel the pressure of her own deception. It offended her that Clinton, despite his efforts to end the illicit relationship, still appeared to her to be toying with Lewinsky’s affections, and that the young woman still remained so lovestruck. The possibility that the president had grown genuinely fond of Monica and was letting her down easy while protecting their secret doesn’t seem to have occurred to her. (As in all love affairs, the proportions of altruism and selfishness in this one remained a mystery—perhaps even to Clinton and Lewinsky themselves.)

Meanwhile, despite Tripp’s frequent reports to “Harvey,” the code name she had bestowed on Isikoff, he wasn’t moving forward on her timetable. The reporter was listening and cooperating, but there was no way to know when he would have sufficient evidence. Newsweek’s institutional caution had delayed the Kathleen Willey story until after the Drudge Report broke it.

Besides, to whatever degree Isikoff shared Tripp’s and Goldberg’s contempt for the president, his enthusiasm for their methods was more restrained. The week before Thanksgiving, according to him, Tripp called with the remarkable news that Lewinsky had kept a dress bearing stains from Clinton’s semen since the previous February. Now she and Goldberg were thinking about purloining this damning frock and turning it over to Isikoff.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Have it tested,” Tripp answered.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” He was sure Tripp had lost her mind, and more or less told her so.

Crazy she might have been, but crafty too. Through Goldberg, she had benefited from the forensic expertise of Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles detective then working with the literary agent on his second book. Fuhrman explained that even a tiny sample of semen could remain viable as evidence for years. The only problem, as Isikoff pointed out, was the absence of a sample of Clinton’s own DNA for laboratory comparison. Where was Newsweek supposed to get that?

It is safe to say Tripp was fascinated by the stained dress. She even attempted a ruse to gain access to Lewinsky’s apartment so she could steal it. When Lewinsky casually mentioned in late November that she planned to have the navy blue Gap shift dry-cleaned for a family occasion, the older woman begged her not to. The evidence should be preserved, Tripp admonished her, just in case.

“And I feel this is what I would tell my own daughter. That’s why I’m saying this to you. I would say to my own daughter, for your own ultimate protection, which mea culpa [sic], I hope you never need it …”

“What for, though?” Lewinsky wondered.

“I don’t know, Monica. It’s just this nagging, awful feeling I have in the back of my head.”

When those elliptical arguments didn’t work, Tripp remarked that the Gap dress made the plump, insecure Monica look “really fat.” Monica decided to leave the soiled souvenir in a closet.

 

Waiting for a subpoena from the Paula Jones lawyers was also taking a psychological toll on Tripp. She was looking forward to testifying, “gleefully,” as she later put it, yet she desperately wanted to control the circumstances. Tripp is strongly suspected of having made several anonymous telephone calls to the Jones lawyers, urging them to subpoena both herself and Monica Lewinsky. (She has denied making those calls, but some of her best friends apparently don’t believe her.) According to Tripp’s grand jury testimony, she remembered telling Goldberg, “I don’t mind being subpoenaed, but I just wish there was a way to do this without having to be deposed in the presence of Bob Bennett,” the president’s lawyer. “He will find out about the tapes because if he asks me under oath I’ll have to say, you know, that, yes, I have proof, and I’m dead meat. At that point if they know what I’ve been doing, I’m dead meat.” (Describing her feelings to Lewinsky, Tripp sputtered, “The biggest thing is, I hate Bennett. I think he’s an arrogant asshole, and I think he’s a sleaze—a sleazeball.”)

More than once that fall, the pressures on Tripp became so intense that she blew up in rage at Lewinsky and broke off their false friendship. “From now on, leave me alone,” she E-mailed at the end of October. “I really am finished, Monica. Share this sick situation with one of your other friends, because, frankly, I’m past nauseated about the whole thing.”

“I will respect that,” Lewinsky replied. “I would only like to ask that I have your assurance that everything I have shared with you remains between us. You have given me your word before, but that was when we were on good terms. Can I still trust that?”

Another blowup occurred in late November, just before Tripp’s birthday on November 24. Lewinsky sent gifts with a conciliatory note, which Tripp rejected the next day with a plea for solitude. “I need a break.” They reconciled again, but by then Tripp was already talking about Lewinsky to the lawyers for Paula Jones. By then, in fact, the Jones lawyers had sent their own birthday present to Tripp at the Pentagon, in the form of a subpoena.

 

The man who set up Tripp’s long-awaited rendezvous with the new Jones attorneys from Dallas was Richard W Porter, the conservative activist with an expanding resume: former Bush White House aide, adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle, and Republican opposition researcher; fellow University of Chicago Law School alumnus and close friend of Jerome Marcus, with whom he had arranged continuing legal assistance for Paula Jones; law partner of Kenneth W Starr at Kirkland & Ellis; lawyer and anti-Clinton researcher for investment banker Peter W Smith, who talked to him about negotiations with the Arkansas state troopers in Troopergate; and now conduit to the Jones team for Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg.

During the third week of November, the agitated Tripp had asked Goldberg to “get me subpoenaed” by the Jones camp. She correctly assumed that the literary agent would be able to make the necessary connections. And Goldberg either knew or guessed that Alfred Regnery, the right-wing, Chicago-based president of Regnery Publishing and a publisher with whom Goldberg dealt frequently, might offer a useful suggestion. Regnery said Goldberg should call his friend Peter Smith, which she did on November 18.

“I did tell him at the time, I told him why we needed some help,” Goldberg recalled much later. “Smith said,”I’ll be glad to help you with whatever you need, I know the whole story anyway.”’ Smith called back that day with Richard Porter on a conference call. After Goldberg finished telling Tripp’s story, Porter promised to take care of the subpoena.

Then, according to Isikoff—who had his own sources among the clique of conservative lawyers helping Jones—Porter also contacted George Conway in New York via E-mail. “There’s a woman named Lewisky,” he typed, misspelling her name. “She indulges a certain Lothario in the Casa Blanca for oral sex in the pantry.” (Isikoff notes that Porter mentioned that among those aware of this situation was “a certain reporter at Newsweek:”) He sent along Lucianne Goldberg’s telephone number, too. Conway called the lawyers at Rader, Campbell in Dallas that same afternoon.

 

Until they heard about Monica Lewinsky, the Dallas attorneys were not so eager to contact Tripp. They regarded her testimony as potentially damaging to the credibility of their star witness, Kathleen Willey. But when David Pyke called Tripp at her Maryland home on the evening of November 21, he discovered that she intended to help him, a scenario that Pyke described as a “Willey-type situation.”

Goldberg had briefed Pyke earlier, and now Tripp filled in most of the blanks regarding Lewinsky’s affair with the president, except for her name. “I told him that I had been documenting through tape recording this information.” She was relieved to learn that Jones had just won a ruling permitting the deposition of Willey, and thus providing a plausible reason for subpoenaing Tripp. According to Tripp’s testimony Pyke worded the subpoena with sufficient imprecision that Tripp would not have to surrender the tapes just yet, “because he, too, did not want them to fall into the hands of Bob Bennett.” They tentatively agreed on a deposition date in December. She also had a warning for Pyke, however. He was not to advise her attorney, Kirby Behre, that they had spoken about the subpoena.

Behre, a Democrat, had been recommended to her years before by the White House, and she no longer fully trusted him. (Evidently Tripp felt she couldn’t fire Behre just yet because doing so might alert the White House to her real sympathies.) Pyke served Tripp the subpoena by mail at the Pentagon three days later.

After getting the subpoena, Tripp brought it to Behre’s office along with the tapes of Lewinsky. Aghast that Tripp had violated Maryland’s privacy statutes, Behre took possession of the tapes and ordered her to stop taping if she wanted to avoid prosecution. If they were subpoenaed, she would be exposed. But when Tripp showed him the Pyke subpoena, Behre laughed at how poorly it had been drawn. He had no idea his client had listened to Pyke draft it over the phone a few nights earlier. By demanding “writings” rather than “documents” from Tripp, the lawyer explained, it permitted him to withhold her tapes. “Oh,” she said. “Isn’t that great?”

 

Acting on an instinct that something was wrong, Bob Bennett made an attempt in early December to discern the true dimensions of his adversaries in the Jones case. The aggressive Clinton attorney had known for some time that back in 1994, before Kenneth Starr took over as the Whitewater independent counsel, Starr and others at Kirkland & Ellis had worked on an amicus brief supporting Jones’s argument against presidential immunity. More recently, however, Bennett had learned something that troubled him even more. In October, according to James Warren, the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, a sealed affidavit in the Jones case had been faxed to the newspaper’s office, in violation of Judge Susan Webber Wright’s strict gag order, from the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis. In other words, someone in Kenneth Starr’s law firm had access to sealed documents in the Jones case.

Bennett had no way of knowing how serious the implications of that small fact were about to become. What bothered Bennett at the time was just the whiff of collusion. He was also aware that the OIC had, like Jones’s lawyers, been investigating the president’s personal life. At the very least, he thought, Starr might have a significant conflict of interest. The OIC’s power could not be used to promote the interests of Starr’s law firm. And he wondered whether the reluctance to settle on Jones’s part might have something to do with the independent counsel.

Pursuing his intuition, Bennett delivered a subpoena on December 2 to Kirkland’s Washington office, seeking any documents concerning the Jones lawsuit as well as all attorneys, individuals, and groups associated with it, including the Jones legal fund, Eberle & Associates, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, the Rutherford Institute, and Cliff Jackson, among others, that might exist in the files of the Starr firm’s Washington or Chicago offices.

 

That same week, Monica Lewinsky returned from a Thanksgiving visit to her father’s home in Los Angeles, and she was again becoming impatient with Clinton and his friends. Vernon Jordan hadn’t returned any of her telephone calls since their meeting in November. On the morning of Saturday, December 6, she tried to enter the White House with an armful of presents for Clinton, but was turned away at the gate. When a Secret Service officer told her that the president was visiting with the blond CBS News correspondent Eleanor Mondale, Lewinsky made a scene and walked away enraged. A flurry of phone calls ensued between her and Betty Currie and Clinton, who first scolded her for being a pest and then invited her to come by later in the day.

In the Oval Office, Clinton greeted her warmly. She gave Clinton the gifts she had brought, and then told him of her frustration with Jordan. The president agreed to speak with his friend again. What Lewinsky didn’t know then, although Clinton probably learned it that morning, was that her name was on a witness list delivered to Bennett by the Jones lawyers the previous day Jordan saw the president that weekend, and on Monday his secretary called Lewinsky to set up a lunch meeting for her on December 1 l.

As they ate turkey sandwiches in his office, Jordan jokingly urged her to take out her anger with the busy, neglectful Clinton on him. Later that day, after sending Lewinsky away with a renewed promise to help her find a job, Jordan called top executives at three major New York firms: American Express; the diversified holding company McAndrews & Forbes, which owns Revlon; and the worldwide advertising agency Young & Rubicam.

About a week later, Clinton called Lewinsky at home around 2 A.M. with bad news. Betty Currie’s brother, the president told her, had died in a terrible car accident. Also, Monica’s name had showed up on the Jones witness list. According to Lewinsky, the president said she might avoid testifying if she gave an affidavit. They talked about whether Clinton could settle the lawsuit, as Lewinsky wished he would. He asked her to contact Currie if she received a subpoena.

The subpoena arrived at Lewinsky’s Pentagon office on December 19. It summoned her for a deposition in January and demanded all her written communications with Clinton and all the gifts she had received from him. The list of gifts covered by the subpoena included, of all things, “hat pins”-a clear ref erence to the first present that Clinton had given her, and a none too subtle sign of treachery.

A shocked and sobbing Lewinsky called Vernon Jordan, who smoothly took control. He told her to come over, and when she got to his office, he tried to calm her down by explaining that there was really nothing extraordinary about the subpoena, despite its unusual demand for a hat pin. Jordan said he knew a good defense lawyer, Frank Carter, who might be able to represent her. She stepped out of the office for a moment so he could make a phone call. At that point, Jordan called Clinton and assured the president that he would find Lewinsky a good lawyer. Then he called her back in and asked two questions. Did she ever have sex with the president? Had he ever asked her to have sex with him? She answered no to both. She wasn’t certain whether Jordan understood the real nature of her relationship with Clinton, although she later tried to explain their “phone sex” encounters to him. Perhaps because erotic talk on the phone hardly constitutes a love affair, perhaps because he might not have believed her, Jordan brushed it off.

On December 22, Jordan took Lewinsky in a limousine to Frank Carter’s office. He stayed briefly to introduce them and then left. Carter, too, asked whether Lewinsky had had sex with the president. She again denied it. She had brought along some but not all of the gifts Clinton had given her, saying she hoped these would be enough to “satisfy” the Jones lawyers. Carter emphasized that she had to produce any and all items covered by the subpoena, and even urged her to go home and look for anything else that might be relevant. She hadn’t brought the hat pin.

 

When Lewinsky returned to the Pentagon that afternoon, she and Tripp went out into an alley, where the older woman could smoke. There, Tripp came as close to telling her friend the truth as she ever would. “Monica, don’t ask me to lie. If I’m asked about you, I’m gonna tell.”

Frantic to find a way to avert that disaster, Lewinsky had talked through various scenarios, trying to convince Tripp to come over “to Bennett’s side,” to fake an injury that would postpone her deposition, to consult with the president’s lawyers and Kirby Behre so that she wouldn’t have to testify. At several points in November and December, Tripp had encouraged Lewinsky to believe that she might cooperate in some such scheme.

But in the alleyway, and again that night when they spoke on the telephone, Tripp made her intentions, if not her real purposes, clear. “Hey, look Monica, we already know that you’re gonna lie under oath … . If I have to testify, if I am forced to answer questions and I answer truthfully, it’s going to be the opposite of what you say … . If they say, ‘Has Monica Lewinsky ever told you that she is in love with the president or is having a physical relationship with the president?’—if I say no, that is fucking perjury. That’s the bottom line.”

Gratuitously she added, “I will do everything that I can not to be in that position,” when she had actually done everything she could to ensure she would be a witness for the Jones lawyers. “I am being a shitty friend,” she said with unusual understatement, “and it’s the last thing I want to do, because I won’t lie.”

 

If, during the last hour she spent with Clinton, Lewinsky had alerted him to the obvious danger posed by Tripp, everything might have turned out differently. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. It would have meant admitting that she had betrayed their secret and thereby jeopardized him, his family, and his presidency. On a Sunday morning, December 28, she went to visit him at the White House to pick up his Christmas gifts for her. Her job at the Pentagon had ended on Christmas Eve with a farewell party—where a smiling Tripp had insisted they be photographed together—and Lewinsky was preparing to leave for New York.

When the topic of the Jones subpoena came up, the trusting Clinton mentioned that troubling “hat pin” reference. Had Monica mentioned the little gift to “that woman from last summer,” meaning Tripp? No, Lewinsky replied. Should she get rid of his other gifts, or give them to Betty Currie? she later said she asked him. According to her, he said he would think about it. They parted with a farewell kiss.

Sometime later, Betty Currie called Lewinsky at home to talk about the gifts. Their accounts of that conversation conflict somewhat as to the exact time, although neither woman said that the president had encouraged their scheming. The end result was that the secretary picked up a box of Clinton’s gifts to Lewinsky, took it home, and stored it under her bed.

Just over a week later, Clinton called Lewinsky. She told him she had agreed that afternoon to sign an affidavit drafted by Frank Carter—which, if properly worded, might allow her to avoid testifying in the Jones case. The president didn’t have much to say about that, although he suggested a few ways she might evade damaging responses to questions about why she had left the White House. In retrospect, his casual attitude toward her testimony suggests his confidence that she would protect him as well as herself. Their final conversation was brief and somewhat curt, as Lewinsky would later recall with some sorrow.

 

If Bill Clinton appears to have been dangerously cocksure as the Paula Jones case moved forward in late 1997, he did have his reasons. With hindsight, Clinton’s decision to lie about Monica Lewinsky to his own lawyers and closest advisers, Hillary among them, appears almost inexplicable—especially given that the president knew perfectly well that Kenneth Starr’s investigators were poking around Arkansas for evidence of his legendary sexual exploits. Moral considerations aside, how could anybody so smart be so dumb? Even if accounts of the OIC’s questioning of his former state trooper bodyguards hadn’t been widely publicized, many of the women in question were Clinton loyalists and would have reported to the White House. Starr’s interest in the president’s amorous past had long been an open secret in Little Rock.

Clinton must have believed that the OIC’s sleuthing into his intimate life hadn’t yet given Starr any useful evidence. The Washington Post’s revelation of Starr’s prurience had damaged the independent counsel badly, and Troopergate had already done Clinton all the damage it was ever going to do. Interviewing the troopers was like reshuffling a worn deck of pornographic playing cards. More importantly, meanwhile, the Jones case was falling to pieces.

Unknown to the press and general public, Jones’s incoherent performance during her November 12, 1997, deposition made it seem that in the unlikely event Judge Susan Webber Wright allowed the case to proceed, the trial would be sheer farce. Jones had her story about Clinton’s alleged demand for oral sex down reasonably well, although there were some significant loose ends. Her initial pleadings had specified that the incident at the Excelsior Hotel had taken place after 2:30 P.M. No witnesses, however, placed Clinton at the hotel after late morning, when he had departed to attend a luncheon at the governor’s mansion.

Her coworker Pamela Blackard, whom Jones had first told about Clinton’s boorish pass, was uncertain about the time. Asked in her October 23 deposition if she remembered telling a reporter that the incident happened in the morning, Blackard answered, “I probably said it could have happened in the morning or the afternoon. I really don’t remember. I thought it happened in the afternoon. It might have happened in the morning … . It could have happened close to lunch, or after we went in. And I just cannot remember.”

“Did you talk with Mrs. Jones about what time of day this happened?”

“We might have had that conversation,” Blackard said, “because I said, ‘Paula, you know, when did this happen? I don’t even remember.’ And I don’t remember what she told me. I still don’t know. Someone would have to tell me, because I do not remember what time of day.”

The timing was important because Jones insisted she’d been so shaken by Clinton’s behavior that she had left work immediately. Blackard didn’t recall any mention of the governor’s dropping his pants and asking for oral sex, or of any “distinguishing” genital characteristics. Considering that Blackard’s testimony had been cited by many journalists as greatly enhancing Jones’s credibility, she seemed to know very little. “People ask me … on a daily basis, ‘Did it happen?”’ Blackard testified. “I don’t know.”

Jones’s sworn legal pleadings also claimed that her career as a state employee had suffered tangible damage as a result of turning down the governor’s advances. Legally, some counts in her complaint depended upon the claim that she had received no pay raises or promotions and was treated by her superiors “in a hostile and rude manner” following the alleged incident at the Excelsior. Based upon those claims, Judge Wright had granted the Jones attorneys broad discovery to ask about the president’s sexual conduct with other state and federal employees like Gennifer Flowers and Kathleen Willey.

During her deposition, however, Jones was pressed to admit that those claims had no factual basis. Confronted with documentation, she conceded that she had gotten the same cost-of-living increases as everyone else in her agency. Personnel records obtained by the Clinton lawyers showed that Jones wasn’t the state government’s most brilliant employee. She had scored 45 percent on a grammar test, had missed eleven of thirty-four questions in an alphabetizing exercise, and was a poor typist. Even so, she had received satisfactory evaluations, and her salary during her sixteen months at the agency after May 1991 had risen from about $10,000 to about $12,000. But Jones denied being aware of two merit pay raises, and professed ignorance that she had been promoted from grade 9 to grade 11 within two months of the alleged incident at the Excelsior. “I don’t really know how the grades went,” she testified.”I don’t know what I came in as, and I don’t know what I left as. So I don’t know.”

Jones also admitted that she’d left her job to move to California in pursuit of her husband’s acting career, not because she’d been shunted to a “dead end” job, as her legal pleadings claimed. She had made no transfer requests and filed no grievances. Her entire case appeared to rest on her complaint that she hadn’t gotten flowers on Secretary’s Day. “I’m the only one out there that did not get any flowers,” she said. “And everybody noticed it and was coming around saying, ‘That is so cruel of them. I cannot believe they did that to you.’ Now what other reason would they do that? Just to leave me out intentionally knowing that I’m a secretary … . There had to be a reason for it. I know I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So that’s why I feel that there was things—somebody knew something.”

Other AIDC employees, including director David Harrington, testified unanimously that they had heard only good things about her encounter with Clinton, and had never heard a word about Paula Jones from the governor or his staff. Her supervisor, Clydine Pennington, said that immediately after the conference at the Excelsior, “Jones told me that she had met Governor Clinton and had shaken his hand. She appeared genuinely excited about having met the governor … [and] expressed a desire to obtain a position in the governor’s office, and expressed that desire on other occasions as well. At no time did Mrs. Jones ever indicate or imply that Mr. Clinton had acted improperly.” According to Pennington, Jones told her that Clinton had shaken her hand and complimented her clothes and her hair. “She was very excited about it. It was a big day in her life.”

Another acquaintance who said she had heard an innocuous version of the meeting at the Excelsior was Carol Phillips. A receptionist in the governor’s office who had moved to Washington with Clinton, Phillips testified that Jones came by her desk at the capitol twice a day on courier rounds, and often spent thirty minutes or more exchanging gossip and small talk. She said Jones had told her“in a happy and excited manner” about meeting Bill Clinton at the Excelsior, describing him as a “nice looking man” and his demeanor as “gentle and sweet.” She often called ahead to ask about Clinton’s schedule in order to enhance her chances of encountering him. She had asked for and been given an autographed photo of the governor. Phillips said that Jones often asked for troopers Larry Patterson and Danny Ferguson, and spoke with them frequently. She spent so much time hanging around the vestibule outside the governor’s office that her superiors at the AIDC reprimanded her about it.

Nor was Paula Jones the only witness called whose story was far from persuasive. With the exception of Larry Nichols, Larry Case, and Say McIntosh, virtually the whole cast of characters from the sexual side of the “Clinton scandals” either filed affidavits or gave depositions between October 1997 and January 1998. Juanita Broaddrick had done both, adamantly insisting that the allegations made in Phillip Yoakum’s widely circulated letter claiming Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted her in a Little Rock hotel in 1978 were spurious. No copies of tape recordings Yoakum claimed to have made of her allegedly confirming the charge ever materialized. Nothing surfaced that hadn’t previously been reported. None of the president’s accusers had done very well.

Kathleen Willey had come across as vague and scattered. She couldn’t recall, for example, whether the president had kissed her before supposedly placing her hand on his genitals. Asked by one of Jones’s lawyers whether she had communicated with Clinton after the incident or sought a job from the White House, she said that to the best of her recollection she had not. (That was before the White House released evidence of nine letters and twelve phone calls to the president asking for a job, including an ambassadorship.)

Clinton’s lawyers walked Gennifer Flowers through a detailed accounting of every dollar she had banked as a result of going public about her alleged twelve-year affair with the president. The total came to more than $500,000. As in her two books, however, Flowers was unable in hours of cross-examination to specify a single time and place where she and Clinton had ever been alone together. After claiming to have shacked up with him in several Little Rock hotels, for example, she was unable to name one.

Dolly Kyle Browning arrived with a handful of brief handwritten notes from the childhood neighbor she insisted on calling “Billy.” Most thanked her for gifts she had sent, or apologized for missing her when she visited Little Rock. None proved anything scandalous. Had Clinton ever sexually harassed her? “Absolutely not,” she answered.

The Jones lawyers also deposed several bickering Arkansas state troopers, all of whom were cross-examined about their financial and contractual arrangements with Cliff Jackson, Peter W. Smith, and the American Spectator, and no two of whom appeared capable of agreeing about anything of substance in Jones v. Clinton.

Danny Ferguson and Roger Perry disliked Hillary Clinton and had their suspicions about Bill’s friendships with several women, but knew nothing to confirm them. Ferguson claimed that Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel had badgered him to say that Clinton had promised the trooper a job in return for silence, and that Rempel had put words in his mouth when he refused.

L. D. Brown claimed to have hustled babes for Clinton all over the United States and to have benefited from what he called “residuals” himself. But when it came to particulars, Brown had no names, places, or dates to offer—only hearsay and rumors.

Buddy Young, a Clinton federal appointee, testified that L. D. Brown hated Clinton for refusing him the state crime laboratory job, and had also gotten himself fired as president of the state troopers’ association for spending its money partying with lobbyists and state legislators. Young also mentioned that Larry Patterson was obsessed with getting in women’s “britches,” to the exclusion of all other topics. Patterson’s accusations against Clinton, Young said, reflected nothing more than the trooper’s own dirty mind. Patterson said Clinton had confessed several affairs to him, and claimed to have seen the governor receiving oral endearments in parked cars. Other troopers called that a physical impossibility. The video surveillance camera through which Patterson allegedly monitored those titillating scenes hardly worked at all.

Clinton’s attorney Bob Bennett grilled Patterson about Troopergate payola, about his rent-free living arrangements with Cliff Jackson, and about his multistate speaking tour with Larry Nichols on The Clinton Chronicles circuit. Specifically, what did Patterson, a sworn law enforcement officer, know about the president’s involvement in drug smuggling and murder?

“Mr. Bennett,” Patterson said, “at no time have I ever said that Bill Clinton’s ever been involved in any murder, or at no time have I ever said that Bill Clinton has ever used or abused drugs … . I have no reason to believe that.”

“Has Mr. Nichols ever said that on these trips?”

“I have heard him on occasion say things like that.”

“Did you ever tell him to stop it?”

“Mr. Bennett,” the trooper replied, “he’s an adult.”

By the time Monica Lewinsky’s name showed up on a subpoena, the president had every reason to believe that Jones v. Clinton would never go to trial. The Supreme Court had cautioned Judge Wright to conduct the case with due regard for the institution of the presidency. More scholarly than partisan, Wright was a well-known stickler for procedure. The tone of her rulings made it clear that she had been angered and embarrassed by wholesale leaking of salacious details to the media in defiance of her stringent gag order. She was unlikely to allow her courtroom to be used as a platform to dramatize dubious evidence about the president’s sex life, acquired by equally dubious means. Based on evidence and law, Wright was likely to dismiss the case.

Once again Bill Clinton’s luck appeared to be holding. With both reckless arrogance and justifiable anger, Clinton may have imagined that all he needed to do was finesse Monica Lewinsky away from the White House and up to New York, and dance around the hard questions at his own January 17 deposition. Hillary would never know, and he would win a significant victory over his worst personal and political enemies.

 

In consultation with Carter and Jordan during the first week in January, Lewinsky worked out the wording of the affidavit, which would be filed under “Jane Doe #6.” Its last paragraph contained the lies she had been prepared to swear to for months. “I have never had a sexual relationship with the President … . The occasions that I saw the President after I left employment at the White House in April, 1996, were official receptions, formal functions or events related to the U.S. Department of Defense, where I was working at the time. There were other people present on those occasions.” In her own mind, Lewinsky had rationalized that “sexual relationship” meant “sexual intercourse.” Over her signature, dated January 7,1998, was a line that read: “I declare under the penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.”

She flew to New York the next day for a second interview at McAndrews & Forbes, the holding company for the Revlon cosmetics company. The interview went well, but Lewinsky felt otherwise and called Jordan, a company director, to pull strings on her behalf. Obligingly, Jordan called McAndrews & Forbes chairman Ronald Perelman. Lewinsky probably would have gotten the public relations job she wanted there even without Jordan’s last-minute intervention. The McAndrews executives liked the bubbly young woman and made her an offer following her third interview on January 9. After accepting it, she called Jordan to express her gratitude. Jordan duly informed both Currie and Clinton: “Mission accomplished.”

That night, she talked to Linda Tripp for the first time in over a week. According to Lewinsky, she no longer trusted the older woman and misled Tripp about both her affidavit and her new job. Now she lied, claiming that Jordan hadn’t yet found her a job, that she hadn’t signed the affidavit, and that she hadn’t seen Currie, Jordan, or the president since New Year’s.

Ironically, Tripp didn’t pick up on the deception at all. Having decided to bring her tapes and other evidence to Starr, she tried to draw Lewinsky into a trap that not only would implicate Jordan and Clinton, but would provide a perfect context for intervention by the independent counsel. Tripp wanted immunity for her felonious taping, but she also wanted to destroy Clinton.

“Monica, promise me you won’t sign the affidavit until you get the job,” she said in her well-rehearsed tone of maternal concern. This advice had nothing to do with Tripp’s “protecting” herself, and everything to do with the prosecutorial agenda of her conservative friends. “Tell Vernon you won’t sign the affidavit until you get the job.” Still hoping that Tripp might somehow be swayed or neutralized, Lewinsky agreed.

 

According to the Starr Report eventually submitted to Congress by the Office of Independent Counsel, everything that followed went exactly by the rulebook. “On January 12,1998,” the report’s narrative began, “this Office received information that Monica Lewinsky was attempting to influence the testimony of one of the witnesses of the Jones investigation, and that Ms. Lewinsky herself was prepared to provide false information under oath in that lawsuit. The OIC was also informed that Ms. Lewinsky had spoken to the President and the President’s close friend Vernon Jordan about being subpoenaed to testify in the Jones suit, and that Vernon Jordan and others were helping her find a job. The allegations with respect to Mr. Jordan and the job search were similar to ones already under review in the ongoing Whitewater investigation.

“After gathering preliminary evidence to test the information’s reliability, the OIC presented the evidence to Attorney General Janet Reno. Based on her review of the information, the Attorney General determined that a further investigation by the Independent Counsel was required.”

But that wasn’t quite how it all happened. The January 12 date, for example, is deceptive. The OIC learned about Monica S. Lewinsky at least several days earlier than the report acknowledges, and from sources whose complicity with his investigation Kenneth Starr had powerful motives to conceal. In Michael Isikoff’s version of the story in Uncovering Clinton, “it was not clear who first had the idea” of bringing the independent counsel into the Paula Jones case. Isikoff lists several possibilities: Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp, Richard W. Porter, and Jerome Marcus. Additional candidates would be Ann Coulter and George Conway, two more of the so-called elves helping Jones.

But there is no doubt that all the members of this group were in contact with one another from September 1997 onward, and also that Goldberg, Tripp, Coulter, and Conway, at least, were regularly in touch with Isikoff. According to the Newsweek reporter (whose book expresses deep discomfort at his having become “a player—one of the acts in the scandal circus”), he never realized that he was being used as a cat’s-paw in a conspiracy against Clinton. Although he had become aware of Conway, Coulter, and Marcus five months before writing his first story about Lewinsky, the existence of a group of high-powered conservative lawyers working behind the scenes for Paula Jones had never struck him as newsworthy.

“I had relied on the elves for information at critical junctures,” Isikoff wrote, “even while they concealed from me their role in bringing the Lewinsky allegations to the Jones lawyers and later to Ken Starr.”

Presumably alerted by Jill Abramson and Don van Natta Jr: pathbreaking investigation in the New York Times, Isikoff discusses a dinner party that took place in Philadelphia on January 8, 1998. Present were Porter, Marcus, and Paul Rosenzweig, the fellow Chicago alumnus who had joined Kenneth Starr’s Washington OIC staff in November 1997. Exactly why Starr hired an ambitious young lawyer at a time when the Whitewater investigation and Filegate, Travelgate, and the Vince Foster investigation were near completion isn’t clear. But during the intervening three months, the Times reported, Rosenzweig had spoken with Marcus about the Jones case several times by phone.

Rosenzweig traveled up from Washington for the January 8 dinner at the elegant Deux Cheminées restaurant in Philadelphia. Porter, Kenneth Starr’s law partner and Lucianne Goldberg’s conduit to the Jones lawyers, flew in from Chicago. “Largely for the hell of it,” Isikoff reports, Conway came by train from New York. It was Conway whose timely leaks to the Drudge Report had helped prevent the Jones case from being settled several months earlier, and who had just that day helped find another Federalist Society lawyer to represent Linda Tripp. “Pure serendipity” is how Jerome Marcus later described the gathering—a casual meal enjoyed by four very busy lawyers from four different cities.

Before the others arrived that Thursday evening, according to Marcus, he had informed Rosenzweig “very briefly” about the tale of the president and the intern, Jordan’s efforts to find Lewinsky a job, and Linda Tripp’s tapes. “I don’t know if it’s real or not,” he said. “But do you think this is something that your office would be interested in?”

Rosenzweig didn’t know, but would make it his business to find out. On the following Monday, January 12, Lucianne Goldberg called Linda Tripp. From Washington, Rosenzweig had called Marcus in Philadelphia, who had called Porter in Chicago, who had called Goldberg in New York, who had relayed the message back to Tripp in Washington. A deputy independent counsel named Jackie Bennett was definitely interested. But Tripp would have to call him directly. For the sake of propriety, the information would have to come in by “the front door.”

Even if the participants’ accounts are taken at face value, it was surely no accident that the January 8 dinner was omitted from the Starr Report. For Rosenzweig to be meeting with a clique of attorneys who had helped the Jones team was bad enough. But the participation of Porter, as Starr’s law partner, presented the OIC with ethical problems. Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety was the whole point of the Independent Counsel Act. It specifically states that “any person associated with a [law] firm with which such independent counsel is associated may not represent in any matter any person involved in any investigation or prosecution.”

Moreover, as Clinton attorney David Kendall pointed out when Porter’s role came to light, by law “a legal representation of a client by one partner is attributable to all partners.”

 

While her story found its way to the OIC, Linda Tripp had been taking the measure of her new lawyer, James Moody. Through Conway and Porter, Lucianne Goldberg had set Tripp up with Moody on the recommendation of Ann Coulter, the ubiquitous TV commentator with whom Moody shared a passion for right-wing causes and the Grateful Dead. In subsequent testimony, Tripp portrayed herself as politically independent and somewhat put off by Moody’s ideological zeal. Even though he offered to represent her pro bono, Tripp said, “I was concerned about this new attorney’s zealous behavior on the phone … . I spoke to him for hours over that couple of days … . His behavior seemed to me to be [that of] someone with clearly a political agenda as opposed to just an attorney’s advocacy role.” By January 12, Tripp said, she was “hysterical and saying to Lucianne, ‘I don’t know where to turn. I don’t know what to do. I can’t protect myself. This man sounds nutty to me on the phone.’”

Whatever her misgivings, Tripp apparently overcame them. She retained Moody, who promptly worked out an agreement with the Jones lawyers that Tripp wouldn’t need to be deposed immediately—and thus face the feared Bob Bennett—if she would agree to brief them in detail about Lewinsky prior to Clinton’s January 17 deposition. Moody quickly contacted Kirby Behre, who reacted by warning Tripp that Moody was not a criminal lawyer.

Behre had urged Tripp to warn the president’s lawyers about the Lewinsky tapes. He thought Clinton would be forced to settle the Jones case—thus keeping the tapes a secret and protecting Tripp from potential prosecution. Moody had a different plan. Taking possession of the tapes, he and Ann Coulter made high-speed dubbings that, according to Tripp, Coulter kept for her own purposes. Tripp later testified that they did so contrary to her instructions.

 

According to the New York Times, Jackie Bennett briefed Kenneth Starr about Rosenzweig’s meeting with the “elves” on Monday, January 12. After Tripp called that evening, Bennett, two assistant prosecutors, and FBI agent Steve Irons came to her Maryland home around 11:15 P.M. They stayed for two hours. According to Agent Irons’s 302 report, Tripp represented herself as a victim of circumstances. “Tripp did not seek out Newsweek magazine to provide information concerning Kathy Willey,” the agent wrote. “Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff contacted Tripp … . [S]he told him she believed President Clinton did not harass Willey during the episode … . Tripp felt Willey had been seeking a relationship with President Clinton.”

Tripp appears to have told the eager prosecutors essentially the same story she had given Monica Lewinsky. Because of the Willey allegation, she had been subpoenaed against her wishes by the Jones lawyers. The subpoena put her in a terrible position with regard to her young friend. She advised the OIC that she and her lawyer had listened to one of her Lewinsky tapes earlier that day. She told them it contained the following dialogue:

TRIPP: I’m going to tell the truth … . You’re going to lie.

LEWINSKY: If I lie and he lies and you lie, no one has to know.

While true enough in essence, that last sentence does not appear on Tripp’s tapes. “TRIPP advised,” the FBI agent wrote, “she did not realize that recording her own telephone conversations with LEWINSKY was a violation of state law at the time she did it, and that she was just trying to protect herself from the eventuality … that [she] would be attacked for telling the truth.” Neither Tripp’s dealing with Lucianne Goldberg nor any book deal were mentioned.

According to Irons’s 302 the OIC told Tripp they didn’t have the power to grant her immunity from the state of Maryland, but did guarantee her that she would not face federal charges for turning over her tapes. After she told them of a planned lunch with Lewinsky the next day, Tripp signed a form agreeing to wear a wire to assist FBI agents in what the 302 report, with unintended irony, called “the consensual monitoring of MONICA LEWINSKY”

 

If the Starr Report is accurate, the independent counsel’s decision to wire Tripp was a bold gamble. Acting on no legal authority but his own, Starr had set out to investigate a crime potentially involving the president that not only hadn’t yet happened, but might never happen. It wasn’t just the “elves” working for Paula Jones whose activities were well known to OIC prosecutors. Linda Tripp was herself a known commodity; by the time she presented herself as Monica Lewinsky’s unwilling confidante, Tripp had previously testified in four previous OIC probes—Filegate, Travelgate, the Vincent Foster suicide, and Whitewater. While peripheral, her testimony nevertheless had made her hostility to the Clinton White House amply clear.

Before she left to meet Lewinsky on January 13, Tripp phoned Lucianne Goldberg to alert her. Almost instantaneously, Newsweek’s Isikoff got a call from a confidential source telling him what was going down at the Ritz-Carlton. A quick call to Goldberg confirmed it. Someone didn’t trust Kenneth Starr to act with bold resolution. Someone wanted the whole world to know.

For her part, by the time Lewinsky turned up at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City she had grown even more deeply distrusting of her former confidante. Having signed an affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton on January 7, she had accepted a job with Revlon in New York two days later. Tripp knew nothing about either decision. As far as she knew, Monica was holding out until Vernon Jordan got her the job she wanted in exchange for her silence. From the beginning to the end of their three-hour luncheon, the two women were lying to each other like high-stakes poker players. The difference, of course, was that Tripp knew that she was wired. Lewinsky only suspected it.

At first they talked in code. Betty Currie was “the black woman.” Clinton was unnamed.

“So when do you get your present?” Tripp asked.

Monica didn’t know. “I’m sure I’ll get over it. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him—I don’t want to look at him. I can’t look at him on TV, can’t anything.”

“You’re kidding.”

Two months of silence from the big creep, Lewinsky said, had cured her. The truth was that she had visited with Clinton in the Oval Office as recently as December 28. Monica told Tripp she had informed the “black woman” how events were to unfold.

“So I talked to her this week, and I said to her, I said, ‘Look, I’m supposed to sign something: And I said, ‘I’m supposed to sign something, and I’m not signing until I have a job.’”

Tripp thought that was terrific. But she still didn’t see how she could bring herself to lie under oath to protect Bill and Monica’s secret. It just wasn’t her nature. Besides, what if she got caught? Lewinsky tried every manipulative argument she could muster, from fear that Tripp might end up like “Mary Jo Chappaquiddick” to pity for her to metaphysical doubt about whether she had ever had “sex” with Clinton. “I’m not trying to have an existential conversation with you … . But what is the truth? Linda, did you ever see anything?”

Tripp conceded that she had not, but said that carrying Lewinsky’s secret was still a heavy burden. Lewinsky had Vernon Jordan and the president of the United States looking out for her interests, while Tripp had Kirby Behre. Having fired Behre already, what Tripp really had were James Moody, Kenneth Starr, and a roomful of prosecutors and FBI agents in an upstairs suite. They were getting terribly agitated because the radio transmitter in Tripp’s bra wasn’t working and they couldn’t be sure of the backup tape recorder.

Waxing patriotic, Lewinsky even invoked a national security argument: “To me … it’s for the country. Every president, every [bleeping] president we have ever had has always had lovers, because the pressure of the job is too much. Too much. Too much to always rely on your wife, with whom you have too much baggage—which you inevitably will, if you got to that point. I think it’s [i.e., the truth is] bad for the country.” Then she began to cry.

A few minutes later, Tripp went to the bathroom. Lewinsky quickly rifled through her purse, looking for a recording device. Even if she had found it, the OIC investigators had everything they needed to threaten the heartsick young woman with prison.

 

Starr’s prosecutors spent much of Wednesday, January 14, reviewing the “sting” tape and debating whether or not they needed to ask the attorney general and Judge David Sentelle’s three-judge panel for expanded jurisdiction to investigate the president’s sex life. Some argued that they could tie the case into Whitewater by way of Vernon Jordan. They had never found any evidence to implicate Jordan in paying hush money to Webb Hubbell, but they did have a mandate to investigate him. Cooler heads realized that merging Whitewater with Jones v. Clinton would be a controversial, high-risk venture. The OIC would be well advised to seek jurisdictional authorization.

At the same time, Jackie Bennett was getting repeated phone messages from Isikoff. It didn’t take the prosecutors long to determine that Tripp had been communicating with Lucianne Goldberg.

Tripp, meanwhile, appeared to have taken it upon herself to expand the probe. Prompted by an early-morning phone call from Tripp, Lewinsky later testified, she spent several hours writing at her computer. She drove by the Pentagon at the end of the day and offered Tripp a ride home. On the way, Monica handed her betrayer a three-page document headed “Points to make in affidavit.” As soon as Tripp arrived at her Maryland home, she handed FBI agents what would later be touted as hard evidence of a White House plot to suborn perjury. Shortly after receiving the”talking points;’ Jackie Bennett paged Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general, at a Washington Wizards basketball game. They agreed to meet in Holder’s office at the Justice Department on Thursday morning, January 15.

 

The talking points was among the first items to leak, and quickly generated reams of media speculation about a White House conspiracy—much of it preceded by phrases like “Starr suspects” or “sources in Starr’s office.” Vernon Jordan was an alleged possible author. Tripp hinted (and later testified) that the wording reminded her of White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, prompting the New York Times’s William Safire to write accusatory columns based on that surmise. But to prosecutors familiar with Lewinsky and Tripp’s lunch conversation, the document’s origins should have been clear from the start.

Believing Tripp’s lie that she was a reluctant witness in the Jones case, Lewinsky had seen one way out. Tripp could contact Bob Bennett, hire a new lawyer, and file a truthful affidavit concerning Kathleen Willey, Michael Isikoff, and Newsweek. As soon as the Jones lawyers realized how badly Tripp’s testimony would damage their star witness Kathleen Willey, they would drop her from their deposition list. The question of Monica Lewinsky would never come up.

Unaware that Tripp had betrayed her to Isikoff six months earlier, Lewinsky sympathized with her friend’s plight. “You saw what happened to me in Newsweek,” Tripp complained. “I mean I got smeared in the national media.”

“If I were in your shoes,” replied Lewinsky, “having already had that article, you know, with Isikoff screwing you over—that whole setup, that whole thing, already—what I would do, what I would say, you know … . You did see Kathleen and those things. You did see her disheveled. You did see her lipstick smeared. You did see those things. But what … you could say that the article didn’t describe was that … you don’t know that it happened.”

“Well, I wasn’t in the room.”

Lewinsky agreed. She reminded Tripp that Julie Hiatt Steele had said Willey had asked her to confirm a phony story to Isikoff. Why couldn’t Tripp now emphasize her own doubts about Willey?

“The first thing I would say,” urged Lewinsky, “is ‘Well, I didn’t see her come out of the Oval Office. But after she allegedly came out of the office what she told me was blah, blah, blah … .’ Okay. They say, ‘Do you believe?’ or ‘Did you believe what she said?’ You could say, ‘I now do not believe it to be true, but at the time I did.’ That you now do not believe. Why do you not believe it to be true? ‘Well because Kathleen—Because she’s changing her story. So if she lied tome …’”

“She’s calling it sexual harassment,” Tripp said.

“Right. ‘If she lied to me once, why wouldn’t she have lied to me before?’”

“Well, and I could say that I talked to her after Michael Isikoff,” Tripp said. “Which is true.”

“Which is true,” Lewinsky repeated.

“And that she gave an entirely different version.”

“Exactly,” Monica said.

Lewinsky returned to the theme relentlessly. “Let me try to be clear,” she said. “Listen to me … . ‘This is what the situation was. This is what she told me. I believed it at the time, because I had no reason not to believe it.’ … Okay? And then you say, ‘My concern now in the light of everything that’s happened, with her switching her story, she called me, and her switching her story, I really don’t believe it.’ You know? ‘I certainly don’t believe that he sexually harassed her.’”

The two also discussed in some detail Monica’s experience in helping her lawyer draft the affidavit she supposedly hadn’t signed yet. After lunch, Lewinsky drove Tripp back to the Pentagon. With the OIC’s tape recorder still running, Lewinsky insisted that they get together the next day to go over the Willey matter one more time. Given her understanding of the situation, Lewinsky’s legal tactics were not only sound but legitimate. Aware of Tripp’s attitude toward Willey, the Jones lawyers had no intention of surfacing her at this point in the case.

Before she got out of the car, Tripp gave Lewinsky every reason to believe she might go along with the affidavit scheme. Outside the Pentagon, she said thanks for the ride.

“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” Lewinsky said. “I’d drive you to the moon, my dear.”

 

On Wednesday morning, Lewinsky testified, Tripp called and agreed to her plan. She told Lewinsky yet another lie. She was meeting with Kirby Behre later that day, and needed Monica’s help in composing an affidavit. So Lewinsky sat down to work. The talking points merely reiterated Lewinsky’s oral argument in a more systematic fashion: “The next you heard of her [Willey] was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn’t name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed,” the document read in part. “ … As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the president sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc.”

In a remarkable footnote in Uncovering Clinton, Isikoff concedes that the ideas expressed in the talking points closely parallel the angry unpublished letter Tripp sent Newsweek, after his original Willey article in August 1997—a letter Lewinsky had urged her to write. Expressing regret that his own reporting fueled subsequent speculation about the document—his January 21, 1998, story on Newsweek’s Web site would be the first to break the news of its existence—Isikoff claims that in all the excitement, he had simply forgotten about Tripp’s letter. His January 21 article merely “reported—perfectly accurately—that Starr’s prosecutors were investigating to determine if [the talking points] had been written by anybody associated with Clinton’s legal team.”

But since the talking points portrayed Tripp’s actual opinions, it never mattered much who wrote them. By studiously ignoring the now available context—though it was known from the first that Lewinsky handed the document to Tripp—Isikoff avoids confronting the likelihood that whoever fed him that story intended to light a firestorm of media speculation. Far from suborning perjury, the document asked Tripp to affirm the same views that Starr’s prosecutors knew she and Lewinsky had discussed for hours. Yet as late as July 1998, “sources close to the investigation,” as the press described them, speculated that Bruce Lindsey was the mysterious author.

 

“No contacts w Paula Jones lawyers,” read the notes of one OIC deputy about Jackie Bennett’s meeting with Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday, January 15. Like the Starr Report, Bennett saw no need to mention Paul Rosenzweig’s dinner in Philadelphia with the elves a week earlier. He would later say that he was unaware of the “elves’” ties to the Jones lawyers. Rosenzweig himself has never said anything on the subject. Bennett’s recollection also conflicts with that of another OIC deputy, John Bates, who had the distinct impression that Bennett did know the information Rosenzweig brought him came “directly or indirectly” from “the Jones legal team.”

There were several other items the OIC did not confide to Holder and Attorney General Janet Reno. No mention was made of Rosenzweig’s conversations with Jerome Marcus, who represented Paula Jones. Nothing was said about Richard Porter being Kenneth Starr’s law partner. Whether or not the independent counsel would have thought that posed a conflict, there are signs that Porter had his concerns.

According to Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata, he consistently asked that his name not appear on any documents or letters. During Starr’s November 1998 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Clinton’s lawyer David Kendall asked the independent counsel about an entry in Lucianne Goldberg’s notebook for January 15 that read: “Call from Richard [Porter] on mobile phone worried that Ken Starr might be hurt.” Porter called Goldberg five times that day.

Nor did Starr inform Attorney General Reno about his own personal involvement with the Paula Jones case. That Starr had once considered writing an amicus brief for the Scaife-funded Independent Women’s Forum supporting Jones’s right to sue the president before his appointment as independent counsel was no secret. What Starr kept to himself, however, was the fact that he had also been consulted over the telephone by Jones’s lawyer Gil Davis. The Virginia attorney had billed Jones $975 for consultations with the former solicitor general on six occasions in 1994.

The OIC also withheld mitigating evidence from the attorney general that day—specifically, that Vernon Jordan’s involvement in Monica Lewinsky’s New York job search had preceded her subpoena in the Jones case by two months. In addition, Jordan was an old friend of both Betty Currie and Lewinsky’s mother’s fiancé, Peter Strauss. Those facts considerably weakened the likelihood of Jordan’s participation in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, Starr’s linkage between Lewinsky and the Whitewater investigation. The only evidence favoring that theory was taped conversations with Tripp, in which investigators knew Lewinsky was lying about her affidavit.

Tripp’s tapes also showed that Lewinsky had been offered a job at the United Nations on October 31, 1997, and had turned it down a few days later—several weeks before her subpoena in the Jones case. There’s no sign that Janet Reno was told that salient fact, either, if indeed the OIC was aware of it by then. It may have been morally objectionable for the president to recommend his ex-mistress for a government job. But it wasn’t illegal.

Had Reno known any of these facts, she would probably have chosen someone else to investigate Linda Tripp’s allegations. The situation was rife with appearances of impropriety, exactly what the independent counsel statute was enacted to prevent.

But there was one important fact Jackie Bennett decided to share with Reno and Holder, and that was the involvement of Michael Isikoff. His appearance had dashed any hope the OIC might have entertained about keeping its investigation of the president’s sex life a secret. As the Newsweek reporter tells the story, he had confronted Bennett with what he knew early on January 15 at the OIC’s Washington headquarters. In regular contact with Lucianne Goldberg and the elves, Isikoff had already phoned Betty Currie to ask her about any presents President Clinton might have given to a certain Monica Lewinsky. The secretary had put him off with a promise to look into it.

According to Isikoff, he had faced down Jackie Bennett with a threat. “Look, you guys are the ones that need to cooperate with me, I said. You need to lay out your evidence, or at least your basis for starting this investigation … . It was, in a way, a form of blackmail.” The reporter gave them a deadline of 4 P.M. Friday.

By passing Isikoff’s threat along to Janet Reno, the OIC prosecutors turned it into their own weapon. Any further actions taken by Isikoff to report the story would alert the White House and ruin the Jones lawyers’ surprise at Clinton’s deposition. Starr’s prosecutors had no interest in putting the president’s girlfriend in jail for filing a false affidavit. They intended to let an unsuspecting Clinton walk into the deposition blind on Saturday, and then flip Lewinsky to testify against him.

For that to happen, there were two necessary elements: Clinton had to remain ignorant of his peril, and the Jones lawyers had to ask the right questions. If Clinton somehow escaped, Reno would be blamed, not the OIC and Kenneth Starr. Whether Isikoff realized it or not, the real target of his “blackmail” was the attorney general.

In her January 16 letter to the three-judge panel recommending that Starr be authorized to investigate possible obstruction of justice, Reno wrote that Monica Lewinsky “may have filed” a false affidavit. To a judge, her murky statement could have meant any of three things: The affidavit may have been filed, or it may have been false, or both. Why was Reno so vague? She had no way of knowing whether the affidavit had been either signed or faxed. The OIC had two sources of information telling them different stories about the affidavit. On the Ritz-Carlton tapes, Lewinsky had lied to Tripp, indicating she would sign no affidavit until she had gotten her New York job. The next day, Tripp told FBI agents that Monica said she might sign it on January 15.

Only a select few knew that Lewinsky had already signed an affidavit on January 7, denying a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. Nearly all of those who knew were on the White House side—except for the Paula Jones lawyers.

Lewinsky’s attorney, Frank Carter, had faxed them a copy of the affidavit on January 12. His cover letter stipulated that unless he heard from them by January 15, he planned to file the affidavit in support of his motion to quash their subpoena with Judge Wright in Little Rock. All the lawyers involved in Jones v. Clinton were under a strict gag order. Under penalty of contempt, they were forbidden to communicate anything substantive about the case to any unauthorized person. For the OIC to be given a copy of the Lewinsky affidavit would require a court order.

Judge Wright had issued no such order, but the OIC did possess a copy of Lewinsky’s affidavit by January 15. Following the House Judiciary Committee hearings in November 1998, Starr admitted that Linda Tripp’s lawyer James Moody had faxed a copy to his office. But who was Moody’s source for the affidavit? There is no doubt that Moody was in touch with the Jones lawyers. Neither he nor the Dallas lawyers have commented on the affidavit’s strange journey. In any event, showing Reno the affidavit might have raised inconvenient questions about collusion (and exposed the Jones attorneys to contempt proceedings). Failing to show the affidavit to the attorney general could be interpreted as evidence of intentional deceit by the OIC.

This precise matter became the subject of an investigation by the Justice Department.

 

Having submitted a proposed court order for Judge Sentelle to rubber-stamp, Starr’s deputies wasted no time after receiving approval from the three-judge panel. One last time they used Linda Tripp to bait the trap. She lured Lewinsky back to the Pentagon City Mall, where FBI agents working for the OIC grabbed her in the food court around 1 P.M. on Friday, January 16, and ushered her upstairs to room 1012 in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Present were six deputy prosecutors, including Jackie Bennett and Michael Emmick, as well as private investigator Coy A. Copeland (who had worked for Hickman Ewing in Arkansas).

Tripp was there, too. Grasping the situation at once, according to Monica’s Story, the terrified young woman hissed, “Make her stay and watch … . I want that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me.” The OIC had already rented Tripp a room at the hotel. If, as promised, she was going to brief the Jones lawyers before the president’s deposition, Tripp needed to know what had happened.

The smooth, good-looking Emmick was chosen to give Monica the bad news. An experienced federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Emmick enjoyed a reputation as a ladies’ man. Lewinsky came to view him as “a revolting specimen of humanity,” and would later insist that he leave the grand jury chambers so she could testify about how he had browbeaten her.

In the hotel room, Emmick told Lewinsky that the OIC was prepared to charge her with a laundry list of federal crimes including perjury, obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury, witness tampering, and conspiracy. Altogether, she could expect to spend upwards of twenty-seven years in jail. Unless she agreed to cooperate, by giving a full statement and wearing a body wire for “consensual monitoring” of her conversations with Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and Bill Clinton, they would have no choice but to prosecute her. They might even be forced to file charges against her mother, Marcia Lewis. Shaking with fear, she nevertheless had the presence of mind to ask to speak with her attorney, Frank Carter.

Department of Justice policy required that Emmick let her make the call, and do his negotiating with Carter. It also forbade “seeking to compel testimony of a witness” by squeezing “close family members.” But Starr’s prosecutors had no time for such niceties; they particularly couldn’t afford to let her call Frank Carter. According to Lewinsky, the prosecutors looked at each other and said they didn’t want her to tell anyone about the matter, as it was “time sensitive.” She thought she knew what that meant: keeping her on ice until after the president’s deposition in the Paula Jones case the following day. The OIC’s dilemma was even more elementary. If Isikoff blew their cover by phoning the White House with any more questions about Monica Lewinsky, the president would have been warned before he walked into his deposition.

Anyone who listened to Lewinsky’s tearful conversations on Linda Tripp’s tapes knew that the passionate young woman was in a volatile state. Her book says she contemplated suicide after Starr’s team picked her up. If she had really believed Tripp would betray her secret, would Monica have allowed “Handsome” to go into the Jones deposition without a warning? By not telling Clinton the truth, she appears to have been clinging to the last shreds of romantic illusion. His cold anger when he suspected her of blabbing to Tripp had made her fear that she would lose him for good. She had no wish, however, to humiliate him and destroy his presidency. There was a real danger that she would finally warn him.

Instead, the prosecutors badly wanted to flip Lewinsky. Through Moody, the OIC had obtained a copy of her affidavit. But they couldn’t be sure that it had been filed with the court in Little Rock. Until it was, the affidavit meant little. As of Friday afternoon, January 16, Lewinsky had committed no serious crime, and had she been permitted to call Frank Carter that day, she never would have.

Still wanting to do some research on case law in the Eighth Circuit, Carter hadn’t sent Lewinsky’s affidavit to the Little Rock court on January 15 as he had told the Jones lawyers he would. Marking it for Saturday delivery, he had dropped it into a FedEx box at 2:00 A.M. on the morning of January 16. Since an affidavit is for all practical purposes just another piece of paper until it’s date-stamped for receipt by the court, all Carter would have needed to do to protect his client would be to telephone FedEx and cancel delivery.

Every time the weeping young woman asked to call Carter, however, the prosecutors had a different answer. She could call him, they explained, but all negotiations would be off; the time to make a deal was now. They told her Carter was a civil lawyer and she needed a criminal attorney. (Carter had headed the public defender’s office for the District of Columbia for six years.) They offered to fix her up with a criminal defense lawyer of their own choosing, which she declined. Lewinsky feared that if she left the room to call her lawyer, she would be arrested and jailed. At 5:23 P.M. an FBI agent finally phoned Carter’s office, which was already closed for the three-day Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The answering service declined to furnish a forwarding number. (The U.S. District Court in D.C. eventually rejected Lewinsky’s argument that her constitutional rights had been violated by Starr’s agents in the hotel room.)

When Lewinsky asked to call her mother, as she later testified to a grand juror’s question, the hulking Jackie Bennett—he had played defensive tackle on his college football team—told her: “You’re twenty-four, you’re smart, you’re old enough. You don’t need to call your mommy.” After a few hours, however, she was permitted to call Marcia Lewis in Manhattan, although an FBI agent had his finger poised above the button to cut her off if she started to say anything the OIC didn’t like. Lewis agreed to take the Amtrak Metroliner down to Washington, arriving at 11:30 P.M. When the two women were allowed to speak alone for a few minutes, Lewinsky told her mother what she later told the grand jury. To gain immunity, “I’d have to agree to be debriefed [about her love affair with the president] and that I’d have to place calls or wear a wire to see—to call Betty and Mr. Jordan and possibly the president.”

Lewinsky also told her mother that regardless of what happened to her, she could not betray Currie and Jordan, decent people who had been kind to her. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t wear a wire. I can’t tape-record phone calls. I can’t do this to the president.” They decided to call Monica’s father in Los Angeles. He made the mistake of calling his friend William Ginsburg, a medical malpractice lawyer of considerable renown on the West Coast. Had Lewinsky stuck with Frank Carter that night, the OIC’s strategy would have crashed.

Despite his lack of criminal experience, the much-maligned Ginsburg wisely demanded that the OIC put its immunity offer in writing. He also asked Emmick for a copy of Lewinsky’s affidavit. When Emmick admitted that he couldn’t produce either one, Ginsburg told his clients to go home. At 12:23 A.M., more than eleven hours after FBI agents confronted her, the young woman and her mother were allowed to leave.

Whatever else can be said about Monica Lewinsky, her courage that night—bolstered partly by personal loyalty, partly by her strong belief that government agents had no business investigating her intimate life—may have saved her duplicitous and inconstant lover’s presidency.

 

Several months later, in November 1998, Kenneth Starr was questioned by Clinton lawyer David Kendall about Lewinsky’s treatment at the hands of his prosecutors that winter day. Growing petulant and defensive, Starr denied that Lewinsky had been “held” by his prosecutors in what he insisted were the “commodious” surroundings of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. His voice rising with indignation, he also denied that the OIC had planned to put a body wire on Lewinsky to lure the president into an incriminating conversation—directly contradicting her grand jury testimony.

Moreover, according to Monica’s father, Bernard Lewinsky, and corroborated by an FBI 302 report dated January 16, he was told by Emmick that “telephone calls [and] body wires” would be one condition of an immunity deal. The same document said that Lewinsky had asked whether partial cooperation was a possibility, and paraphrased her mother as follows: “Marcia Lewis asked what would happen if Monica Lewinsky gave everything but did not tape anything?”

 

In keeping with the deal worked out by her new attorney, James Moody, Linda Tripp went directly from the Ritz-Carlton to her home, where she had an appointment that evening to meet with the Paula Jones lawyers. While there was later some controversy over whether or not the FBI actually drove her to Maryland, there is little doubt that Starr’s agents knew of her plans to brief Wesley Holmes, one of the lawyers from Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke. By then a witness in a federal investigation, Tripp was herself Starr’s agent, having recorded several additional phone calls with Lewinsky on her home recorder at the FBI’s direction. (While denying any collusion with the Jones attorneys, Starr later conceded that his office ought to have kept its key witness under tighter control.)

According to Isikoff, Holmes was quite disappointed when Moody said he was unable to provide the Jones team with copies of any of Tripp’s tape recordings. Holmes vaguely recalled Moody’s saying that the tapes were evidence in a federal investigation, and that he possessed no copies. Moody denied talking about the federal investigation; but he did, in fact, possess copies of the tapes. According to an affidavit by Starr assistant Stephen Bates, as reported in an article in the Baltimore Sun on December 14, 1999, by Del Quentin Wilber and Jonathan Weisman, two of Starr’s deputies handed over copies of Tripp’s December 22, 1998, tape to Moody at what the article described as a “midnight rendezvous in a Howard Johnson’s in Washington” on the night of January 16—17. Also present with Moody during the exchange according to the Bates affidavit, was “elf” George Conway. The affidavit was given in connection with Linda Tripp’s unsuccessful prosecution by Maryland officials for illegally taping her phone conversations with Lewinsky. Sometime after midnight, Moody went downtown to Newsweek’s Washington bureau to play the December 22 tape—which he described as “the most important tape” for Isikoff and his editors.

“Long after I thought the tapes had been turned over,” Linda Tripp later said of Moody in the grand jury, “he played for Newsweek one of the tapes. At the time he said that the independent counsel wanted him to do that because—to preempt Mike Isikoff from going forward with the story. So I thought this was a help to the investigation.”

So it was. Isikoff had been pestering the OIC with demands for information, lest he write what he already knew and blow the investigation’s cover. The delivery of the tape by Moody placated Newsweek.

When Tripp testified that her lawyer Moody had played the tape at the independent counsel’s behest for Isikoff, the OIC prosecutors in the grand jury room who heard that remark didn’t contradict her. They registered no surprise, displayed no curiosity, and asked no follow-up questions.

 

By all accounts, Bill Clinton left his six-hour deposition at the downtown Washington offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on January 17 believing that he had done well. Toward the end he had finally admitted that, under the convoluted definition of “sexual relations” provided by the Jones lawyers, he had once done something sexual—exactly what they did not ask—with Gennifer Flowers in 1977. He had brushed aside Kathleen Willey’s accusations as coming from a “very upset” woman who had misinterpreted a kindly embrace. He had repeatedly denied the allegations of Paula Jones, insisting that he didn’t remember meeting or even seeing her.

He had prevaricated in his responses to the initial questions from Jones attorney James Fisher about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, claiming not to remember the last time he had met with her or whether they had been alone in his office, not recalling the gifts he had given her. “Do you know what they were?” he had asked Fisher.

Taking full advantage of a peculiar definition of sexual activity adapted by the Jones lawyers from the criminal code—which, of course, deals largely with nonconsensual encounters—the president thought he had spotted a loophole. After the judge struck a couple of clauses so vague they could have applied to two people who brush against each other in an elevator, “sexual relations” was defined for the purposes of the deposition as “contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” On that basis, he testified, “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I’ve never had an affair with her.”

There is no question that Clinton intended to deceive the court and Fisher, not to mention his own attorneys. Since the dictionary definition of “sexual relations” is “coitus” or “intercourse,” his answer could be considered technically true, even though it did put him in the preposterous position of arguing that he was not having sex with Lewinsky at the very moment that she was having sex with him.

But Judge Wright’s ruling made more sense than that. After lengthy quibbling among the lawyers, she threw the definitions out altogether. “Mr. Bennett has made it clear,” she said, “ … that embarrassing questions will be asked, and if this is in fact an effort on the part of Plaintiff’s counsel to avoid using sexual terms and avoid going into great detail about what might or might not have occurred, then there’s no need to worry about that. You may go into the detail.”

 

As for Bob Bennett, he had made the naive mistake of trusting his client, the president of the United States. When Lewinsky’s name came up, he had produced a copy of her affidavit, but the judge had permitted the questioning to go forward. At times, Clinton appeared to be enjoying this contest of wits. Asked if he’d ever talked to anyone about finding a job for Monica Lewinsky, he answered with a question.

“When she got the job in the legislative affairs office? No.”

“Before she got that job?”

“No.”

Had he tried to get her a job in the White House? Also no. If Fisher wasn’t going to ask about the New York job search, Clinton wasn’t going to tell him. When Fisher asked if he’d ever taken Lewinsky down the hallway into his private kitchen in the White House, Bennett interrupted. Although Clinton later claimed he hadn’t really been listening, he gazed directly at his lawyer while Bennett spoke.

“I’m going to object to the innuendo,” Bennett told Judge Wright. “I’m afraid this will leak … . Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky has filed an affidavit which they are in possession of saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton, and yet listening to the innuendo in the questions—”

But the judge allowed Fisher to proceed, without requiring him to show any basis for his questions. “Go ahead.”

He resumed asking Clinton whether and where he might have been alone with Lewinsky in the White House.

“Well, let me try to describe the facts first, because you keep talking about this private kitchen,” he began. “The private kitchen is staffed by two naval aides. They have total, unrestricted access to my dining room, to that hallway, to coming into the Oval Office. The people who are in the outer office of the Oval Office can also enter at any time … . After I went through a presidential campaign in which the far right tried to convince the American people I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother’s bed with four prostitutes, and done numerous other things, I had a high level of paranoia. There are no curtains on the Oval Office, there are no curtains on my private office … .” Then he said something clever which he could only have wished was fully true. “I have done everything I could to avoid the kind of questions you are asking me here today.”

The president said he couldn’t recall whether he had ever been alone with Monica Lewinsky—if being alone meant Betty Currie wasn’t nearby. Had he talked with her about testifying in the lawsuit? The last time she’d come by to see Betty, he had teased Lewinsky about how “you all, with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I’d ever talked to … and ask them that, and so I said [to her] ‘you would qualify,’ or something like that.”

After a number of more pointed questions about gifts he and Lewinsky had exchanged—which Clinton parried by explaining that he exchanged a lot of gifts with people who visited him—Fisher finally got down to the nub.

“Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?”

“No.”

“If she told someone that she had a sexual affair with you beginning in November, 1995, would that be a lie?”

“It would certainly not be the truth. It would not be the truth.”

“So the record is completely clear, have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the court?”

Bennett objected, and the judge permitted Clinton to reread the definition.

“I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky,” he answered. “I’ve never had an affair with her.”

There was another exchange about Vernon Jordan’s role in finding Lewinsky a job. (“Vernon liked to help people,” Clinton explained. “He was always trying to help people.”) Fisher went off on a tangent, asking whether the president had paid off Lewinsky’s debts. After he signaled he had no further questions on Lewinsky, Clinton posed one of his own.

“Mr. Fisher, is there something, let me just—you asked that with such conviction, and I answered with such conviction. Is there something you want to ask me about this? I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I don’t think.”

“Sir,” Fisher said, “I think this will come to light shortly, and you’ll understand.”

 

It came to light within about twelve hours: Matt Drudge posted an item on his Web site a few minutes after 1 A.M. EST on Sunday, January 18:

“NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR-OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN,

SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

**WORLD EXCLUSIVE**

“The Drudge Report has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top Newsweek suits hours before publication … . The Drudge Report has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist.”

As Isikoff would later explain, his magazine’s top editors in New York had hesitated to run a story accusing figures like the president and Vernon Jordan of committing felonies with no stronger proof than a taped telephone conversation between third parties who might be lying or crazy. Isikoff was deeply frustrated, and his editors were troubled. Having been promised by James Moody that they would hear Lewinsky say Jordan instructed her to lie, they had heard no such thing. When he learned early Saturday evening that the story wasn’t going to run, Isikoff had notified both Tripp’s lawyer and Lucianne Goldberg, a “courtesy” he would soon regret.

 

The first alarm was sounded by Republican strategist and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol on the ABC Sunday morning news program This Week. An old friend of Richard Porter, whom he had once hired when he served as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, Kristol had somehow learned of the details behind the Drudge item. A bit mysteriously, he suggested that while the president’s dispute with Paula Jones was his word against hers, another, hotter story was developing that might produce hard corroborating evidence.

“I also think the media is going to be an issue here,” Kristol continued. “The story in Washington this morning is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer intern at the White House—”

George Stephanopoulos interrupted. “And where did that come from, Bill? The Drudge Report … .”

“There were screaming arguments at Newsweek magazine yesterday,” insisted Kristol, who had once cautioned David Brock against writing the Troopergate expose and perhaps damaging his career. “They finally didn’t go with the story. There’s going to be a question of whether the media [are] now going to report what are pretty well validated charges of presidential behavior [sic] in the White House.”

 

By Tuesday night, January 20, the OIC’s favorite correspondent, Jackie Judd, and her producer, Chris Vlasto, had scooped the world with reports on ABC radio, the network’s overnight TV news broadcast, and the ABC Web site. The print journalism race was won by Susan Schmidt, another Starr favorite, whose Wednesday-morning headline dominated the Washington Post’s front page: “STARR INVESTIGATES WHETHER CLINTON TOLD INTERN TO DENY AFFAIR.” In conversations on Linda Tripp’s tapes, the Post reported, “Lewinsky described Clinton and Jordan directing her to testify falsely in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against the president, according to sources … . She said that Clinton then told Lewinsky that Jordan would help figure out what to say, the sources said.” Over at Newsweek, where “sources” had promised them the same illusory smoking gun, they couldn’t help but wonder whether Sue Schmidt knew what she was talking about.

Possibly to console Michael Isikoff for having the biggest story of his life lifted from under his nose, someone slipped him a copy of the talking points. “Newsweek obtained what may be an important new piece of evidence,” he wrote in the long article he posted on the magazine’s Web site on the evening of January 21. “It is a written document allegedly given to Tripp by Lewinsky. The document coaches Tripp on ‘points to make in affidavit’ in order to contradict the account of … Katheen Willey … . It was Tripp who partly confirmed Willey’s claims that she had had a sexual encounter with Clinton—as reported in a Newsweek story in August.” Isikoff went on to state categorically that while it wasn’t clear who wrote the talking points, “Starr believes that Lewinsky did not write them herself. He is investigating whether the instructions came from Jordan or other friends of the President.”

 

Before Isikoff finally managed to get his exclusive version on the Newsweek Web site that night, the story itself had been superseded by the TV pundits and political soothsayers. Just after 8:00 A.M. EST, George Stephanopoulos appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to recant his skepticism of two days before. The young man who had once been so close to Clinton made a dire prediction. “If the allegations are true, it could lead to impeachment proceedings.” Not to be outdone, Sam Donaldson, the network’s White House correspondent, predicted that the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency would henceforth be measured in days.