A Vast Conspiracy (22 page)

The trio of women—Goldberg, Tripp, and Gallagher—decided to title the book
Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw at the Clinton White House
, and
Gallagher’s proposal eventually ran to fifty pages. The chapter on the “graduates” was entitled “The President’s Women.” On August 6, Gallagher traveled to a restaurant in New Jersey, near Tripp’s mother’s home, to meet Linda in person for the first time. Tripp had only minor changes to make on the proposal, and Goldberg prepared to begin circulating it. Then, just a few days later, Tripp called Goldberg and pulled out of the project. She felt that the financial risks did not justify the rewards, especially since Gallagher was going to receive a third of the proceeds. Gallagher was miffed. She had put in all the work on the proposal for no compensation, and now there was not going to be any payoff at the end. But Gallagher’s anger paled next to Goldberg’s. In part, her concern was simply financial; no book meant no money for the agent. But it was more than that, too. For Goldberg, Tripp’s book represented a passport to the action, the deal flow, and a chance to embarrass a president she despised. On the telephone with Tripp, Goldberg scoffed at her misgivings. “Who do you think you are,” Goldberg asked her putative client, “the queen of England?”

With the Tripp book project on what turned out to be a temporary hold, another chronicler of Clinton’s personal life was getting back into business. A few days after Jones filed her lawsuit against the president, Isikoff had quit
The Washington Post
and signed on at
Newsweek
, where he served as the in-house expert on Clinton’s sex life. As Bob Bennett and Lloyd Cutler had figured when the suit was filed more than two years earlier, the press had lost interest when the case bogged down in appeals on legal issues. But shortly before the 1996 election, Stuart Taylor, Jr., had written a widely read piece on the case in
The American Lawyer
, suggesting that the case deserved to be taken seriously. The election, the Taylor article, the presence of an expert like Isikoff, and, of course, the inherent sex appeal of the story pushed
Newsweek
to revisit the Jones case as 1997 began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, he did,” Willey replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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