A Vast Conspiracy (29 page)

Broaddrick said she had been pursued for years by reporters and “I just had to try and evade all of this.” Her memories of Clinton were “not
pleasant.… It’s very private. We’re talking about something twenty years ago.”

Rick tried another tack. “Do you feel in your mind that Paula Jones …?”

“Oh, she’s telling the truth.… Anything she would say bad about him, she’s telling the truth,” Broaddrick replied.

Rick picked up the thought. “All of the attorneys we are working for are good strong Christian men, and they are taking it with the risk of knowing what could happen, and we are, too. We’ve already been warned about the dangers and what could happen.” Even in private settings like this one, the myth of the Clinton hit teams surfaced.

“We’re Christians,” Beverly explained.

“You’re a Christian?” Rick asked.

“Yeah,” Broaddrick answered.

“The reason we took the case,” Rick went on, “the reason those attorneys took the case, this is a law firm that is all Christians.”

“There’s just no way I can get on the witness stand and tell that,” Broaddrick said with some finality. Then she referred the Lamberts to her attorney, who was also an Arkansas state senator.

“Is he a Democrat or a Republican senator?” Rick asked.

“Republican.”

“Good,” the investigator said.

Broaddrick stuck with her refusal to tell her story to the Jones team and filed a sworn affidavit stating, “I do not have any information to offer regarding a nonconsensual or unwelcome sexual advance by Mr. Clinton.” She also gave a sworn deposition to the same effect. Broaddrick would later recant both of these statements and assert that Clinton had raped her.

Beverly Lambert certainly thought they were on the right track. Not long after their interview of Broaddrick, Beverly told me later, she saw a “black helicopter” circling over her family’s farm, outside Tyler, Texas. Because the Lamberts regarded the helicopter as the prelude to a White House–sponsored assault to obtain their files from the Jones case, they promptly moved the records to a more secure location.

The pious murmurs of Campbell and the Lamberts had a different sound from the ribald prattle of Tripp and Goldberg, but they merely represented the sacred and profane sides of the same coin. As the end of 1997 drew near, the literary team on the East Coast and the legal team in Dallas had reached much the same conclusions—that the Jones case represented the best way to hasten Clinton’s destruction. For the lawyers, their weapon
was the subpoena; for the agent and putative author, their tool was the fragile psyche of one Monica Lewinsky.

“You know what I just want to say to him?” Monica Lewinsky asked her friend Linda Tripp. “I just want to be like—you know what I think? I just have to say this. Okay?”

“What?” said Tripp.

“The most pathetic commentary on this entire relationship is that it will be two years next month, and I have no clue how he feels about me.…”

“I think you have a lot of information,” Tripp answered. “You have to sort through what you feel resonates to you. I think—I think there is no one outside of you and him who can really determine what level of emotion was there.…”

And so the conversations went, for hour after droning hour. There were few better measures of Tripp’s dedication to her book research and Clinton-hating than the simple fact that she tolerated Lewinsky’s inane chatter for so long. Their talks occasionally drifted into areas like dieting and hair care, but mostly focused on a few themes: Monica’s desire to leave the Pentagon for a new job at the White House; her uncertainty about Clinton’s feelings for her; her resentment of the women who had succeeded in getting access to him; her frustration with Betty Currie for failing to engineer more frequent contact between her and the president. Yet despite the endless repetitions and slight variations on these leitmotifs, Tripp remained a rapt audience. “Now, listen to me,” she said at one point. “If you get a call [from Clinton] tonight, I don’t care what time it is, will you please call me?” On another day, Lewinsky made a rare inquiry about Tripp’s life. “Oh, please tell me about your weekend,” Monica offered. But Tripp would have none of it, answering, “Wait a minute. Come on, come on, come on. So what about Betty? What is Betty saying?”

Tripp posed in these conversations as a sort of wise aunt—commiserating, consoling, concentrating, as she often said, on “what’s best for you.” She expressed disdain for Clinton’s behavior, but she also advised Monica on preserving her relationship with him. “You know,” Tripp mused at one point, “I have to say this because I’ve thought about it a lot recently. If he for one minute considered someone doing this to his daughter—”

“Yeah, exactly,” Lewinsky jumped in. “I thought the same thing, you know? I know. What would you tell your daughter to do?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Tripp replied. “In fact, that’s a question you might want to ask him. I mean, he would die rather than let this happen to Chelsea, but you’re supposed to be a stoic soldier.” (“Sigh,” the Starr transcript advises.) “Some fifty-year-old man decides to have an intimate relationship with his [deleted] daughter, and then she—oh, it defies imagination. Well, who would want to with her?” (That last line, disparaging Chelsea’s appearance, was an especially rich Tripp touch.)

For all the whining, though, Tripp and Goldberg, who were speaking to each other often during this period, made clever use of the conversations to close the vise on Clinton. For her part, Lewinsky still entertained dreams of resuming her relationship with the president. On September 30, 1997—the day before Donovan Campbell officially took over the Jones case—Lewinsky wrote Clinton a jokey memo in an effort to wangle an invitation to see him. Heading it “Memorandum for: Handsome; Subject: The New Deal,” Lewinsky wrote that they had not visited or spoken in six weeks. She promised that she “will be on my best behavior and not stressed out when I come (to see you, that is).” She concluded by comparing herself to one of her presidential forebears. “Oh, and remember,” Lewinsky wrote, “FDR would never have turned down a visit from Lucy Mercer!” Clinton did call Lewinsky late that evening, when, she testified later, they “possibly” had phone sex, but they also discussed the possibility that she might return to the White House. It was now ten months into the president’s second term, and Lewinsky was no closer to returning to the White House than she had been when she was evicted a year and a half earlier. Monica was primed for disappointment, and on October 6, Linda Tripp dashed her hopes once and for all.

In a conversation taped on the afternoon that she and Goldberg would later meet with Isikoff, Tripp called Monica at the Pentagon and told her that she had no chance of ever returning to the White House. Tripp’s friend “Kate” at the NSC had made it clear: Monica would remain persona non grata. Lewinsky later testified that this news from Tripp was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Tripp stoked her friend’s anger and insisted that Clinton be made to pay for all the disruption he had caused in her life. On the telephone that evening, Tripp helped Lewinsky draft a letter to the president in which she demanded that he help her find a job, preferably in New York, where Monica’s mother was moving. On the telephone, Lewinsky read a draft of her letter to the president: “ ‘I’d like to ask you to secure a position for me.’ ”

“Right,” Tripp said.

“Okay, fine … but you know, I don’t know,” Lewinsky jumped in, suddenly irritated. “Maybe I’m being an idiot. I don’t want to have to work for this position.”

“Say that again,” Tripp replied.

“I want it to be given to me,” said Lewinsky, displaying her sense of entitlement.

“Right,” Tripp agreed. “You don’t want to go through the whole interview process.”

This conversation captured the first moment in what would become an important new chapter of the story—the president’s role in Lewinsky’s job hunt in New York. Indeed, in his impeachment trial, one of the main charges against Clinton was that he tried to buy Lewinsky’s silence with a job in New York. Yet the record in the case shows that Tripp instigated this entire episode under false pretenses: Tripp had lied to Monica about her conversation with “Kate.” In interviews with Starr’s investigators, Kate Friedrich of the National Security Council denied ever telling Tripp that Lewinsky would never get a job at the White House; indeed, Friedrich had never even heard of Lewinsky until the story broke in 1998. Tripp had fabricated this “last straw” in Lewinsky’s White House job hunt so that her young friend would start making new demands for the president to find her a different job. Had Tripp told Lewinsky the truth, the former intern might never have reached out to Vernon Jordan, Bill Richardson, and, of course, Bill Clinton in an effort to find a job in New York.

And as Tripp nudged Lewinsky to increase her demands on her former paramour, she made certain that the young woman continued to use the Goldberg family courier service. Apropos of nothing in particular one day, Tripp volunteered, “You’re using a very reliable and reputable courier service.” In the middle of October, Tripp called Isikoff with a message to call “New York.” Isikoff did call Lucianne Goldberg, who, in turn, instructed him to call Jeff Harshman, the proprietor of Speed Service. At Goldberg’s urging, Harshman showed Isikoff the receipts from the occasions when Betty Currie or her designee had signed for Monica Lewinsky’s letters to the White House.

As her dream of a White House job faded, Lewinsky’s hold on reality seemed to go with it. She would call Betty Currie and Bayani Nelvis, one of
Clinton’s Navy stewards, as many as a dozen times a day to ask about the president’s whereabouts. By this means, Lewinsky kept almost minute-by-minute tabs on Clinton’s activities—all in the hope that there would be time for a phone call or visit between them. When she couldn’t see him, Lewinsky would materialize in crowds at the White House and even plant herself along the routes of his motorcade, including his trips to church on Sunday mornings. Much later, during Clinton’s impeachment trial, the question of whether Lewinsky was a stalker or a girlfriend became important. But that was a false choice. Lewinsky was both—a genuine, if occasional, sexual partner as well as an obsessed, unhinged fan.

In her dealings with the president, Lewinsky alternated between haughty presumption and abject whining. On October 16, she sent a package by courier to the president with a letter about her job prospects. “I am open to suggestions that you may have on work that … may intrigue me,” the twenty-three-year-old wrote to the president. “The most important things to me are that I am engaged and interested in my work. I am not someone’s administrative/executive assistant, and my salary can provide me a comfortable living in New York.” She suggested a handful of advertising agencies, public relations firms, and media outlets (“anything at George magazine”) that she regarded as acceptable. Earlier, when she had said she wanted to move to New York, Clinton had thought of finding her something with Bill Richardson, the ambassador to the United Nations. Betty Currie passed the idea to John Podesta, then the deputy chief of staff, who spoke to Richardson. After she had expressed some initial interest in the UN, Lewinsky changed her mind, writing in the same letter to Clinton that “I want a job where I feel challenged, engaged, and interested. I don’t think the UN is the right place for me.” Following up on the letter, Lewinsky also mentioned that she thought his friend Vernon Jordan might be able to come up with something for her in New York. Lewinsky later testified that Tripp had given her the idea of mentioning Jordan to Clinton.

Richardson, not knowing that Lewinsky had cooled on the idea of working for him, called her to set up an interview. To her surprise, the interview with Richardson, which took place at the Watergate Hotel, went well. (The night before the interview, Clinton called Lewinsky and, she later testified, “we talked about some of the different issues at the UN, and he gave me some suggestions of things I could say.”) Thanks to a tip from Tripp, Isikoff arranged for the dining room of the hotel to be staked out by another
Newsweek
reporter, so he could see how the president was setting
up his girlfriend with a job, but he missed Lewinsky as she walked to the elevators. For Monica, the good interview with Richardson was bad news. She took to wailing to Tripp about the injustice of Clinton’s having forced her to apply for a job she did not want. In response, Tripp gave Lewinsky word-for-word instructions on how she should ask Clinton for help. “Well, when you do speak to him and he tries to snow you about the UN,” Tripp said one day, “I think you just have to say, ‘I really don’t want to be seen as unappreciative. That’s not the case. But I—I cannot work for the government anymore.… My experience with the government has been hellacious. It’s been enough to last two lifetimes.’ ” Starr’s transcripts of their conversations barely do them justice.