A Vast Conspiracy (33 page)

With her job search still unsettled, Monica Lewinsky had taken to writing Clinton ever more beseeching notes in an effort to see him. Her first meeting
with Vernon Jordan, on November 5, had yet to produce results. “I am not a moron,” Lewinsky asserted in a letter to Clinton sent by courier on November 11. “I know what is going on in the world takes precedence, but I don’t think what I have asked you for is unreasonable.… I need you now not as president, but as a man. PLEASE be my friend.” Clinton and Lewinsky talked the following evening, and he proposed she stop by briefly on November 13—the second day of Paula Jones’s deposition—which would prove to be her most pathetic, and comical, visit to the White House.

That morning, Lewinsky began hounding Betty Currie. After several calls, Currie finally admitted that the president had gone golfing—news that prompted Lewinsky to go “ballistic,” as she wrote in an e-mail to a friend. She announced that she was coming to the White House anyway, and Currie told her to wait in Currie’s car in the West Wing parking lot. Lewinsky arrived to find the car locked—and then it started to rain. After getting a good soaking, Lewinsky persuaded Currie to let her in, and the two women hustled into the president’s private study, where Monica awaited his return from the links. Noodling around in the president’s desk, Lewinsky was delighted to see that he had kept several of her gifts to him, including
Vox
, Nicholson Baker’s novel about phone sex, and
Oy Vey! The Things They Say: A Guide to Jewish Wit
. Clinton finally arrived from his golf game, with only a minute or two to talk. Lewinsky gave him an antique paperweight and showed him an e-mail describing the effects of chewing Altoid mints before performing oral sex. “Ms. Lewinsky was chewing Altoids at the time,” the Starr report noted, “but the President replied that he did not have enough time for oral sex.” He rushed off to a state dinner for President Zedillo, of Mexico.

Later that evening, Lewinsky reported all of these developments to Linda Tripp, who was by now thoroughly frustrated. She had no book contract. Isikoff had not yet written a story. The Paula Jones case seemed to be going nowhere. And still this hysterical young woman was whining to her about the president in several long phone calls every day. She had to do something to break the logjam. So, just after she heard about Monica’s latest misadventure at the White House, Tripp called Goldberg with an idea. Tripp said she wanted to be subpoenaed to give a deposition in the Jones case. That would finally get the information about Lewinsky’s affair with the president to people who could do Clinton some real harm.

Goldberg took to the mission with gusto and embarked on a game of what might be called right-wing telephone tag. First, she called Alfred Regnery,
the conservative publisher of Gary Aldrich’s book—and that of Goldberg’s client Mark Fuhrman. “This woman recently phoned me with some fascinating info, and she wants to be in touch with Paula Jones’s lawyers,” Goldberg told Regnery. “Call my friend Peter Smith,” Regnery said. This was fitting. Smith was the Chicago financier who had bankrolled David Brock’s original investigation of the trooper story, which had led to the publication of his article in
The American Spectator
. (Indeed, a year before the trooper story, Smith had tried to sell Brock on the Clinton-and-the-black-prostitute story.) Smith, in turn, directed Goldberg to Richard Porter, the former aide to Dan Quayle who had since made partner at Kirkland & Ellis, Kenneth Starr’s law firm. Goldberg called Porter on November 18.

Porter was one of the original “elves,” the group of conservative young lawyers who had been secretly advising the Jones lawyers throughout the case. Amazed by what he heard from Goldberg, Porter quickly e-mailed his fellow elf George Conway in New York. “There’s a woman named Lewisky [
sic
],” he wrote. “She indulges a certain Lothario in the Casa Blanca for oral sex in the pantry.” Porter’s message went on to say that Betty Currie was “Lewisky’s” contact at the White House and that Isikoff had been kept abreast of all the latest developments. Conway printed out the e-mail, made sure Goldberg’s phone number was included, and faxed it to Don Campbell in Dallas. Just to make sure, he then called one of the lawyers in the Dallas firm to make sure that they followed up on the message.

There was an unmistakable sense of giddy delight as Clinton’s enemies passed this juicy morsel to its intended recipient. Virtually all of these people—including Smith, Porter, Conway, Goldberg, Tripp, and Isikoff—had been hoping for years to catch Clinton in an adulterous affair. Of course, based on what they knew at that point, the president’s conduct wasn’t illegal, wasn’t harassment, wasn’t relevant in any way to his public duties; it was just a story about sex. But that was what they really wanted—and that went for everyone from the raunchy sophisticates like Goldberg to the “good strong Christian men” on the Jones team. In a small way, the smarmy tone of Porter’s e-mail (“a certain Lothario”) illustrated how the elves—and the right wing generally—were more obsessed with the details of Clinton’s sex life than with the content of his character.

Conway need not have worried about a lack of interest on the part of Paula Jones’s lawyers. On November 21, another one of Campbell’s partners,
David Pyke, called Linda Tripp at home. (Apparently unintentionally, Tripp taped the call—which, it appears, she put Goldberg on call-waiting to receive.)

“Ms. Tripp?”

“Oh, Mr. Pyke.”

“How are you?”

“Well, thank you. Thank you for calling.… I don’t know how familiar—familiar you are with my situation.”

“Well,” Pyke answered, “Lucy Goldberg filled me in to some degree.”

Some of the details had been lost in the long telephone chain—Pyke thought Tripp worked at the Treasury Department, not the Pentagon—but the lawyer had the gist of the story. Tripp began by asking about the status of Kathleen Willey’s deposition. Tripp’s onetime friend had filed a motion, near her home in Virginia, to avoid testifying, but the judge in the case had just made a secret ruling that Willey would have to submit to a deposition. “Okay,” Tripp said. “That would leave you open to deposing me?”

“Right,” said Pyke.

But there was a hitch. Under normal circumstances, the subpoena for Tripp’s deposition would go through her attorney, Kirby Behre. A young lawyer who had recently left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, Behre had urged Tripp to stay out of the Jones case. Tripp told Pyke that Behre “has my best interests at heart, but he … feels strongly that I should not involve myself.”

“Uh-huh,” said Pyke.

“Um, I feel strongly that the behavior has to stop, um, or should at least be exposed.”

Pyke then turned to the real reason for his call. “Ms. Goldberg told me about—that you’ve—you talked to a woman that’s having a relationship with Clinton currently, is that correct?”

With her usual precision, Tripp said that “currently” wasn’t exactly right. “It’s in the process of ending, let’s say.… It is very sad and the girl will deny it to her dying breath. Um, she is very, very angry with him because of the way he’s handling this, but would rather martyr herself in a way rather than—than expose him.”

Tripp then set out to construct a scheme, with Pyke, to deceive her own lawyer about her plans to testify. “I need to look hostile,” said Tripp, so Pyke should pretend that she was not cooperating with their side. “My livelihood
is at stake here,” she explained. (This was a recurring theme of Tripp’s—that because she was a political appointee, she would lose her job if her anti-Clinton activities were known. Yet even though her role became highly public—as did her illegal taping of Lewinsky—Tripp never lost her high-paying political appointment at the Pentagon.)

Tripp and Pyke agreed on a plan whereby “a subpoena would drop on your doorstep out of the blue,” and only then would Tripp tell Behre about it. Tripp would pretend to be upset that she was being dragged into the case, but ultimately she would cooperate and tell her tale about Lewinsky under oath. “Hold on,” Tripp said. “I’ll get my calendar.” In subsequent calls, Tripp and Goldberg told the Jones lawyers the correct spelling of the name in Richard Porter’s e-mail—Lewinsky, not Lewisky.

At 5:40
P.M.
on Friday, December 5, the Dallas lawyers faxed their witness list to Robert Bennett, in Washington. Many of the names were unfamiliar to Bennett and his team, so they had an informal agreement with David Pyke to give a capsule summary of each potential witness’s testimony. Bennett’s partner Mitch Ettinger called Pyke for the rundown. As Ettinger read a name, Pyke would say, “He slept with that one,” “He raped that one,” “He harassed that one.” It was a surreal litany.

The following afternoon, Clinton’s lawyers met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the witness list. It was an important meeting for Bennett and his team. They had the names of all the women that the plaintiffs had managed to track down during three months of depositions. The president now had his chance. If Clinton had even hinted that there might be a problem with one of them—if he had just raised an eyebrow—Bennett could still settle the case. Bennett prided himself on his ability to get clients to be straight with him, to confide their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. All these names would become public if the case proceeded to trial. This was the time for Clinton to cut his losses.

So in the course of the long meeting, the lawyers put the question to their client: “Monica Lewinsky?”

Clinton’s confidant, the deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, who was also there, didn’t even recognize her name. Bennett explained that she was a young former White House aide. The plaintiff’s lawyers were alleging Clinton had had an affair with her.

“Bob, do you think I’m fucking crazy?” the president said, according to two people present. “Hey, look, let’s move on. I know the press is watching me every minute. The right has been dying for this kind of thing from day one. No, it didn’t happen.

“I’m retired,” he said. “I’m retired.”

10

Consensual Sex

C
lintons lies to his lawyers on December 6 were even more extraordinary in light of what had happened at the White House earlier that day.

Lewinsky had wangled an invitation to a Christmas party at the White House the previous night, and she had seen the president only on the receiving line. This brief meeting sent Lewinsky into a new spiral of despair, and she made one of her periodic vows to be finished with the relationship once and for all. On Saturday morning, she decided to pack up all the Christmas presents she had been stockpiling for Clinton and leave them with Betty Currie at the White House. So at around ten o’clock, Lewinsky appeared at the southwest gate of the White House—bearing a sterling silver antique cigar holder, a mug from Starbucks, a tie, “a little box that’s called hugs and kisses,” and an antique book on Theodore Roosevelt that she had purchased at a New York flea market.

Lewinsky tried to summon Currie to pick up the packages but didn’t get an answer from the secretary’s phone number or her pager. Then, seeing Marsha Scott, a presidential aide whom she regarded as one of her White House enemies, Lewinsky detoured to the northwest gate. There one of the guards let slip that Currie was giving a White House tour to Eleanor Mondale, the television correspondent and daughter of the former vice
president, who was visiting Clinton in the Oval Office. In the grand jury, Lewinsky was asked, “What was your reaction to that?”

“Not good.… Very upset. Hysterical.”

Notwithstanding her resolution of that very morning to put Clinton behind her, Lewinsky dissolved into a jealous rage at the thought of Clinton with another “other” woman. Lewinsky stormed off to a nearby bar, telephoned Currie, and began screaming at her. Lewinsky thought Currie had deceived her by telling her that Clinton would be meeting with his attorneys in the Jones case on this day; here Monica had discovered that he was seeing a woman she regarded as a rival. (As it turned out, the lawyers were simply due at the White House later in the day.) At this point, Currie began to worry about finding herself in the middle of these intrigues, and she told Monica that she was concerned about being fired herself. Later that morning, Currie called Lewinsky at home and asked her to calm down. Monica demanded to talk to the president, who was then speaking with the attorney general. Moments later, Lewinsky called back again, and Currie at last put her through to Clinton.