A Vast Conspiracy (20 page)

There was one more victim—Starr himself. At a time when he was thinking about moving on with his life, Washington’s conflict-of-interest culture dropped another unwelcome gift in his lap. Starr could have, and probably should have, turned the Filegate case back to the Justice Department, but only a prosecutor sure of his own judgments (a Bob Fiske, for example) would have had the self-confidence to take that kind of step. Burdened with Whitewater, Travelgate, the Foster suicide, and now Filegate, Starr made it clear that he would not take any public action in these investigations through the presidential election in November. Though the Whitewater case—the original reason for his appointment—had just about run its course, Starr was heading into year three of his investigation with no end in sight.

The Clintons, of course, had no sympathy for Starr’s troubles. For them, the expansion of Starr’s jurisdiction to include Filegate was followed by a piece of good news. On June 24, 1996, at the end of the Supreme Court’s term, the justices announced that they would hear the case of
Jones v. Clinton
during its October term. This decision meant that Bob Bennett had succeeded in his most important goal in the case. The case could not be resolved before the election. Though it had been filed in May 1994, Bennett had delayed it for more than two years, and the Supreme Court’s decision meant that no one would be able to take depositions in the case until 1997 at the earliest.

On November 5, 1996, Bill Clinton was reelected after a campaign in which Starr’s investigation figured hardly at all. His margin of victory was held down by the emergence, shortly before the election, of what became known as the campaign finance scandal—even though, as with Filegate, scarcely anyone could even articulate any criminal offense the president might have committed. On this issue, Reno would spend much of the following several years in another controversy about whether she should appoint independent counsel. Ultimately, she declined to do so. (Meanwhile, of course, the campaign finance laws—which were clearly the root of the “scandal”—remained unchanged.)

The election also served as an opportunity for Ken Starr to take stock. By that time, he had won his cases against Hubbell, Tucker, and the two McDougals, but their cooperation hadn’t brought the prosecutors any
closer to the Clintons. With the investigation stalled, the prosecutor tried to declare defeat. On February 17, 1997, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated for a second term, Starr announced that he would be stepping down to become dean of the Schools of Law and Public Policy at Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California.

The White House reacted with quiet satisfaction to the news that Starr was, in effect, surrendering, and decamping to a school of modest reputation in a beach community known for starlets, bodybuilders, and surfers, to take a job partially financed by Richard Scaife, who had also subsidized
The American Spectator
and a variety of anti-Clinton causes. But the Republican right was outraged. In a typical example of conservative pique, William Safire declared that Starr had “brought shame on the legal profession by walking out on his client—the people of the United States.” Four days later, Starr announced contritely that he had changed his mind about Pepperdine, and he promised to stay on until the end of the investigation. Still, as Bill Clinton began his second term in office, Kenneth Starr had effectively concluded his work as independent counsel.

6

“Joan Dean”

I
n the first two years of its existence, the Starr team had behaved in the tradition of honorable law enforcement. For the most part, they had investigated crimes rather than people and operated by the same general standards as other federal prosecutors. Notwithstanding his own political and personal distaste for the president, Starr himself appeared content to depart for Pepperdine without inflicting many wounds on his chief target. In sum, Starr had nothing to do with keeping the case against Clinton going at this low moment. The forces of culture and money took care of that.

Clinton’s election as the first baby-boomer president had unleashed powerful resentments against him. It was Clinton’s perceived moral lassitude and self-indulgence—far more than his political views—that outraged his critics. The president’s conservative adversaries in what became known as the culture wars never represented a majority of Americans, but they were a market—especially for books. When Starr flagged, the forces of capitalism took temporary custody of the anti-Clinton campaign.

The first person to tap the anti-Clinton market with great success was a former FBI agent named Gary Aldrich. For Clinton’s adversaries, Aldrich provided one of the few bright spots in the otherwise dismal year of 1996. In late June, Aldrich published a book titled
Unlimited Access
, an account
of his brief tenure in the Clinton White House. Aldrich had a minor job coordinating the background investigations of new employees, but he parlayed his contacts among disaffected career staffers into a remarkably hostile narrative about the first family and the people around them. The book received a good deal of publicity when it first appeared, mostly because of its allegation that the president regularly ducked his Secret Service protection and made “frequent late-night visits to the Marriott Hotel” for assignations with a woman who “may be a celebrity.” The former agent noted gravely that the story of the Marriott trysts had been provided to him by “a highly educated, well-trained, experienced investigator.” Aldrich’s scoop was marred somewhat by the fact that it turned out to be fictional; shortly after the book was published, Aldrich’s “source” was revealed to be David Brock, the erstwhile chronicler of the troopers’ tales, who had merely asked Aldrich about rumors of Clinton’s late-night wanderings.

Despite his errors, however, Aldrich managed to express a coherent message about the president, and in time, the book emerged as a sort of ur-text of Clinton-hating. He wrote at one point, “If you compared the staffers of the Bush administration with those of the Clinton administration, the difference was shocking. It was Norman Rockwell on the one hand, and Berkeley, California, with an Appalachian twist on the other.” Aldrich charged that the White House social office hung pornographic ornaments on the White House Christmas tree, and that the men on Clinton’s staff wore earrings and the women no underwear. Some of these charges were provably false, but that was almost beside the point. Aldrich tapped into a genuine cultural fault line in the country, and his book was an enormous success.
Unlimited Access
spent nineteen weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list and sold even more copies than its unofficial videotape counterpart, Patrick Matrisciana’s
Clinton Chronicles
. (Like so many of Clinton’s adversaries, Aldrich included an obligatory passage about how “I might even be in danger, if the stories coming from Little Rock were true—about how so many enemies of the Clintons ended up having fatal ‘accidents.’ ” Like all the others who expressed this fear, Aldrich survived to tell his tale.)

The core of Aldrich’s complaints concerned sex. In one passage, as Aldrich sat musing about one of Newt Gingrich’s appearances on
Meet the Press
, the author observed, “I nodded in agreement when Gingrich said that the Clintons and their staff were throwbacks to the 1960s counterculture.” (At the time, Gingrich himself was engaged in an extramarital affair
with a House staffer two decades his junior.) Aldrich’s disgust at gay staffers, at the president’s supposed affairs, and at the first lady’s disrespect for her husband poured forth on nearly every page. In this respect, Aldrich had a kindred spirit on the White House staff. They spoke nearly every day, and they kept in touch after he retired. This former colleague watched the success of Aldrich’s book with pride—and more than a little envy. And Linda Tripp decided to follow in Gary Aldrich’s footsteps.

One of the ironies of Linda Tripp’s emergence as a conservative heroine was that, in truth, she represented one of the archetypes that the right wing most despised. She was the civil service lifer, whose mastery of the arcana of job rights, seniority, pay levels, and retirement bred in her a sense of entitlement that scarcely existed anymore in the private sector. She could figure out her pension benefits to the third decimal. By the time she injected herself into the story of the Clinton presidency, she, like so many people in this saga, had already had a difficult and unhappy life, and she had learned that she could rely on no one except herself.

Tripp liked to refer to herself as a “hick from Morris County,” a largely rural part of New Jersey where she was born in 1949. Linda Carotenuto’s father was a high school teacher who married a German woman he met during his service in World War II. Tripp’s adolescence, like Lewinsky’s, was marred by her parents’ acrimonious divorce, which was precipitated by her father’s adulterous relationship with a coworker. In 1971, she married Bruce M. Tripp, a career Army officer. They spent two decades together, raising two children near a string of Army bases. Tripp had a series of what she called “jobettes,” mostly secretarial, as her husband worked his way up to colonel. In 1990, when their children were teenagers, they divorced.

The following year, Tripp found a job at the White House as a secretary for a group of people on the communications staff, and she quickly earned a reputation for diligence and competence. She was kept on after Clinton’s victory, but her attitude toward her employers changed. As with Aldrich, her complaints ran more to the cultural than the political changes she saw at the White House. (In fairness, the arrogance of many members of the new Clinton team alienated even some potentially sympathetic members of the permanent White House staff.) Aldrich later told an interviewer, “Linda Tripp and I and about two thousand other permanent White House employees shared a scorn for what we were seeing.”

Under Clinton, Tripp was assigned to the counsel’s office, which proved to be a magnet for controversy in the early days of the administration. The turning point in her career came with Vince Foster’s suicide. Tripp would sometimes boast that she was the last person to see him alive—“I served him his last hamburger,” she said—and she was an eyewitness to the panic and chaos that followed his death. In a series of e-mails that were disclosed during the many investigations of Foster’s death, Tripp was withering about her superiors. Tripp called her boss, Bernard Nussbaum, and two of his colleagues “the three stooges” and wrote in another message, “So it took until Monday to figure out if [the briefcase] should be looked at? Christ. And we’re the support staff?”

Notwithstanding her distaste for many of the Clinton staffers, Tripp made it her business to learn as much as she could about their personal lives, especially if they intersected with the president’s. According to Tripp’s grand jury testimony, no fewer than three women at the White House confessed to her that they had had sexual contacts with Clinton. Two of them, Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey, became well known, but Tripp enthusiastically shared news of the third with the grand jury as well. Debbie Schiff had parlayed a job as a flight attendant on Clinton’s 1992 campaign plane into the position of receptionist in the West Wing of the White House.

“One day,” Tripp said, in a particularly breathless moment in her testimony, Schiff “came up to me and said, ‘I won.’ And I said, ‘What did you win?’ And she said, ‘I have my twenty minutes every morning.’ I said, ‘With who?’ She said, ‘With the president.’ And I said, ‘For what?’ And she said, ‘You figure it out.’ Subsequently, she said they had a sexual relationship.… She was so comfortable in his presence that she would, for instance, come in and wear his shoes and traipse around the Oval Office complex and out in the lobby wearing his shoes. And she’s tiny, just a little tiny girl, and he is a big man, and it was obvious right away that she was wearing gunboats on her feet compared to her little feet. So—” At this point, the prosecutor from Starr’s office finally cut in and ended the bizarre monologue. But Tripp’s meticulous recounting of Schiff’s purported activities showed how much attention she paid to the president’s sex life. (For her part, Schiff denied to Starr’s prosecutors that she had had a sexual relationship with Clinton.)