A Vast Conspiracy (21 page)

In time, though, Tripp felt the need to escape the White House, and she arranged an advantageous departure. In the spring of 1994, Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel who had been her direct supervisor, was forced to resign, and Tripp had to look for a new job. There was an opening
for a political appointee in the press office at the Pentagon. The job involved scheduling interviews with the then secretary of defense, William Perry. Following the usual policy for political appointees, the supervisor of the position, a fellow named Willie Blacklow, sought a “priority list” of candidates from the White House. When he got the list, Blacklow was astonished to see it contained only one name—Linda Tripp. Blacklow had seen many such lists, but he had never before seen a job-seeker preemptively eliminate all competition. Blacklow wanted someone else for the job, and he protested about the one-name list to his own boss, Cliff Bernath. “The White House is trying to shove somebody down my throat, and I am not going to take it,” Blacklow said. But Bernath pointed out that anyone who possessed the bureaucratic skills to put herself on a list of one was going to get hired.

Willie Blacklow could have been Linda Tripp’s
Doppelgänger
. Before he was hired as a deputy assistant secretary of defense, the last time Blacklow had visited the Pentagon was when he and several thousand others had tried to levitate the building, in a famous anti–Vietnam War protest of 1967. He spent most of the intervening decades as a press secretary to various liberal congressmen. Not surprisingly, then, his first meetings with Tripp were inauspicious. Within a week of arriving, she told Blacklow that she wanted a private office, which no one at her level received at the Pentagon. He told her no. She went over his head to Bernath, who told her the same thing. Officials in Secretary Perry’s office began to complain about Tripp’s peremptory manner. Tripp also had a great deal of trouble getting along with the woman with whom she shared a cubicle, Susan Wallace. The two women had screaming fights, and their desks soon had to be separated.

But worse was to come. Tripp accused Wallace of listening in on her conversations. Much later, when Tripp’s name became synonymous with the surreptitious whir of a tape recorder, some Pentagon colleagues would shake their heads at the memory of one particular Tripp outburst. “She’s eavesdropping on my phone calls!” Tripp screamed about Wallace. “I’m going to sue that woman!”

Blacklow recognized that he had to make a change. He shifted Tripp to another job, where she ran a program that each year allowed a group of prominent civilians to tour military installations. She succeeded in this difficult job, and she and Blacklow even developed a friendship of sorts, based largely on their shared need to sneak cigarettes in “pigeon alley,” a small airspace between the D and E rings of the Pentagon. For the most
part, Tripp kept her political opinions to herself, but Blacklow would sometimes bellyache about the difficulties of getting a decision out of the president’s people. “It’s crazy over there at the White House,” Blacklow sighed.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Tripp replied.

When Aldrich’s book was published, in the summer of 1996, Tripp had already been gone from the White House for almost two years. But the former secretary couldn’t resist investigating whether she, too, might cash in the same way. She told her idea to Tony Snow, a journalist who had served with her in the Bush White House. Snow said Tripp needed a literary agent. “You ought to talk to Lucianne Goldberg,” Snow said. “She’s a piece of work.”

Lucianne Goldberg seemed to emerge from a virtual space somewhere between the Republican National Convention and the bar scene in
Star Wars
. She had banked a lifetime of obsessions—about sex, gossip, secret tape recordings, tell-all books, and conservative politics—as if in preparation for her moment in this case. She acted throughout with a kind of joyous malice, pretending at every moment to be outraged by one thing or another (usually the behavior of Bill Clinton), but in truth she was thrilled to be, finally, at the center of the action. Like Norma Desmond descending the staircase at the end of
Sunset Boulevard
, with her heart full of murder and longing, Goldberg was ready for her close-up. But unlike Desmond, the silent-screen diva who was left behind in a changing world, Lucianne Goldberg reflected the new face of American politics—personal, petty, and mean.

Born in Boston in 1935, Lucianne Cummings dropped out of high school at sixteen and claims to have had fifteen jobs before she was twenty-one. Since then, she has had nearly that many careers. She was a clerk at
The Washington Post
, ran a one-woman public relations firm (the sign on the door boasted of nonexistent offices in London and Paris), and served as a Democratic campaign worker and low-level White House staffer under Lyndon Johnson. After an early marriage and divorce, she married Sid Goldberg, a Republican who worked for a newspaper syndicate. In 1972, a friend of Sid’s, the right-wing columnist Victor Lasky, introduced Lucianne to Murray Chotiner, a veteran political operative for President Richard Nixon. Chotiner hired Goldberg at $1,000 per week to be a spy on
George McGovern’s campaign plane as the representative of the fictional Women’s News Service. After Watergate, she ghostwrote Maureen Dean’s bestselling novel,
Washington Wives
, wrote a couple of less successful novels on her own, and began work as a literary agent, mostly for conservative authors with incendiary tales to tell. (Goldberg’s most recent novel,
Madame Cleo’s Girls
, published in 1992, featured a literary agent who “was known for her representation of sensational nonauthors and their ghostwritten stories.”)

In 1985, Goldberg materialized at the second trial of Claus von Bulow for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. The literary agent was trying to sell a book by one David Marriott, who was, among other things, a male prostitute, a drug dealer, and an acquaintance of several people involved in the case. Marriott had hidden a recorder in his jockey shorts and made tapes of von Bulow and others. Marriott’s tapes turned out to be less than dispositive, and he never wrote a book, but at the trial in Providence, Rhode Island, Goldberg became friendly with the writer Dominick Dunne. For the next thirteen years, they spoke almost every morning; they hashed over the tabloids and Goldberg listened to Dunne’s tales of life on the A-list dinner circuit.

Virtually all of Goldberg’s projects appeared to involve, in one way or another, tell-alls and tapes.
Madame Cleo’s Girls
concerned the efforts of a celebrated madam to recite (on tape) and then sell a sensational memoir about her famous clients. The story mixed soft-core sex (“It got better and better until he stopped counting the orgasms”), nose-against-the-glass voyeurism (“The black Super Puma helicopter hovered above the Mosby Media office tower”), and breezy contempt for the famous in general and politicians in particular (“The Connecticut lawyer who paid to watch Sandrine masturbate while he sat on the couch chewing the ear of a teddy bear was running for Congress and had gone back to his home district to campaign”). There wasn’t much of a theme to the novel—“Everyone is for sale” was about as close as it came. Nor was there a clear pattern to Goldberg’s life. As she often said, she hated being bored, and she loved “dish.”

That, more or less, was the picture Goldberg presented of herself. A political thrill-seeker. A good-time girl. With her cigarette holder and her booze-and-nicotine-ravaged voice, Goldberg made herself into a caricature, a kind of joke—the “Auntie Mame of politics,” as one former client described the image. Yet this picture served to free Goldberg from any real responsibility for her actions. This, too, was a pattern in her life. In fact, in
addition to crazy stories and many laughs, Goldberg left a trail of wreckage behind her.

Goldberg’s literary agency was more of a hobby than a business. She operated it out of her home and never made much of a living from it. One advantage of Goldberg’s preference for one-shot sensational authors was that few people wanted to do business with her for a second time. Her best-known client, the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, sued Goldberg for breach of contract and fraud and won a judgment of $41,407. (Goldberg’s lawyer in that case then sued her for not paying his bill; Goldberg never contested the suit, and the judge entered a default judgment against her, which she never paid.) Goldberg used to tell friends that she had two sons who were killed in an automobile accident—a made-up story. Her marriage was often troubled; a friend was surprised to discover, after she lent Goldberg her apartment several times so she “would be closer to the theater,” that she was using it for private afternoons with a prominent Washington writer.

Once Goldberg emerged as a national figure, many people who knew her well were astonished to hear the strict, moralistic tone she took toward the president’s behavior. “He’s such a weak man, such a bad man,” she said any number of times. In one interview, she said, “We’re all saying ‘blow jobs’ at dinner parties. I mean, I’m old enough to be shocked by that.… He is the president of the United States. He sets the moral tone for this country.” Like many of Clinton’s critics, Goldberg displayed contempt for the president’s roots in Arkansas. “Borderline trailer trash,” she called him—which recalls Aldrich’s dismissal of the president and his friends as having Berkeley values “with an Appalachian twist.”

Yet Goldberg’s books abounded in blow jobs—and phone sex and bondage and more—and she often told a story about herself that resembled the one Monica Lewinsky would tell Linda Tripp. On any number of occasions, Goldberg told friends that when she worked in the White House—that is, when she was just a few years older than Lewinsky was in 1995—she had had an affair with President Johnson. There is, of course, no way to verify the claim now; and Goldberg, after she became famous, took to denying that she had ever said she had slept with Johnson. Still, the irony—her outrage at an affair that seemed to duplicate one she had claimed as her own—was extraordinary.

In any event, Goldberg was only too happy to chat with Linda Tripp about her book idea. From the moment they first spoke in 1996, Lucianne Goldberg took on the role of Linda Tripp’s id, always pushing her to do
what she, Tripp, really wanted to do anyway—that is, destroy the president and make some money in the bargain. After all, as Goldberg wrote of her fictional alter ego, this agent “prided herself on being a ‘closer.’ ”

“This is going to be bigger than Gary Aldrich,” Goldberg confided on the telephone. “She was right in the center. They can’t get anything on her. We need to do it fast. I just can’t tell you her name yet. Let’s call her ‘Joan Dean.’ ”

Goldberg was talking to Maggie Gallagher, a conservative columnist for the
New York Post
. After a few conversations with Tripp, Goldberg was ready to move. Gallagher agreed to talk to Tripp on the telephone, hear her story, and then prepare a book proposal. All through July 1996, Gallagher and Tripp would speak almost every night—a total of fifteen or twenty hours of conversations. In their talks, Tripp told Gallagher that she was worried that the financial payoff for the book would not justify the risk it would present to her career. She was a political appointee at the Pentagon, so she no longer enjoyed civil service protections. Tripp told Gallagher she was earning about $80,000 a year, more than she had ever expected she would make in her life. Still, she plowed ahead, with Tripp rambling into the night and Gallagher scribbling notes. Tripp’s paranoia prompted her to impose one condition for their conversations—a rather extraordinary one, in light of what was to come. Tripp refused to allow Gallagher to tape-record their conversations.

Gallagher shared Tripp’s rather starchy and proper demeanor, and they convinced each other that their book was not really about Clinton’s sex life. It was, they said, a more generalized exposé of the shoddy operations at the White House. Goldberg, in contrast, had no such illusions. She knew the appeal of the book lay in what Tripp could say about what she called “the graduates”—women employees at the White House who purportedly owed their careers to their sexual relationships with Bill Clinton. (At the time of Tripp’s 1996 book proposal, her list of graduates did not include Monica Lewinsky, who had not yet confided in Tripp.) Goldberg knew the sex would sell the book, and she boasted to Alfred Regnery, the head of the right-wing publishing house that had scored with Aldrich’s memoir, that she had another hot one in the pipeline for him.