Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  It would be wrong to think that, when it came to other men, Monica’s life during these months was entirely monastic, turned over wholly to her devotion to the President. Even when she had a regular boyfriend, however, she always kept one eye on the clock, like Cinderella racing to get home before midnight just in case Prince Charming might call. On one occasion, for example, she was dating a man whom she names only as Thomas, a Pentagon worker, a charming, craggy-faced, older man whom she had met on a trip to Bosnia in July 1996. Just after she returned from that tour she saw him on a date, and he invited her to stay the night at his house. She decided against it, thinking that the President might call. Her instincts proved unerring, as they usually did, and they chatted away far into the night, the President enthralled, actually sexually aroused, by her excited description of the Bosnia visit. She told him how proud she was to be an American when she saw how the US troops had helped to restore sanity and give hope to this war-torn land.

  That evening encapsulated the emotional contradiction in her heart and mind. She yearned for a normal relationship, but when offered the chance of attaining her goal she seemed to shrink back. It is as though she felt unworthy of enjoying a typical romance, and as though the deep scars left by her parents’ divorce had made her afraid of approaching genuine commitment. So she clung to a romantic vision of love at once unattainable and unrealistic, the pain she felt somehow corresponding to her sense of worthlessness. Better the anguished fairytale than the genuine but flawed reality.

  Even though, in the early days of her romance with Thomas, Monica began to feel good about herself, she was constantly distracted by the thought that she might be missing a telephone call from the President. She also couldn’t resist teasing the President, saying that he now had competition.

  In the fall of 1996, she ended her three-month fling with Thomas—because, ironically, he was seeing other women. When the affair began, her friends had been delighted: here was a single guy who might take her mind off the President. But it soon became clear that Thomas was never going to be the new love of her life. Then, in early October 1996, just as the relationship was ending, Monica discovered that she was pregnant.

  She was convinced that she did not want to be a single parent, not least because she wished to be in a full relationship before having children, and so, with the greatest reluctance, she decided to have an abortion. She had problems finding a suitable doctor on the East Coast, and she and Thomas fell out over sharing the costs of the procedure, which meant she had to borrow the money from Aunt Debra. Originally Thomas had promised to accompany her to the hospital but, with relations between them strained, she decided to go through with it alone. Monica had thought that, being a sassy, liberal-minded West Coast girl, she would sail through the operation. In the event, it proved to be noisy, painful and distressing, leaving her traumatized and deeply scarred. “I was not emotionally prepared for the experience,” she says, “It was just horrible and very depressing.” Her friends were anxious and concerned for her. Neysa DeMann Erbland says, “It was very difficult time emotionally for her, especially as she wants kids so desperately.”

  She did not realize at the time just how profoundly affected she would be in the long term. Her mother did, though, and virtually forced her to undergo counseling at the medical center in Virginia where Monica attended a weight-loss clinic. There, in November 1996, Monica first saw therapist Kathleen Estep, to whom she talked at length about the trauma of her abortion.

  Estep found Monica anxious and depressed, with a very low sense of self-esteem. At only their second meeting, she confessed to her affair with the President, talking rapidly for the whole ninety-minute session about their clandestine liaison. During her counseling sessions Monica discussed her fear of her relationships failing or not lasting, focusing in particular on those with Clinton and with her father. Most unhappily, just as she was beginning to make progress, Kathleen Estep moved away, leaving Monica without professional guidance at this critical juncture in her life.

  The abortion, coupled with Monica’s anxieties over her job, her hopes about returning to the White House, her troubled relationship with the President and her loneliness in Washington, sent her into a downward spiral. Then, at this time of desolation, isolation and depression, the unlovely figure of Linda Tripp began to take control of Monica’s life.

  It is difficult to believe, now, that there was a time when most of America—not to say most of the world—had never heard of Linda Tripp. Everyone knows today that it was her machinations that exposed Monica’s affair with Bill Clinton and ultimately brought the President to impeachment; what is much more difficult to discern is her motivation. Yet the plain fact is that the roots of the veteran government secretary’s Machiavellian scheming lay in the complex and contradictory matrix of her character.

  Born in 1950, as a youngster growing up in New Jersey Linda Tripp suffered much the same misery about her physical appearance as Monica did about her weight. By the age of fourteen she had grown to be five foot eight inches tall. Her height, her broad shoulders and unfortunate nose, led to her being given the cruel nickname “Gus,” after the basketball star Gus Johnson, by her contemporaries. It was something she bitterly resented; “Don’t call me that,” she complained in one yearbook of her school in East Hanover, New Jersey, while another year she complained about “a certain fairweather friend”—words which she would have cause to reflect on. Like Monica, she went through the trauma of her parents divorcing; her father, a science teacher whom she remembers as a strict disciplinarian, left the family home when she was in her senior year of high school. She spoke to him for the first time in thirty years after the Clinton—Lewinsky scandal broke.

  As if that in itself were not enough, she also resented, not unreasonably, the fact that, while her younger sister was able to go to college as a result of the financial settlement from the divorce, the money came too late for her. Instead Linda, who in any case achieved only mediocre grades at school, settled for secretarial college, shortly afterwards marrying a soldier, Bruce Tripp, by whom she had two children, Ryan and Alison, both now in their twenties. While her husband was working his way up the promotion ladder, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, Linda earned extra income by taking a job as a secretary on the Army base, trusted sufficiently to work with a top-secret commando unit, Delta Force.

  Working on the covert side of defense gave her the vicarious thrill that being “in the know,” working on the inside, gives to so many people. The girl known as “Gus” could now sneer at her former New Jersey schoolmates—she had a ringside seat from which to watch how America really worked. For four years from 1990 she was in the very front row, working as a secretary in the White House Press Office in the administration of Republican President George Bush, thriving on the gossip and the intrigue.

  In January 1993, however, the Democrat Bill Clinton was inaugurated, and Tripp’s world changed. Her disapproval of what she viewed as lapsed standards of dress, deportment and discipline at the White House once the Clintons took over was equaled only by her spiteful scheming and her skill at leaking information. Colleagues viewed her as superficially friendly but manipulative, with a vindictive streak that sometimes saw her threaten legal action against those who crossed her path. During the inquiry into the suicide in July 1993 of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, she told investigators that a fellow secretary had a drink problem. As Tripp had been the last person to see Foster alive before he shot himself, she earned a certain minor fame. Indeed, on August 1, 1995, just a couple of weeks after Monica started as a White House intern, Linda Tripp testified before the grand jury considering the circumstances of Foster’s death. The Counsel’s links to the First Lady and the now notorious Whitewater land scheme soon had conspiracy theorists weaving their web of fact and fantasy, and his involvement was investigated by Kenneth Starr. Tripp herself contributed to the rumor mill, whispering about dark forces in the government, people who had taken action against Foster b
ecause he knew too much and was too close to Hillary Clinton.

  Her days working in defense had given Tripp, too, a taste for conspiracy theories, and her resentment at the course of her life—she and Colonel Tripp were divorced in the 1990s, after twenty years of marriage—made her a perfect recruit for right-wingers who hated Bill Clinton and all his works. At once self-serving, self-righteous and self-important, she had a highly developed sense of moral indignation. These characteristics were given an extra edge of bitterness when, in 1994, she was moved from the White House to the Pentagon on the resignation of her boss, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Tripp, who likes to be at the center of events, resented being moved to the Pentagon, even though, like Monica, she received an increase in her salary. It was said, too, that her move was welcomed by the new Counsel, who suspected her of leaking information and making trouble for her colleagues, several of whom she publicly criticized.

  When she arrived at the Pentagon she soon started to throw her weight around, demanding her own parking space and private office so that she could prepare for her testimony in the Vince Foster investigation. By contrast, Monica, when she moved to the Pentagon in April 1996, had taken little interest in the Foster case. All she knew about Tripp was that she worked at the back of her section on the second floor and never answered her phones, obliging Monica to field the calls.

  Though Tripp privately criticized the Clinton administration, in public she made a great show of loyalty, displaying outsize pictures of the President on her desk. It was this colorful show of loyalty to the President that first sparked conversation between her and Monica. Later, the fact that both women had been removed from posts at the White House drew them closer together.

  Monica’s initial impressions of Tripp were of a “cold, rather rough woman with a good heart.” At work she was thorough, competent and professional, although she complained that her salary of $80,000 a year was not enough to fund her dreams of owning an antiques store and living on a property where she could keep horses. Indeed it was their shared interest in antiques, as well as the fact that they shared a similar sense of humor, that drew the two women together, in spite of the age gap of nearly a generation. Furthermore, Tripp already had, from her time at the White House Press Office, a reputation for taking young interns under her wing, thereby gaining their confidence, respect and allegiance. This friendship seemed to be following the familiar pattern.

  Catherine Allday Davis says that Tripp plugged into a need in Monica, and that, with her insider’s knowledge of the Washington scene, she was able to persuade the younger woman to act in ways which other friends were uncertain about because they had so little knowledge of the White House setup. “Tripp was like a gossipy coworker,” Catherine says, “not a real friend. Monica really needed to talk about what was going on [that is, her affair with the President]. Ashley [Raines] didn’t want to know and didn’t approve, so Linda was the perfect person. She didn’t judge her, but at the same time gave her absolutely no help.”

  At first they shared diet tips, in the course of a year Monica encouraging her new friend to lose sixty pounds, and offering her enthusiastic approval when Tripp joined Weight Watchers. They talked about antiques, about Tripp’s difficulties with her ninety-minute bus commute from her home in the suburb of Columbia, across the border in Maryland, and about the problems of raising two children. Her divorce had been bitter, and although her son, Ryan, the elder of her children, was away at college, her relationship with her daughter, Alison, was so bad that at one stage she kicked the girl out of the house. Yet for all that Linda Tripp seemed a decent mother, and had a lovely home filled with the antiques she collected.

  Despite her difficult relationship with her daughter, Tripp seemed fascinated by Monica’s mother. She refused to meet Marcia before she herself had lost weight, a strange reason for hesitation, and constantly asked Monica what her mother thought about Tripp’s various schemes and stratagems. In time, albeit too late, Monica came to realize that Linda Tripp had a secret addiction: she was trying to live her life through Monica. For some bizarre reason of her own she was stalking the girl—not physically, but attempting to invade her psyche. (This behavior continued even after Tripp had betrayed Monica to the Office of the Independent Counsel.)

  At the time Marcia, who has never met Tripp and thought she was a contemporary of Monica’s, considered her behavior weird, if harmless. Now she sees it as having been a form of entrapment. “She sought Monica out, a vulnerable easy target. Tripp has an obsession with Clinton—at one point she claimed that Hillary Clinton was jealous of her because she suspected that she was having an affair with the President. This woman is delusional and pops up everywhere Clinton has trouble. She seemed to insinuate herself in every situation that had a whiff of scandal. She is like a meddlesome witch, a praying mantis.”

  When Monica and Tripp talked, politics was rarely on the conversational menu, and the latter, sensing Monica’s lack of interest in the subject, only spoke occasionally about Vince Foster. While she was inclined to make much of his friendship with the First Lady, Tripp’s usual refrain was about the dire impact his death had had on her. She told Monica that she had become a compulsive eater on the return flight from Foster’s funeral in Arkansas on board Air Force One, the President’s personal plane.

  During one conversation the topic of President Clinton arose, and Tripp told Monica that she was just the kind of girl he would like. “Oh, he would go crazy for you, I just know,” she said. In her distressed and unhappy state, these words were balm to Monica’s soul. they continued to be so, although to a lesser and lesser extent, for as the weeks went by, Tripp’s belief that the President would love a girl like Monica became a kind of nagging mantra, as irritating as it was consoling. Just when those who loved and cared for Monica were urging her to end her unrequited love affair with the President and move on, there was one voice whispering in her ear, wheedling and flattering, urging her to continue with her pursuit of the romantic fairytale. Unknown to Monica, Tripp’s honeyed words were uttered less out of friendship than from self-interest. She had the idea of writing a “tell-all” book about life in the White House.

  In May 1996, after a call urging her to do so from a mutual friend, the conservative newspaper columnist Tony Snow, in Washington Tripp secretly met with the right-wing literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, a gravel-voiced New Yorker who was a political spy for President Richard Nixon during the 1972 election campaign. During the meeting, Tripp showed Goldberg notes and discussed a possible deal for a book focusing on the death of Foster and the shenanigans in the White House, and provisionally entitled Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw In The Clinton White House. In due course, a ghostwriter, Maggie Gallagher, wrote a proposal which included two pages about women Clinton had allegedly been involved with, referring to Debbie Schiff and Kathleen Willey (although at that time Willey was not named). After the proposal had been sent to Putnam, a leading New York publishing house, however, Tripp decided to drop the project, saying that she had little personal chemistry with her ghostwriter, and that she was afraid of losing her job. The book was only resurrected seriously in 1998, after Monica confessed to her relationship with the President.

  Although she had abandoned the book, at least for the time being, where Monica was concerned Tripp now scented innocent blood. The older woman, who emerges as the wicked witch in this tragic fairy story, constantly dangled the rosy-skinned apple of romance in front of a trusting and gullible Monica Lewinsky. During the summer of 1996 Monica increasingly confided in Tripp. Although she never revealed the name of her lover, she did debate with her, among other subjects, the pros and cons of her plan to travel to New York to see the President at his fiftieth-birthday party. The older woman may well have made the connection between Monica and the President, something made easier by Monica’s trusting nature. Unlike Marcia, Aunt Debra and her friends, Tripp told Monica exactly what she wanted to hear; her words carried extra weight because she was someone who gave t
he impression of knowing the President’s mind, who had worked with him, and who understood the workings of the White House and its key players.

  Monica and her mother by San Francisco Bay just after she had started walking.

  Monica aged two at her favorite park in San Francisco. She showed this picture to the President because she thought she looked too pensive for a two-year-old. He agreed.

  The President preferred this picture, commenting that it looked much more like the Monica he knew.

  Monica with her brother Michael in the sandbox at Holmby Park, near their home in Westwood, Los Angeles. In the summer of 1998 they returned to that same park for an emotional heart-to-heart about the traumatic events of the past year.

  Monica aged five, posing for her father, who is a keen and very accomplished photographer.

  Monica with her father and a friend in September 1977.

  Second-grade school picture at John Thomas Dye. At that time Monica’s ambition was “to be a teacher and help other people to learn . . I would be nice but strict,” she wrote then.

  Monica in third grade. She was a member of a local soccer team, The Cardinals, but was relegated to left fullback. “I was a hopeless athlete.”

  In Santa Barbara with her mother, father and brother during visiting day at camp in the summer of 1986.

  Monica’s first trip to New York, aged twelve.

  Monica with her escort for the Bel Air Prep Prom.