Spinning a yarn

In her testimony, the older woman held herself out as worldly confidante, wise adviser, caring friend. But she also spelled out the seething bitterness she felt toward the Clinton White House. Ever since the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky burst into headlines on January 21, one of its strangest elements hasbeen the role of Tripp, Lewinsky’s one-time co-worker at the Defense Department.

It was Tripp who single-handedly precipitated the scandal with what appeared to be a stunning act of personal betrayal. It was Tripp, an obscure government worker, who befriended a desperate Lewinsky, then voluntarily delivered the incriminating tapes to independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Transcripts of the tapes, plus grand jury testimony indicate that resentment over what Tripp saw as her own mistreatment by the White House turned her into a self-commissioned secret agent bent on revenge.

Tripp made herself Lewinsky’s counselor, her surrogate mother. Tripp assured Lewinsky that her only goal was to see her out of the affair unharmed — even though it was Tripp herself who was preparing to pull the pin on the grenade. “Who you are, Monica, is not what I give a (deleted) about right now,” Tripp said in a conversation in which Lewinsky was trying to explain the seriousness of her feelings for Clinton. “You’re awonderful person, but please let some self-preservation enter into this…. I know you’re going to hate me, Monica, but I want you the (deleted) out of there. I want you with a life.”

Tripp led the conversation back to a meeting Lewinsky was seeking with presidential secretary Betty Currie. Tripp urged Lewinsky to try to get Currie to spell out exactly what the president would and would not do to get a good job in New York City for the former White House intern, at this point exiled to the Pentagon with Tripp.

Ostensibly, Tripp’s goal was to rescue Lewinsky from agonising uncertainty about her future. But such specifics from Currie would buttress the idea that Clinton was trying to buy Lewinsky’s silence about their affair. After Lewinsky had learned that Tripp had secretly taped their conversations, she told the grand jury: “I hate Linda Tripp.”

Tripp did not disguise her resentment of the way the Clinton administration had pruned the White House staff after taking office. In her telling, thefirings were abrupt and uncaring. “They took a lot of the older women and a lot of the older guys who had worked, some for almost 30 years and said, leave by 5, don’t come back,” she told the jury.

She was incensed by the events leading to her own departure from the White House. After her boss, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, resigned, Tripp was told to look for something else. At the same time, she strongly denied trying to compile a case against Clinton out of revenge for these perceived wrongs.

The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service