Linda Tripp, dragon lady

Moments from those films –Close boiling alive the pet rabbit of Michael Douglas’s daughter, Bates breaking the legs of the bed-ridden James Caan with a mallet have become the popular iconography of insane female vengeance. And this is how many Americans seem to see Linda Tripp.

In the Washington excitements of recent weeks, Tripp has understandably been somewhat forgotten, remembered mainly for her alarmly apt name: Tripp who was wired by the FBI to trip up the President. However, on Friday night, she returned to the spotlight with the releae by Congress of edited transcripts of the conversations between the older government employee and Lewinsky captured by Tripp’s telephone-microphone and electronically-enhanced bra.

The return to prominence of Tripp usefully reminds us that Bates or Close or whoever might find themselves cast in this role in a Clinton movie would probably be playing the most interesting and complex part. For Tripp increasingly looks likely to be seen as the woman who first seemed to have made it possible forStarr to topple a president — by uncovering the sexual relationship but ultimately made it impossible.

Because, inconveniently for the Special Prosecutor, she highlights the aspects of the affair which best provide Clinton’s defence. In the transcripts released on Friday, Tripp frequently appears as an agent provocateur. She coaches Lewinsky in the employment demands she should make from Clinton in passages of Iago-like prompting: “They create jobs at the White House, six days a week.”

The only material which immediately seemed damaging to Clinton was what might be called the smoking neurosis when Monica appears to be in fear of her life from “these people” if she crosses them. But, given that Starr and his own people had won this admission by surrounding a young woman with FBI agents and a wired-up friend, it is clear why he excluded the alleged threat from his report.

Tripp is a minor presence in the text of the official Starr Report, listed way down the dramatis personae merely as “friend ofMonica Lewinsky”, a description which, given her actions, suggests an unexpected flair for comedy in the report’s author. The spin on this low-level presence at the time was that her conversations with Lewinsky had operated largely as clues to material which the Special Prosecutor himself subsequently drew from the former intern.

Once confirmation had been gained, the source of the original information became irrelevant. It now seems clear, though, that Tripp was omitted because of her liability as a witness. Openly rightwing and morally disapproving of Clinton, she had also lodged her recorded conversations with a book agent. The two motivations for investigation with which Starr could least afford to be linked — the political and the personal were represented in Tripp.

Alone among those ranged against Clinton, she had provenly conspired. Recent revelations of technical doubts about her tapes — suspicious edits, inconsistencies in origin — seem to confirm that the witness who got Starr started maybe about to finish him off.

And the Tripp transcripts — along with those of Betty Currie, the president’s secretary, also released on Friday — illustrate the strangest aspect of the scandal: its gender relationships. When the scandal began, it was interpreted by many as a story of workplace relationships between men and women in which the president stood convicted at the very least of sexual harassment. However, this view of the balance of sexual desire — and even of power — in the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship does not survive a reading of the Starr Report.

And what the Tripp and Currie evidence now suggests is that the real heart of this story may be the workplace relationships between women and women. If Lewinsky was bullied and harassed by anyone — and led by them to believe that her career might be at risk — then the culprit was Linda Tripp. While Clinton seems to have had at least some affection for Lewinsky, Tripp’s conversations with her are an appalling record of false friendship conductedto entirely selfish ends.

Clinton, in his video evidence, described relationships between men and women as “mysterious”. But, in this case, it is the associations between the women which appear really spooky. Why was Tripp prepared to destroy a young woman’s life in pursuit of a political goal? Why was Betty Currie a woman of grandmotherly rectitude apparently so helpful to Lewinsky in her efforts to seduce the President? Both Monica and Hillary, from their different perspectives, might borrow for the 1998 section of their memoirs the title Women Beware Women.

Yet Tripp’s return to prominence is good news for the White House. Her transcripts emphasise the elements of incrimination and conspiracy which form a sordidness on Starr’s side to balance out the sleaziness on Clinton’s. Bates or Close, though, should get on to their agents now.

The Observer News Service