On a bad Tripp

No Hollywood screenwriter could have confected a better vamp. She could be straight out of a afternoon soap opera — brassy and insidious. It did not need the magnifying and amplifying power of the media microscope to expose this aspect of human character that resided in an anonymous and seemingly harmless woman. Although the media did a merciless hatchet job, it comes out loud and clear on the 22 hours of tape she has left for posterity.

Linda Carotenuto was a child of middle America in more ways than one. She grew up in the swinging Sixties without much to swing in a modest New Jersey upbringing that included the divorce of her parents when she was 16.

She had few friends in school and married her first boyfriend, Bruce Tripp, an Army operations training officer. For years, she was a dutiful military spouse who went where her husband wasposted, often finding related military jobs — as an executive assistant to a top-ranking military representative in Netherlands and personal assistant to a US deputy chief of staff in Heidelberg, Germany.

By the time Bruce Tripp was posted back to the US in 1987, Linda Tripp had worked her way up even in the military hierarchy, becoming a secretary of the US army Intelligence Command at Fort Meade and later joining the Army office of the Delta Force in Fort Bragg, both sensitive military assignments where she had to have top secret security clearance. She had borne her husband two children but her marriage of 20 years was coming apart.

In 1990, she landed a job in the Bush White House after a tip off from a friend and neighbour who worked there. She began working in a secretarial pool at $45,000 a year. By 1992, about the time of her divorce, she had worked her way to the chief of staff’s office in a role that was described as jack of all trades — answering phone calls, assisting in schedules andappointments and even assisting in speech writing (she once boasted about having ghostwritten an op-ed piece on the Clarence Thomas case).

Tripp’s troubles — and America’s grand soap opera — took roots when Bush was voted out and Clinton took office. Typically in the American system, if there is a change in the ruling party and a new President is elected, there is a wholesale turnover in administration jobs.

Thousands of hometown and home state benefactors and patrons cash their chips in the form of job reccos to their near and dear. Although Linda Tripp came to the White House from the Defence Department as a career civil servant, her low level status meant that she could be flooded out by the Arkansas brigade which would come clamouring for jobs.

As it turned out, Tripp survived. Not only hung in but prospered — briefly — working first with Clinton advisor Bruce Lindsey and later Vince Foster, a Clintons’ friend who would commit suicide shortly under mysterious circumstances. From all accounts,Tripp was not treated as an outsider or leftover from the Bush regime. A competent worker, she handled sensitive assignments. Among other things, she was entrusted with the Clintons’ tax records.

Foster’s suicide changed everything. She thought there was something suspicious in the whole affair and discussed it with friends over e-mail.

She was disturbed by the Travelgate affair in which government employees like her were fired unceremoniously and replaced by political appointees from Arkansas (Monica Lewinsky too was a political appointee who got her internship and later a White House job because of family connections). By then Tripp was beginning to dislike too what she felt was the rather licentious atmosphere in the White House.

The new informal dress codes, the cool language, and relaxed ambience among the gaggle of interns offended the sensibilities of the prudish, conservative woman who thrived in the stiff and starchy aura of the Bush era. She was finally run out of the White House and shippedout to Pentagon, where she was given a windowless basement office and not much to do.

By then, she had begun to hate the Clinton White House and had even begun to talk about the President’s roving eye. According to one account, she even began to write an insider account of the White House with a ghost writer under the working title Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw at the Clinton White House. Apparently, the divorce had embittered her too.

She abandoned the project after two chapters, not trusting her ghost writer. But what she saw, or thought she saw, in the Clinton White House found its way to Newsweek magazine via Lucianne Goldberg, a New York book agent with Republican sympathies. In 1997, she told a Newsweek reporter that she had once seen a White House aide named Kathleen Willey emerge from the President’s office with her lipstick smeared and her dress dishevelled.

The remark was denounced by the President’s attorney Robert Bennett, who virtually called Tripp a liar. This stung Tripp andscared her. Around this time, she was mothering a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, who had also been put out to grass at the Pentagon from the White House.

The two women had become friends and Monica was telling her fantastic stories about her affair with the President. Afraid that someday she might become embroiled in the scandal, possibly be called to testify and nobody would believe her, she went out and bought a $100 voice activated tape recorder and began taping their conversations. It seemed a smart thing to do.

But in January this year, Tripp — quite likely at the instance of Goldberg — called up lawyers for Paula Jones to tattle about the tapes. They led her to Ken Starr’s lair. And thus began to unfold the saga of sex, lies and audiotape right down to the semen-stained dress. Reviled for her betrayal, Tripp once pleaded for understanding at a news conference telling the American people, I am you. But the verdict so far has been, Oh no, you are not.

Firmly stampedas the ultimate in treachery, Tripp has now applied for a job to be the US Army liaison to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. America seems ready to put her on ice much before that.