At about 9:15 on Friday morning, the 28-year-old son of a New York book agent waited on a rain-spattered downtown street for an investigator from the office of independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
When the investigator arrived, the young man handed over the last two of 19 cassette tapes on which former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and a co-worker discussed Lewinsky’s alleged affair with President Clinton.
The brief encounter a few blocks from the White House was a telling moment in the rapidly unfolding drama that threatens Clinton’s presidency. The young man with the tapes was the son of Lucianne Goldberg, a New York agent who has emerged as a pivotal figure in the unfolding events.
An unapologetic Clinton critic who has political and financial stakes in the White House scandal, Goldberg told reporters Saturday that she first persuaded Linda Tripp to secretly tape her conversations with Lewinsky.
Eventually, Tripp would call an aide at Starr’s office and tell him of the explosive tapes in which Lewinsky talked of her alleged sexual encounters with the president. The call would set off a scramble to substantiate the claims before they became public.
Within days, Tripp met Lewinsky at a swank Virginia hotel and secretly recorded a luncheon conversation as she wore a wire installed by one of Starr’s FBI agents. A few days later, Tripp reportedly again lured Lewinsky to the same hotel so a group of Starr’s investigators could unsuccessfully cajole and threaten to gain further cooperation from the former White House intern, who was shocked by her friend’s betrayal.
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One of Starr’s main goals was to document that Clinton not only had sexual relations with Lewinsky but that he and his confidant, Vernon Jordan, advised her to lie about it in a court case, an action that could be considered perjury, a federal crime that could be grounds for impeachment.
The tapes became public before Lewinsky’s lawyer and Starr could come to terms, and now the recordings are at the heart of the unfolding scandal.
Speaking to reporters Saturday, Goldberg insisted that her role in bringing the tapes to the attention of Starr and the public was motivated by patriotism and human decency.
“It makes my skin crawl,” she said of what she heard on the tapes. “This is not about money. This is about not controlling moral authority.” She said she also arranged an interview in her son’s apartment between Tripp and Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff in an effort to get the tapes in the hands of the media. But she said he was not “an activist.”
“I’m an independent agent, I’m an independent person,” she said.
Her background suggests she is a lot more than a disinterested observer of the political scene.
During the last four decades, she went from spying on Democrats for the campaign of President Richard Nixon to peddling book proposals about the alleged peccadillos of President Clinton. Goldberg’s life and publishing fortunes also have been entwined with conservative political causes.
Speaking of Clinton to The Washington Post on Saturday, Goldberg said: “What I’m glad about is he’s getting caught. At something. If it took this to get him, fine.”
Goldberg’s son Jonah, vice president of his mother’s literary agency and a producer of programs aired on public television, said Starr’s office served a subpoena for the tapes he turned over at his mother’s Manhattan apartment Thursday. Goldberg said he put the tapes in his briefcase, pushed his way through the media throng outside and jumped into a cab.
Nobody followed him to the airport as he carried “the most coveted tapes in Western civilization,” he said.
The subpoena did not demand that they turn over the tapes immediately, and it apparently did not prohibit the Goldbergs from copying them. Jonah Goldberg would not comment on whether the family had duplicated the tapes. He said the family had received a $2 million offer for the tapes, but that might be only a fraction of what they are worth.
“I can’t imagine the price my mom would get if she put the screws to somebody and jacked up the price,” he said.
Goldberg said any decisions about what to do with the tapes would be made ultimately by Tripp. “These are Linda’s tapes, not our tapes,” he said.
Lucianne Goldberg got to know Tripp in 1993 when Goldberg was helping a writer with a book about Clinton aide Vince Foster’s suicide. Tripp had worked in the White House counsel’s office and was one of the last people to see Foster alive.
Tripp suggested writing her own tell-all account of her White House years, but that effort never got much past the talking stages. Goldberg did not shop around a full-blown proposal; she just talked to some people in the business.
Although the book deal dissolved and no money changed hands between Goldberg and Tripp, the two stayed in touch. In the brassy, salacious agent, Tripp found a political soulmate and an adroit guide to the seamy side of Washington.
As a young woman, Goldberg had parlayed a job with Lyndon Johnson’s political staff into White House and Commerce Department staff positions with the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Johnson.
In 1969, after she left the White House, she penned a dishy, four-part expose on Jacqueline Kennedy’s $10,000-a-month shopping bills and “stormy” arguments with JFK.
“Despite all attempts to keep the presidential family affairs quiet, the White House is, alas, a fish bowl,” Golberg wrote in Chicago Today.
Tripp had talked previously to the media about Clinton’s alleged philandering, and her credibility had been attacked by one of Clinton’s attorneys, Robert Bennett. To back herself up, Goldberg advised Tripp to secretly tape her friend Lewinsky.
“She was very reluctant to do that. Ladies don’t tape their friends,” Goldberg said Saturday.
Tripp “feels terrible (and) is heartsick” about the travail she has caused Lewinsky, Goldberg added.
Her son said: “Knowing what this White House can do, for her own . . . safety sounds weird, but, for her own security, (Tripp) felt it essential to cover her ass.”
Goldberg accompanied Tripp to the October meeting with Isikoff, but he declined at that point to listen to the tapes.
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The Newsweek reporter said in an interview Saturday he turned down the offer because he knew the tapes had been made illegally and he did not want to get dragged into becoming a player in the story.
Newsweek editors and reporters later listened to some portions of Tripp’s many hours of tapes.