Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

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How Tripp came to start taping her young friend is itself a cautionary tale for White House damage controllers. Tripp had a history of befriending women who told tales of intimate encounters with the President. She certainly shared the view of those who disapproved of the frolicsome Clinton culture, and was pleased by the 1996 publication of former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's book in which he alleged that sex toys dangled from the White House Christmas tree. Tripp was annoyed by the efforts of the President's men to discredit the author.

When she was still at the White House, she saw a volunteer named Kathleen Willey not far from the Oval Office, her makeup smudged, her blouse untucked. Last summer, when Newsweek ran a story about Tripp's account of Willey's saying that Clinton had kissed and fondled her, lawyer Bennett publicly challenged Tripp's honesty. But lawyers for Paula Jones saw Willey and Tripp as golden witnesses and aimed subpoenas at them. Tripp anticipated that she would be asked about Lewinsky and that the White House would challenge anything she had to say. So last August she sought the advice of a friend, a literary agent and former Nixon operative, Lucianne Goldberg. Goldberg has represented the Arkansas state troopers who went public with stories of Clinton womanizing, as well as a woman named Dolly Kyle Browning who has been trying to sell an account of her own alleged affair with the President. The agent had approached Tripp through an intermediary months before to suggest she participate in a book on former White House lawyer Vince Foster; Tripp had been the last to see Foster before his suicide. The women never struck a deal, but they became close, and Tripp followed Goldberg's counsel on what to do about Lewinsky: she went to RadioShack and bought a tape recorder.

Tripp's conversations with Lewinsky--some taped, some just recalled--tell a steamy story of sex and power, pressure and confusion. The women spoke all the time, in the Pentagon corridors, over coffee, when they met after work for a drink or drove home together. Lewinsky spoke of at least a dozen sexual encounters with Clinton, perhaps as many as 20. She claimed she would go to the White House, usually in the late afternoon or evenings, and be cleared in by Currie. When Lewinsky and the President couldn't rendezvous in person, they allegedly did it on the phone. The phone sex picked up in frequency as her invitations to see Clinton tapered off after the Willey story broke last August.

Lewinsky's account alternates from puppy love for the man she refers to as "handsome" to sorrow that she didn't get to see him as much as she wanted, to eventual bitterness at "the Creep" who let her be banished to the Pentagon. Talking to Tripp, she referred to his intrusive staff as "the protectors" and to ex-girlfriends in the White House as "graduates." At times the very amount of detail strains credulity. In one exchange, Lewinsky laments that when she tried to get into the White House one night to visit the President, the guard turned her away, saying another woman had got there first.