Ask Camille
Dear Camille:
What do you make of Linda Tripp? Is she an evil, spiteful crone with a deep hostility toward randy sexuality (remember she is reportedly the one who spread rumors about George Bush's supposed affair, so it didn't start with Bill)? Or is she a principled defender of traditional values? And do you think someone in the White House really was stupid enough to write down the so-called Talking Points and hand them to an emotionally unreliable intern? Or are they one more strange invention from the Starr-Tripp-Lucianne Goldberg camp?
-- Pamela Pundit
Dear Pamela:
Linda Tripp, for the benefit of Salon's international readers, who have not been bored to death by the parochial obsession of the American major media with this subject for the past six months, is the middle-aged woman who secretly taped her young prot‚g‚, Monica Lewinsky, babbling about alleged sexual assignations in the White House with Bill Clinton. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Tripp managed to turn up everywhere -- even outside the Oval Office door as then-volunteer Kathleen Willey lurched forth with blouse reportedly disarranged and lipstick smeared.
My first impression remains unchanged. Whatever Tripp's concern about gathering hard evidence to protect herself legally, anyone who betrays a friend in that calculating manner deserves the fate that Dante would assign her: being trapped in ice up to the neck in the deepest pit of the Inferno, where treachery against basic human bonds is punished and where Satan himself, once the brightest of the rebel angels, beats his bat's wings.
On the other hand, whistle-blowers in general are not always likable people. It may take zealotry and fanaticism to expose institutionalized business-as-usual when things become as slack and corrupt as they appear to have in many areas of the Clinton administration, uncorrected by a vainglorious and self-righteous first lady who sees moral error everywhere but in her stinking backyard. Tripp is the anti-Hillary, stalking the White House as its ghoulish bad conscience. Like the gangrenous picture of Dorian Gray, Tripp's tense, hooded, iron-jawed face is like a festering archive of unexpiated sins.
As a persona, Tripp reminds me of Barbara Stanwyck at her most withering and implacable. With her big-shouldered trench coats, Tripp could sub as a pro football linebacker. As she dashes from house to car past the cameras, her magnified vulture eyes (glasses curtained by those blond Afghan bangs) and blocky, bullish body language remind me of a whole, florid series of talented but one-sided, narrowly focused, rather terrifying women: Bella Abzug, Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Madeleine Albright and yes, Mrs. Rodham, Hillary's mother, whom I saw in person at the 1996 Democratic Convention and mistook for a prison matron.
The Tripp tapes themselves may contain little but titillating hearsay that could prove of limited legal use. We will see in time, however, whether the "Talking Points" document is the smoking gun that demonstrates there was a systematic White House effort to suborn perjury in the various investigations into Bill Clinton's checkered past. I suspect that, at worst, the ax will fall on a Clinton advisor or two, while the president himself, though badly embarrassed, will make it to the end of his term relatively unscathed. At this point, most Americans would probably prefer being governed by a charming, oafish philanderer than by a simpering, shilly-shallying, fascist milquetoast like Special Prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, who has a face like creamed corn and the brains to go with it.
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