The Nixon spy who has Clinton taped
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Democrats abandon wounded President
LUCIANNE Goldberg is already thinking ahead. Puffing on a Lark
cigarette with an 18-carat Dunhill holder from Harrods - it is still,
just, legal to smoke in New York - the architect of Bill Clinton's
downfall wonders which agency of the US government will carry out
the final, humiliating act.
The FBI? The US Marshals? The cigar inspectors from the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? Which one will be sent to
extract President Clinton from the Oval Office?
"It's a real constitutional question: who can arrest the President? It's
the Park Police that's responsible for tidying up the White House, so
maybe they'll have to clean up this mess," she said, with a loud
guffaw, as we sat in a gale outside the Rockefeller Centre eating pƒt‚
de foie gras. I can see it now, they'll have to prise his long, white,
bony fingers from the Roosevelt Desk and drag him out."
Mrs Goldberg, n‚e Von Steinberger, a 6ft, blonde, high-church
Episcopalian married to a wealthy New York Jew, has some
experience with disintegrating presidencies. Before becoming a
novelist and literary agent, she served as a "press bunny" to
President Johnson, and then switched to the Republicans in time to
get a ringside seat for the demise of President Nixon.
In 1972, the Campaign to Re-elect the President, Creep of
Watergate fame, paid her $1,000 a week to work as an "observer" -
spy, actually, codenamed 'Chapman's Friend' - on the election
campaign of George McGovern. Masquerading as a journalist, she
wrote field reports that were rushed by special courier to Nixon at
the White House.
But if Nixon had his faults, at least he had the grace to resign when
his time was up, she says. This President is a different animal. By the
manner of his leaving, she predicts, Mr Clinton will achieve the
extraordinary feat of making Nixon look like a gentleman.
In the meantime, she is expecting trouble and is worried about her
cat, a five year-old calico tabby. "The White House goon squads are
capable of doing anything when they find out that her name is
Margaret Thatcher," she said.
There is already one feline casualty in the Lewinsky wars. Kathleen
Willey, the White House volunteer who has accused Mr Clinton of
grabbing her breasts in the "wiggle room" off the Oval Office, says
her 13-year-old, Bullseye, vanished last year at the same time that
6in nails were driven into the tyres of her car.
But the danger will be over soon, Mrs Goldberg says, because Bill
Clinton is now irretrievably ruined. "The moment he went out and
gave that speech, he swallowed his strontium-90. It rots you from
inside, slowly. It may take weeks, it may take months, but you might
as well pack your bags because there's nothing you can do to stop
it."
Unlike the US media, which beg for crumbs of gossip outside her
grand, rambling apartment on the Upper West Side, she knows what
Mr Clinton actually did with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
"It's psychologically shocking more than anything else. It's the cruelty
of what he was doing to Monica, the torture of a girl with low
self-esteem who wasn't strong enough to tell him to jump in the
lake," she said.
"When the American public hears these tapes, it will be the final
straw that brings home what this whole story is about: abuse of
power." The tapes: 20 hours of X-rated pornography recorded on
C90 Radio Shack cassettes by a cheap, voice-activated
tape-machine. They are her own special contribution to the history of
the late 20th century.
"Leave aside all the kinky sex, which I don't want to talk about.
Here is this 22-year-old girl calling Clinton 'that bastard', 'that son of
a bitch'," she says. The tapes make it explicit that Betty Currie, the
President's elderly black secretary, was used as a cover for the affair
and knew she was being used. On one occasion she was trapped in
a bathroom until late at night because she could not get out without
disturbing the President and Miss Lewinsky at work.
If political intelligence is not on tape, Mrs Goldberg learned long
ago, it can always be discounted. So, when her friend Linda Tripp
told her last autumn that a young colleague at the Defence
Department was confiding details of an affair with the President and
asking her to participate in an increasingly dangerous cover-up, Mrs
Goldberg instructed her in the arts of political espionage. Nobody
quite knows who owns the copyright on the tapes, which makes it
difficult for Mrs Goldberg to respond to gargantuan offers of money,
like the latest $6 million (œ3.6 million) package for world rights that
is being explored by a British news corporation.
"We may end up giving it all away," she said. "Our main motive is
just to get the stuff out. We'll post it on the Internet if necessary, but
first we're waiting to see what Judge [Kenneth] Starr does in his
report."
For her part in the taping, Ms Tripp has been vilified as a scheming
betrayer of trust. Friends don't tape friends for book deals, runs the
stock line. It drives Mrs Goldberg to paroxysms of indignation.
"Friends don't ask friends to commit felonies, do they?" she
thunders. "The press has got this whole thing wrong. It was never
about a book deal. Linda came to me because the President's
girlfriend was asking her to testify falsely. That's a crime, and that's
when I told her to get a tape-recorder for her own protection."
For four years Ms Tripp had witnessed crimes and abuse of power
before speaking out. "We're the vast Right-wing conspiracy: two
middle-aged broads who got angry and said enough's enough," said
Mrs Goldberg. "If the only thing we can get him on is sex, fine. You
take what you can get."
Mr Clinton's great mistake was to hang on for seven months, lying
through his teeth. "When we got him on Lewinsky last January, he
should have admitted everything, harvested his high polls and walked
into the sunset."
But he didn't. |
