American Rhapsody (17 page)

[14]

Kathleen and the Ratwoman

“I said something about Marsha Scott,” Monica said. “He said—‘She was my girlfriend in like 1968' or something like that, just a stupid thing like that.”

“Oh, yes,” Linda Tripp said, “he banged her on the canal or something.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, how gross!”

U
p onstage already were Monica and Paula Jones and Gennifer . . . and now, out of the darkened wings, came not trailer trash or Beverly Hills bimbo but a classy, intelligent, and attractive socialite, Kathleen Willey, doing a “pity me” monologue about yet another unwanted groping in that bordello hallway between the Oval Office and the private study.

Even as the pundits feverishly forecast “the other shoe” that was surely soon to drop, it seemed suddenly that it had. Within weeks, however, Willey's monologue was exposed as a selective and suspect account. The victim of the groping stood revealed as an upscale, scheming, former stewardess trying to make a buck by offering her well-kept body to Bill Clinton, who rarely turned a body down. Backstage, whispering, sharpening her fangs, was Monica's new “lifelong” friend at the Pentagon, Linda Tripp, the Ratwoman.

Kathleen Willey, who enjoyed skiing in Vail and sunning in Bermuda, met Bill Clinton in 1991, with her husband, Ed, a prosperous real estate lawyer. She and Ed set up the state of Virginia's first Clinton campaign headquarters. When the candidate flew into Richmond for a debate with George Bush and Ross Perot, Willey went to greet him at the airport with a group of other Democrats. Nancy Hernreich, then Clinton's office manager in Little Rock, went up to Willey at the airport and told her Clinton wanted her phone number. Willey gave it to her. Moments earlier, news cameras had caught Willey hugging Clinton and Clinton then turning to an aide to ask who she was.

Bill Clinton called her at home that afternoon. He had a bad cold. “It was really good to see you,” he said.

“It sounds like you need some chicken soup,” she said.

“Would you bring me some?” he asked.

“Well, I don't know about that,” Willey said.

Aides came into his hotel room and he told Willey, “I'll have to call you back. I'll call you at six.”

When he called at six, Willey had a friend there with her named Julie Hiatt Steele. She asked Julie to listen in on their conversation. Willey told him she couldn't take him his chicken soup. She'd see him at a fund-raiser after the debate that night.

On election night, Willey and her husband, Ed, flew to Little Rock to celebrate Bill Clinton's victory. A few months later, in April 1993, Kathleen Willey became a volunteer at the White House Social Office. She commuted from her home in Richmond three times a week. She organized White House tour groups. She recruited high school bands to play there. She helped plan the White House Jazz Festival.

Kathleen Willey had made her move by then on Bill Clinton, no doubt regretting the chicken soup she hadn't taken him. Like Monica later, she sent him a tie. Like Monica later, she gave him a book—its title as intriguing as
Vox,
the phone-sex book Monica would send him. Willey's book was entitled
Honor Among Thieves.
Like Monica later, she called Bill Clinton to wish him a happy birthday. She sent him a handwritten note inviting him to spend his winter vacation in Vail. She added that she was going to be there in mid-December and offered to help make travel arrangements for him. She never mentioned her husband.

As she was writing her notes and calling Bill Clinton, Kathleen Willey was in the throes of a personal nightmare. Ed had been caught embezzling $340,000. Ed's victims and the law were after him. Kathleen Willey, who knew a lot about living well, was going broke.

The Ratwoman had been watching her by then.

The Ratwoman knew how she felt about Bill Clinton by then.

The Ratwoman had become her friend by then.

Linda Tripp, forty-three years old, was a “floater” in the White House secretarial pool. She had worked for George Bush and had been inherited by Bill Clinton. She was the ex-wife of a career soldier, a lieutenant colonel, who had dumped her and left her with two college-age kids. Thanks to her ex-husband, Linda Tripp had worked the dark side of the Pentagon. She had even been assigned to the supersecret antiterrorist Delta Force. She knew about black-bag operations and had a top secret clearance. She was a creep and a spook.

And here she was now, in the Clinton White House, among people she loathed—people who cussed and wore blue jeans and acted like the White House were a college campus. She was a dumpy, stiffly conservative spy among attractive, sexual young people who had taken over the government. A woman who'd been cruelly dumped by her husband, she seemed to have a special loathing for Bill Clinton, the star of the show. She knew all about the women on the White House staff—“the graduates” who went into his office and did things to him and for him that she would never be called upon to do.

So Linda Tripp began wooing, ingratiating herself with, Kathleen Willey, the volunteer worker who seemed to have a special relationship with Bill Clinton. The former Pentagon black-bagger just happened to be at the right place at the right time, working near Kathleen, just as she'd been at the right place at the right time with Vince Foster, her desk right outside Foster's office, the last person to see him before he drove down to the park to shoot himself.
In the right place at the right time . . .
to later claim that she saw Hillary's Rose Law Firm billing records among Foster's files.

Linda Tripp fawned all over Willey, praising her hairdo, her dresses, even her deep voice. She filled Willey in on her black-bag scoops, pointing out the staffers who were among “the graduates” who were intimately satisfying Bill Clinton's needs. Tripp told Willey how outraged she'd been when she was sent down to McDonald's to get a cheeseburger for the president (a frightening image in retrospect—the Ratwoman, who loathed Bill Clinton, bringing him his fat-poisoned food). She told Willey constantly that the president was romantically interested in her: “Look at him, Kathleen. He's looking right at you and nobody else in the room.”

Kathleen Willey's life, meanwhile, was coming apart. She and Ed desperately needed money. She was only a volunteer at the White House; she needed to be paid. On November 29, 1993, she went to see Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. She sat down across from him.

“I've got something I need to talk to you about,” she said. He asked if she wanted a cup of coffee and led her . . . into the hallway . . . to his private study. He poured her a cup of coffee in a Starbucks mug. He showed her around the private study and displayed his political button collection (as he would with Monica).

“I've got a really serious problem,” she told him. “I need to talk to you. There's something going on in my life. Ed has gotten himself into some financial trouble, and I'm really kind of desperate. The bottom line is, I need a job.”

She was crying. Suddenly embarrassed, she turned from him and walked away . . . into the hallway . . . and tried to open the closed hallway door that led back to the Oval Office. Bill Clinton, behind her suddenly, hugged her.

“I'm really sorry this happened to you,” he said. He kissed her. They were still in the hallway. She still had the hot Starbucks mug of coffee in one hand. He ran his hands through her hair. She was afraid she'd spill the coffee.

“You have no idea how much I wanted you to bring me that chicken soup,” he said.

She said, “Aren't you afraid there are people around here? What if somebody comes in?”

He had his arm above her head. He looked at his watch. He said, “Yeah, I've got a meeting. But I can be late.” He took the Starbucks mug out of her hand and put it on a shelf.

“I've wanted to do this since the first time I laid eyes on you,” he said.

He kissed her again. He felt her breasts and her back and put his hand up her skirt. He put her hands on Willard. Willard was erect. Bill Clinton's face was beet red.

Then, his nightmare of nightmares
—why did this keep happening again and again?—
some idiot of a damn fool started knocking on the hallway door, yelling, “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

“I've got to go!” Kathleen Willey said. “You've got a meeting.” She grabbed the Starbucks mug back off the shelf and walked through the Oval Office and out the door.

She went straight to the Ratwoman's desk. “Where's your lipstick?” Linda Tripp said. They went outside and sat by a picnic table on the White House lawn. Willey told her what had happened. “I could always tell the president wanted you,” Linda Tripp said.

Willey went back to Richmond and told her friend Julie Hiatt Steele what had happened. But she had another, much more critical problem. Ed wasn't at the office and he wasn't home. She and Julie looked everywhere and couldn't find her husband. The next morning, police found Ed's body. He had committed suicide. Kathleen Willey lost it. Julie had to put her in a hospital.

When she got out of the hospital, in dire straits, she got a job as a secretary in the White House counsel's office, working right alongside of Tripp, also in the counsel's office. Kathleen Willey started sending Bill Clinton affectionate and supportive notes again. But now she had another pressing problem—and so did Tripp. A new counsel was coming in, and that meant new secretarial staff could come with him. The Ratwoman and Willey went to see the new counsel, Lloyd Cutler, together. They told Cutler, the most veteran of Washington operatives, that
they
could help
him
maneuver his way around the politics and bureaucracy of the White House.

When Cutler took over, he said he was keeping Willey at her job temporarily but was letting Tripp go. The Ratwoman nearly hemorrhaged! Willey, this inept, spoiled socialite who could barely run a computer, was staying on? Was getting
her
job?
Why
? Because the president of the United States thought Willey was a sexy babe and knew Tripp wasn't? The same old Clinton standards . . . a pair of nice tits and a sweet ass meant more than a woman with job experience, a woman who'd worked with Delta Force.

“Don't you think for one moment I don't know what's going on around here!” Tripp yelled at the inept, spoiled socialite she now hated. “Don't you think I don't know why I'm getting fired and you're getting my job!”

“What are you talking about?” Willey said.

“I know they want you because the president wants you around,” Tripp said.

As Linda Tripp walked out of the office on her last day, she turned to Willey and said loudly enough so others could hear it, “I will get you, if it's the last thing I do.”

Out of the White House, stuck in a cubicle at the Defense Department, planning celebrity trips to defense bases, Linda Tripp raged and kept tabs on Kathleen Willey. Willey, she learned, was soon out of the White House and was now working for the State Department, flying to glamorous places like Jakarta and Copenhagen at taxpayers' expense. The State Department! This former stewardess, who'd been organizing White House tours two years ago! Who couldn't even run a computer! But who'd let the president of the United States feel between her legs and had said nothing about it!

In August 1997, the story about the incident in the hallway between the president of the United States and Kathleen Willey made its way into the papers. Willey initially didn't speak to the press. Her story got out through leaks from one of Paula Jones's attorneys. In the beginning, Willey fled from any kind of publicity.

Her story was discredited after she did a nationally traumatic interview with
60 Minutes,
recounting in low-key, classy, socialite terms what had happened in the hallway leading to the private study. The White House had simply released the affectionate and supportive notes she had sent to Bill Clinton before
and
after the incident.

Her story was discredited in another crucial way . . . by the Ratwoman, who had said, “I will get you, if it's the last thing I do.” Yes, Tripp told the press, Willey had come right to her after leaving the Oval Office that day. But Willey, Tripp said, wasn't shaken or upset. She was “excited.” Willey had been after Bill Clinton ever since she'd come to the White House. Willey was a “woman on a mission.” As they spoke out by the picnic table that day, Tripp said, Willey had wanted her advice on “the next step” in her now-blossoming “relationship” with the president. In no way was this, Linda Tripp said, “sexual harassment.” The fact that Linda Tripp was saying this, a person who admitted to an intense dislike of Bill Clinton, was the final factor in the discrediting of Kathleen Willey's story.

What no one at the time knew was that the entire story had been leaked thanks to an anonymous phone call to one of Paula Jones's lawyers. The caller, who sounded like a middle-aged woman, told the lawyer all the details of the incident in the hallway and gave him Kathleen Willey's name. The lawyer leaked the information to a reporter.

Linda Tripp, though no one would ever prove it, had pulled off a black-bag op worthy of the best (or worst) of Delta Force. She began it with an anonymous phone call. She publicly humiliated Bill Clinton with the public revelation of his sleazy sexual behavior, this time with an emotionally distraught woman seeking his aid. She humiliated Kathleen Willey by exposing her as a woman willing to use her body for money. And she made herself look publicly noble by defending the president, whom everyone knew she loathed, against sexual harassment charges.

But by the time the press spoke to her about Kathleen Willey, the Ratwoman was gnawing a bone tastier and more rancid than any of the others.
In the right place at the right time . . .
first with Vince Foster, then with Kathleen Willey . . . and now with a young woman she had met in the office at the Pentagon, a young woman very much Bill Clinton's type. A young woman who had been a White House intern. Linda Tripp crunched her bone and knew that this one came from right under Bill Clinton's soft white underbelly. The Ratwoman smelled roast pig.