American Rhapsody (19 page)

Even as he pondered the miraculous October surprise of a bastard child, the Night Creature found himself with mixed feelings about Hillary. He knew he should have hated her—Hillary, who had been part of the House Judiciary Committee that had forced him from office—and in some ways he did. Hillary “was frightening, her ideas way out there . . . . I still can't believe it! She was on the goddamn committee to impeach me! She's a radical! . . . If she gets in, whoa! Everybody had better fasten their seat belts . . . her eyes are ice cold . . . . She really believes this liberal crap . . . . The people around her are all to the radical left. They are going to doom her.” But in other moments, he found himself respecting her, admiring her. “How could she sit there next to him on 60
Minutes
knowing what she does about his running around? Humiliating! But she has a higher agenda. She is very sharp, and she just wants to win the goddamn election. Take a little humiliation now and get power later . . . . She's a master behind-the-scenes manipulator . . . . Hillary's so steely. She even
claps
in a controlled way.”

When Bill Clinton was elected the forty-second president of the United States, the thirty-seventh president of the United States said to his Monica, “Clinton has vindicated the anti-Vietnam, draft-dodging, drug-taking behavior of the sixties. Most of that generation was bad, really bad. The Silent Majority was a reaction to that moral decay, but who's going to do it now? The Clintons are going to be our moral symbols for four years, maybe eight. Four years, and maybe we can recover. Eight, and the damage will be irreparable.”

What he feared had, in his mind, taken place: America had gone to hell. He was talking to Monica about it the day after Bill Clinton's election, when a bird smashed into the window right above his head.

“My God! What the hell was that?” the Night Creature said, throwing his hand over his bestaked heart.

“A bird hit the window, Mr. President,” Monica said.

“Oh,” he said, “did it fall to the ground?”

“No,” Monica said, “it was stunned for a moment but then recovered and flew away.”

“That's good,” the Night Creature said, searching the squishy caverns of his mind, trying to find Stygian import in the bird's action, and shortly after the inauguration, he sat down and wrote President Bill Clinton a letter. He congratulated him for his victory and went so far as to say that Bill Clinton had “the character to lead America” . . . very far
indeed,
bird or no bird, since he'd called him “as weak as piss on a rock” and “a goddamned liar . . . with little or no character.” The Night Creature parsed his letter to Monica: “I know it goes a bit overboard, particularly on the character stuff, but the guy's got a big ego and you've got to flatter the hell out of him if you're going to get anywhere.”

President Bill Clinton called Nixon soon after he got his letter. The president spoke to him for forty minutes! The president sought
his
advice about Russia, and the president invited him
—him,
the Night Creature—back into the White House for a meeting. “He was very respectful but with no sickening bullshit,” Nixon told his Monica. “In twelve years, neither Reagan nor Bush ever put me on the White House schedule . . . neither Kennedy nor Johnson ever invited Mrs. Nixon and me to the White House . . . . Clinton said things to me that he absolutely would not want made public.
I wonder if his wiretaps are working . . . .
He never brought up Hillary, not once. And I gave him several lead-ins. He didn't respond to any of them. Strange.” At dinner with his old Texas politico friend Bob Strauss shortly after his forty-minute chat with the president, Bob Strauss told him that President Clinton had told Bob Strauss that his conversation with Richard Nixon was “the best conversation” he'd had as president.

When the Night Creature returned to the White House for his meet-ing with the president of the United States, they both drank diet Cokes—Clinton from the can, Nixon from a glass. Bill Clinton told him he had put on weight defending himself against Gennifer's charges in New Hampshire. Bill Clinton used Nixonian words with him:
asshole, son of a bitch, bastard.
Bill Clinton took him up to the residence to meet Hillary and Chelsea: “The kid ran right to him and never once looked at her mother. I could see that she had a warm relationship with him but was almost afraid of her . . . . Hillary is a piece of work. She was very respectful to me and said all the right things . . . . Hillary told me we had done ‘great things on the domestic side' although compliments coming from her are like—I don't know what.”

There may have been a stake through his black heart, but the Night Creature felt alive after his reentry to the White House. He couldn't stop talking about his visit: “Clinton knows how the game is played . . . the trip was probably the best one I have had to Washington since I left the Presidency . . . it was the best conversation with a president I've had since I was president. Better than with Bush and I've never had such a conversation with Reagan. It was never a dialogue with the others . . . . Clinton is a fast learner and he's not afraid to defer to someone else's expertise. My only concern is that if his numbers are up, he may get cocky and not be as willing to listen to me . . .
as long as he's talking to me, he'll be okay.
” And talking they were. Bill Clinton called him for advice again . . . and again.

The Night Creature's admiration for Hillary was growing, meanwhile, into near infatuation. “Hillary is becoming an icon . . . . He doesn't scare anybody.
Hillary inspires fear!
” He told new Clinton adviser David Gergen: “She's always there, working with him, working apart from him, pushing him to take on more, taking it on herself. No one can control her!” He even gave Gergen advice to make Hillary look better. “Rein in Hillary's sharp sides. She can't continue to appear like those French women at the guillotine during the revolution, just watching, knitting and knitting.” He did a scowling imitation of Madame Defarge for Gergen to make sure Gergen got it. After seeing Hillary testify before Congress about her health plan, he said, “Goddamnit!
She has the gift of dazzle!
She knocked them dead up there! They swooned over her and gave her a standing ovation. She takes the gloves off but does it with such sickening sweetness that it makes me want to gag.” It was a wonder his Monica didn't raise an eyebrow the way he carried on about Hillary: “She's so clever . . . . She's invisible when the negative stuff erupts
 . . . . She's strong and decisive, she's just good . . . .
She's the tower of strength and intellect around there.”

But if there was a relationship in the making between the Night Creature and the First Lady, all chances of it ended when the Night Creature's longtime companion, his long-suffering wife, Pale Pat, died. The president of the United States didn't go to Pale Pat's funeral; neither did Hillary; neither did any cabinet member. Bill Clinton sent . . .
a black man . . .
Vernon Jordan, who, a few years later, would try to find Monica Lewinsky a job. The Night Creature, insulted, wounded, horrified, raged! “Vernon Jordan? The Clintons sent Vernon Jordan? Come
on!
Hillary should have been there! He comes to me for advice to save his ass and he can't even send a Cabinet member to Mrs. Nixon's funeral?”

Well fuck them!
the Night Creature thought, and immersed himself once again in his vat of bubbling bile, suddenly paying eyebrow-squiggling attention to the developing scandal called Whitewater. “Hillary's up to her ass in it, they are both guilty as hell . . . . It's worse than Watergate. In Watergate, we didn't have profiteering, and
we didn't have a body . . . .
Clinton and Hillary are guilty of obstruction of justice, maybe more. Period. Our people must not be afraid to grab this thing and shake all of the evidence loose. Watergate was wrong; Whitewater is wrong. I paid the price, the Clintons should pay the price . . . . He's pretending not to notice Whitewater. Of course I tried that and it doesn't really work . . . . How dare he bitch about the press coverage? They have treated him with kid gloves. He should be kissing their ass, as Johnson used to say, in Macy's window . . . . To think that Hillary came after me during Watergate! They are making the same goddamn mistakes we made . . . and here was Hillary on the Impeachment Committee, screaming about the eighteen and a half minutes missing from the tape, and now she's in Little Rock, shredding.”

As the Night Creature watched the Pope being greeted by the Clintons on television, he snarled, “Well how do you like this? The Pope and the Clintons together! The Saint and the Sinner! What a pair! And Hillary standing there! Oh boy!”
Hell hath no fury like a Night Creature's pale longtime companion's funeral scorned . . .
and in his fury he even called Bob Dole, his soul brother, to tell him to “put someone good” on the select Senate Whitewater Committee—“We can't have a bunch of dumbos asking the questions.”

But underneath everything, he was profoundly depressed. A shrewd political operative, he knew Whitewater wasn't going to bring Bill Clinton down, any more than his philandering was. “Maybe it doesn't matter anymore,” he glumly told his Monica; “look around—sex, drugs, violence everywhere. Remember when this whole thing got started in the sixties and seventies. Counterculture, they called it. Morals went out the window. Nobody cared about other people, just themselves . . . so you see, the people elected Clinton because they're surrounded by immorality on all sides. It gets to the point where it doesn't affect them anymore. So they sit and listen to what he has to say about health care and saving the spotted owl and are tone-deaf when it comes to his personal character.”

The Night Creature was even further dejected by the knowledge that he had no credentials to speak of moral decline. “Watergate took away any chance I have of talking about that stuff credibly. Our critics will say, ‘Who is Nixon to talk about this? He contributed to it! He's the Watergate guy, the Vietnam guy. He resigned in disgrace.' ”

The Night Creature kept going back to where he felt it had all gone wrong for him—not Watergate, but our protests in the streets in the sixties and seventies. “It was a miserable goddamned time,” he told his Monica. “I was the one who had to face down those
hippie hoodlums
who opposed the war . . . those
goddamned protesters . . .
my God, I wasn't just from another generation from these people; it was like I was from a different planet . . . . The pressure of waging the war in Vietnam broke Johnson, but I was damned if it was going to break me. Johnson left a broken man. Me, as President, I always knew that we had a responsibility to leadership no two-bit protesters were going to destroy. I couldn't stop them from destroying our values and our culture, but I could stop them from telling us that we weren't fit to lead.” The Night Creature acknowledged that the killing of four student protesters at Kent State in 1970 “wasn't right,” and then he added, “Those kids
were
Communists.”

What
? What, I reflected, was this filth the Night Creature was spewing?
Communists? They
were Communists? The kids at Kent State? I was transfixed by the enormity, the horror of his lie, though it was the very same lie he'd built his entire career on. He'd branded Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas as Communists when he'd run against them in the beginning in California. And now, the four kids shot to death at Kent State by National Guard kids who were stoned on Nixon's toxic and hateful rhetoric were Communists, too. Bill Schroeder, the apple-cheeked all-American ROTC student . . . a Communist! Allison Krause, the daughter of a Westinghouse executive . . . a Communist! Sandy Sheuer, the pacifist daughter of a Holocaust survivor . . . a Communist! Jeff Miller, with flowers painted everywhere around his apartment . . . a Communist!

He was slandering and violating the dead, whom
he'd
put into their graves. The only word that possibly applied was the word Congressman Dan Burton was calling Bill Clinton now during Bill Clinton's impeachment travail, “Scumbag!”

And when I saw that his Monica—no, no, his
Elvira!—
didn't even question him, didn't say,
Communists, sir? These kids
? I erased all that soft-focus prattle from my mind about the snowball fight they'd had in Moscow and the lights twinkling in Anchorage. His Monica let him do the same thing to her that the other Monica had allowed Bill Clinton to do. Richard Nixon had put words into his Monica's mouth, seeds designed to impregnate the minds of future generations with hate.

Monica Crowley's sin, I decided, was much deadlier than Monica Lewinsky's. What each man had put into his Monica's mouth defined the difference between Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, between liberals and conservatives, between
us
and
them.

[ Act Two ]

MYSTERY TRAIN

Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot . . .

Do you hear that mocking and laughter?
Do you hear the ironical echoes?

—
WALT WHITMAN
, Leaves of Grass

[1]

The Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze

“It was just that he was scared and I enjoyed that,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “Isn't that disgusting? I enjoyed it. I lapped it up that he was so scared. I could just tell in his voice.”

G
nawing away on Monica's juicy innards, stripping her down to the bone over the phone and in person, the Ratwoman found an ally: a whisky-voiced, chain-smoking, self-styled literary agent to the unseemly likes of Mark Fuhrman, the racist Dirty Harry of O.J. fame, and Gary Aldrich, former FBI man and author of the specious and malevolent anti-Clinton tract,
Unlimited Access.

Lucianne Goldberg was Linda Tripp's perfect mate. Already handling Dolly Kyle's lubricious account of sex with young Billy Clinton, she was herself the author of soft-porn novels like
Madam Cleo's Girls.
She was in her sixties, tied closely to right-wingers like Al Regnery, the book publisher, and Tony Snow, former Bush speechwriter and now one of Rupert Murdoch's hired guns.

As a literary agent, Goldberg was perhaps best known for representing Judy Chavez, a hooker who specialized in sadism. Chavez became infamous for revealing that Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko paid her ten thousand dollars a month for five nights of company with money provided by the CIA. Goldberg sold her handcuffs-and-whips account to a publisher and reflected later, “The last time I saw Judy, she was wearing snake from head to toe. How many pythons it took to make that outfit with her five-inch heels, she might as well have had a whip in her hand. With that beautiful white skin and dark hair, what she telegraphs very subtly is pain. ‘I'm going to hurt you, tongue-lash you, and cause you pain.' ”

To those in Washington who learned of the tight connection between Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, it made perfect sense, the two of them part of the same sleazy photo: the Ratwoman gnawing on her bone in her bunting-filled gutter and, feeding next to her, the noxious Bag Lady of Sleaze, cigarettes drooping from both their bloodred lips.

Linda Tripp turned to Lucianne Goldberg “for advice and protection” first in the days after she'd been banished from the counsel's office in the White House. She decided, in those first months of rage, that she was going to write an insider's account of the sexual shenanigans at the White House, including Kathleen Willey's magical adventures in the fairy-tale hallway. She called the commentator Tony Snow again, whom she'd met in the Bush White House, and Snow, who would call Bill Clinton “the Caligula of the Ozarks,” sent her to the Bag Lady of Sleaze.

Goldberg, naturally, loved Tripp's idea: politics and sex together, her main interests, a book even better maybe than the one she had written called
Purr, Baby, Purr.
Tripp's book was going to be called
Behind Closed Doors
and she was going to write it as “Joan Dean,” a cute and barbed reference to John Dean, whose testimony had brought down the Nixon White House. Tripp would bring Bill Clinton down and Joan Dean would be in-joke revenge. Goldberg sent Tripp to an editor at Regnery, a publish-ing house long devoted to the character assassination of liberals and/or Democrats.

At the last moment, Tripp chickened out, afraid that she just might lose her job at the Defense Department if she wrote the book. “Bubelah,” Lucianne Goldberg had said to her, “if you blow the whistle on the big kahuna, you ain't gonna be working for the government.” Joan Dean was dead.

Years later, while stripping down Monica, the Ratwoman slipped and told Monica that if she ever lost her government job, she'd write a “tell-all book” about everything she knew. Monica shrugged it off, unaware that her new caring, mothering friend was already at work trying to sell the book. Tony Snow had called the Bag Lady for her and now Goldberg was calling Linda Tripp, who didn't know that Goldberg, no political virgin, was tape-recording
their
conversation.

They talked about the best way to profit off of what the Ratwoman knew. Yes, she could get a book contract, but the best way to maximize both of their profits would be to leak the story first, or to leak “snippets,” and while the snippets made their infectious way through the airwaves, walk into a publisher's office with the
whole
story and walk out with millions of dollars. They had to “titillate” the public first, and they picked out
Newsweek
reporter Michael Isikoff to leak the snippets to. They also talked about passing Tripp's slimy knowledge on to Paula Jones's attorneys and blowing the story of the intern and the president wide open through the courts.

Tripp couched her greed in self-righteous tones, saying she was “appalled by” Bill Clinton's behavior. “It's so sickening!” she said. “He has to get his come-uppance.” She also portrayed herself as the caring protector of the young woman whose innards she was gnawing. “Enough already. Personally, my opinion is it's time for her . . . she has got to move on. She's right now going through emotional hell . . . . I would very much like to see her leave and just get on with her life.”

“Well, have you talked to her about going public with this?” Goldberg asked.

“She refuses.”

“Then what can you do with it?”

Tripp told her that she had kept dates and records of meetings, phone calls, and gifts between the intern and Bill Clinton.

“Yeah,” Goldberg said, “but you realize the press will destroy her. I mean, I love the idea. I would run with it in a second, but do you want to be the instrument of this kid, um—”

“She's not a kid,” Tripp said. “She comes from a very privileged Beverly Hills background. I mean, she's definitely sophisticated . . . she wasn't a victim. When this began, she was every bit a player.”

“You have to be ready to lose her as a friend,” Goldberg said.

“Oh,” Tripp said loftily, “I've already made that decision.”

A week later, in their second telephone conversation, allegedly not taped by either of them, Goldberg told Tripp to tape her phone conversations with her young friend, the former White House intern. “You need evidence, you need proof, you need tapes.”

Tripp, frightened, said taping her friend would be “unfriendly.” Goldberg said, “Well, Bubelah, if you're going to go after the big kahuna, you better kill him.”

Tripp started taping Monica and telling Goldberg what she was getting from Monica on her tapes. Monica thought Bill was on drugs because he kept “zoning out.” Monica had dates of the phone sex she and Bill were having. Bill had cold sores that Goldberg thought sounded suspiciously like herpes.

They kept trying to figure out how to get the snippets out there to titillate the public. Tripp received an invitation to spend a weekend in Greenwich, Connecticut, from a wealthy woman named Norma Asness, who was known to be a good friend to Hillary Clinton. Tripp had spent time with Asness before, at a Chanukah party at Asness's Georgetown house and also on a civilian tour of the Pentagon, which Tripp had arranged for her.

The invitation from Asness, the former Delta Force associate was certain, was a covert, black-bag op on the part of the White House. She called Goldberg, who agreed with her.

“You're being set up,” Goldberg said.

“You don't think they're going to poison me, do you?” Tripp asked.

“Uh, no. They're going to co-opt you. They're going to love-bomb you, show you this is the way you could be living if you stay loyal . . . .”

“All right,” Tripp said. “Well, then, I won't worry about it. I just thought, oh good, so they're going to kill me when I'm there or something . . . .”

“No, they're not going to kill you.”

They were stewing now in their own witch's brew, furtive, trusting no one except each other (although Goldberg was still secretly taping Tripp's phone calls, just as Tripp was secretly taping Monica's). They decided together that Tripp couldn't trust her lawyer because he sometimes played golf with a lower-level White House attorney, and Tripp fired him. They decided they couldn't trust the
Newsweek
reporter, Isikoff, to whom they were planning to leak their snippets, because he might write a book himself.

They decided to turn, finally, to the one person they felt would be simpatico to Linda Tripp's story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the one person who shared their loathing of Bill Clinton: Kenneth W. Starr. They would use Ken Starr to get them their millions of dollars from the publishers. Tripp would spill him the beans and the preacher's son would scarf them up and disgorge them into the headlines.

Yikes,
Lucianne Goldberg just loved it! She hadn't had so much fun since the good old days, back in 1972, when she'd been making a thousand dollars a week as a spy on George McGovern's campaign plane, writing memos that were rushed right into the White House, for the eyes only of Richard Nixon, the man who had hired her. The Bag Lady of Sleaze still thought fondly of Nixon, her dark, political guardian angel.

Through the chain-smoking Goldberg and her friend, the chain-smoking Tripp, the Night Creature was loose in the world again, out of the grave again, smearing, clawing, drawing blood . . . making Bill Clinton pay . . . for sending black Vernon Jordan to the funeral of Pale Pat, his cancer-ravaged wife . . . for the sixties, for the protests, for Watergate, for his resignation, for his disgrace.