THE REAL LINDA TRIPP

None of the above. The villain of the scandal is . . . Linda Tripp.

Hers is by now a household name, fast becoming a byword for treachery. Early on in the scandal, a Time/CNN poll found that 66 percent of respondents considered Tripp’s secret taping of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky ” inappropriate.” But as the days pass — to judge by the anecdotal evidence of man-on-the-street interviews, overheard conversations, the comments of friends and acquaintances — the judgment seems to have crystallized into something far harsher.

Some members of the press, too, are speaking out against the horror of Tripp. Who knew our nation’s newsrooms housed so many moralists? “Could we all quit calling Linda Tripp anything but the spy-provocateur she is?” thundered Time’s Margaret Carlson in a brief hit piece last week. What Tripp did was “transcendentally bitchy,” said a writer in the New Yorker. Jacob Weisberg in Slate, an Internet magazine, called Tripp a “villain of potentially Shakespearean proportions”; plus, said Weisberg, in ethical overdrive, she has “bleached hair,” wears “gold jewelry,” and possesses a ” bitter soul.”

“In moral, if not legal terms,” Weisberg wrote, taping Lewinsky was “much worse . . . than anything Clinton is accused of doing.”

Call this the Eleventh Commandment. And amazingly it now seems to supersede the original Ten: Taping a friend’s phone conversations without her knowledge is worse than adultery, which Moses had — mistakenly, I gather — placed at number seven, in between the ones about killing and stealing. To say the least, this is a curious inversion of traditional morality. But they don’t make moralists like they used to.

Here I should interject a personal note and a declaration of interest. As it happens, I know — or rather, knew — Linda Tripp. In 1992 I worked at the Bush White House, where for several months she was a secretary to my immediate boss. We worked together on several projects for long and late hours. I liked her very much, and in talking with former colleagues about her over the last couple weeks I’ve found that my recollections of her are universally shared. Linda was indefatigable, enormously competent, friendly, funny, irreverent, and reliable — easy to like, in other words, and, more important in the cut-throat Bush White House, easy to trust. She was particularly liked by the interns in the White House office of media affairs, whom she oversaw for a time. The ex-interns I talked to still speak of her with great affection. “A mother hen,” one of them called her the other day. ” Our den mom,” said another.

Now, the story of Tripp’s motivation in the Lewinsky scandal has come out only in bits and pieces, bundled up in news stories among much more compelling detail about the president’s current troubles. And even then the story has often been hopelessly muddled, as in Weisberg’s account, or maliciously distorted by the president’s media surrogates, as in Carlson’s little op-ed.

Tripp herself isn’t talking, and her lawyer, an agricultural-regulations specialist named James A. Moody, is no longer answering his phone. So consider what follows, compiled from news reports and talks with Linda’s remaining allies, a kind of secondhand apologia. It’s my opinion, and the opinion of others who worked with her, that if Linda Tripp did something transcendentally bitchy, she must have had a good reason for it. And it turns out she did — a couple of them, in fact. One is self-defense. The other will be harder for our current crop of moralists to understand.

Tripp first came to the limelight in 1995, during the D’Amato Whitewater hearings. As a career civil servant, a member of the permanent secretarial pool, she had continued to work in the White House after the Bushies left. She was assigned to the counsel’s office, working for Bernard Nussbaum and Vince Foster. She was the last known person to see Foster alive. In front of the D’Amato committee she testified that in early 1993 she had complained to Nussbaum, the president’s chief counsel, that Foster was spending “an inordinate amount of time” on personal business for the Clintons.

Having worked for President Bush’s counsel, Tripp said this personal work didn’t fall under the normal duties of the taxpayer-financed counsel’s office. (She was right.) She further alienated the Clintonites when her office e- mail messages were released, in which she described Nussbaum and his lieutenants as “the three stooges.” After that, there wasn’t much work for Tripp to do at the Clinton White House. When she had a chance for a higher paying job at the Pentagon, in August 1994, she took it.

But her life had already taken a fateful turn, though she didn’t know it at the time. On November 29, 1993, Tripp saw an acquaintance, Kathleen Willey, emerge from the Oval Office. Willey apparently told Tripp of a sexual encounter with Clinton.

Fast forward to April 1996. Monica Lewinsky left her job at the White House and moved to the Pentagon, where she and Tripp became friends. In their conversations over the next year and a half, the details of Lewinsky’s alleged sexual relationship with Clinton emerged.

Meanwhile, Willey’s story reached lawyers for Paula Jones, who were casting about for evidence of the president’s dalliances. In the summer of 1997, they subpoenaed Willey. Willey’s story had already reached Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. According to an uncontradicted statement Tripp released through her lawyer on January 30 of this year, Willey identified Tripp to Isikoff as a witness who could corroborate Willey’s account of the encounter with Clinton. Tripp rebuffed Isikoff, who finally showed up at her Pentagon office. According to Newsweek’s account, Tripp eventually gave Isikoff an on-the- record version that she apparently thought was exculpatory for Clinton. Willey had not been sexually harassed, Tripp said. To the contrary: After her Oval Office encounter, Willey had appeared “flushed and joyful.”

Isikoff’s story appeared last August. It quoted Tripp by name. In the same story, Clinton’s attorney, Robert Bennett, said, “Linda Tripp is not to be believed.”

Tripp was back in the limelight, whether she liked it or not. But it seems clear she didn’t much like it, and she definitely had not sought it. As a veteran of the Clinton White House, she had seen what happens to people who displease the administration. Thanks to Clinton-allied private detectives, we have learned more about the personal lives of Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones than anyone would ever want to know. Arkansas state troopers who talked out of turn found themselves the subjects of unflattering news stories about their pasts; another was demoted. Billy Dale, fired in the White House travel- office affair, was actually prosecuted and later acquitted for nonexistent malfeasance.

And so, by the summer of last year, Tripp found herself in a dangerous position. Contrary to Carlson, Weisberg, and others, the threat of retribution was real. Her job at the Pentagon was a political appointment, without the civil-service protection she had enjoyed at the White House and earlier in her career; she served at the pleasure of the president. She had been publicly identified as someone knowledgeable about Clinton’s sex life. Paula Jones’s lawyers had let it be known they would subpoena anyone with such knowledge, and Tripp, thanks to Lewinsky, had more knowledge than they realized. By late summer, it was almost inevitable that she would be deposed in the Jones case. And she would very likely be asked an open-ended question as to whether she knew of any other presidential dalliances.

If she lied, she would be committing a felony. If she told the truth about Lewinsky, she would be contradicted by the president and probably by Lewinsky herself, exposing herself to ridicule, the ruin of her reputation, and the loss of her job.

Unless . . . unless she had some corroborating evidence. And that’s when Linda Tripp decided to tape her conversations with her friend. The expected subpoena from Jones’s lawyers came in December, by which time Lewinsky was explicitly encouraging Tripp to lie, with the implication that the subornation was inspired by Clinton’s camp. The taping continued from last fall through the middle of last month, when the FBI wired Tripp for her climactic date with Lewinsky. On January 21, Tripp responded to the Jones subpoena by filing an affidavit that recounted what she knew from her taped conversations with Lewinsky.

If you doubt the wisdom of Tripp’s decision, imagine how that affidavit would appear without anything to back it up. But let’s leave wisdom aside, for the moment. Was all of this — taping her friend, bringing the tapes to the independent counsel — an act of betrayal? Yes. But it was also an act of self-defense — or, as our new moralists might say, she was covering her ass. This they should understand, since self-interest now seems to be the one universally comprehensible principle of human behavior.

But there was another element to Tripp’s series of decisions, which will be harder for the new moralists to grasp. Given the choice of betraying his country and betraying his friend, E. M. Forster said, he hoped he “would have the courage” to betray his country. The main problem with this formulation, of course, is that one’s country usually contains one’s friends. But Forster’s absurd maxim seems to have become a settled pseudo-principle on one side of America’s great cultural divide.

Linda Tripp found herself on the other side. “She had a strong sense of rectitude,” Isikoff and Evan Thomas wrote in Newsweek. She had been an army wife for twenty years, and it showed. Her former interns tell of gentle scoldings over matters of decorum. She believed in the integrity of public service, and, unlike a lot of people she worked with in the Bush administration (including me), she actually liked the government. She loved the White House and felt honored to work there. And what Monica Lewinsky told her filled her with revulsion. The real betrayal, by Tripp’s lights, wasn’t her own. It was the president’s. And she wanted the story out.

You either understand this or you don’t. But even if you don’t, it seems odd to brand Tripp a moral cretin because she adhered to a time-honored and quite orthodox, if currently unfashionable, hierarchy of values. And it now appears she has adhered to them throughout her life. In the reams of coverage Tripp has received in the last weeks, there has been remarkably little dirt. But that doesn’t mean the White House hasn’t been trying. Within days of the scandal’s breaking, the anti-Tripp campaign began. Clintonites faxed to friendly reporters a three-page document headlined “Who is Linda Tripp?” Among its earth-shaking revelations, offered in bold type: “TRIPP THOUGHT BY NEIGHBORS TO BE A REPUBLICAN.” “TRIPP DESCRIBED AS CONSERVATIVE.” That this is the best they can do tells us a great deal about the Clintonites. But it tells us even more about Linda Tripp.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.