A few belated words about Linda Tripp, as she departs from the living and a grateful nation gets to put her story further behind us: What she did to Monica Lewinsky was awful. What she did to all notions of friendship, privacy and human dignity was awful.
And what she told us about ourselves and our sense of national voyeurism and our bared-teeth, win-at-any-cost, self-destructive politics, was even worse.
Marc Antony was right: “The evil that men do lives after them.”
Women, too.
At 70, Tripp died the other day, two decades after she undressed Lewinsky and the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, for all the world to see.
As if sex between two consenting adults were any of our business, instead of just Bill and Hillary Clinton’s.
In the fullness of her crime, Tripp became the most vilified woman in America. She won the confidence of a foolish young woman, Lewinsky, and then drew out Lewinsky and Clinton’s most intimate sexual secrets and secretly taped them so that the whole country could gossip over them and turn their foolishness into a hypocritical political battle that could have crippled a presidency.
And for what?
Yes, Bill Clinton had a wandering eye and a loose libido, but we had hints of that when we voted him into office. Can anyone legitimately compare his furtive little tryst with Monica against more than a dozen women accusing President Donald Trump of sexual impropriety — or with Trump’s own boasts of sexual assault?
Trump’s sexual advances go uninvestigated. Clinton’s cost the country $40 million to investigate over long months in which 50 different witnesses were brought in. Grand jurors listened to 20 hours worth of tape that Tripp coaxed out of Lewinsky.
Tripp claimed she did it out of patriotism. Actually, it was a book deal she was angling for. In either case, the tapes then brought us the pornographic leerings of the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, who was Clinton’s version of Inspector Javert.
Remember the report Starr finally gave us? Good lord, how did they ever print that material in a daily newspaper!
To America’s credit, the great majority of us rejected Starr and Tripp, and gave Clinton his highest popularity ratings — but only after the entire country had been dragged through that whole impeachment business.
But it also gave us a glimpse into how cutthroat our politics had become – the hypocritical excuses that were made to inflate sex into a national security issue – and it offered a troubling look at the whole country’s prissy voyeurism.
This was captured, on national television, not by Linda Tripp but by Barbara Walters. Does anyone remember that big, trumpeted TV interview?
What Tripp did in private, Walters did in public.
She was the surrogate mother figure, soothing Monica, verbally stroking her. There, there, sweetie, tell me again what kind of kisser our nasty-boy president is, and speak directly into my microphone.
What Walters did — and what Tripp and Starr did before her — was tell us secrets about our leaders (or any human beings) that we had no business knowing. They exposed the moral smallness and laxity of people we once were taught to respect.
They lowered the bar. We heard Donald Trump, only weeks before an election, brag about grabbing women by the genitals. Big deal. Millions figured, we went through Clinton, remember? And he was a pretty good president, so what the hell.
That’s what Linda Tripp helped to bring us. She tore away all dignity from Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton (and herself.) And helped tear it away, too, from our notions of what’s acceptable in a president of the United States.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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