Entrippment of Clinton is tangled web of intrigue

Even as the US House of Representatives begins its impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton, it is becoming obvious that they have missed a much more interesting sex scandal. This epic affair involved a man and a woman close to the centre of political and military power. One is the wife of a well-known head of state. The other is a close adviser to a famous general. She is Lady Macbeth, and he is Iago. We know they had an illicit affair because what other liaison could possibly have engendered Linda Tripp? How, if not from the coupling of a great wheedler and a great manipulator, could the woman revealed in the Linda-Monica tapes released this week have been conceived?

As a political issue, Monica-gate is dead and exists only in some kind of congressional hell where Republican Party sinners are doomed to revisit again and again the scene of their most painful embarrassment. Being in America this week, I was struck by a general air of incredulity that, even after the resounding message of the mid-term elections, all of this stuff is still going on and that Kenneth Starr and his political allies go on pretending that decent God-fearing Americans cannot abide Clinton's morals for a moment longer.

The only political question that surrounds the hearings now is not how much damage the Republican right can do to Clinton but how much it can do to itself.

But the scandal retains a certain fascination, not as a political battle, but as a running commentary on the state of modern mores. It functions now, not like a law case or a parliamentary debate, but like a movie or a TV drama serial. And there has been a gripping twist in the plot. Increasingly, the old star, Bill Clinton, is being written out and a new, more awesomely riveting character is commanding attention. With the release of the tapes, Linda Tripp has taken her place in the collective psyche with the repulsive magnetism of the witch in a fairytale.

Suddenly, the story is being seen, not as the tale of Bill and Monica but as the fable of Monica and Linda. It has changed from a Victorian melodrama of innocence seduced to the Disney cartoon of Snow White, with Monica as the lost princess and Linda as the evil stepmother. The operative stereotype is no longer the powerful older man who manipulates and exploits a younger woman for sex. It is the bitter older woman who manipulates and exploits a younger woman for money.

The Tripp on the tapes is Mother Machiavelli, a weird, deeply disturbing combination of maternal concern and cold-blooded machination. She offers herself as a generous source of emotional bounty, peppering the conversations with assurances like "It's because I care about you in my heart of hearts." She openly presents herself as a substitute mother. Persuading Monica to keep the now infamous blue dress, she says "I would say (this) to my own daughter, for your own ultimate protection, which mea culpa, I hope you never need it." (The mea culpa is an interesting Freudian slip which poor Monica was not alert enough to hear.) And all the time she is plotting and planning, edging the conversation around to incriminating subjects, luring her would-be friend into indiscreet disclosures, actively creating a scandal which she can then write about in a tell-all book. Even before she started to tape her conversations with Monica, Linda Tripp was recording them in writing, presumably as material for her best-seller. Not since Les Liaisons Dangereuses have we had an older woman so cynically planning the sexual downfall of an ingenue. What you get from the tapes that you miss in the previously released transcripts is the banality of the betrayal. Part of what makes the tapes so powerful is the background noise of everyday life - snacking and the sound of television. During one tape, you can follow the full Fox Sports channel coverage of a baseball game. Rupert Murdoch's omnipresent media empire works its way into the entrippment of the President.

All of this has created a situation in which most people I spoke to in New York this week used words like "evil" and "monster" about Linda Tripp. She has been expelled from the category of decent humanity and now exists in some exterior darkness reserved for inhuman creatures. Maybe she deserves all this odium, and maybe it's no harm that the prevailing stereotype of women as warm, loving and maternal be shattered by the abundant evidence to the contrary she has provided.

But there are two problems with the lurid image of the evil villainess. One is that it falls too easily into another kind of female stereotype, the vengeful, frustrated, sex-hater. The other is that it distracts attention from a much more intriguing possibility: that Tripp was not the author of the conspiracy to bring down Clinton but was herself used by larger forces.

We haven't yet got the full story of the Monica tapes. But there is a story there somewhere, one that media less in thrall to fairytale conventions ought to be ferreting out. Buried in the material presented by Starr to the House Judiciary Committee is a summary of an extraordinary report on the tapes by the FBI Audio Signal Analysis Unit.

The FBI's preliminary analysis indicates that eight of the tapes Tripp handed over to Starr seem to be straightforward recordings. But many of the others emit a distinct odour of fish.

Nine tapes submitted by Tripp "are not consistent with being recorded on the Radio Shack CTR107 tape recorder Ms Tripp says she used to record the original tapes." Each of these nine tapes "exhibits signs of duplication".

Seven of the nine were duplicated on one particular tape recorder. One "was produced by a recorder that was stopped during the recording process." Two of these tapes are now inaudible.

Linda Tripp, irony of ironies, may have committed perjury when she swore that she made all of the recordings herself on her trusty Radio Shack voice-activated recorder. The memo notes that "if Ms Tripp duplicated any tapes herself or knew of their duplication, then she has lied under oath before the grand jury and in a deposition."

If there is an innocent explanation for the duplication of the tapes, it seems extraordinary that Tripp would lie under oath about it to lawyers who were, after all, her close allies.

What all of this amounts to is that more than half of the tapes that Linda Tripp gave to Starr's office are not original recordings. They seem to have been interfered with in some way.

The memo contains a remarkable concession: "For the seven tapes which contain audible conversations and which exhibit signs of duplication, the Office of the Independent Counsel cannot exclude the possibility of tampering at this time." And the duplicate tapes were made by some mysterious third party or parties.

Starr's office admits in this memo that it "is not aware who made the `likely to be duplicate' tapes." Whoever it was, it was not the Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Stepmother or some archetype from the realm of myth and fairytale, but someone more ordinary and more interesting.