"I realized something that should have been apparent to me much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president."
A quarter of a century after Woodward and Bernstein's history-making expose All the President's Men stunned the nation by capturing the Nixon presidency in the throes of turmoil, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff gives us an equally explosive and surprisingly suspenseful behind-the-scenes account of his investigative role in the scandals that have rocked President Clinton's second term and led to the historic vote for impeachment that will define his presidency.
Isikoff, who is credited with breaking the Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky stories, is universally acknowledged as the leading reporter who brought to light the incredible revelations about Clinton's personal and political lives that have consumed this country and shocked the world. As a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek, Isikoff has established himself as an astute observer and chronicler of Clinton's conduct throughout his presidency, following a trail of presidential misconduct from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the Oval Office. But Isikoff also unwittingly became a primary character in the unfolding Clinton drama. This is a story only he could tell, a gripping narrative of how one journalist went from battling skeptical editors and a formidable White House spin machine in his quest for the truth about Clinton to becoming a central participant in one of the biggest scandals in American political history.
Featuring a cast of bizarre characters who make this book as entertaining to read as a novel, Uncovering Clinton is also a nuanced and scrupulously fair account with a wealth of never-before-told information about the major players and events in the Clinton scandals, including:
The real reasons why some Washington Post reporters and editors believed Paula Jones's story from the start--and why Isikoff's story nonetheless was later killed before it ran.
How George Stephanopolous covered for Clinton as Isikoff pursued the Paula Jones story.
How Lucianne Goldberg's private notebook and tapes of her phone calls with Linda Tripp show that while Tripp was crying "victim" to the press, she was really plotting to bring down the president and betray Monica Lewinsky--and write a book about it all.
The real truth behind Hillary Clinton's oft-cited "vast right-wing conspiracy"--a coterie of right-wing lawyers known as "the elves" who secretly wrote the Jones legal briefs and arranged to bring the Lewinsky story to Ken Starr's office and to public light.
How Linda Tripp manipulated Ken Starr's prosecutors into launching a criminal investigation into the Lewinsky matter while withholding critical information, including her repeated contacts with Isikoff.
Isikoff had no agenda when he started investigating President Clinton's conduct other than to get at the truth. Now, after accomplishing a remarkable case of journalistic detective work, Isikoff gives us something even more significant: a work that illuminates the psychologically troubling behavior of a president, an Administration that has enabled his actions, a motley crew of Clinton-haters who would stop at nothing to topple the president, and a rapidly changing media grappling with the ever-shifting boundaries between public and private behavior. Uncovering Clinton will surely be the definitive account of our nation's biggest political scandal since Watergate.
Amazon.com Review
First at the Washington Post , and later at Newsweek , Michael Isikoff researched the stories that helped turn Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, and Monica Lewinsky into household names. Uncovering Clinton is his version of All the President's Men , a play-by-play account of how he put the pieces together and gradually came to the conclusion, based on the allegations surrounding Bill Clinton's sexual behavior, that the president of the United States was "psychologically disturbed."
But Uncovering Clinton is also about how Isikoff had to fight with his own editors to get his reporting into print and how he fell victim on multiple occasions to online gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who stole Isikoff's thunder by printing items about stories that hadn't run. He also found himself caught up in the machinations of Linda Tripp and her literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, as they schemed to manipulate the president and his paramour into a compromising situation. Isikoff is up-front about the frustrations he experienced on the journalistic trail; although he wanted to think of himself as another Seymour Hersh when he set out on the Jones story, he writes, "instead, I was starting to feel like Geraldo Rivera." Even though just about everybody knows the basic story at this point, Uncovering Clinton is still as lively a read as any political thriller--and all the more unsettling for being true. --Ron Hogan
From Library Journal
FamouslyAor infamouslyAthe Washington Post killed Isikoff's initial story on Paula Jones, but he's had plenty of chances since then to cover Clinton's saga for both the Post and Newsweek. Here's more coverage, with promises of some surprises. But can there be any surprises left now that Monica has talked to Barbara.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
I will not. Bonnie Smothers
Review
"A penetrating look at the most explosive presidential scandal since Watergate."
-- Associated Press
"Isikoff is who Woodward used to be."
--Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine
"A lively, highly readable, and attention-holding account."
-- Los Angeles Times
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
ized something that should have been apparent to me much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president."
A quarter of a century after Woodward and Bernstein's history-making expose All the President's Men stunned the nation by capturing the Nixon presidency in the throes of turmoil, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff gives us an equally explosive and surprisingly suspenseful behind-the-scenes account of his investigative role in the scandals that have rocked President Clinton's second term and led to the historic vote for impeachment that will define his presidency.
Isikoff, who is credited with breaking the Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky stories, is universally acknowledged as the leading reporter who brought to light the incredible revelations about Clinton's personal and political lives that have consumed this country and shocked the world. As a reporter for the &l
About the Author
Michael Isikoff joined the Washington Post in 1981, where he covered the Justice Department, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Latin American drug operations. In 1994, he moved to Newsweek, where he covered the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 election campaign, and other national issues. His exclusive reporting on the Lewinsky scandal gained him nationwide attention, including profiles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is a news analyst for MSNBC and a frequent guest on numerous news programs including NBC's Meet the Press and PBS's Charlie Rose. Isikoff lives with this wife and daughter in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
The next day, November 21 [1997], Tripp called me. There was another courier pickup from the Pentagon this morning. Only this time, it was not a letter. It was a tape--for phone sex, she told me. I called Speed Service and arranged to get the receipt. It showed once again a "Monica" at Lewinsky's extension at the Pentagon calling it in and a delivery to the White House with Betty Currie's extension as the contact number. As luck would have it, the messenger who delivered it also had to make a delivery to Newsweek that morning. I asked him to describe what he had delivered to the White House. It was a package, sort of like this, he said holding up his hands, sort of like a small box. Like a tape? I asked. Yes, he told me, like a tape.
I was once more impressed with the reliability of what Tripp was telling me. And with the strangeness of the information: a sex tape couriered to the Oval Office. What would people think if they knew about this? But then I also started, for the first time really, to feel strange myself about what was going on--and what I was doing. I realized with a bit more clarity something that should have been apparent much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president.
I was only covering it, of course. Or so I told myself. But I was covering it from the inside, while it was unfolding, talking nearly every week with the conspirators as they schemed to make it happen. Tripp would at times ask me questions. She would seek my advice. I would, cautiously, give it: No, you shouldn't go to the tabloids with this story, it would only cheapen it, I had told her when she floated this idea. You should deal only with me. Reporters have these kinds of conversations with sources all the time. But in a situation like this, the lines between aggressive reporter and passive co-conspirator can get awfully blurry.
I had tried at every stage to adhere strictly to my role as a journalist: when I wouldn't listen to Tripp's tapes, when I rejected her harebrained scheme to steal the semen-stained dress and give it to me, when I wouldn't give Joe Cammarata the name of Kathleen Willey. But still, I was in treacherous and uncharted territory. There was a lot about Linda Tripp I didn't know--and much that even then made me distinctly uncomfortable. Her duplicity was obvious. Leave aside her tapes, which we had not talked about since that meeting back in October. She was betraying Lewinsky every time she spoke to me. She was relating in the mornings conversations she had been having with her unsuspecting young friend the night before--intensely personal conversations that Lewinsky obviously thought were taking place in confidence. On a practical level, I found it mindspinning--the cutouts, the code names, the switching on and off between sympathetic friend and devious informant. How did Tripp keep it all straight? And what were these talks between Tripp and Lewinsky really like? What was Lewinsky like? Who was she? I had no idea, really, and no effective way to find out--without tipping her off to what was going on, without betraying the woman who was betraying her. Yet it was the betrayer who was my source.
We all like to think of ourselves as ethical people, even headline-hungry reporters. But the ethics here looked a bit bewildering. I retreated to more comfortable terrain: my professional obligation as a journalist. On this score, I felt sure, I was safe. I reminded myself that neither I nor Newsweek had decided to publish anything. And for a good reason, too: I couldn't prove that any of this was real and that Monica Lewinsky wasn't some psychotic fantasist. I was only doing my job: listening, collecting evidence, testing what my sources were telling me to see if the information would hold up if and when Newsweek decided there was something here worth sharing with the public. According to Tripp, Clinton was using his office to get Lewinsky a job. That, in and of itself, was suspect. There was also a lawsuit out there in which the alleged sexual compulsiveness of the president of the United States was a central issue. This thing could well come up. I was doing only what any good reporter under the same circumstances would do, I concluded. What was I supposed to do? Tell Tripp and Goldberg to get lost? Say to them, "How dare you provide me with evidence of presidential misbehavior"?
Still, I was uneasy and told myself again I had to be extremely careful.
Description:
"I realized something that should have been apparent to me much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president."
A quarter of a century after Woodward and Bernstein's history-making expose All the President's Men stunned the nation by capturing the Nixon presidency in the throes of turmoil, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff gives us an equally explosive and surprisingly suspenseful behind-the-scenes account of his investigative role in the scandals that have rocked President Clinton's second term and led to the historic vote for impeachment that will define his presidency.
Isikoff, who is credited with breaking the Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky stories, is universally acknowledged as the leading reporter who brought to light the incredible revelations about Clinton's personal and political lives that have consumed this country and shocked the world. As a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek, Isikoff has established himself as an astute observer and chronicler of Clinton's conduct throughout his presidency, following a trail of presidential misconduct from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the Oval Office. But Isikoff also unwittingly became a primary character in the unfolding Clinton drama. This is a story only he could tell, a gripping narrative of how one journalist went from battling skeptical editors and a formidable White House spin machine in his quest for the truth about Clinton to becoming a central participant in one of the biggest scandals in American political history.
Featuring a cast of bizarre characters who make this book as entertaining to read as a novel, Uncovering Clinton is also a nuanced and scrupulously fair account with a wealth of never-before-told information about the major players and events in the Clinton scandals, including:
The real reasons why some Washington Post reporters and editors believed Paula Jones's story from the start--and why Isikoff's story nonetheless was later killed before it ran.
How George Stephanopolous covered for Clinton as Isikoff pursued the Paula Jones story.
How Lucianne Goldberg's private notebook and tapes of her phone calls with Linda Tripp show that while Tripp was crying "victim" to the press, she was really plotting to bring down the president and betray Monica Lewinsky--and write a book about it all.
The real truth behind Hillary Clinton's oft-cited "vast right-wing conspiracy"--a coterie of right-wing lawyers known as "the elves" who secretly wrote the Jones legal briefs and arranged to bring the Lewinsky story to Ken Starr's office and to public light.
How Linda Tripp manipulated Ken Starr's prosecutors into launching a criminal investigation into the Lewinsky matter while withholding critical information, including her repeated contacts with Isikoff.
Isikoff had no agenda when he started investigating President Clinton's conduct other than to get at the truth. Now, after accomplishing a remarkable case of journalistic detective work, Isikoff gives us something even more significant: a work that illuminates the psychologically troubling behavior of a president, an Administration that has enabled his actions, a motley crew of Clinton-haters who would stop at nothing to topple the president, and a rapidly changing media grappling with the ever-shifting boundaries between public and private behavior. Uncovering Clinton will surely be the definitive account of our nation's biggest political scandal since Watergate.
Amazon.com Review
First at the Washington Post , and later at Newsweek , Michael Isikoff researched the stories that helped turn Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, and Monica Lewinsky into household names. Uncovering Clinton is his version of All the President's Men , a play-by-play account of how he put the pieces together and gradually came to the conclusion, based on the allegations surrounding Bill Clinton's sexual behavior, that the president of the United States was "psychologically disturbed."
But Uncovering Clinton is also about how Isikoff had to fight with his own editors to get his reporting into print and how he fell victim on multiple occasions to online gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who stole Isikoff's thunder by printing items about stories that hadn't run. He also found himself caught up in the machinations of Linda Tripp and her literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, as they schemed to manipulate the president and his paramour into a compromising situation. Isikoff is up-front about the frustrations he experienced on the journalistic trail; although he wanted to think of himself as another Seymour Hersh when he set out on the Jones story, he writes, "instead, I was starting to feel like Geraldo Rivera." Even though just about everybody knows the basic story at this point, Uncovering Clinton is still as lively a read as any political thriller--and all the more unsettling for being true. --Ron Hogan
From Library Journal
FamouslyAor infamouslyAthe Washington Post killed Isikoff's initial story on Paula Jones, but he's had plenty of chances since then to cover Clinton's saga for both the Post and Newsweek. Here's more coverage, with promises of some surprises. But can there be any surprises left now that Monica has talked to Barbara.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
I will not. Bonnie Smothers
Review
"A penetrating look at the most explosive presidential scandal since Watergate."
-- Associated Press
"Isikoff is who Woodward used to be."
--Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine
"A lively, highly readable, and attention-holding account."
-- Los Angeles Times
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
ized something that should have been apparent to me much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president."
A quarter of a century after Woodward and Bernstein's history-making expose All the President's Men stunned the nation by capturing the Nixon presidency in the throes of turmoil, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff gives us an equally explosive and surprisingly suspenseful behind-the-scenes account of his investigative role in the scandals that have rocked President Clinton's second term and led to the historic vote for impeachment that will define his presidency.
Isikoff, who is credited with breaking the Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky stories, is universally acknowledged as the leading reporter who brought to light the incredible revelations about Clinton's personal and political lives that have consumed this country and shocked the world. As a reporter for the &l
About the Author
Michael Isikoff joined the Washington Post in 1981, where he covered the Justice Department, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Latin American drug operations. In 1994, he moved to Newsweek, where he covered the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 election campaign, and other national issues. His exclusive reporting on the Lewinsky scandal gained him nationwide attention, including profiles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is a news analyst for MSNBC and a frequent guest on numerous news programs including NBC's Meet the Press and PBS's Charlie Rose. Isikoff lives with this wife and daughter in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The next day, November 21 [1997], Tripp called me. There was another courier pickup from the Pentagon this morning. Only this time, it was not a letter. It was a tape--for phone sex, she told me. I called Speed Service and arranged to get the receipt. It showed once again a "Monica" at Lewinsky's extension at the Pentagon calling it in and a delivery to the White House with Betty Currie's extension as the contact number. As luck would have it, the messenger who delivered it also had to make a delivery to Newsweek that morning. I asked him to describe what he had delivered to the White House. It was a package, sort of like this, he said holding up his hands, sort of like a small box. Like a tape? I asked. Yes, he told me, like a tape.
I was once more impressed with the reliability of what Tripp was telling me. And with the strangeness of the information: a sex tape couriered to the Oval Office. What would people think if they knew about this? But then I also started, for the first time really, to feel strange myself about what was going on--and what I was doing. I realized with a bit more clarity something that should have been apparent much earlier: I was in the middle of a plot to get the president.
I was only covering it, of course. Or so I told myself. But I was covering it from the inside, while it was unfolding, talking nearly every week with the conspirators as they schemed to make it happen. Tripp would at times ask me questions. She would seek my advice. I would, cautiously, give it: No, you shouldn't go to the tabloids with this story, it would only cheapen it, I had told her when she floated this idea. You should deal only with me. Reporters have these kinds of conversations with sources all the time. But in a situation like this, the lines between aggressive reporter and passive co-conspirator can get awfully blurry.
I had tried at every stage to adhere strictly to my role as a journalist: when I wouldn't listen to Tripp's tapes, when I rejected her harebrained scheme to steal the semen-stained dress and give it to me, when I wouldn't give Joe Cammarata the name of Kathleen Willey. But still, I was in treacherous and uncharted territory. There was a lot about Linda Tripp I didn't know--and much that even then made me distinctly uncomfortable. Her duplicity was obvious. Leave aside her tapes, which we had not talked about since that meeting back in October. She was betraying Lewinsky every time she spoke to me. She was relating in the mornings conversations she had been having with her unsuspecting young friend the night before--intensely personal conversations that Lewinsky obviously thought were taking place in confidence. On a practical level, I found it mindspinning--the cutouts, the code names, the switching on and off between sympathetic friend and devious informant. How did Tripp keep it all straight? And what were these talks between Tripp and Lewinsky really like? What was Lewinsky like? Who was she? I had no idea, really, and no effective way to find out--without tipping her off to what was going on, without betraying the woman who was betraying her. Yet it was the betrayer who was my source.
We all like to think of ourselves as ethical people, even headline-hungry reporters. But the ethics here looked a bit bewildering. I retreated to more comfortable terrain: my professional obligation as a journalist. On this score, I felt sure, I was safe. I reminded myself that neither I nor Newsweek had decided to publish anything. And for a good reason, too: I couldn't prove that any of this was real and that Monica Lewinsky wasn't some psychotic fantasist. I was only doing my job: listening, collecting evidence, testing what my sources were telling me to see if the information would hold up if and when Newsweek decided there was something here worth sharing with the public. According to Tripp, Clinton was using his office to get Lewinsky a job. That, in and of itself, was suspect. There was also a lawsuit out there in which the alleged sexual compulsiveness of the president of the United States was a central issue. This thing could well come up. I was doing only what any good reporter under the same circumstances would do, I concluded. What was I supposed to do? Tell Tripp and Goldberg to get lost? Say to them, "How dare you provide me with evidence of presidential misbehavior"?
Still, I was uneasy and told myself again I had to be extremely careful.