Lucianne Goldberg, who leaked tapes at center of Clinton impeachment, dies at 87
Lucianne Goldberg, a New York literary agent and conservative provocateur who took on a Machiavellistyle role in the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton by encouraging a former White House aide to secretly tape Monica Lewinsky discussing her affair with the president, died Oct. 26 at her home in Weehawken, N.J. She was 87.
Author and political commentator Jonah Goldberg confirmed the death and said his mother had kidney and liver ailments.
For decades, Goldberg had cultivated a reputation as brash, brassy and sharptongued in her takedowns of progressive causes.
As a younger woman, she co-wrote an anti-feminist manifesto called “Purr, Baby, Purr” and said she had been a spy for President Richard M. Nixon’s campaign in his 1972 reelection bid. Later, after a long career writing or ghostwriting sexy potboilers and representing such authors as Kitty Kelley and discredited Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, she delighted in taking aim at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Goldberg carried such a big personality that there were always questions about whether her rightleaning political sentiments were genuine or a kind of performance art.
Either way, her place in the Clinton scandal made her, to some, a conservative hero.
At the suggestion of conservative columnist Tony Snow, former White House aide Linda Tripp had first contacted Goldberg about a possible project on White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, whose 1993 death was ruled a suicide but remains a focus of conspiracy theorists. Tripp was reportedly one of the last people to have seen Foster alive and was deeply shaken by his death.
The project fell through, but Tripp then tried to sell a tell-all White House memoir highly critical of the Clintons before telling Goldberg that the president had an affair with a former White House intern.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ you know the kind of agenting that I did, I heard a lot of wild stuff, and people have to prove things,” Goldberg said in an interview for the 2020 PBS show “American Experience” on the Clinton years.
Tripp said she had conversations nearly every day with Lewinsky, who had left the White House and was working with Tripp in the Pentagon’s public affairs office.
“And I said, ‘You say you talk to her every day - how about taping your phone conversations?’” Goldberg recalled.
Goldberg even suggested the type of tape recorder: a Radio Shack model like the one she kept on her desk at her Manhattan office. Tripp wasn’t sure.
“She always was reluctant,” Goldberg recalled to The Washington Post in late 1998. “She said, ‘I think it’s kind of sleazy.’”
Goldberg pressed Tripp and reportedly assured her the taping was legal, even though recording someone without the person’s permission is illegal under the law in Maryland, where Tripp lived at the time.
Yet the recordings became a centerpiece for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whose probes of Clinton began with allegations over improper real estate deals in Arkansas but mushroomed into a blanket inquest on the Clintons.