Why Vince Foster’s Suicide Was a Turning Point for Linda Tripp in Impeachment: American Crime Story

In the years since Linda Tripp secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky, setting the stage for Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Lewinsky’s public humiliation, people have struggled to understand why Tripp would betray a friend so profoundly. One theory was that Tripp had simply been angling for a book deal throughout her acquaintance with Lewinsky, and took advice from conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg to record the conversations for evidence. But Tripp herself claimed that idea was outrageous—she would not have “chose[n] to turn the world upside down to sell books.” 

Instead, Tripp, who died in 2020, said she acted out of moral duties to stop abuse in the White House and protect her friend. “I was so angry at him [Clinton],” Tripp later told ABC News. “I wanted this relationship exposed in the biggest way because it was so cruel. It was beyond cruel what he was doing to her.”

The truth about Tripp’s motivations is likely far more complicated. And Tuesday’s premiere of Impeachment: American Crime Story, “Exiles,” establishes the complicated backstory to Tripp’s betrayal by isolating a critical turning point in Tripp’s path from loyal to embittered civil servant: Vince Foster’s 1993 suicide.

Tripp had begun work at the White House as a floating secretary under the Bush administration. In 1993, she was offered a permanent secretarial position in the White House counsel’s office, where she worked for Bernard Nussbaum and Foster—the latter of whom was an Arkansas lawyer, longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, and deputy counsel. The position was a prime one for a lifelong government employee like Tripp. (“The White House was the dream,” Tripp later said in an interview with ABC News. “I would have cleaned toilets with my tongue to work at the White House.”) As special assistant to White House counsel, Tripp was positioned outside the offices of Nussbaum and Foster who, as The Washington Post put it, were “the men who dealt with the White House’s most sensitive internal matters.” Tripp’s proximity essentially put her “at the seat of power.”

This blissful period for Tripp came to a crashing halt on July 20, 1993, when Foster died by suicide. She had served Foster his final meal, a cheeseburger and M&M’s, and was one of the last people to see Foster alive. Tripp recalled Foster leaving the office the day of his death telling Tripp he would “be back.” Instead, Foster went to a suburban Virginia park overlooking the Potomac River and shot himself in the head using an antique revolver.

At the time of his death, Foster was confronting a series of Clinton scandals—both as deputy White House counsel and, in the case of Whitewater, in his role as personal lawyer for the Clintons. Given Foster’s responsibilities, his suicide spawned myriad conspiracy theories even after five investigations—including by independent counsels Robert B. Fiske Jr. and Kenneth Starr—concluded that Foster suffered from severe depression that caused him to take his own life.

There were no signs of struggle, or evidence that Foster had been intoxicated or drugged. Foster’s wife identified the revolver found with Foster as being one that had been missing from the family home. And multiple family members and a physician later revealed the depth of Foster’s depression. Per Starr’s report:

“Mr. Foster told his sister four days before his death that he was depressed; he cried at dinner with his wife four days before his death; he told his mother a day or two before his death that he was unhappy because work was ‘a grind;’ he was consulting attorneys for legal advice the week before his death; he told several people he was considering resignation; he wrote a note that he ‘was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.’ The day before his death, he contacted a physician and indicated that he was under stress. He was prescribed antidepressant medication and took one tablet that evening.

Dr. Berman concluded that Mr. Foster’s ‘last 96 hours show clear signs of crisis and uncharacteristic vulnerability.’ Dr. Berman stated, furthermore, that ‘[t]here is little doubt that Foster was clinically depressed…in early 1993, and, perhaps, sub-clinically even before this.’ Dr. Berman concluded that ‘[i]n my opinion and to a 100% degree of medical certainty, the death of Vincent Foster was a suicide. No plausible evidence has been presented to support any other conclusion.”

Conspiracy theories were further fanned when the press learned that scraps of a suicide note in Foster’s briefcase were found, but not reported to police for 30 hours after they were discovered. (The White House attributed the delay to its need to inform Foster’s family and the president of the fragments.)

According to The Baltimore Sun, Tripp emailed an employee, “I can’t imagine that anyone as meticulous as this individual [Foster] was, would have left anything he did not intend to be found.” Per The Washington Post, “Tripp felt that Clinton officials acted as though they had a lot to hide: rifling Foster’s office, looking for God-knows-what. The whole thing seemed disrespectful to her, almost sordid.” A woman quoted by The Baltimore Sun added, “Linda was appalled by what happened after his death. She thought he was not treated well by the White House.”

There were other details about Foster’s death that seemed suspicious to Tripp. So she took them to the Office of the Independent Counsel on April 12, 1994. Per Vanity Fair’s 1998 feature “Decoding the Starr Report”:

“He removed the onions from his hamburger, which struck Tripp as odd in retrospect. She couldn’t understand why he would do that if he was planning to commit suicide. It did not make sense to her that he might be worried about his breath if that were the case. Tripp does not know if Foster likes or dislikes onions.”

Foster’s death “fed [Tripp]’s growing disaffection” with the Clinton administration, according to The Washington Post. Even before the suicide, Tripp had been unimpressed by the Clinton administration’s relaxed attitude toward working in the White House. Her first job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had been when George H. W. Bush was in office, and Tripp felt that the 41st president had demanded more formality and deference from his staff members. 

In a 1999 interview with Larry King, Tripp went so far as to portray Foster as the last vestige of decency in the Clinton White House. “He was a great man; he was a decent man. I remember thinking, because I had gotten to know him when I had worked in the immediate office of the president, that he seemed so ill-placed in this administration. His kindness and his decency and his professionalism made him seem to me at any rate far more suited to what I had come to know in the Bush White House.”

Tripp later explained what else she had come to dislike about the Clinton administration on Slate’s Slow Burn podcast in 2018:

“[T]o say that I was dismayed in the beginning [of Clinton’s administration] is an understatement…. It was the disdain and contempt for the military, all the while working on the don’t ask, don’t tell…. The reality was that they were contemptuous of the military and that was painful. That hurt my heart. Having been married to a soldier for 20 years and living that life, they didn’t want a uniformed presence in the White House…. When I started in the Oval Office, I became very quickly aware that they were going to do away with the people who occupied those positions in the correspondence unit. And I honestly couldn’t believe it because from a practical perspective, to get up to speed with new people would be almost impossible without creating a literally millions of documents backlog. But on a personal level, these women were so proud to be a small part in the cog of the operation of the White House that I couldn’t really believe that they could be fired without some sort of thanks or some sort of acknowledgment of what they had done all these years…these are small examples of the machinations that were going on that were completely not only misrepresented to the American people, but it was hiding.”

In the aftermath of Foster’s death, two events further propelled Tripp on her path toward betrayal. First, she was introduced to Goldberg—the literary agent who would advise Tripp to record her conversations with Lewinsky—during casual conversations about a possible book devoted to Foster’s death. And then Tripp was booted from her dream role within the White House—after Nussbaum left and Nussbaum’s successor, Lloyd Cutler, determined Tripp to be “abrasive and overbearing,” according to The Washington Post. 

Her next position, beginning in August 1994, was at the Pentagon, a far less exciting office, where Tripp worked as a public affairs officer. “She did not want to leave the White House. And a certain bitterness lingered,” per the Post. “To Tripp, the White House had become a place where loyal people were canned, where good people died and bad people picked at their bones.”

Tripp had been discarded. But within two years, she would be joined by an office mate who was also feeling profound rejection from the White House: Monica Lewinsky, who was relocated to the Pentagon.

“It’s so clear why they became friends,” actor Beanie Feldstein told Vanity Fair last week, after portraying Lewinsky in Impeachment: American Crime Story. “Because they both had been at the White House, which is this shiny, beautiful, warm work experience and they get tossed aside to the Pentagon, which, in their perspective, is icy and cold and barren. And they find each other in that space, where they both feel like they were tossed aside. That’s a very powerful starting place for two people to connect…. What happens when you, as a human being, are made to feel like you don’t matter, or you’re tossed aside? Or you’re made to feel insignificant? What can that feeling create in someone?”

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