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Though Bill Clinton's approval ratings soared by the weekend, he owed no thanks to his wife's blame laying. In a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week, only a third of those surveyed agreed with Mrs. Clinton's conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, the mainstream media dealt with the vast plot of which it was allegedly a part by rolling its collective eyes. As Mrs. Clinton's inflammatory sound bite burned its way through the welter of cable-TV shows, Internet forums and talk-radio programs that are to the Lewinsky scandal what the Pony Express was to the Wild West, a quick consensus formed: the White House either believed in the conspiracy (a symptom of Nixonian delusion) or it was engaging in a diversion (a sign of desperation). Janet Reno and the Washington Post, both key players in the current scandal, hardly seem like reactionary schemers. Possibly to disguise his leading role in the cabal, a chuckling Rush Limbaugh offered listeners a Right-Wing Conspiracy coffee mug.
Shared interests, cross-referenced Rolodexes and incestuous employment histories do not, of course, a conspiracy make. Professional wrestlers are probably at least as tight a bunch as the obsessive Clinton haters. Still, there is one place where the vast conspiracy may well exist: in the Clintons' minds. Remember the hundreds of FBI reports on influential Republicans that mysteriously appeared in the White House in 1996? The cloak of unnecessary secrecy thrown over Mrs. Clinton's health-care task force? Indeed, so obsessed is this White House with its enemies--real and imagined, great and small--that in July 1995 it prepared a 331-page report exposing their alleged machinations. In the tradition of Spiro Agnew's nattering nabobs of negativism, the report was titled The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. It purported to prove that ideological reporters like Ruddy, acting in concert with Internet muckrakers and the British tabloids, were behind every scandal from Nannygate to Filegate.
As the Lewinsky scandal unfolds, however, the blanks in the crossword puzzle are filling up and starting to spell intrigue. Last fall, around the time that Tripp began recording Lewinsky's anxious chitchat, an anonymous female tipster left three messages on the Rutherford Institute's answering machine describing an illicit romance between Lewinsky and the President. Asked about the informer's identity, Goldberg pleads ignorance. "I do not know. And I do not know if it was Tripp," she says. No, it wasn't, says Tripp, through lawyer Moody.
One last mystery. How did Moody, a conservative with links to the matrix of blandly named foundations supported by angels like Scaife, come to represent Tripp in the first place? Tripp, remember, portrays herself as an apolitical civil servant and reluctant girl detective. Re-enter matchmaker Goldberg, stage right. She made a call to someone, who in turn made a call to conservative New York lawyer George Conway (a backstage force in Jones' Supreme Court case), who made a call to yet another someone, who recommended Moody. Why the frenzied, circuitous round robin when Tripp already had a lawyer, chosen for her by the White House? Because she didn't trust him. Tripp, says Goldberg, was "totally paranoid." Like the flu and like Starr's subpoenas, it seems to be going around.
--Reported by Edward Barnes and Andrea Sachs/New York and Jay Branegan/Washington