Excerpts from Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton.

Pages 356-57

What do you do when you find yourself sucked into the story? What happens when you become beholden to sources with an agenda? ... When I went to see Linda Tripp at the Pentagon in March 1997, I had no idea what I was going to learn--and no inkling of the anger and resentment that stirred inside her tortured soul. There were warning signals, of course. What sort of woman tapes her friend? ...

Much that I learned later cast a somewhat different light on events. I was stunned to learn, upon reading the transcripts of the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes that fall, that Tripp had tried to persuade Lewinsky to have breakfast with U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson downstairs at the Aquarelle restaurant--even as she was urging Newsweek to stake the place out and take pictures. I was amazed to discover, buried in Starr's volumes of evidence, the FBI interview of Kate Friedrich, then of the National Security Council. It was Tripp's claims about what "Kate of the NSC" was saying about Lewinsky that caused Lewinsky to flip--and demand that the president find her a job in New York. But, according to Friedrich's account, it was all made up: Friedrich at the time had never heard of Monica Lewinsky.

I was chagrined to discover, while reading the transcripts of the Tripp-Goldberg conversation on the evening of September 18, 1997, that they had been talking about a book deal from the start.

Pages 190-91

What Tripp didn't know when she offered these explanations was that her initial conversations with Lucianne Goldberg had been secretly taped--by Goldberg. It is one of the supreme ironies of the entire Clinton-Lewinsky drama. ... The tapes show precisely how these two women created and then sought to manipulate the very situation Tripp claimed was "not of her own making." They also reveal a far more complicated and somewhat less flattering portrait of Tripp's motives. Tripp was moved, it appears, not so much by fear and a desire to protect herself as by anger, even disgust, at Bill Clinton. As a parent of college-age children, she thought the president's behavior with her young friend was "appalling," and she wanted it exposed to the world. "It's so sickening," she told Goldberg during the first few minutes of their conversation. "He has got to get his comeuppance," she added later.

But coexisting with Tripp-the-avenger was Tripp-the-aspiring-author. Spurred by dreams of personal enrichment, Tripp and Goldberg immediately plotted ways to use the new material about the intern to revive the book deal that, little more than a year earlier, had imploded. Indeed, some of the women's actions over the next few months could be construed as part of a strategy designed, at least in part, to maximize Tripp's marketability. ... Of course, if they went forward with their plan, there was something else she should be ready to lose, Goldberg warned: "You have to be ready to lose her [the young woman] as a friend."

"Oh," Tripp replied, "I have already made that decision."

Pages 205-06

Why? Some of my journalistic colleagues later expressed astonishment that I had declined the opportunity to hear Tripp's tapes. "I would have listened to those tapes in a heartbeat," Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media critic, told me months later. It's an interesting journalistic issue. My hesitation was instinctive--but rooted in principles I had drummed into me when I first started as a young reporter at the Post. We don't tape without permission, the late Howard Simons, then the paper's managing editor, had decreed. Simons had overseen the paper's coverage during Watergate--when Nixon's secret tapes had shocked the world and ultimately led to the president's downfall. Taping without consent may be legal in most places, including Washington, D.C. But it was sneaky and had a bit of an odor to it. We reporters shouldn't deceive our sources, any more than we should deceive the public. Or so Simons--a wise and revered editor--had taught me.

Of course, I wasn't being asked by Tripp to tape anybody secretly. But the distinction was a bit fuzzy. Tripp's taping of Lewinsky was ongoing. If I started to listen in on her conversations as she was taping them--as opposed to when she was finished--then I inevitably would have become a part of the process. Virtually any comment I made about the tape she played for me would have informed her next conversation with Lewinsky. "Gee," I could imagine myself saying, "that's interesting what I heard Lewinsky say about playing footsie with the president, but I didn't hear her say she actually massaged it." During their next conversation, Tripp would have pressed Lewinsky for the extra detail: "Did he let you massage his foot?" For all intents and purposes, I would have been writing Tripp's script. I would have become her partner in the betrayal of Lewinsky. ... And I was in a bit of a hurry to make it to Hardball. Although it was not quite time for me to go, listening to a long, rambling conversation between these two women struck me as a bit pointless, especially since it seemed clear to me I was still a long way away from being able to write anything."

Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story
By Michael Isikoff
Crown; 402 pages; $25