It was Ms. Goldberg, a literary agent, who suggested that Linda Tripp tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. She later fed revelations to the news media.
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Lucianne Goldberg in 1971. She dealt with a number of high-profile clients over the years, but it was the Bill Clinton scandal that guaranteed her place in history.
Lucianne Goldberg, a colorful, conservative literary agent who played a pivotal role in the scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, died on Wednesday at her home in Weehawken, N.J. She was 87.
The journalist Jonah Goldberg, her son, confirmed the death. He said that she was in hospice and had suffered from liver and kidney failure.
It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.
Ms. Goldberg, a New York agent with a reputation for tell-all books and a presence that Time magazine once described as “a cross between Angela Lansbury and Jimmy Cagney,” happened to speak with Ms. Tripp one day in 1997 when Ms. Tripp knew she would later be speaking with Ms. Lewinsky, who considered her a confidante.
Ms. Tripp welcomed the idea of exposing Mr. Clinton’s behavior, but it had never occurred to her to tape her telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky.
Ms. Goldberg suggested that Ms. Tripp buy a tape recorder at Radio Shack. She urged her to persuade Ms. Lewinsky not to dry-clean or throw away a certain dress that held physical evidence of the affair. And she fed carefully timed revelations to the news media.
Over the years, Ms. Goldberg dealt with her share of high-profile clients.
They included Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles detective who wrote about the O.J. Simpson case in the best-selling book “Murder in Brentwood” (1997), and Maureen Dean, for whom she ghostwrote the novel “Washington Wives” (1987).
Ms. Goldberg represented “Teddy Bare: The Last of the Kennedy Clan” (1971), an exposé of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s fatal car accident in Chappaquiddick, Mass., by Zad Rust (a pseudonym for Michael Sturdza, a Romanian diplomat). When she handled Kitty Kelley’s biography “Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star” (1981), she neglected to pay the author for the book’s European sales. Ms. Kelley sued and won a five-figure settlement.
She was considered a go-to agent for writers peddling conservative fare. The author John Podhoretz, writing on the Commentary magazine website on Thursday, said that at one time she “was maybe the only agent in New York” representing conservatives.
But it was the Clinton scandal that guaranteed Ms. Goldberg her place in political history. She always contended that she was motivated primarily by concern for Ms. Lewinsky, whom she saw as a classic case of a young woman being taken advantage of by an older, married man. And that was also, she said, the way Ms. Tripp saw it.
“She was very fond of Monica,” Ms. Goldberg said. “She honestly thought that she was saving Monica’s life.”
Lucy Ann Steinberger was born in Boston on April 29, 1935, the third child of Raymond Leonard Steinberger, a physicist, and Lucy Jane (Moseley) Steinberger, a physiotherapist. The family soon moved to Alexandria, Va., outside Washington.
Lucy Ann (a spelling she later changed to Lucianne) dropped out of high school in Alexandria to work in advertising sales. She later received a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University.
Ms. Goldberg often told people that she had been a copy assistant at The Washington Post, but The Post reported that she had been a clerk in the newspaper’s promotion department from 1957 to 1960. She married her high school sweetheart, William S. Cummings, in 1957 and opened a public relations firm, Lucianne Cummings & Associates, in the 1960s.
“I’ve never joined any publishing associations or groups, because I don’t like having other people tell me what to do,” Ms. Goldberg told The New York Times in 1998.
She worked for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1960. She and Mr. Cummings divorced in 1963. In 1966 she married Sidney Goldberg, a news-syndicate executive, and they were together until his death in 2005.
Her experience with political dirty tricks began in 1973, when a political adviser of President Richard M. Nixon’s paid her $1,000 a week to pose as a reporter to gather inside information on Senator George McGovern’s campaign for president.
ImageMs. Goldberg addressed journalists outside her New York apartment in 1998. She took personal abuse for her part in the Clinton scandal but, she said, “I can take a truthful slime.”Credit…Emile Wamsteker/Associated Press
Before the Clinton scandal, Ms. Goldberg was the author or co-author of four books. “Purr, Baby, Purr” (1971), written with Jeannie Sakol, was an anti-feminist manifesto that suggested that women think of their bodies as “a switchboard with all sorts of lovely buttons and plug-ins.”
The other three books were novels. “Friends in High Places” (1979), written with Sondra Till Robinson, focused on a doctor manipulating her former lover. “Madame Cleo’s Girls” (1992) told the story of three high-priced escorts (Kirkus Reviews called it “lightly amoral”), and “People Will Talk” (1994) looked at a tabloid gossip columnist’s legacy.
She had no aversion to the tawdry.
“I love this stuff!” Ms. Goldberg told The New York Times in 1998. “And so do the millions of people who buy these books.”
She was happy to let other agents handle highbrow work, she said, adding, “I wouldn’t know literary stuff if I fell over it!”
Ms. Goldberg was considering a book on Vince Foster, the Clinton lawyer whose suicide in 1993 was the subject of conservative conspiracy theories, when an associate recommended Ms. Tripp as a source.
That book never happened, but by 1995 — the year Ms. Lewinsky began her White House internship — Ms. Tripp was developing her own book proposal. The working title, according to CNN, was “Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw Inside the Clinton White House,” and one proposed chapter heading was “The President’s Women.”
When Ms. Tripp reached out to Ms. Goldberg with the Lewinsky story, Ms. Goldberg saw only one way to prove it.
She assured Ms. Tripp that the recording of conversations with only one party’s consent was legal. It was — in the District of Columbia and in 39 American states. But Maryland, where Ms. Tripp lived, was not one of them.
Eventually Ms. Goldberg turned over more than 20 hours of audiotapes to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, which led to Mr. Clinton’s 1998 impeachment by the House of Representatives. The Senate, however, voted not to convict him, and he remained in office for the rest of his term
The story continued to fascinate the public. The FX series “American Crime Story” devoted its third season, which aired in 2021, to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, with Margo Martindale as Ms. Goldberg.
In addition to her son Jonah, Ms. Goldberg is survived by a granddaughter. Another son, Joshua Goldberg, died in 2011 after being injured in a fall.
In later years, Ms. Goldberg turned to political blogging. Her lucianne.com report was an aggregation of news articles with pointed commentary. She led a 2022 post with a cartoon showing an Olympic torch labeled “Biden misinformation lies fraud deceit.”
Ms. Goldberg took personal abuse for her part in the Clinton scandal. In his book “American Rhapsody,” Joe Eszterhas referred to her as “the bag lady of sleaze.” She never made a dime from the scandal, but she considered herself too savvy to be a victim.
“Let them take their best shot,” she told Time magazine in 1998. “I can take a truthful slime.”
“You have to be bulletproof to survive something like this,” she said in the same interview. “And there is enormous freedom in not caring whether people like you.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
