The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 57

1 IP Kl 4D THE PALM BEACH POST WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1998 'Solid friend' or 'horrible human'? Tripp's tale complei TRIPP From ID Soften undervalued and misused, who daily see and hear secrets they are expected, as loyal foot Tripp testifies on Aug. 1, 1995, before-the Senate Whitewater Committee irt' Tripp was called to testify: soldiers, to protect. Tripp, 48, was a smart and skillful worker, older than many of her colleagues and her bosses, cannier than most of them, working at jobs that were often beneath her abilities, with a chip on her shoulder that may date to her childhood as an ungainly adolescent teased about her size. She was wounded by a marriage that friends say squashed her chance for a formidable career and then dissolved much as her own parents' had: in loveless acrimony. She is, according to friends and associates, a moralist but not a prig.

She is conservative but not political. She is nurturing to people she likes, cold and contemptuous I zr I 1 i 1. i in Kenneth Starr's investigation because she Is a former secretary for' -White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. THE ASSOCIATED PRESSFILE T. I I i 1 1 jf 'M cash in her possession, according to authorities in Greenwood Lake.

The disposition of the case remains unclear, although Tripp's current lawyer, James Moody, says Tripp was "set up" by-acquaintances and that criminal nickname, "Gus," mentioned in the yearbook, but no one was talking. The nickname was a humiliating put-down. Gus was a reference to Gus Johnson, a big NBA basketball star. Linda was 5 feet 10 and solidly built. She hated cameras.

She wanted to blend in and disappear, according to several high school classmates. She wanted to fix ...1 'r 7 to those she does not. She is not known for her tact but can be diplomatic when it suits her purpose. She is often judgmental but seldom cruel. She can be manipulative and aggressive about advancing her own interests.

She is self-aggrandizing but oddly shy, arrogant but not pompous. She'll laugh at herself. She is a good mother, a bad dresser, a coddler of animals. She is daring but not impulsive. When she makes a decision, it is often after long and careful planning.

What brought her to that telephone on a January night in 1998 was a series of events, many beyond her control, that began in THE ASSOCIATED PRESSFILE PHOTO Multiple camera crews hound Linda Tripp as she leaves her Columbia, home on Jan. 22. The walk to her car turned out to be her final public appearance before she disappeared from view. commonly friendly. Anonymous German accent: She was a German national when she met and married Linda's father, Albert Car 'Linda was savvy.

In any situation she could scope out how things were, a sixth sense of what is going on around her. LESLIE ANN SKURLA High school friend 1990. There were seven crucial steps. One led to another. In the end, she acted with cunning self-interest, but the end was at no point inevitable or even foreseeable.

Each step is dependent on the one that preceded it. Eliminate any one and the ultimate event cannot occur. Sometimes, Washington resembles a Ouija board. Many hands are laid upon a moving, slippery planchette. There is tugging and pushing, and then the mysteries of vector physics take over.

Inexorably the pointer assumes a life of its own, heading in directions no one planned. It looks like the hand of God. But it is just a bunch of people, fighting for con be petite. She loathed the nickname Gus. Her social life consisted of weekend sleepovers with girlfriends.

She was a good and loyal friend, part of a group, ingratiating, perhaps a little oversensitive to slights. "Linda was savvy," says Skurla. "In any situation she could scope out how things were, a sixth sense of what is going on around her." The final line of Linda's yearbook entry lists her pet peeve: "A certain fair-weather friend." The irony has not passed unnoticed. The press pounced, pursuing it with vigor. No answer has emerged.

"Wouldn't you know," laughed Inge Carotenuto in a brief telephone interview, "that a comment like that could haunt you the rest of your life?" Parents divorce During Linda's senior year, her mother divorced her father, who was a local high school math and science teacher; divorces in Whippany were rare. Linda never spoke of it to her friends. One day her father was home, and one day he was not, and that was that. The divorce is the one thing Linda's mother will speak about, and even then she is guarded: "Any marriage that appears normal and happy, in general terms, when it breaks up, it deeply affects charges were dropped. A Pentagon spokesman said Friday that the Defense Department will" investigate whether Tripp lied on a security clearance form in 1987 in failing to disclose the incident, which was first reported in "the New Yorker.

Tripp ultimately peeled out for secretarial school. And then, suddenly, news came back that Linda, who never had a boyfriend, Who never had a date, was married; Linda Tripp's ex-husband, with whom she lived for two "decades, lives in a homely town house in Columbia, the digs of. 9 divorced man. There are picture windows," but they might as well be bricked up. The curtains are perpetually drawn these days; not a sliverjof light comes When Xt.

Col. Bruce Tripp, U.S. Antty retired, comes to the door, the first, thing you notice is his size. He is! 5 feet 6, four inches shorter than Linda, 20 pounds lighter: a smaU, spare man with a sour smile. The sour smile is understandable.

"You are the 75th person to come here," he says, executes a cfigp about-face, and slams the door; Not much is publicly known about the 20 years Linda spenf with Bruce Tripp. Tripp's resume reveals only that she took a series 1 of secretarial jobs in support ofjier husband's career. There was long string of assignments, in Ger'-many and elsewhere. Linda got a top-secret security clearance. 'Ai one point, according to her she was doing secretarial work for Delta Force, the super-secret counterterrorist unit that does not, officially, exist.

There were two children. Daughter Alli co-worKers aescriDea ner, variously, as a consummate professional, a trusted colleague, a warm and caring confidante, a shrewd operator, a shrew, a sanctimonious prude, an embittered quisling, a greedy mercenary, a hit man, a spy, a witch. "She was a strong, solid friend all she cared about was good government," said one former coworker. "I avoided her like the plague," said another colleague. "She was such a horrible human being." Mary Worth or Broom Hilda.

Take your pick. A cartoon either way. The dueling portraiture is not surprising. Tripp has emerged as an instrument of political vengeance, or of political comeuppance, depending on which side you are on. Opinions are likely to be strong, without nuance and, sometimes, nakedly partisan.

Much of what has been aired and published about Linda Tripp has been accurate; some has not. The mistakes are both trivial and substantial. Her dog is a golden retriever, not a Labrador. (Its name, for the record, is Cleo.) Tripp's father did not abandon the family, as was widely reported; there was a divorce, but according to Tripp's mother, he stayed in touch and remained financially responsible. When Tripp was transferred from the White House to the Pentagon, she went to a new job for which she was neither unqualified nor overpaid as has been alleged by some detractors who saw it as a payoff for her otenuto, in Frankfurt in 1948.

She is unshakable in her silence gracious, smiling, obstinate, firmly in control. She is Linda's mom. Like all senior class yearbooks, the Hanover Park Pathways my-thologizes the seniors. Most students' photos are in the books several times, first their official portraits, and then in pages on clubs and societies, receiving awards, mugging for the camera. Not Linda Carotenuto.

She has the one obligatory portrait, period. She is not Most Likely to Succeed, Best Dressed, Most Athletic, Most Scientific, Class Individualist, Class Wit, Class Daydreamer, Senior with the Nicest Smile, or Most Popular. That last award went to Leslie Ann Skurla, the knockout blonde with whom Linda often hung out. Girls like Linda sometimes hang out with girls like Leslie. "She was just there," says Skurla, laughing.

"The girl you sort of remember from home ec class." Skurla is a dentist in Whippany, one of a few women of the Class of '68 who stuck around. Whippany wasn't a great place for young women who wanted careers. 'It was the last year of the Beaver Cleaver era," says Skurla. "As a woman you could be a nurse, a secretary or a teacher. I became a dental hygienist.

I was 27 when I went to dental school. Linda took the business route." Skurla likes and respects Tripp: "People don't push her around. Maybe it is the German in her." She speculates that whatever Tripp did, she did because of moral outrage. In the days after the Lewinsky scandal broke, Tripp's old high school friends whom she kept in touch with through reunions formed a protective knot. When others elsewhere were savaging Tripp, the high school friends offered the discovered that she can be a terrific, loyal friend.

In 1996, while he was detailed to Tripp's Pentagon office as a uniformed member of the armed services, the colleague blurted out that he was gay. Telling her was a violation of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It could have cost him his job. "We were on a plane, and she was asking me what I was going to do after I retired, and answering her just got too complicated," he said. "I wanted to stay in D.C.

because my partner was there. I had a gut feeling I could trust her, so I told her that. She said, 'So She was extremely accepting of this, and never, ever divulged it to anyone." Eventually, of course, she would betray another friend in a spectacularly public fashion. A polite welcome She grew up in an ordinary house on Adams Drive in Whip-pany, N.J., 30 miles from New York City. Whippany was built around a paper mill and later was home to Bell Labs during the years when ballistic missile guidance systems were designed there.

Whippany dads walked around with slide rules bouncing on their hips. The moms did not work. Linda Tripp's mother answers the door, welcomes you in politely, then informs you, in no uncertain terms, that she will say nothing because Linda has asked her not to. Inge Carotenuto has a light trol. A six-second TV film clip In the days.

after the scandal broke, Tripp's public image was -reduced, cartoonishly, to a single six-second TV film clip: a large, broad-shouldered woman with unfortunate hair, trudging disconsolately from her door to her car. Here she is again, in slo-mo. Here the angle is different; there were multiple camera crews camped on her lawn. The 30-foot walk was her final public appearance before she disappeared from view into what was colorfully reported to be an FBI "safe house" but was actually a series of hotel rooms. She has been spotted in one hotel gym, wearing a black wig.

Now her hair has been coiffed as part of a sweeping makeover. In her absence, the media did what they could. Reporters fanned out to interview everyone who ever knew Tripp. No fact was too trivial, no opinion too reckless or absurd. Her son once teased a neighbor's child.

She could be darned demanding, said a service station attendant near her house. A neighbor down the street said she was grumpy and standoffish. A neighbor next-door found her un- the children. But the repercussions, in this case, may have been singular. Linda was never close to her father; their relationship was testy at best.

According to an article in the current issue of the Aw Yorker, he was a philanderer who carried on a public affair with a fellow teacher, humiliating Linda. She developed an intense distaste for marital infidelity. She also ran into some trouble. In May 1969, a year after graduating from high school, she was arrested for grand larceny in Greenwood Lake, N.Y. Police found stolen goods watches and son is now 19; son Ryan is 22.

In 1990, the Tripps.utarriage; came undone. They separated and the divorce would be final two' years later. By then, Linda embarked on a new life, one that, would lead her, ultimately through the seven distinct steps;" to the sort of spotlight in which' she was never at ease. silence. She was undeniably good at her job, with a string of laudatory evaluations, and her Pentagon salary was in line with those of others who did similar work.

Also, it appears she simply didn't know much that the White House considered damaging. She is extraordinarily complicated. People who like her tend to love her. One former colleague Coming Thursday: From tHe Bush White House to Monica. The Seven Steps 0 Linda Tripp.

media compliments and platitudes Reporters asked about Linda's Allergy, asthma attacks nothing to sneeze at mwm discuss safety with their physician. Another "Music sounds different when you're all blocked UD." She savs. but she rnntrnk hpr class of drugs called anti-leukotnenes in eluding Accolate and the new Singulair-fight asthma by thwarting chemicals released by white blood cells that irritate airways. When allergy attacks occur, antihistamines like Claritin, Allegra and Zyrtec can relieve IS symptoms while safely avoiding the sedation caused by older products. Combination prod ucts add a for decongestant.

Immunotherapy-injections to build toler ance through gradual exposure now are purer and more potent, causing some patients, like the California accountant, Broderick Jew, to experience shortness of breath or other reac tions. (Doses may have to be reutrated and patients may need to rebuild their tolerance to avoid severe side effects.) In addition, he carries an epinephrine shot to use in an emergency. Blame it on El Nino. Doctors are surprised and overwhelmed by the numbers of patients succumbing out of season. By Marilyn Chase The Wall Street Journal Millions of allergic Americans will soon be under the weather.

A wet, mild winter prodded trees to bud prematurely in the East, and rains saturated the West and South, sowing pollen and mold spores before last week's snowstorm chilled the untimely spring. Allergists meeting in Washington this week will discuss new techniques for measuring airborne irritants, and therapies to treat seasonal misery suffered by about 35 million Americans with allergies and 15 million with asthma. More data seek to explain how thunderstorms once believed to purge the air of pollen can provoke outbreaks of asthma. Just how bad is it out there? "It's a terrible season," says Broderick Jew, a Palo Alto, accountant heading into the busy tax time even as his allergies flare. "Your professional demeanor is compromised jf you're a sniveling wreck." He preps for meetings with a nonsedating antihistamine-decongestant pill, and takes allergy shots to prevent attacks.

1 In Sarasota, allergist Hugh Windom says, "We're having one heck of a time. It's been a bad year, and it hasn't peaked yet" Measuring airborne allergens from Miami to Tallahassee, allergist Mary Jelks says pollen and mold counts are high, plants are blooming "way out of season," and flooded homes are mold incubators. One of Windom's patients, lyric soprano Future shots may involve DNA vaccines. which use DNA to modulate the immune asthma inhaling puffs of corticosteroid drugs. Manhattan's early spring, following an extended autumn, left allergy sufferers little relief, says Lynelle Granady, co-director of the Children's AIR (Allergy, Immunology and Respiratory) Center of New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center.

"People who usually have seasonal allergies have had problems around the year," she says. In Rochester, N.Y., maples budded prematurely, says Donald Pulver, who chairs the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology's committee on aerobiology the science of airborne allergens. Last week's cold snap may nip allergy season in the bud, though few believe one snowstorm will reverse an unusually temperate quarter. The National Allergy Bureau is deploying sophisticated new pollen-monitoring devices this spring to pinpoint pollen peaks. Older machines simply showed accumulated deposits over 24 hours.

"Now we can look at what's happening at 2 p.m., 4 p.m. or 3 a.m., and see what weather correlates with it," he says. Treatment strategy for allergies is three-pronged: avoidance of allergens, prevention of attacks and palliation of symptoms during attacks. Today, avoidance moves beyond air-conditioners and filters to focus on mold. Washing down walls with bleach and moldicides such as X-14 Mildew Remover can help.

Trouble spots include aquariums, house plants and flooded basements. Preventive drugs include corticosteroid nasal sprays like Rhinocort and Nasacort. Inhaled versions of similar steroids such as Pulmicort can help counter lung inflammation of asthma. Though newer steroids have less troublesome systemic side effects, patients should still system instead of extracts of the whole allergen, to inhibit the immune overreactions be hind allergy attacks, says Marshall Plaut of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Another advanced weapon is now being tested: a monoclonal antibody against immunoglobulin considered the master switch of the allergic response.

If successful, the antibody a joint project of Novartis, Tanox Biosystems and Genentech Inc. could help fight both allergies and asthma, Plaut says. At the AAAAI meeting in Washington, an Australian researcher explained mini-epidemics of asthma in Britain and Australia after thunderstorms. He found that rainstorms rupture grass-pollen grains, charging the air with tiny but highly allergenic fragments that provoked asthma attacks and swelled emergency room visits tenfold. Judith Hamilton, recently soldiered through a Bach cantata despite seasonal congestion..