The Lives They Lived

[0] Hello.

[1] I'm Wesley Morris.

[2] I'm a critic at the New York Times and a staff writer at the Times magazine.

[3] And today we're going to do something a little different on the daily.

[4] Every year in December, the magazine puts out an issue called The Lives They Live.

[5] And it focuses on notable people who have lost their lives throughout the year.

[6] Some of the people in the issue tend to be very famous, and some of them tend to be people that very few people have heard of.

[7] But the point is to focus on the extraordinary and in some cases vividly ordinary life that someone lived.

[8] This year, of course, has been quite an extraordinary one for life and the loss of it, whether it was death as the result of COVID or from some form of racialized violence or death from any other cause.

[9] It's been a long year of grieving people.

[10] I guess, I mean, if there were a national emotion this year, it probably would be bereavement.

[11] And a very human thing to do at the end of a year is to stop and sort of take stock of the kind of year it was.

[12] And some of that involves acknowledging that, for example, some people who were here in 2020 aren't coming with us into 2021.

[13] To take a moment to reflect on what it's going to mean to not have them come forward with us into that next year.

[14] And to look at your life and the complexities of the life you're living through the lives that they lived.

[15] So here are four stories of lives lived and lost in 2020.

[16] Written in red by writers for the New York Times, including me, starting with Stanley Crouch.

[17] He loved jazz, so much that he was willing to fight for it with his fists.

[18] Okay, well, what I'm trying to say is that in reference to black art and black music, most black people know more about white people and imitation black people, imitation black artists, and they know about black artists, you know.

[19] That is that we have not only had our greatest artists hidden from us, but the white man has thrown imitators of those artists at us, and we know them even better than the ones that really did the first thing, you know?

[20] What I'm trying to say is this.

[21] If you were a New Yorker, out in the town in the late 1970s and 1980s, the sort of person who'd frequent house parties, bars, and clubs on a Tuesday night, Odds are fair that you'd run in to a large, well -dressed, bespectacled man. Odds are actually better that he'd run into you.

[22] And that at some point during the encounter, this charismatic dark -skinned cat might slip you one of his business cards.

[23] Nothing fancy.

[24] Vanilla even.

[25] A name, Stanley Crouch.

[26] A number.

[27] And this.

[28] An embossed pair of boxing clubs.

[29] 1908.

[30] Jack Johnson.

[31] Used to making white men mad because he was arrogant enough to carry himself as a man like they were.

[32] Finished chasing Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship title.

[33] That's my man. Crouch was known well as many things.

[34] Critic, intellectual, keeper of flames, holder of court, friend, opponent, epicure, castigator, acolyte, mentor, lover -crank snob contrarian of the bull.

[35] black condition.

[36] So, for instance, so see, this is what I find fascinating, is you have Barack Obama here, right?

[37] And there are supposedly questions about his authenticity.

[38] Then you have 50 cents over here.

[39] And there's supposed to be no questions about his authenticity.

[40] Boxing, though, animated a good deal of him.

[41] The gloves were a shorthand for temperament, misleading, too, since none of his fights, on the page, at a restaurant, in the offices of the Village Voice, where he was the Weekly's first black staffer, involved anything as formal or as gentlemanly as a glove.

[42] In 1988, he socked the voice's rap critic, Harry Allen, during a conversation about hip -hop, which Crouch flamboyantly loathed.

[43] It sells a lot of tennis shoes.

[44] It gets a lot of people to wear their hats backwards, And it gets a lot of people to put together this rhyme dog roll that they chant over sample bag beats.

[45] You're sounding like my father.

[46] I always said, oh, it's just bad rhyme.

[47] The fight caused Crouch's job.

[48] In 2004, he made the news when he slapped the literary critic and self -described hatchet man, Dale Peck, at a cozy French restaurant for bludgeoning Crouch's lone novel four years earlier.

[49] Such were his passions.

[50] They ruled him.

[51] If Crouch handed you that card, you were accepting an invitation to his intensity.

[52] Jazz is the only art that I know of that actually moves at what we call digital speed.

[53] Which veered from imposingly pugnacious to relentlessly genial.

[54] Gangsta?

[55] Chum.

[56] Even his affability could be a lot.

[57] Many of us were subjected to long, rambling, drum interludes over the phone that could be quite wearying.

[58] Recalled his longtime friend, Lauren Schoenberg, the saxophonist and jazz scholar.

[59] I loved it, he told me, laughing.

[60] Another friend, the trumpeter Bobby Bradford, recalled his phone ringing too.

[61] I remember distinctly once where he was doing something that he figured out about the hi -hat, Bradford said.

[62] That particular thing was good, very clever.

[63] But that wouldn't sustain a drum solo or an evening playing the drums, you know?

[64] So, yes, one of the country's preeminent jazz critics was also an endearingly inconsiderate player, of drums, no less.

[65] Crouch knew the music he tried to make was neither as muscular or dexterous as his writing on music.

[66] Iconiclasm was his hook, his uppercut.

[67] Which beloved text would he aspers?

[68] What Shibboleth would he undo?

[69] Which colossus would he raise?

[70] In recent years, the long tradition of America's own music, jazz has experienced a resurgence in popularity.

[71] Regular appearances on Charlie Rose's talk show made Crouch a sort of egghead famous.

[72] I think that the most important thing about all of these young musicians who play jazz is that they are exhibiting absolute freedom from mass media hype.

[73] See, there's nothing that tells a young musician to try to learn what the lonious monk was playing, what Charles Mingus was playing, the music of Duke Ellington.

[74] These people...

[75] Care about it and learn it and...

[76] And they think for themselves.

[77] Once in 1992, with the pianist Marcus Roberts and Crouch's good friend, Witten Marsalis, seated around Rose's table.

[78] Stanley, why are you smiling?

[79] Crouch surmised that if you had some rappers on here...

[80] If you had some rappers on here, you wouldn't get this level of discourse.

[81] That's why I know that we're going to win and they're going to lose.

[82] Clashing culture was music to him.

[83] Modernity versus tradition.

[84] Jazz, a particular classical era of jazz, against everything else.

[85] See, to actually play jazz, you see, to actually play jazz, have to be able to hear.

[86] Miles Davis, after 1960, was useless.

[87] Beyond the terrible performances and the terrible recordings, Crouch wrote in the New Republic in 1990, Davis has become the most remarkable liquor of moneyed boots in the music business.

[88] Criticism was his art, and he could get carried away with it.

[89] Take concert going.

[90] Whenever Schoenberg and Crouch went to see live music, they had to work out.

[91] an arrangement because Crouch liked to talk during the show about what was working and what stunk.

[92] We kind of sat separate and then talked after the set, Schoenberg said.

[93] Afterward, Crouch would walk right up to the band and critique the show to the players' faces.

[94] I don't think you could name me one of his peers, Schoenberg said, who had the authority or the respect of the musicians that when he went up on the bandstand and gave them his review right there.

[95] And it could be harsh that they actually 90 % of the time accepted it even if they might have rolled an eye or two.

[96] I've been so influenced by listening to jazz, by the interpretations of jazz made by people like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, and that I've come to see it as a truly American art form that has and that contains in the very way it's made.

[97] much of the sensibility of the country itself.

[98] Crouch was hard on women novelists and young rappers, the avant -garde, and his heroes.

[99] He deplored the woe of certain racial politics.

[100] His writing against black grievance, at least as he understood it, was meant to denounce the separatism, sense of inferiority, and pleas for special treatment that he suspected was curdling the way we talked about politics and art, the way we talked to each other.

[101] To a boxer, kid gloves are an insult.

[102] To a jazz man, a traditionalist, no less, no race that could invent that music should ever doubt itself.

[103] No race that invented that music should ever be anything other than original.

[104] Free, free thinking.

[105] We have, I believe, spiritually, emotionally, and aesthetically subsidized white America long as we have been here.

[106] That is that the world.

[107] white American culture, what has been considered, say, innovational, you know, has usually been whatever some white person was able to get his hands on that somebody black had already done, you know.

[108] What I'm saying is, that critical shove of Miles Davis down the elevator shaft in Crouch's essay, play the right thing, lasts for many thousands of words, and the thud still resounds.

[109] Crouch abandoned the drums to make that sort of noise, to perform the leaving of his mark.

[110] The performance hurt people, the pianist Cecil Taylor, whom Crouch outed as gay in 1982, his formidable mentor and friend Albert Murray, who distanced himself from Crouch after he disparaged the rigor of Murray's writing in a piece from the mid -1990s.

[111] Once when I visited him in New York, Bradford said, he was getting the hate mail by the bundles while he was working for the village voice.

[112] And he said to me, well, that's how I keep working, man, because this hate mail represents that people are reading what I'm writing.

[113] Crouch was a sportsman that way.

[114] Everything about him was don't try this at home.

[115] For here was a man who lived for more than thriving as a critic.

[116] He wanted to be criticism itself.

[117] Sheer Height.

[118] She explained how women orgasm and was hated for it.

[119] Written in red by Jasmine Hughes.

[120] Shear Height never set out to discover the female orgasm.

[121] As a child, she wanted to be either a classical composer or a person who could figure out how society got to be so irrational.

[122] But, as she once told an interviewer, how many women have you heard of becoming composers, right?

[123] So she obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in history instead.

[124] And in 1968, she enrolled in Columbia University's PhD program, where she ended up studying female sexuality.

[125] Around that time, Haidt modeled for extra money.

[126] She was booked for a television, commercial for Olivetti typewriters, but she later discovered it was being used for an advertising campaign with the tagline.

[127] The typewriter that's so smart, she doesn't have to be.

[128] Height was livid.

[129] She discovered that the National Organization for Women was protesting the campaign and decided to join them on the street.

[130] Soon after, she became a member of Now New York.

[131] By then, she had dropped out of Columbia, disheartened by its conservative standards for, for her studies.

[132] She came up with the idea to create a questionnaire about woman's ability to orgasm for a now discussion.

[133] She found a printing press that was Quaker during the day, but cheap and agnostic at night, and printed her 58 -question survey about female sexuality on pieces of colorful paper to match the colorful topic.

[134] In 1972, she began distributing them via now, as well as abortion rights groups, university women centers, church newsletters, in women's magazines.

[135] Haight received comprehensive responses, sometimes 14 or 15 pages, often from women who wrote in secret.

[136] Without university support, she called the answers herself over nearly half a decade, surviving on about $10 ,000 a year.

[137] The Haight report, published in 1976, provoked a sexual revolution, the second smallest thing that year to elicit extensive male anxiety, with the clit, literous being the first.

[138] Subtitled a nationwide study of female sexuality.

[139] It was based on the responses of more than 3 ,000 women, ages 14 to 78, who for the first time described how they felt about sex in their own words.

[140] What they liked, what they didn't, and to great male shock, how vital clitorial stimulation was to orgasm.

[141] Being asked these sorts of questions was clearly the release these women needed.

[142] Number 14.

[143] How do you masturbate?

[144] Please give a detailed description.

[145] Number 51.

[146] Do you think your vagina and genital area are ugly or beautiful?

[147] Height ran pages of women's responses to every question.

[148] The comments on faking orgasms run over 10 pages.

[149] Confessional, forlorn, and funny.

[150] Quote, Sometimes when I hate the partner and feel the state of my mind might lead him to violence.

[151] Quote, I went along for 34 years carrying the burden.

[152] of not having vaginal orgasms, never telling anyone because I felt something was wrong with me. Quote, yes, I always fake orgasms.

[153] It just seems polite.

[154] The book's bombshell was that woman couldn't reliably orgasm from penetrative sex, contradicting the wildly accepted Freudian theory that women who didn't were broken.

[155] According to Heid's work, approximately 30 % of women said they orgasm regularly from intercourse.

[156] Traditionally, this has been referred to as a problem.

[157] for women.

[158] Women have a problem supposedly having orgasm, but actually we don't have a problem having orgasm.

[159] The society has had a problem in how it defines sexuality.

[160] Of the 82 % who said they masturbated, almost all of them orgasm reliably from masturbation, which meant that women were orgasming all the time.

[161] They just didn't really need men for it to happen.

[162] Many women for all too long have had to, after sex with their husband or their lover, go into the bathroom, close the door and masturbate in order to have an orgasm.

[163] The problem, according to height, was our inaccurate expectations for sex.

[164] That's tragic and ridiculous at the same time.

[165] It didn't have to be a contest or a recipe.

[166] Instead, bodies should be in communication with each other.

[167] Penetration was not the only game in town.

[168] I certainly didn't expect it to be a bestseller.

[169] I thought this would be academic or it would be also for feminists, but I never expected a big media reaction.

[170] I certainly had no experience.

[171] Have you read my study completely from page to page?

[172] Nobody has read your study completely.

[173] After publication, Haidt was ambasted for being a man hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values.

[174] Sherry's report is flawed extensively, and she only asked women.

[175] Why didn't she ask any men what they thought?

[176] Social scientists and book reviewers alike castigated her for using unrepresentative samples of women that didn't match the census data.

[177] in order to draw her conclusions, calling her findings flawed and unreliable.

[178] Instead of communicating and saying there's something wrong, what they do is they pout or they have a particular attitude and you say, what's the problem and they don't want to tell you what the problem is.

[179] Well, you have a whole book of women telling what's the problem and men are reacting like they've been shot.

[180] Critics started referring to her as sheer hype.

[181] Playboy, the country's head cheerleader for male pleasure, refer to the book as The Hate Report.

[182] Let me just say, but I never once used the word men's fault in the book.

[183] Okay, so I never used the word fault.

[184] Maybe someday you'll read this book and then you'll know.

[185] She wrote three more reports on men in sexuality, on women in love, and on the family, each laden with new controversies, each receiving similarly vicious attacks.

[186] She received death threats and was followed by the paparazzi.

[187] She had to redirect her phone calls.

[188] It began taking a toll on her psyche.

[189] She invented staff members, a publicist, and an assistant, and sometimes assumed their identities when she spoke to the press, using them to defend her work.

[190] In 1995, she renounced her American passport and became a German citizen, claiming that the previous decade of intellectual attacks had left her unable to do the work she wanted.

[191] She lived in Europe until her death this year, writing one final book, The Hype Report on Share Height, Voice of a Daughter in Exile.

[192] autobiography published in 2000.

[193] The first chapter describes an innocent detail, the first time she masturbated, feeling a strong foreign desire come over her, and figuring out how to wriggle it out of her body.

[194] After all of her studies of women and men, pleasure and pain, of shame and disappointment, she realized that she'd had the ideal experience of discovering her sexuality, on her own not hearing about it first through pornography or seeing naked bodies displayed for profit on every newsstand but just alone in my room in my own bed finding my own sensual self we'll be right back the following is paid for and furnished by hair club for men limited this station is not responsible for claims made in the following program I've been a hair club client for a while now and what I love about it is is when I go got it done, it was just so quick.

[195] It was fantastic.

[196] It was like I went in for a regular haircut.

[197] I had heard about hair club.

[198] I thought, why not try it?

[199] Sysperlin.

[200] He made baldness a club you didn't need to be ashamed to join.

[201] Written in red by Taffy Brodesser Ackner.

[202] The hair club for men does everything that the advertisers say it does.

[203] The me that you see right now is the me that I want you to see.

[204] It's the best me. You are wearing a Mets cap.

[205] You are bald.

[206] It is 1979, or 1986, or 1989.

[207] It doesn't matter, because you're bald, and you live in a culture where a man's hair is his virility, is his masculinity, is his worth.

[208] You pass a movie theater that has a Rambo poster in the coming soon frame, Sylvester Stallone's mullet hanging down rectangularly, like his neck wanted a privacy shield.

[209] You live in the cold shadow of Tom Selleck's Magnum P .I. mustache.

[210] Your wife reads a novel with Fabio on the cover.

[211] They must have brought in a wind machine to make his hair blow around like that during the shoot.

[212] For most of civilized modernity, baldness remained the third rail of masculinity.

[213] Innovation in the hairless space is rare.

[214] You can wear a toupee, but people will know when the first strong wind comes around.

[215] You can get hair plugs, but what good is the sparse hair it will yield when people can tell what you did to get it?

[216] But you saw a commercial on TV during the game the other day.

[217] If your hair is standing like mine was, call now for your free video.

[218] In it, a man explains a hair weaving system.

[219] In our free video, you'll see our clients up close and natural.

[220] Their new hair responding under any condition just like their own.

[221] It sounds like something that might work for you.

[222] What with it being strange to wear this hat all day?

[223] And what with your hair being at a stage 5 or 6 on the Hamilton -Norwood scale of male pattern baldness?

[224] In the commercial, the man sits halfway, cool -like, on a desk, a bookshelf behind him.

[225] He introduces himself.

[226] I'm Cy Spurling, president of Hair Club for Men.

[227] A Cy Spurling, president of the Hair Club for Men.

[228] He's not too handsome, and he's certainly not a professional pitchman.

[229] He gives a speech that has been rehearsed and that he is or -rating in a Bronx, Long Island, slow -rolling diction that is hypnotic.

[230] If you've ever thought about doing something about your...

[231] your thinning hair, and this important new booklet is something you should have.

[232] And I'll see that you get it free if you call our toll -free number.

[233] He holds up a picture of a man who looks just like him, a man who is him, but who has only the Mr. Spacely side fringe of his hair left, a real Hamilton -Norwood, stage seven.

[234] He says he is the hair club president, but also...

[235] I'm not only the hair club president, but I'm also a client.

[236] He's a client.

[237] That totally ordinary looking Joe with a bouquet of hair is wearing a wig, a rug, a toupee, a custom -made hair rig using a proprietary hair club for men system.

[238] This shocked you, the startling admission of it, the delectable subversion.

[239] How can a president also be a client?

[240] Here is a man who did not appear to share your shame about his baldness, who addressed it as casually as if you were talking about fixing your carburetor.

[241] So you go.

[242] You arrive at the Madison Avenue headquarters, and you find not a storefront, but an office building.

[243] You get into an elevator, and when you will light onto the correct floor, you're in front of a giant monogram H .C .M. Nothing to give away to the other people on the elevator while you're there.

[244] You marvel at the black marble floor in the waiting room.

[245] You're brought back for a consultation where you sit on a leather sectional and are shown your hair restoration options on a TV with a built -in VCR.

[246] You are taken to the styling floor and treated to the hair club's strand -by -strand system during which a pretty woman makes a plastic wrap mold of the affected region of your scalp and then marks with a Sharpie where the new hair needs to go.

[247] Several strands of your remaining hair are pulled in order to match its color, texture, and curl.

[248] You come back in a few weeks.

[249] A custom piece of hair is then sewn into your remaining hair.

[250] In later years, they will glue it with a proprietary adherent called polyfuse.

[251] You weren't getting a rug.

[252] Sai had banned the word toupee.

[253] Dupeau implied in a contrement.

[254] What Sai was giving you was something that was now part of you.

[255] Shake your head.

[256] Get into that shower.

[257] Let a woman run her hands.

[258] through your glorious new Maine.

[259] There was nothing to call it except all yours.

[260] How had no one ever thought about approaching baldness with such kindness before?

[261] Maybe Sye came at it from a point of necessity.

[262] He was a born salesman, a charming guy who worked with his brother to sell home improvement products, swimming pools, carpeting, I kid you not.

[263] He himself was 26, when a point.

[264] Upon his scalp appeared the reflection of the light bulb over his head.

[265] He was divorced already with two kids.

[266] He was bald already.

[267] He was staring down the barrel of a life being the butt of a joke.

[268] He got his own hair replacement, and maybe it wasn't the most pleasant experience.

[269] He and his brother saw an opportunity and rented an office on 34th Street in a dingy walk -up and hired a few stylists and created their own not -too -pleasant experience.

[270] But Sye knew they could do better.

[271] So he took one of the stylists, the one he was dating, the one who ended up being his second wife, and rented a better place on Madison Avenue, right around the corner.

[272] What if hair restoration didn't need to be done in dingy walk -ups?

[273] What if you presented a man with a place that made this secret, shameful project feel more like a spa day?

[274] What if you made a person's worth as important as his hair?

[275] The business grew thick.

[276] Franchises sprouted everywhere.

[277] His widow, his third wife, Susan, told me he was moved when he was recognized, when a man in a restaurant with a full head of hair winked at him on the way to the restroom, or when someone stopped him in the condo to say his life was changed by his hair club experience.

[278] science spiraling got out of the game in 2000 just at the dawn of the power shave but there are more of his stores than ever before and it's not the hair club for men anymore it's now just called the hair club so that anyone can join and there are more options tattoo dots on your head that will simulate stubble called restorink and something called XT Extreme Hair Therapy, and something called Extrans Plus, and Sweet Lord, something called biographed.

[279] But fundamentally, Spurling's contribution was Balding's last great innovation.

[280] Not since he humbly, cheerfully displayed his own shiny paint and his own client status, and led the way to the promised land of dignified haredness, has anyone else been brave enough to speak up on the bald's behalf.

[281] There is no iconic spokesman for Rogaine.

[282] And this made spurling proud.

[283] It gave him a good life.

[284] It gave you one too.

[285] It was second only to having a full head of hair.

[286] Linda Tripp.

[287] She was cast as the ultimate villain during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

[288] Written in red by Irina Alexander.

[289] And let's face it, Monica, this situation is overwhelming.

[290] Won't it almost be two years?

[291] Yes.

[292] We're 15.

[293] Yes.

[294] We're in October.

[295] You have had two years of emotional health.

[296] How could you not be?

[297] You would have to be robotic not to be in a bad condition right now.

[298] Truly.

[299] So it's not you.

[300] You're a victim.

[301] Late one night in February of 2 ,000, 2004, a pregnant horse dropped into Linda Tripp's swimming pool.

[302] The horse's name was Aksana.

[303] She had wandered into Tripp's backyard and mistaking a pool covering for solid ground, fell in.

[304] Tripp, the former civil servant whose audio tapes of Monica Lewinsky, led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton six years earlier, was at home.

[305] She and her husband, Dieter Rauch, ran out and found Exana thrashing near the deep end.

[306] Tripp called for help, but her prospect The property sits at the end of a series of gravel roads in rural Virginia.

[307] If they waited, Aksana could drown.

[308] While Rauch cut the pool cover, Tripp's daughter, Allison, dove in to rescue Aksana.

[309] Eventually, the fire department arrived and pulled Aksana out of the pool.

[310] A month later, Aksana gave birth to a healthy foal.

[311] Before Allison told me this story, I'd heard it from Leon Nefuck, who interviewed Tripp in 2018 for his podcast, Slow Burn.

[312] Mayfak ended up not using the anecdote.

[313] Like the ducks that once landed in Tony Sopranos pool, the horror story seemed to contain some key symbolism.

[314] But what was it exactly?

[315] To review, in 1996, Lewinsky, a former White House intern, found her way to Tripp's cubicle at the Pentagon and began confiding in Tripp about her affair with the president.

[316] The last time I heard from him was October 23rd.

[317] But the ground was not solid.

[318] Yeah, but remember, I mean, before that, it was pretty routine.

[319] Relative.

[320] It started to slow down.

[321] Tripp made secret recordings of their conversations, which she then gave to Ken Starr, an independent counsel investigating the president.

[322] She said she did this to help Lewinsky.

[323] So who was the horse?

[324] And who was drowning?

[325] Did anyone actually get saved in that story?

[326] Tripp was portrayed not as the hero, but as the villain of the impeachment scandal.

[327] The tapes confirmed the affair, but they also revealed.

[328] Tripp sustained deception.

[329] It was Tripp who had encouraged Lewinsky to not dry clean the blue gap dress, to ask the president for a job, to use a messenger service to send him letters, all to build a body of evidence.

[330] I believe that had I been documenting a very crucial time in this sequence of events, there would be no doubt in any of your minds, certainly not in the minds of the public, that there was complicity in ensuring that Monica Lewinsky received a job for her silence.

[331] Recent years have been kinder to women we've judged harshly.

[332] Just see Hollywood's rehabilitation of Tanya Harding, Marsha Clark, and Lorena Bobbitt.

[333] Lewinsky, everyone now seems to agree, was at the very least taken advantage of by her boss and slut -shamed by the country.

[334] Trip is unlikely to ever get the same redemption.

[335] But now that we have a better understanding of how stories are told and by whom, reducing her to a one -note villain feels like lazy storytelling.

[336] I know what it's like to be in the crosshairs of the most powerful person in the world.

[337] To be attacked viciously, not because I said something untrue, but because I said something people did not want to hear.

[338] Restoring humanity to her doesn't in any way let her off the hook, the filmmaker Blair Foster told me. It only makes her more interesting.

[339] With her A &E documentary, series The Clinton Affair, Foster set out to return full -personhood, not only to Lewinsky, but also Paula Jones, who described Clinton inviting her to his hotel room, where he exposed himself to her, and Juanita Broderick, who accused him of rape.

[340] Like those women, Tripp was eviscerated in the press.

[341] Hi, I'm meeting a friend here.

[342] Your name?

[343] Monica Lewinsky?

[344] Oh, yes.

[345] Right this way.

[346] This trip is already here.

[347] On Saturday Night Live, she was played by John Goodman.

[348] who screwed his face into a rodent -like grievous.

[349] I enjoyed talking to you last night about your numerous sexual trist with President Bill Clinton.

[350] And shoveled fast food into his mouth.

[351] The crux of the joke was her weight and her looks.

[352] No, Linda, you have been such an amazing friend to me, and all I ever do is talk about myself.

[353] I want to hear what's going on with you.

[354] Do you still want to get liposuction on your jowls?

[355] The president got to be a fully formed human who's flawed and complex, Foster said.

[356] But the women were always reduced to stereotypes, and that includes Linda.

[357] Allison told me that to understand her mother, we have to begin with her childhood in New Jersey in the 1950s.

[358] Her father was an American soldier when he met her mother, then a teenager in Germany, where he was stationed.

[359] He was unfaithful and physically abusive, and according to Allison, Tripp received regular beatings.

[360] A raging bully is how Tripp later described, described him.

[361] It is probably a good part of the reason that I could not tolerate the behavior of Bill Clinton, the Supreme Bulley, all those years later, she wrote in her book, A Basket of Deplorables.

[362] Eventually, Tripp's father ran off with another woman, leaving Tripp with no money for college.

[363] She attended secretarial school and a 21 married an army lieutenant.

[364] Once they divorced in 1990, Tripp's career thrived.

[365] She got a job in the Bush White House and stayed on for the Clintons.

[366] In 1993, she was transferred to the Pentagon, where Lewinsky arrived three years later.

[367] One of the great mysteries is why Tripp did what she did.

[368] The reasons given at the time, mostly not by her, were Myriad.

[369] She was an opportunist after a book deal, being that it was the book agent, Lucien Goldberg, who advised her to make the recordings.

[370] She was part of that, quote, vast right -wing conspiracy that Hillary was always talking about.

[371] She loathed the Clintons, whom she saw as hippies invading the White House.

[372] Among the offenses she lists in her book were their jeans, takeout boxes, and rings left by soda cans.

[373] But according to Tripp, it was none of the above.

[374] She felt it was her moral duty to expose the president and rescue Lewinsky from a man she considered a sexual predator.

[375] You know, in my case, my duty, my oath was to the office of the presidency, to the institution, not to the sitting incumbent.

[376] And I was true to that oath.

[377] I told the truth.

[378] But I do fault myself for not having the gumption or the courage to do it sooner.

[379] Its plausible trip wanted to hold someone she saw as a bad man accountable.

[380] But that doesn't feel like the whole story.

[381] Was publicly humiliating Lewinsky the best way to save her?

[382] Or to entrust the matter to a special counsel and a book agent?

[383] Did Tripp not see that, or did she choose not to?

[384] That's the ultimate question.

[385] Did she believe that herself, Neufax said?

[386] And the answer to that, I think, is yes.

[387] How does that make you feel that 97 % of America hates you?

[388] It feels like high school.

[389] Trip was deeply hurt by how she was perceived.

[390] Starting in 1999, she got extensive plastic surgery, including a nose job, a chintel, and a facelift.

[391] I did not realize how ugly I was until I saw the pictures, she told 2020.

[392] Then she mostly retreated from public view.

[393] She moved to Middleburg, Virginia, and married Rausch, a childhood friend from summers she spent visiting her mother's family in Germany.

[394] Together, they opened the Christmas sleigh, a year -round holiday store.

[395] Lovely gal was how Joanne Swift, the owner of the shop next door, described her.

[396] punkin lee who owns journeyman saddlers where linda shop sometimes told me people are people we take them as people not what you read about them a few years ago tripp's granddaughter peyton learned about her grandmother in school omi were you a bad person peyton asked and so tripp set out to clear her legacy she began writing a book but died before she could finish it her co -writer finished it without her giving the book its title, which Allison described as, quote, a slap in the face.

[397] It is out this month, posthumously.

[398] It's hard to know how Trips saw her story in the end.

[399] On Slowburn, she sounded regretful about deceiving Lewinsky.

[400] But to say it was distasteful, to this day I have enormous guilt about doing that.

[401] And of all the people I care about understanding, she is the one I wish I could convince.

[402] I expected more of this when I picked up her book, but that's not what it is.

[403] Tripp's eye for the Clintons in it is boundless.

[404] Her writing on Lewinsky, whom she calls narcissistic, a flake, and a pampered princess, is unkind.

[405] She says they were never really friends, and so hers wasn't really a betrayal.

[406] And anyway, Lewinsky's betrayals of other people were far worse.

[407] Part of what makes it all hard to read is the obvious hurt and anger of someone who felt so fundamentally misunderstood.

[408] The more evidence stripped mouths to clear her name, the more it is like watching a thrashing animal unable to escape a trap of her own making.

[409] Here's what else you need to know today.

[410] More than 30 nations, including Russia, India, and Canada, have now banned travelers from Britain, suspending flights and cutting off trade routes as alarm grows over a highly transmissible variation of the coronavirus that has spread rapidly across the U .K. That set off panic buying inside Britain as residents feared food shortages in the days before Christmas.

[411] British medical officials say that while the variation may be more infectious, it is no more dangerous or lethal than the original virus.

[412] Still, many countries took extraordinary steps to keep it out.

[413] Saudi Arabia, for example, is banning all international travel for the next week.

[414] Why don't we act intelligently for a change?

[415] Why don't we mandate testing before people get on the flight or halt the flights from the UK now?

[416] So far, the United States has not banned travel from the UK, but under an agreement reached with the governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.

[417] Both British Airways and Delta will require a negative coronavirus test before a passenger can board a flight from the United Kingdom to New York.

[418] This is a major problem.

[419] And for us to once again be incompetent as a federal government and take no action is not a viable option for us in New York.

[420] Today's episode was produced by Kelly Prime, Michael Simon Johnson, and Eric Krupke, with help from Perrin Beruze.

[421] It was edited by Mike Van Nuwa and Lisa Tovin and engineered by Marion Lazano.

[422] That's it for the Daily.

[423] I'm Michael Babaro.

[424] See you tomorrow.