Lucianne Goldberg, a New York literary agent and conservative provocateur who took on a Machiavelli-style role in the 1998 impeachment of president Bill Clinton by encouraging a former White House aide to secretly tape Monica Lewinsky discussing her affair with the president, has died aged 87.
For decades, Goldberg had cultivated a reputation as brash, brassy and sharp-tongued in her takedowns of progressive causes. As a younger woman, she co-wrote an anti-feminist manifesto called Purr, Baby, Purr and said she had been a spy for president Richard M Nixon’s campaign in his 1972 re-election bid. Later, after a long career writing or ghostwriting sexy potboilers and representing such authors as Kitty Kelley and discredited Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, she delighted in taking aim at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
