“My sister, a tax attorney for the IRS, is married to a woodworker-sculptor. They live in Reston, Virginia,” I said, before pausing to take a sip of my piña colada and looking over in Woodward’s direction. In the short time I had worked for him, I had come to recognize that Woodward always seemed to be engaged in some kind of internal struggle between his midwestern politeness and his innate impatience with anyone who wasn’t a potential source. Now his face was saying, Where are you going with this, Barbara?
I continued, “Recently, my brother-in-law was working in his studio when the phone rang. He answered, ‘Rick Wall’ and heard a female voice say, ‘Don’t be alarmed, but this is the CIA calling.’”
Though Rick started out as a furniture maker, he had expanded his repertoire to sculpture, and his recent work featured larger-than-life objects, like giant Mont Blanc pens and fire extinguishers constructed of wood with secret compartments. Rick’s work was being featured in local Washington galleries, and he had been favorably reviewed in the Washington Post. The woman on the phone said they wanted to explore the possibility of hiring him, but he wasn’t interested in building shelves at the CIA.
“But that’s not what they wanted,” I said. “The CIA needed someone to build spy furniture.”
I paused after “spy furniture.” They were just two words, but together they made a dangerous and enticing phrase. Everyone was listening now. I continued my narrative. After that initial phone call, the CIA arranged two interviews in an unmarked building in Foggy Bottom. They wanted a woodworker to build chairs with hidden compartments for cameras, lamps with antennae, tables with microphones. The agency’s plan was to fly my brother-in-law around the world to different diplomatic outposts where he would install drop boxes for secret documents. They wanted to know, for instance, if he could make a secret compartment in the trunk of a tree in the middle of a forest.
Woodward’s eyes were illuminated. It was an expression I would come to know, but this was the first time I’d seen it. I kept talking as he scribbled on his notepad.
Confidence momentarily replaced my jittery, eager-to-please demeanor. I was mimicking the sort of swagger that made it okay for the Bonapartes of the world to dismiss the girl Fridays of corporate America with lines like “Poor girls always have singles.” Swagger was a by-product of the predictable pedigree of a white male who had graduated from one of the Ivies, who had interned in the most prestigious newsrooms, and who had never shown any self-doubt (that is, if he even had any).
I had graduated from UC Berkeley, one of the finest schools in the country, but it never occurred to me that that gave me bragging rights. I looked at my life thus far as a series of happy accidents. If there is anything I want my female students and my own daughter to learn from my story, it’s that you have to claim what is yours.
The entire investigative unit was paying attention now, and before you could say “pupu platter,” my brother-in-law was slated to become front-page news. Woodward assigned the piece to one of the reporters, Chris Williams, who would later go on to Hollywood to write for TV. The story appeared soon after on the Post’s front page and was subsequently picked up by the international press. Rick was a guest on Charlie Rose’s middle-of-the-night show, Nightwatch. Two decades before the Internet became a thing, Rick went viral, and I had made it happen.
I hadn’t known what real Washington currency was until I found myself in possession of information others deemed interesting. This possession was exhilarating; the best description of it I discovered years later in Richard Ben Cramer’s iconic campaign book, What It Takes:
Alas, it is the surest sign that official Washington remains a precultural swamp that it has not offered mankind any refinement of language to illuminate its own constant preoccupation, the basic activity of its single industry, the work of its days and the spice of its nights, which is knowing. There are, in the capital, a hundred different ways to know and be known; there are fine gradations of knowing, wherein the subtlest distinctions are enforced. But to discuss this art and passion, we have only the same bland flapjack of a verb that flops each day onto our plates, along with the morning paper: To Know.
My bringing the spy furniture story, literally, to the table was my rite of passage, my entry into the kingdom of knowing. In Hollywood or New York you had to be something special: beautiful, or talented, or rich. In Washington, you just had to know. I was hooked.
Too distracted by the lure of investigative reporting to think about fiction, I completely abandoned my novel.
In that first year working for Woodward, I helped him and his reporters with research for their stories, getting clips from the newsroom library, reading through documents, transcribing tapes—basically whatever anyone needed. My gaps of knowledge about history, politics, and government were pretty big. I tried to make up for this by working really hard. The reward was that when I did a good job, they gave me a tagline—a sentence in italics at the end of the story that said “Researcher Barbara Feinman contributed to this report.” I collected them in a scrapbook and showed my parents when they came to town.
One December day, after I had been working for Woodward for several months, he came out of his office and said he had a little project for me. A book by Laurence Barrett revealed that in the final days of the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan’s team had mysteriously obtained Jimmy Carter’s briefing book for the October debate. Barrett reported that William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, had had a hand in stealing the briefing book. James Baker, who had prepped Reagan for the debate and later became Reagan’s chief of staff, swore under oath that he had received the papers from Casey. Casey denied it.
Woodward’s curiosity was piqued, and he wanted to look into the conflicting accounts and try to determine what had happened. The FBI’s investigation appeared to be incomplete, and the matter remained unresolved. Woodward wanted to know if the FBI had interviewed Reagan campaign staffers to see what they knew about Carter’s stolen papers.
The first hurdle was finding a list of people who had worked on the campaign. I have a memory of talking to a source on deep background—meaning I couldn’t quote him, but I could use the information he gave me. Woodward had sent me. I’m pretty sure it was for the Debategate story, but I don’t have a name for the source nor can I summon his face. I can, however, clearly see his office: the gray metal regulation desk, the messy stacks of files, a bookshelf behind the desk with reports haphazardly piled. An air of overwhelming bureaucracy and a sense of resignation permeated the room. The source was pleasant but inscrutable, giving me nothing to take back to Woodward.
I returned to the newsroom and said it was a bust. “Try again,” Woodward directed.
“Okay,” I said, even though I didn’t think it would do any good.
The second visit was as fruitless as the first, and that’s what I reported to Woodward.
“Go back one more time,” he said, his voice flat and his expression unsympathetic.
Woodward read my face, which was telling him I thought this was a waste of time.
“People rarely tell you everything they know in the first meeting,” he said.
I was silent, unconvinced.
“Or the second meeting, sometimes,” he added.
I was nervous when I showed up for the third time that the guy was going to call security. Instead, just like in the movies, he pushed a file toward me. “There’s a copy machine in the next room,” he said, nodding the direction with his head, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “No one is around. I’m going to lunch. Put the file back on my desk when you’re done.”
I returned to the office triumphant, as though it had been my idea to go back again and again. To Woodward’s credit, he congratulated me. Then he told me to get to work on the list.
“Me?”
Woodward laughed and nodded.
My mind flashed on that scene in All the President’s Men where Woodward had a list of names that had been found in one of the
Watergate burglars’ address books and started calling people. In his version he calls the White House and gets Howard Hunt. In my version, people hung up, numbers were changed, people weren’t home.
I began to feel discouraged until Woodward heard me on the phone and he patted my shoulder and said, “You’re doing great.” All that mattered to me then was living up to his expectations. I stayed late the next few evenings to work the phones for the story some more. Woodward stayed late, too.
At 9:30 p.m. one night Woodward got ready to leave and I was still dialing. He started to walk away after saying good-bye, but then he turned around and came back. He stopped and I stood up.
“I’m really impressed with you,” he said, “I haven’t seen someone work like you do—in a long time. You cast a big net over everything and draw it all in.”
I just stood there, afraid I would say something stupid—finally I uttered a thank-you.
That weekend I went to a colleague’s party and one of the guys on the investigative unit gave me a ride home. “Woodward’s a nice guy,” he says, “but he thinks he’s got a patent on reality.”
I laughed, but it scared me. I felt like Woodward had my future in his hands and that this was a safe place. It surprised me that someone who worked for him would speak about him with anything but reverence. Someone should have told me to stop acting like I was a hurricane victim and that Woodward was the Red Cross.
In those days, Woodward was known for his sharp reporting, and less so for his news analysis. But in an opinion piece accompanying the news story, he wrote, “Even though this is no Watergate, Debategate offers some troubling echoes of the past. There are questions about some top administration officials, about the attorney general’s conduct of the inquiry, about the FBI’s performance and about collective memory loss that is almost a contagion.”
The other piece that ran that day in the same section, headlined the fbi didn’t even ring once, described the agency’s investigation into the briefing book scandal, and after pointing out some of the bigger names they hadn’t contacted, the story noted:
Washington Post research assistant Barbara Feinman, working with Reagan campaign staff lists available to the FBI, last week found another nine people from the Reagan operation not contacted by the FBI, including Louise Bundy, the correspondence officer whose office handled all incoming mail; Kathryn Ahem, who worked at the front desk, and these others who worked in the campaign headquarters: Clifford Heverly, Anne Graham, Laura Genero, Karen Ceremsak, Donna Eiron, Penny Eastman and Anne Brooks.
A congressional investigation was launched, and the predictable partisan sniping and blaming ensued with the usual scapegoats and intrigue, and the matter was never conclusively put to rest. It certainly was no Watergate, but Woodward’s interest in it became obvious to me in November 1984; about six months or so after the Post’s coverage of Debategate had died down, I learned that Woodward was gearing up to write a book about Casey, who by this time was Reagan’s CIA director. Debategate proved to be an early case study of Casey’s tactics. Woodward traditionally hired a researcher to work with him solely on his books, and given my role as his researcher for his newspaper stories, I was next in line for this position. This was an exciting prospect, but almost as soon as I found out about the book, I also found out I wasn’t going to be the chosen one.
One morning I arrived in the newsroom to see Woodward interviewing a stream of young people. When I approached him to ask what was going on, he looked guilty and uncomfortable. He told me he was looking for a research assistant for his next book, and it had something to do with Central America and he really needed someone who spoke Spanish. I had had two years of French and two years of Italian and could barely ask for directions in either language.
My head started to spin. I couldn’t believe I was going to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because I had studied the wrong languages.
I asked Woodward if I could take a crash course, at Berlitz or something? He shook his head. He told me not to worry, that my job working for the investigative unit was safe. I was great at that, he assured me, and things wouldn’t change.
Devastated, I went home and crawled into bed before the sun set. The next day I didn’t get up; instead, when the morning light started to intrude, I pulled the covers over my head.
Recently I had moved from my Foggy Bottom apartment to a Capitol Hill row house that I shared with a couple of guys. I was tired of living alone so I had moved, happy to have more space and companionship. My male roommates were good people, but neither had had much experience consoling a distraught female. So one of them, a police reporter for the Post, unbeknownst to me, called the only other woman on the investigative unit, Athelia Knight, who was soon standing over my bed.
“Okay, so this is how you’re going to handle it?” she said, addressing the room since I was submerged in the sheets. “You’re giving up. Defeated. Okay, that’s fine. You can just stay in bed with the covers over your head. Or you could get dressed and go in to work and tell Bob why you have earned this job. Why you are the best person for this job.”
Athelia didn’t suffer fools. Which in her world included people who gave up without a fight. Not only was she the sole female reporter on the investigative unit but she was also one of just two African Americans on it.
This was 1984, and she was one of only a few people of color in the newsroom, and she had made a name for herself covering cops in the nation’s capital. At the time, she was working on a series about drugs being smuggled into the local prison by girlfriends and wives of inmates. She was fearless.
I slowly pulled down the covers, exposing my sad little, tearstained, cowardly face. Her eyes bore into mine. I got out of bed, got dressed, went down to the newsroom, and asked Woodward if we could talk.
“Sure,” he said, not making eye contact.
“I can do this job,” I said. “What’s more, I deserve it,” I went on, summoning up in my mind Athelia’s speech. “I’ve worked hard. I can learn Spanish.”
I wasn’t really sure, but I thought I saw a flicker of guilt when I said “Spanish,” which, given the fact that the whole “needing to know Spanish” thing was bullshit, made perfect sense.
“Okay, let me think it over,” he said.
The next day, I went into work and he told me the job was mine if I still wanted it, and he hoped I did. So we found a replacement for me as the staff researcher, and a few weeks later I began working solely as his researcher on a book that chronicled the CIA’s covert wars in Central America during the Reagan administration.
For the next three years, my responsibilities included researching, reporting, and editing for the book that would be called Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987, as well as for occasional breaking news stories about the unfolding Iran-Contra scandal.
Every young woman trying to find her way needs to have an Athelia in her life.
This was my first time researching anything longer than a newspaper series, and predictably Woodward’s standards were high. My confidence had been shaken by his charade of needing a Spanish-speaking assistant, and I also felt some shame at having retreated into the fetal position. I was relieved he had relented but also a bit shell-shocked. His reluctance to hire me had the effect of making me bound and determined to prove him wrong, which was useful because working on a book with him would prove to be an endurance test.
The hours were long because they could involve everything from conducting background research Woodward would use to prepare for interviews, to transcribing the tapes he brought back and synthesizing the information from different sources, to reading through interviews to find discrepancies or patterns among sources. I had to get up to speed fast on a raft of complex national security issues. Woodward suggested reading material to help with that, and soon I was carrying around books like The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, reading them on the subway or before I fell asleep at night.
We worked on the third floor o
f his beautiful Georgetown brownstone, our offices across the hall from each other’s. We were close enough that we could hear the tapping of each other’s keyboards, a sound that signified a challenge to see who could work longer. I always lost; Woodward could outwork anyone I had ever known then or have ever met since. And I’ve known my share of workaholics.
We established a steady routine, and after a few months, the book was taking shape. Though I seemed to be performing well enough, I still felt insecure because of the rocky way I got the job. Woodward, perhaps overcompensating, tried to make me feel more like “one of the guys,” even buying me a set of expensive golf clubs for Christmas because I had (half) jokingly noted that he and the other investigative reporters spent a considerable amount of time discussing stories they were working on while they were on the golf course, and I wasn’t a part of that general male bonding.
To no one’s surprise, golf was not my thing, and after schlepping the clubs from apartment to apartment through a series of moves, I finally sold them. Over the years, Woodward was very generous with gifts. I knew I wasn’t expected to reciprocate, but one Christmas I found the perfect present for him, a movie poster, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he proudly displayed in his den.
It was an endless blur of long days and nights that bled into each other. I felt part of the family, and over the three years I helped Woodward on his book I spent more time on Q Street than I did in my own apartment. I was fond of Elsa, a gifted writer and reporter who would become Woodward’s third wife in November of 1989. She made sure we took meal breaks and she insisted they take vacations, which meant I got time off. Also, I had grown close to his young daughter, Tali, whom I often picked up from her mom’s house or school. Working as a researcher on the book was lonely, and Woodward wasn’t much for chitchat so I found spending time with a lovely and engaging child a pleasant diversion. Looking back, I see that the bond I forged with his daughter probably didn’t help my campaign to be taken seriously. It was my choice, but it wasn’t a strategic one. It reinforced an image that was counter to what an ambitious young journalist should be presenting. And yet, the time I spent with her became a precious memory.
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