Mrs. Graham visited our class that April. It was clear that still, after all these years, and so many successes, they both felt really lucky. They shared the strange combination of confidence and a sense of having good fortune. The bond between the two of them was as strong as ever. We all sat in a circle, about fifteen students, Ben, Mrs. Graham, and me. Mrs. Graham talked about meeting Ben and hiring him, how he tread gently at first, not wanting to barge into the newsroom and be perceived as a heavy-handed manager who didn’t understand the existing culture.
“He wasn’t very pushy or anything. It was a good beginning,” she said.
This was nearly the end of the semester, and Ben had enjoyed teaching and was very fond of the students. “Kay was right. I didn’t really know her very well but . . . this is someone whom I love. And someone who is such a fine person. So gutsy.”
I remember the classroom was silent. Everyone understood that just to be in their company in such a small, private space was a gift. For journalism students, this was as good as it gets.
After a while we realized that Ben wasn’t producing pages very quickly or consistently. We came to the conclusion that one way to get a book out of him would be for me to interview him. The interviews, if we went chronologically, would provide an organic structure, and as we amassed anecdotes and events we would be able to determine what to include and where to fill in material we got from the interviews we did with other people. I would then transcribe the tapes and provide him with all the material he needed to write each chapter and then the chapters would come back to me for editing, proofreading, and fact-checking before we sent them up to Alice.
So we set up a schedule of appointments and met at the designated hour over several months. We started with no ground rules: I could ask Ben anything I wanted, and he could answer any way he chose. This is one of the vexing things about being a researcher or book doctor or ghostwriter; you have amazing access to material but little editorial control.
But it was enough for me, plenty in fact, to be in his presence and to have license to sate my curiosity. And, like anyone familiar with Ben’s history, I was curious about his friendship with President Kennedy. They had become friends when the young senator and Jackie moved in across the street from Ben’s Georgetown house.
Ben had written a short book called Conversations with Kennedy that was published more than a decade after the president’s assassination. It left me with more questions than it answered, particularly about Kennedy’s infidelities, which spoke to a lapse in judgment and his basic decency as a spouse. I wondered if that affected Ben’s view of this man he professed to admire so greatly?
Much has been written about whether Ben knew about his friend’s infidelities while they were going on. Ben told me time and again that he hadn’t known, not even that his own sister-in-law, the sister of Tony Bradlee (Ben’s second wife), had had a two-year affair with Kennedy when he was in the White House. While that shocked Ben, he told me what shocked him even more was learning later about the president’s involvement with Judith Exner, the mistress of a Mafia member. Besides shocking, he told me, he found it depressing to learn that the president of the United States and a Mafia leader shared a mistress. He noted that could never happen now, that society had changed so much. He mused that a president would be completely disgraced. Kennedy’s recklessness troubled him deeply. It was something I could see he hadn’t resolved in his own head, even after all these years. But since he couldn’t come to terms with it, he just compartmentalized it.
President Kennedy’s secret private life seemed like something out of an airport thriller. A cartoonish dashing president who puts the nation at risk with his foolhardy dalliances. Was Ben sure that the affair had happened? This sounded like one of those stories that Ben deemed “too good to check.”
He said he was sure and noted that one of the great Washington status symbols was to have access to private phone numbers of public people. Ben had them and so did Exner, in particular, the direct dial to Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.
This was one of those conversations that reminded me how much I loved my work. I was talking to a newspaperman who had been an intimate of perhaps our nation’s most glamorous first couple. And witnessing Ben mentally time-travel back thirty years to the 1960s made the Kennedys all the more real.
“Were they in love?” I asked, referring to the president and First Lady.
Ben paused, reflecting. He thought despite all the womanizing that Jack did love Jackie. And Jackie, how did she feel about her husband? You could never really know what was in someone else’s heart. But it seemed to him she was truly in love with who she hoped the president was. But also, it was obvious to Ben that she had taken to the First Lady role and she enjoyed the whole Camelot thing, right up to the end. “She did so well in the funeral. She was just extraordinary.”
When we got to the 1970s and Watergate, I felt more prepared than I had for earlier events. I had read Woodward’s and Bernstein’s books, seen the movie, and I had dug into Ben’s files. I not only was familiar with the material, but I knew some of the players. The hard part was coming up with a question for Ben that he hadn’t already been asked and answered or dodged a thousand times. This challenge illuminated for me something I’ve raised with my journalism students over the years: How do you find a new way to approach old news?
Even if readers weren’t expecting Ben to divulge some previously withheld piece of information, they would rightfully be looking for his insights gained in the years following Watergate. So instead of questioning him about the Post’s reporting on the scandal, I prodded him to reflect on what it had all meant and how it had affected official Washington and the way the news is reported.
We had decided we would do these sessions in my airless little office because it was tucked away on another floor far from the newsroom with its distractions and curious onlookers. I’ll never forget how odd Ben looked, with his broad shoulders and big persona, folded into the one small, uncomfortable chair I had for visitors. I was behind my desk, and it felt even odder with our roles, or at least the power balance, seemingly reversed.
So what to ask him about the Watergate years? Deep Throat as a topic was a nonstarter. Having worked for all three of these Watergate legends, I knew how seriously they all took the sanctity of the secret. (It would be another fifteen years until former FBI official Mark Felt revealed through a spokesperson in a 2005 Vanity Fair piece that he was Woodward’s source dubbed “Deep Throat.”)
But one day I did ask Ben: “Do you get sick of it, the Deep Throat part of it, people always asking you who it is?”
“I mean, they always sort of [ask] Who’s Deep Throat, that’s sort of a standard. No, I can say this to you, there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
My heart sank. I was both fascinated and disturbed. I thought about the Bill Casey deathbed scene and the flap that broke out when Veil was published. People cast doubt on whether it had actually happened, including Casey’s own wife. But I had been there that day when Woodward came back from the interview; it was still fresh in my mind because that was just four years earlier. It was too much of a stretch for Woodward to have gone to the hospital, concocted the deathbed conversation, and then returned home and playacted his excitement over the “get.” I didn’t believe that Woodward would have embellished what happened with Casey or Deep Throat or anything else.
“And do you think that’s partially because of the Janet Cooke thing?” I asked Ben.
The Janet Cooke debacle had been one of the few incidents in Ben’s career that he hadn’t been able to shake off. (Woodward, who was Metro editor at the time, also felt stained by the episode, publicly sharing responsibility for the false story having been published.) Cooke was a young and ambitious Metro reporter who had fabricated a story about “Jimmy,” an eight-year-old heroin addict who had been turned on to the drug by his mother’s boyfriend. The front-page story rocked the city of Washington as
officials scrambled to find the boy and save him.
Well, the reason they couldn’t find him was that he didn’t exist. But this wasn’t revealed until after the reporter won a Pulitzer and discrepancies in her bio began to surface. This took much longer to happen than it would in today’s Internet world. For the paper riding high on the glory of Watergate, this was a disaster that happened under Ben’s watch, one he never completely got over.
He brooded about it on the rare occasions he allowed his mind to go there. The brooding led to his fascination with deception. He immersed himself in the topic, carefully studying the work of Sissela Bok, a Harvard professor who studied liars and their motivations. People lying to you, your sources or your own reporters, was the one thing he didn’t know how to guard against in any sort of foolproof way, and that gnawed at him. Sure, you could have a two-source rule, but what if two sources lied to you? Or what if the reporter lied to his editors about having two sources? I was used to hearing him muse along these lines, but this was the first time he had done so specifically in the context of the Post’s Watergate coverage.
“I mean, I know that you trust them, but do you think that that fear—” I asked. Alarmed, I was trying to get him to say that it was an irrational fear that prompted him to wonder about this stuff.
I was afraid this rare moment of introspection was about to pass, this uncharacteristic raw reflection was quickly dissipating. I wanted the honesty for the good of the book but at the same time, I was troubled by the honesty. “You can’t argue with success. I mean, one way or another they were right. Whether they’ve embellished that or not,” Ben said.
He was now talking more to himself than to me, noting that Woodward had promised to reveal the identity of his famously unnamed source after the mystery man died. When that happened, Ben speculated, it would set off a flurry of people trying to fact-check whether it was true.
While he was imagining a day in the future when Deep Throat died and his identity could then be revealed, my mind flashed on something else, something I had wondered about but never actually expressed aloud. Now was my chance: How did Ben feel about the Casey deathbed confession?
Ben said he had no doubts about whether Woodward had actually gained entry into Casey’s hospital room.
I told Ben that Woodward had sent me there first, to locate Casey—who was checked in under an alias—and scope out the security situation. I admitted to Ben that I went but chickened out, that I felt nervous and uncomfortable and returned home empty-handed. I described how excited Woodward was when he returned from having found Casey.
“I have some doubts as to what Casey said,” Ben told me.
I was stunned. Not that he thought this, but that he was saying it to me. I wasn’t his wife. I wasn’t Katharine Graham. I wasn’t important. But maybe that was the point.
We talked about how sick Casey was, reportedly sedated and totally out of it from his recent brain surgery.
It wasn’t that Ben thought that Woodward lied. He believed Casey said something. But whether or not it was coherent was the question. What Woodward was claiming, Ben said, was so dramatic. “There was no retreat from that story once it was out.”
My heart sank.
After the interview I transcribed it, as I did all our sessions, threw the cassette tape in the filing cabinet with the others, and printed out the transcript for Ben. I sometimes underlined passages I thought he should include or expand upon. I didn’t with this one: better to pretend it hadn’t happened. If Ben uttered these doubts in public, he would be disloyal to Woodward. But if he stayed silent, was he honoring the best, most obtainable version of the truth? These two ideals were at odds with each other here in an irreconcilable way. An unintended lesson I learned in my role of amanuensis was that the lure of a compelling narrative can sometimes conflict with one’s concept of loyalty. I was a friend before I was a journalist, an admirable quality or a professional failing, depending on your vantage point.
I felt uncomfortable and wished I could unknow what I had just heard and willed myself to forget the conversation after I transcribed it. Call it denial. Call it survival. Whatever you call it, it would be more than two decades before I would be asked to revisit that conversation.
Five
The Jewish Amy Tan
Fall down seven times, get up eight.
—Variously attributed Japanese proverb
I continued to work with Ben while he wrote his autobiography, interviewing him, acting as a sounding board, and researching to fill in memory gaps and provide context. During that time, I also wrote occasionally for the Post, trying to keep my hand in the game.
One time I submitted an essay to the Post’s Sunday Outlook opinion section. It was about living in the nation’s capital, a place whose culture and climate I was becoming less enamored of the longer I stayed. I had become restless and talked about leaving. I felt mismatched with a city obsessed with politics rather than art and literature. I blamed geography because it was easier than blaming myself. More to the point, I should have reflected on why I was still playing the role of assistant rather than focusing on my own work. Instead, I projected my dissatisfaction onto the muggy, steamy city.
Since I hadn’t heard back whether the piece was accepted or rejected, after working with Ben one day, I stopped by the desk of an editor at Outlook. I knew him from my days at Style. He was an eccentric, gifted wordsmith who had a highly excitable affect that involved a lot of stammering and gesticulating.
“You wrote this?” he said, peering at me over his glasses, which were slipping down the bridge of his nose.
“Yes, of course I wrote it.”
Though he meant no harm, I was crushed. He was merely struggling to reconcile his preconceived notion of me as a girl Friday, mystified by the outlandish notion that I was a writer in my own right. I’m sure it would have horrified him to know that the question he blurted out would become a memory with no expiration date. He ran my article the next Sunday.
“Gauguin did it,” I’d written on the topic of fleeing. “Just picked up and left. I wonder what the pollen count is in Tahiti. I have lost my joie de Washington. I am languid at best, catatonic at worst. It is more than the humidity. It is a reaction to a place where people mark events in their lives as personal as deaths and weddings with phrases like ‘before the election’ or ‘after the inauguration.’ I want to live in a place where phrases like ‘before the drought’ or ‘after the flood’ carry more weight.”
My family and friends laughed about the piece. I was the girl who cried wolf, always talking about leaving Washington and never following through. I was now in my early thirties and hadn’t made any overtures to build a life elsewhere. A few readers wrote in, both those who agreed and those who didn’t, one reader remarking that I had neglected to appreciate the beauty of the city, focusing only on negatives.
I thought I was profound and jaded, that I had seen it all. I had no idea what Washington still had in store for me.
Ben and I worked at a relaxed but steady pace. He seemed to be in no hurry to get the book done, and I welcomed the contrast from the intensity of Woodward and the chaos of Bernstein. My days had a leisurely pace to them. During Ben’s writing of the manuscript, he would sometimes send me to the Post library to check a fact or get more information about something. Once he was finished writing a chapter I would fact-check it and make suggestions when I thought he should make something more clear or fill in an anecdote or cut a scene that didn’t work.
Sometimes he would get an idea for the How to Read a Newspaper book, and he would give me something to research, maybe an old article to dig up that would illustrate an idea he had. And he loved finding funny corrections in other newspapers. The longer and stranger a correction, the bigger the kick he got out of it.
When I felt antsy, I roamed the newsroom and found someone to chat with or stopped by Ben’s office to hang out with his secretary, Carol Leggett, with whom I had become good friends.
; This less demanding schedule meant I had enough time to pursue a master’s degree in English at nearby Georgetown University, something I wanted to do because I was toying with the idea of teaching. My mother had taught high school English, and my growing interest in teaching reflected my wanting to keep her close. I had enrolled in the fall of 1990, a year after her death. Georgetown’s campus was walking distance from Ben and Sally’s house, so I arranged my schedule to work there on the days I had early evening classes. Being in an academic environment, surrounded by people who loved books, compelled me to return to my own novel, incorporating it into my studies when I took a class in women’s autobiography and the autobiographical novel.
After a few semesters at Georgetown, I finally finished my Poor Girls Always Have Singles manuscript, which I had retitled Miss Fortune. I thought that was an easier title to remember and that it might more easily catch the eye of an agent or editor. I still clung to my dream of becoming a novelist.
An aptly named Post colleague, Charlie Trueheart, offered to give the first hundred pages of my novel to his literary agent. About a week later, the agent called excitedly and proclaimed that this novel would make me “the Jewish Amy Tan.”
I shared this news with a few friends, and one of them brought over a bottle of champagne, and giddily we emptied it while imagining a future filled with book tours, royalties, and reviews. But my hopes were quickly dashed when the agent called to say he felt the remaining two hundred pages “didn’t deliver what the book initially promised.”
The words stung terribly, but I decided I wasn’t quite ready to give up. The agent had also said that I could rework those disappointing pages and then, if they were to his liking, he would try to sell the novel. I asked Ben for two weeks off without pay, and I feverishly edited and revised the manuscript, attempting to fix subplots and strengthen the overall story arc. At the end of the two weeks, I sent the manuscript to the agent, and again he wasn’t impressed.
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