Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  The worst discovery of all was up in my bedroom on the third floor, where I found two birds still alive. They were crazed, panicky, injured, and weak from starvation. I thought I was going to be sick when I found them. I yelled for the senator, who came running up the stairs and instantly went into Navy SEAL mode: no expression, no emotion, just I’ll deal with it. He asked for a broom, gloves, and garbage bags and then told me to go outside.

  When he finally appeared, I asked where the two surviving birds were. He said he had killed them.

  Why? I thought. How could you? Was that really your only option?, etc.

  He had to kill them. They were nearly dead; it was the humane thing to do. But somehow that was lost on me. All I could focus on was the act’s gruesomeness, and something had shifted, at least in my mind. I felt he had let me down, or I had let him down. It was unarticulated, but it was there. Sometimes it takes the lens of time to give you clarity. In that particular instance, it took two decades.

  The project with Bob Kerrey had pretty much fallen into my lap. One evening the previous spring, shortly before I left on my Maine adventure, I went to a get-together at the home of my friend Martha Sherrill, then a staff writer for the Post’s Style section, who also wrote occasional celebrity profiles for Esquire. She lived in a tony Georgetown row house that accommodated the dinner parties she enjoyed hosting.

  Flip Brophy, who was her agent as well as mine, was down from New York for a few days to meet with her various D.C. clients, and last minute, Martha decided to throw a dinner party for her. Martha had invited Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, a decorated war hero who had run for the presidency in 1992. The only other thing I knew about Bob was that when he was governor, he had caused quite a stir when his actress girlfriend, Debra Winger, moved into the governor’s mansion. He was divorced, and she was single, but the media couldn’t resist obsessing over a politician and a sexy movie star cohabiting in the nation’s heartland.

  I had interviewed plenty of members of Congress, first during my party reporting years and then during the Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky project, but I wasn’t in the habit of socializing with them and it wasn’t something on my bucket list, given how stiff I found many of them. But I knew Bob Kerrey was one of Flip’s clients so that gave me hope he might not be the typical buttoned-up politician.

  Reality surpassed expectations.

  Sometime between salad and dessert, I learned that Bob (we were by this point on a first-name basis) was trying to write a war memoir. When I asked how much of the manuscript he had completed, Flip laughed. I guess you could say his enthusiasm, up to that point, had apparently exceeded his output. He had lots of reasons: It was hard to carve out the time. He wasn’t getting much traction when he did sit down to write. There was crucial research to be done. He and I talked books for a while, and then the conversation drifted to other topics, laughter punctuating the chatter.

  Martha is not just a gifted writer. She is also a masterful cook and that night, as always, the food was great and the wine was plenty. By the time we made our way to the candlelit dining room, we were all very relaxed. I guess I was particularly relaxed. There are mean drunks and happy drunks, and then there is me, a storyteller. Give me a glass, and I’ll tell you an anecdote. Give me a bottle, and I turn into Scheherazade. Somehow I found myself telling my dinner companions about a date I had gone on the week before, one that Flip had set me up on while I was in New York City.

  I explained that I thought the date went well but I hadn’t heard from him. I wanted to know if they thought I should call him.

  Bob asked where my date lived and I thought for a moment and then replied, “Brooklyn.”

  The table considered my options, gave me some advice, and then the topic turned elsewhere. Meanwhile, Bob had left the room, saying something about needing to call in about a vote. In the background we could hear him on the phone in Martha’s kitchen.

  Then he was back in the dining room, standing behind me, rattling off addresses he had written on the back of an envelope.

  Slowly it dawned on me they were New York street addresses. I turned around, horrified, and saw Bob laughing and heading back to the phone, then dialing.

  “You bastard!” I screamed. “Stop him! He’s calling Michael Epstein!”

  I ran after him, wrestled the phone from him, pleading with him. He gave up and returned to the table.

  I never heard from Epstein but Bob did.

  A year and a half later, Martha wrote a profile of Bob that Esquire published. In it, she recounted that anecdote and Epstein saw it. He wrote a tongue-in-cheek note to Bob at the Senate, telling him which address in directory assistance was his. And under his name, where a letter writer’s title would go on a formal business letter, he had typed: “Hypnotic Television Producer.” That was in reference to Martha’s lead-in to the anecdote:

  One of the dinner guests, a Washington writer named Barbara Feinman, had told a long hypnotic story about a blind date she had been on in New York with a TV producer named Michael Epstein.

  Note that Martha had written that I had told a “long, hypnotic story,” not that Michael Epstein was “hypnotic.”

  Sheesh. Men.

  Besides my less than successful love life ending up in a national magazine, the other thing to come out of that dinner was that Bob called me and asked if I would be interested in helping him with his book.

  After meeting to talk logistics, I readily signed on to help Bob. I was excited about the project. The structure was going to prove to be a little tricky, complicated because he had two stories to tell: his own Vietnam War experiences as a Navy SEAL and his uncle John’s (his father’s brother) as a captured soldier in World War II. Much of the original impetus for writing the book was that Bob had promised his father on his deathbed that he would investigate the mysterious circumstances of Bob’s uncle John’s death. I intuited that while it was important to Bob to keep the promise he had made to his father, what was really compelling him was a need to unburden himself of something in his own past.

  I had come to understand that the price of vulnerability—of presenting yourself as a real person in an age of Photoshop, branding campaigns, and crisis management teams—is too much to pay for politicians who are in perpetual campaign mode. I was intrigued by how the tension between a writer’s urge to tell and a politician’s instinct to obscure would play out in this project.

  I sensed Bob might be willing to go to that place of truth telling that makes writing “come alive.” When I had run into trouble with clients in the past, it was usually when I tried to hold up a mirror to what was really there rather than reflect back the image they wanted to project. I didn’t think that would happen this time: I felt liberated by Bob’s motivation to write a book; rather than further his political career or make money, his compulsion to tell this story grew out of a sense of unfinished business on a psychic level.

  As I got to know him, I was struck, again and again, by Bob’s creativity and unusual mix of prankster, tortured soul, poet, policy wonk, and businessman. In the same day, he could spend the early morning hours lost in the solitary activity of cutting up magazines and pasting images into montages that he created for his friends and himself. Then he would put on a suit and a tie and go vote on a bill or take to the Senate floor to debate some policy issue.

  It was clear from that first evening that Bob was a complex man. Simultaneously approachable and inaccessible. He was charming and funny. He was a gold mine for the magazine political profiler because his quirkiness made for great copy. It was easy to forget that just a few years earlier he had been a presidential candidate, running against Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primary.

  Bob’s candor was disarming and refreshing, an oasis of authenticity in a culture where character can be as malleable as Play-Doh. But that proclivity for being who he really was is what set his handlers on edge and sometimes led to him being his own worst opponent, like the time he told an off-color joke about lesbians to f
ellow candidate Bill Clinton with an open C-SPAN mike nearby. People loved his candor but that didn’t necessarily mean they felt comfortable sending him to the White House. He dropped out shortly after finishing third in the New Hampshire primary. To become commander in chief, there could be no unscripted or unedited moment. That was a box that couldn’t contain Bob.

  I prodded him to write and helped him figure out where the story began—something that every memoirist or autobiographer must determine early in the process. Bowing to the sanctity of chronology, do you begin at the beginning and risk boring your readers with biographical material that comes decades before the main action or heart of the story? Or do you identify the reason you are writing the book and start with the touch point of that event? Or maybe a flashback or a flash-forward will work. The choices are numerous.

  We also came up with a research plan to track down some elusive ghosts in his personal history and that of his uncle. Soon enough he was producing chapters. Periodically I would drive over the Bay Bridge back to Washington to work with him, and I tried to schedule these meetings with the evenings when I was teaching my weekly class at Georgetown. As Flip had predicted, Bob proved himself to be a strong and compelling writer who quickly found his narrative voice.

  What we knew about Bob’s uncle was this: that he had died somehow in the Philippines more than two years after the Bataan Death March of Allied prisoners across the Philippine Islands in the spring of 1942. Fifty years had passed, and I was skeptical we could find anything new. But I sensed that the lack of information regarding Bob’s uncle’s death was an obstacle to telling his own story. I’m not using the word closure, a word that really raises my hackles, overused by too many TV “experts” on hand every time a national tragedy unfolds.

  Bob said his youngest sister, who lived on a farm in Nebraska, was the keeper of assorted family records, and he suggested we pay her a visit. Shortly thereafter, we flew out to the heartland to gather documents and memories from Bob’s family. It was a fruitful visit. I learned that Bob’s father had told Bob that before John had left for his overseas duty, he had a serious girlfriend named Evangeline, or “Vangie.”

  Among the documents his family shared were letters from Vangie to John’s parents. Vangie worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services and predecessor to the CIA). The return address was in the Washington area. Fifty years had passed, but I still hoped she might be living in the area. Then a young woman in her twenties, now she would be in her seventies.

  As soon as I returned to Centreville, I got out a Washington phone book and started dialing. I must have called at least a dozen people with Vangie’s maiden name. She had probably married and changed her name, but I hoped I would stumble upon a relative who shared her maiden name. I left message after message on answering machines or talked to people who had never heard of Vangie. But when I got to the last name on the list, I hit pay dirt: a relative, who told me Vangie had died of cancer twenty years earlier in 1975. But her sister was alive, and she lived in Reston, Virginia, about forty minutes from downtown D.C.

  Bob and I arranged for a visit with Georgia, Vangie’s sister. She had letters that John had written to Vangie, and a particularly intimate one recalled an evening they shared at the Shoreham Hotel that included a dip in the pool. Not long after we got a copy of this letter, one evening Bob went to the Shoreham, got a drink, and sat by the pool, reflecting on the ghosts of Vangie and John. Refusing to be defeated by the passage of time, Bob tried to connect through proximity, searching for something. I didn’t know what it was, and I’m not sure he knew either. Bob was especially dogged by the mystery of how John died.

  We knew Bob’s father believed John had died on October 17, 1944, in the Philippines. John had been stationed in Manila, at General MacArthur’s headquarters. When Bataan fell, John’s family feared that he was taken captive and had been forced to join the Bataan Death March. Bob’s father tried to find out what had happened to John, but all he received was confirmation of his death from the army.

  So we took up where Bob’s dad left off. I had John’s name and rank, deployment location, and date of death. After a few phone calls to government agencies, I established that if John’s veteran service records still existed, they would be in the National Archives’ facility in College Park, Maryland. I packed a bag with snacks, pens, paper, and sticky notes, knowing this was going to take some camping out among dusty, crumbling records. One of my students volunteered to help, and together we spent a few days poring over documents.

  Just when I thought it was time to give up, we found a file with declassified documents—the debriefings of the three men who were with John when he died. These confirmed he had survived the death march, escaped his captivity, and, hoping to be rescued, survived for nearly three years as a guerrilla in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation, in a landlocked and densely forested area.

  One day they got word that an American submarine would meet them at Baler Bay, in the northeastern part of Luzon Island in the Philippines. The group could walk three hours through the mountains or take a quick boat trip to get to their destination. They chose the mountain walk while John and another man, a Filipino, took the boat. They hit bad weather, and the boat either capsized or was blown out to sea. The debriefing told a disjointed story in which suspicions were raised that perhaps the Filipino, who came ashore agitated and disoriented, had killed Bob’s uncle. John had been a strong swimmer and it was unlikely he had drowned.

  This information was bittersweet. It was painful to learn that John had come so close to being rescued and reunited with his family and Vangie. But we were relieved that at last we finally knew what had happened. Or at least we had a sense of what happened. Knowing is better than not knowing. That’s something a journalist or a memoirist has to believe. And I think it gave Bob some comfort to know he had honored his father’s wishes to get at the truth.

  At least he had gotten to that truth. Getting at his own truth was somewhat more difficult. In a letter he wrote from Nebraska about a year after we started working together, he reflected, “I wonder about this book today; it’s getting where I don’t like the subject of the story. You may know the feeling.”

  Unbeknownst to Bob or to me, soon after I was digging around in the National Archives trying to find out what happened to John so many years before, a reporter was digging through other records there investigating Bob’s war record. The reporter, Gregory Vistica, was looking into a tip that claimed Bob had been a key figure in a My Lai–type massacre. The reporter had found army radio logs that noted “an old man from Thanh Phong presented himself to the district chief’s headquarters with claims for retribution for alleged atrocities committed the night of Feb. 25 and 26 February 1969.”

  In 1969, Bob was a twenty-five-year-old Navy SEAL who led his team on a nighttime raid of a village in the Mekong Delta. They had intelligence that Viet Cong leaders were gathering to meet there, and they went looking for them. What they found and what happened next is at the center of the dispute. Bob remembered they were fired at and that they killed women and children who were in the line of fire, between the SEAL team and what they thought was an “armed cadre in the village.”

  In 2001, after four years of research, Vistica believed he had enough information for a New York Times Sunday magazine cover story. Soon after, he coproduced a 60 Minutes segment, and finally in early 2003, he published a book on his investigation, which was titled The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey.

  What ensued was ugly: Vistica’s account implied that Bob was covering up war crimes. Three months before the cover story ran, Bob had retired from the Senate, taking the job of president of the New School in Manhattan. In one of his interviews with Vistica, he said that his decision to leave the Senate and not to challenge Al Gore in the 2000 presidential primary wasn’t tied to what had happened in Vietnam.

  Bob’s book, When I Was a Young Man, had come out between the publication of the New York Times piece and Vistica’s boo
k. Bob did not try to erase from his memoir the raid that Vistica had labeled as a war crime. That raid permeated Bob’s entire book in subtle and not so subtle ways. He described the context and events of the raid over eight very raw pages that were bookended by his feelings about the war and the subsequent incident in which his right leg was blown apart. Bob wrote that he remembered very little “of what happened in a clear and reliable way,” but Vistica wasn’t satisfied with fog-of-war memory explanations and interviewed others who were present.

  Bob’s war experiences informed every moment that came after and that’s what his book was meant to document: how war affects warriors. Bearing witness to Bob’s reckoning with his past and confronting his Vietnam memories was a discomfiting process I couldn’t relate to or fully understand. He was a Medal of Honor recipient, but in the years I knew him I saw the actual medal only once, when I asked him to show it to me. I was insufficiently prepared to understand the ambivalence of those who served in a war as controversial as Vietnam. What did I know of war? I had never served. I did not come from a military family.

  Although my father served in World War II, he didn’t see combat, and the military wasn’t a part of our family identity. He had teletype skills from working in a Chicago courier office before the war, qualifying him for a position in the army’s Signal Corps when most of the men at the volunteer board went to the infantry. He set up his communication equipment in King Victor Emmanuel III’s palace in Caserta, Italy, outside Naples. He spent the war in the throne room as Nazi warplanes strafed the Italian countryside. Many of those who volunteered alongside him didn’t come home. My father did and, thanks to the GI bill, he attended the University of Illinois, where he met my mother.

  So my father, who had come home mentally and physically unscathed, hadn’t prepared me for this assignment. What I lacked in subject matter expertise, I tried to make up for with basic empathy.