My ankle was healing slowly, and I dreaded going to Wyoming. The first family would be staying at West Virginia senator John D. Rockefeller IV’s eight-thousand-square-foot ranch in Grand Teton National Park. The hotel where the support staff and I stayed was not terribly far away, and someone got me a rental car so I could drive back and forth between the ranch and the hotel.
The White House staff was an insular bunch, and for the most part, they ignored me. I felt completely isolated and stressed out because of the pressure of trying to get the book finished in this insanely short amount of time. Mrs. Clinton spent much of her time working, and she was distant and preoccupied, worried about her upcoming trip to China. In addition to working on the book, she was also focused on the speech she was slated to deliver in Beijing at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in early September.
She was meant to lead the American delegation, and it was an opportunity for her to showcase her commitment to the rights of women and children on a world stage. Her speech would be the first phase of her image makeover after the health-care debacle. Her image had not recovered, in part because the Senate Special Whitewater Committee hearings had begun that summer, during which her and her husband’s business dealings would come under scrutiny once again, as would lingering questions regarding Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster’s suicide.
The book’s publication would come just four months later. But the snag in this plan was a growing controversy about whether the First Lady should attend the conference because China was holding human rights advocate Harry Wu on espionage charges. Wu had spent nineteen years in Chinese labor camps, then come to the United States and become an American citizen, where he continued his human rights activism. Just a few months before, he had been detained during a visit back to China.
Mr. Wu was convicted and then, inexplicably, deported, so Mrs. Clinton’s dilemma of whether or not to go became moot. Anyone who has studied the trajectory of her career would say that that speech was the beginning of becoming a politician in her own right and that her platform would be women’s rights. Probably the most famous line from her speech is: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
One day when I was staring out the window at the Rockefeller ranch, distracted by the natural beauty and wishing I was hiking or swimming, I received a package. The handwriting was familiar. I tore open the cardboard box and saw that Bob Kerrey had sent me a care package. We had talked on the phone the week before, and I must have sounded a bit down.
The box was filled with some small presents, mostly things to make me laugh, wacky collages he had made and gag gifts. But he had also included a letter, and its tone was somber, telling me about a friend who had just suffered the loss of a child.
“He will be thinking of death, now; wishing it would come to him, wondering why this had to happen,” he wrote. “I don’t have anything close to an answer. Sorry for the grief mixed with the gifts. I am afraid it’s hard to find a day without both. I’ll be happier when you finish the Village people.”
So will I, I thought. So will I. Or so I thought.
Eight
Losing My Religion
To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.
—Samuel Johnson
The stretch of Massachusetts Avenue NW that is referred to as Embassy Row is home to some of the city’s most prominent politicians and diplomats. It’s also known for its magnificent old mansions and tree-lined sidewalks. And it’s where I found myself walking one mild, sunny October afternoon, the sort of day that lulled me into ignoring my ambivalence about living in Washington. I was even able to tell myself that this swamp could be beautiful when the humidity wasn’t choking you every time you stepped out your door.
My walking companion this day was Bob Woodward, my old boss and a resident of nearby Georgetown. Our afternoon stroll had started from his home.
I had completed my work with Mrs. Clinton on It Takes a Village just the week before, and I was now returning to my “regular” life. I was in the process of trying to forget all the First Lady’s speech patterns and favorite turns of phrase and various sensitivities. I wanted to reembody “Barbara,” even though, by this point, I’d been involved with so many other people’s voices, I wasn’t exactly sure who “Barbara” was at times.
I knew the book’s publication date was just three months away, in January 1996. With the manuscript in the hands of the publishing house and having been told it was going into production, I was given the all clear and had booked a ticket to Rome, where I planned to start a three-week tour of Italy, spending the first week with a friend, the latter two by myself.
I was looking forward to all of it, but particularly to the second leg of the trip when I’d take a train to Cinque Terre, the five small villages tossed along the Italian Riviera like a strand of perfect pearls swept ashore. I had last been to Italy after graduating from Berkeley, thirteen years earlier, and ever since then, I had missed Cinque Terre’s little seaside cafés and sleepy rhythms. What better way to restart or at least unpause my real life than to spend a chunk of time in a place where no one knew me, where I could be exactly myself? This was my reasoning at the time, but I realize now that perhaps I hadn’t thought it through.
Woodward had invited me over for coffee, “for a visit,” he’d said on the phone. I’d been so busy during the eight months I worked on Village that I had neglected not only him, but pretty much everyone in my life. Eight years had passed since I’d worked for him on Veil, but we’d stayed in touch, I was invited to his and Elsa’s wedding, and to occasional parties they threw, and every so often we would catch up over a meal. And, now that I was in my midthirties, I considered him a friend and a mentor, someone I still turned to for advice, both professional and personal. This is similar to the role he has played with other research assistants before and after me; we were an informal club of young people he had helped launch into the media world and continued to support and promote generously.
I had gone over to Woodward’s house thinking we would catch up over coffee in his kitchen, but after a while he suggested we stretch our legs, take a stroll. During the four years I had worked for him and the subsequent eight I had known him, we had never taken a walk for the sake of walking, and in retrospect it’s clear to me now that this should have been the tip-off that something was up.
I had accompanied him on plenty of interviews, to lots of places, out to lunch, even ice-skating with him and his young daughter, but we’d never gone for a leisurely walk. It was completely unexpected, which explains, in part, why I was wearing delicate black suede flats, with toe-shoe-like slippery satin laces that wouldn’t stay tied. After they came undone for the umpteenth time, Woodward, out of impatience or kindness or both, kneeled down and tied them securely for me. The gesture was avuncular, but I was embarrassed by its intimacy.
After we dispensed with the personal catching up—how his daughter was doing in college, news about contemporaries of mine who had also helped him on books—Woodward asked me, as he had the few other times I’d seen him, what my impressions were of the First Lady, particularly now that my work on Village was complete and I could consider my time with her as a whole.
The year before, in 1994, Woodward had come out with The Agenda, a book about the Clinton administration’s first hundred days. I knew he was working on another book about Clinton, but I didn’t know what the book’s focus was and I also knew him well enough not to ask. But it was logical he was picking up the narrative where The Agenda had left off.
Unsure what exactly Woodward was asking, I tried to answer in coolly general terms. I wanted to sound wise, as if I had some truly profound observations to share, as if the investigative training I’d received while working for him was alive and well in me and I could dissect Hillary Clinton with a cold and unsentimental eye. But I had
signed a confidentiality agreement and didn’t want to break the rules.
Woodward had been nothing but kind and generous to me for as long as I’d known him, and I admired him and valued his friendship. I also trusted him completely. This is what I’d always thought, what I’d always known to be true. The trustworthiness of Woodward, and of other people in my life with whom I had a similar relationship and past, was my religion, really. But I had told him early on that I had signed an agreement and he knew I was legally bound by the contract, so why was he pushing?
What was her mood, her state of mind, he wanted to know. Was she depressed? I’d come to work for Mrs. Clinton in early 1995, just months after her initiative on health care had been declared dead in September 1994. She was also dealing with the ongoing Whitewater mess. And before that, in 1993, she had suffered the personal loss of Vince Foster and had to endure the hateful and ridiculous rumors, gossip, and conspiracy theories surrounding his suicide. With these seemingly endless scandals that were stacking up like plates in a diner, who wouldn’t be down?
It would be hard to imagine that anyone who had been through the experiences she’d had in recent years could come out the other side and not be a little battered. And it wasn’t a state secret that she wasn’t particularly carefree at this time in her life. It Takes a Village, obviously, was in large part meant to rehabilitate her image, to remind people that she had fought for the rights of women and children professionally as an attorney and advocate.
My stomach suddenly knotted up, and I knew. He was pressing me like a source. I’d read, transcribed, organized, and scrutinized hundreds of his interviews when I had worked for him at the Post and then as his researcher on Veil. I knew his interviewing techniques as well as I knew the name of the hospital where I’d been born or my mother’s maiden name. I’d tried to use the techniques myself, to coax details and nuance and stories out of my ghostwriting clients. He knew I’d been in close proximity to the First Lady, a First Lady who had been more publicly acknowledged to be involved in policy making than any wife of the president in history.
I was all of a sudden aware that he was working on me in that moment, that he was using the convenience of our personal connection, the one I held so dear, to find out what I might know. The invitation to catch up, I now realized, had been a ruse because Woodward knew I was leaving town for nearly a month, and he intended to “empty my pockets” while my memory was still fresh.
I’d wanted to believe his interest in seeing me was personal, that our bond was still strong. And maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t an either/or calculus. Maybe he did care about me, but at the same time, he wanted to know what I knew. My value to him in that moment was as a commodity (knowledge) rather than as a friend. He must have thought—or felt—on some level that once a Woodward person, always a Woodward person, meaning a journalist who sucks up information. It was naive and magical thinking on my part to believe anything else was going on here.
Nothing, really? he said, with a mix of disbelief and disappointment in his eyes.
Not really, I answered, hesitating, thinking back to what had happened that spring day in the White House.
Woodward waited. We kept walking. The air between us felt heavy.
This, I had learned from observing the master, was the moment in the interview when it was critical for him not to spook his source by saying the wrong thing. This is when it’s safest to stay quiet but maybe just cock your head to the side, expectantly. To calibrate the eye contact—not too much but not too little—so that candor is the only choice. When a child is on the brink of finally jumping from the edge of the pool into the deep end, if you nudge his back too soon, he might turn around and wrap himself around your shins and never let go. But if you stand there, quietly encouraging, he’ll jump. Prod only when nothing else works. Hold out as long as possible to see if that’s necessary. Which is what Woodward did, eyes full of restrained hope.
Finally, I gave in, I gave him the pearl, but not before spelling out all kinds of conditions that he couldn’t use anything I told him. I told him this was just so he could understand the mood of the White House. I’m sure I was telling myself that that’s why I was talking like this.
I won’t, he said.
I believed him.
Have I asked myself why a thousand times? Ten thousand? Probably more. And the answers I come up with are never definitive, because how can I reconstruct what I was feeling in that one pivotal moment when I opened my mouth instead of keeping it closed? Why did I do it? Probably the main reason is because I trusted him not to use the material, which is what he promised. At least I trusted him not to use what I told him until the people involved were dead. Or I was dead. Also there’s no question that I wanted to please him. To tell anyone a secret about something that went on in the White House is tempting, but to tell Bob “Watergate” Woodward, the maestro of knowing—it was irresistible.
And there’s also my history of confusing the difference between wanting to trust someone and being able to trust someone. I fall for people. I fall too easily for them, whether it’s a new fabulous friend, the best boss ever, or, back when I was single, for some great guy who turned out to be not so great. And though I embraced the anonymity of ghostwriting because it was unthreatening, it was also unsatisfying. I didn’t recognize it then but now, twenty years later, I have to admit that this ambivalence played a part in my lapse in judgment.
The minute I started telling Woodward this story, I could almost see myself from a distance looking at the two of us walking down the beautiful street, and I could see the words coming out of my mouth.
In late March, just a few months after I’d started working with Mrs. Clinton on her book, she and fifteen-year-old Chelsea had gone on a tour of Egypt and five countries in South Asia. You may remember the photo ops of them riding camels in front of the pyramids and wearing safari hats atop elephants in Nepal. When they returned, I was called over to the White House for a “debriefing” of the trip.
By this time, Mrs. Clinton and I had written very little of the book, just a handful of scenes and sketches, and the title of course. The editors at Simon & Schuster were asking me for more pages, and in turn, I had been asking for more time on the First Lady’s schedule. That was a large part of my job: to ask for more time, first politely, then more firmly but always apologetically.
I felt bad having to insist, especially because I could see that her scheduler, who was an extremely nice and funny person, was under a lot of pressure to fulfill all sorts of demands made on the First Lady’s time, but this book couldn’t be produced without Mrs. Clinton’s attention. She wasn’t the type of person to just slap her name on something someone else had written, which meant I had to generate pages that originated with her ideas and input and then went back to her for her to make her own. But that required time, lots of time.
I’d already steeped myself in the transcripts of speeches she’d given and in videos of her public appearances, as well as anything published under her name. This was my routine. It was how I always worked. I began a project by pulling together all the available materials so I could engineer a believable, if not necessarily accurate, voice through which we could deliver the intended message. In some cases, for some clients, I was able to imagine, invent, and intuit what the client would say. I would then construct chapters that would come together as a complete manuscript, and the client would read them and make changes that then made it the client’s own book.
But with someone as high profile and accomplished and closely observed as Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t do that without more direct input from her. And the thing I was having trouble figuring out was what was the message of the book?
With It Takes a Village, though the stakes were higher than those I’d dealt with in the past, my struggles with it were the same ones I’d encountered before: authors expecting a book to materialize out of thin air, ordering up a finished book as if it were a bacon cheeseburger, but not realizing that a good book
takes a lot of time, fresh material, and patience. I needed more time with Mrs. Clinton to get her ideas, her thoughts, her previous body of work summarized and into some semblance of a booklike product.
So when I was called to the White House for what they described as a “debriefing,” I didn’t know what to think because this hadn’t been suggested before. I imagined my sitting in on a staff meeting during which the events of the trip would be reviewed and wise observations would be made about the First Lady and the First Daughter on their First Camel Ride. I expected to go home yet again with an empty notebook.
But when I arrived that particular day at the White House for our meeting, I was taken to a sitting room I’d never been to during any of my previous visits. Soon two women, both in their mid- to late fifties, joined me. I didn’t realize they were waiting for the same meeting until one of Mrs. Clinton’s staffers arrived and made hasty introductions. One woman, the smaller of the two, was prim and professional and was introduced as Mary Catherine Bateson. The other, big boned and earthy looking with a rich mane of dark brown hair, was Jean Houston. Neither name meant anything to me.
The three of us followed our escort along the stately halls. We were headed for the first family’s residence, where I’d been many times before, but then the aide said we’d be meeting in the solarium, a room well known for its southern exposure and panoramic view of the Washington Monument. If you imagine a typical photo of the White House’s south face, the side with the semicircle of columns at its center, the solarium is the room sitting atop the semicircle.
This room’s magnificent vantage point, with probably the best views in Washington, is accessible only to the privileged few who are invited. It is definitely not a stop on the daily White House tours. It served as a teen hangout for the Johnson girls, it was where Mamie Eisenhower held her bridge parties, where Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox studied for the bar exam, and where, later, Nixon told his family he was resigning from the presidency. It was where Rosalynn Carter studied Spanish, where Nancy Reagan was told, just sixty-nine days into her husband’s presidency, that he had been shot, and where the Gipper then recuperated from that assassination attempt. In other words, this was not just some room in the White House.
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