But that wasn’t all. Inexplicably, a wine bottle, unopened, unbroken, was resting upside down on its thin top, leaning against the bottom of my refrigerator. It, too, had been on the shelf. How had it fallen a good six feet and not busted wide open? And even more incredible, how could it land upside down and remain standing? It made no sense.
I felt a little frightened and looked around, my mind replaying my movements of the last few minutes. The door had been locked when I slid the key in, hadn’t it? When I put the key in the lock, I heard the deadbolt click open, hadn’t I? Tentatively, I walked into the bedroom and then the bathroom and even the closet, looking everywhere, listening for anything. I reassured myself I was alone in the apartment and that nothing was missing.
My jewelry was untouched in its leather case, my graduation strand of pearls, my mother’s diamond engagement watch, a pair of diamond stud earrings. None of it was exactly the Hope Diamond, but altogether there was probably five thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, a decent day’s haul for a random burglar. But, no, it was all still there.
I went back to the living room and hit “play” on the answering machine. I don’t know what I expected to hear: someone calling to say, Hey, I broke in, smashed a ceramic dish, and left a wine bottle upside down on your kitchen floor. Hope you had a nice trip. None of the messages was urgent. One friend had called to invite me to a dinner party scheduled for the next evening. I returned the call and said I’d love to come, that I’d just gotten back and that I’d be there with a bottle of wine and a story to go with it.
I succumbed to jet lag the next day, falling asleep for several hours, and woke up to darkness, nearly missing the dinner party. I took a shower, threw on some party clothes, and arrived midway through the main course. I presented the wine and told my dinner companions about it as the host uncorked it.
The consensus after several minutes of deliberation was that a truck or jackhammer must have caused a big vibration on the street, launching the pie plate and the bottle on their trajectories. That a bottle had landed and stayed balanced on its thin top was unlikely but not impossible, the crowd collectively concluded. We drank the wine and declared the case closed and I put it out of my mind.
The jet lag continued. I stumbled through the next few days, waking at weird hours, craving huevos rancheros at 2:00 a.m., watching Cheers reruns at 4:00 a.m., falling asleep at 11:00 a.m. On my fourth day home, I finally woke up at a normal hour and decided it was time to restore some semblance of a routine to my life. Since Village was done, I needed to find a new gig.
I looked at the to-do list I had started before my trip. Calling my agent was on the list, to check in about any new potential projects. I had a freelance story idea to write a pitch for. Then there were smaller tasks: call the dentist, get the chimney cleaned and order some wood, return the tape to the White House. Oh yeah, the tape. I walked over to the secretary and pulled down the movable door.
The tape wasn’t where I’d left it, next to the letter opener. But the letter opener was there, alone, in the pigeonhole. My chest tightened as I remembered the broken pie plate and the oddly situated wine bottle.
I proceeded to tear the house apart, going from room to room, drawer by drawer. After many frantic minutes, panic mounting, I reached for the phone. I called Woodward.
Even after my work with Woodward ended, he was always the famous investigative reporter, and I was a researcher, collaborator, aspiring writer—a young woman trying to make it in a man’s world, or at least a man’s town. Despite the fact that I was upset with myself for telling him about what I witnessed in the solarium, I felt there was no one else to turn to in this situation. He would know what to do, I reassured myself. He always did.
When I called to tell him about the tape’s existence and subsequent disappearance, he remained calm, which is what I expected. In general, Woodward never registered much range of emotion. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him lose his cool, and he admired those with a similar temperament. He used to gently scold me, saying I should work on “emotional control.” Now he asked me several questions in a flat, reportorial tone.
I could tell at first he thought I had just absentmindedly misplaced the tape. But when I explained that the tape was labeled “Vince Foster,” he had grown quiet. He had me run through the events leading up to the tape’s disappearance. When did I have it? For how long had I had it? Did anyone else have the key to my apartment? Why did I put it in the secretary? Was I absolutely sure that’s where I put the tape? Yes, I said, I was sure. As we spoke, I grew more and more alarmed. It is the hotbed nature of Washington that, if it doesn’t cause paranoia, it certainly provides the ideal breeding ground in which to flourish.
The cold truth is that, to this day, I don’t know how the plate broke or what happened to the microcassette. No one knew about the tape. Not a soul. Because there was nothing to know. The only thing on it was an innocuous conversation, just something in passing in an effort to elicit book material. Yes, it was about Vince Foster but nothing about the circumstances of his death or anything specific about their friendship, just musing about the nature of resilience, why some people had it and others didn’t.
If, in my absence while I was in Italy, Woodward, a world-famous investigative reporter, had gone nosing around the White House, asking thorny questions about a private meeting in which the First Lady participated in an unconventional talk-therapy session with New Agey overtones, it would be easy to follow the trail directly to me and make someone curious about what else I knew or had in my possession.
But that didn’t occur to me then. It wouldn’t occur to me for another ten months, when Woodward’s book came out and made international headlines.
Nine
Village People
Son, this is a Washington, D.C., kind of lie. It’s when the other person knows you’re lying, and also knows you know he knows.
—Allen Drury, Advise and Consent
I began to feel uneasy in my own apartment after I discovered the tape was missing. I wasn’t really nervous that someone was coming back, but I felt a presence, almost like there was a low-level hum in the back of my brain, as if somebody left on the speakers after shutting off the stereo.
I would be in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil for pasta, and I would imagine someone taking my pie plate and smashing it. Did they do it purposefully to send a message? Or was it a slip of the hand as they searched the apartment? And the inexplicably positioned upside-down wine bottle? Why? Were these professionals who knew exactly how to mess with someone’s head? “Mossad tactics, to unnerve you!” a newspaper friend who covers national security said later when I told him about the strange things that had happened. All I could do was roll my eyes.
I consoled myself by coming up with much less interesting but more plausible explanations. Washington is full of conspiracy theorists; it doesn’t need another one, and my journalism training taught me to rely on evidence when evaluating things. So—where did that leave me?
Possibility #1: I misplaced the tape.
Possibility #2: While I was in Italy a big truck drove up my street, and the vibration of it shook the walls and made the pie plate fall from its place on the shelf and the wine bottle land upside down on its cork. Sure it did.
Possibility #3: It wasn’t a truck that shook the walls, but a nearby jackhammer.
Possibility #4: A minor earthquake: they were not unheard of in the region, and never mind that there were no news reports of a minor quake while I was away or that anyone I knew remembered there being one.
Any of these explanations was possible, but I had no idea what the truth was, so I forced myself to put the whole thing out of my mind.
Not long after this, the phone rang, and I answered it to find a newsmagazine reporter on the line. She was calling to ask me if I had a comment about not being acknowledged in Mrs. Clinton’s book. That was an interesting and surprising way to learn something I didn’t know. Especially becaus
e my contract called for Mrs. Clinton to include me by name in the acknowledgments. This is the place in the book where the author thanks everyone from the UPS delivery guy to the ghostwriter. Not all authors include acknowledgments, but most of them do, and I had been thanked by all the authors I had worked with in the past. It was pretty standard stuff.
This reporter told me that early review copies were making the rounds, and she said the acknowledgments page included no names.
I got off the phone quickly, without revealing that what she was telling me was a surprise. I called my agent and told her what I had just learned. She said she would call Simon & Schuster and get back to me. A little insider baseball: Being acknowledged is a tad about ego, but it’s mostly about earning capacity. Ghostwriters get their gigs through word of mouth; acknowledgments pages are one of the best ways to do that. And everyone in the business reads the acknowledgments pages like tea leaves. What isn’t included is as telling as what is. I feared this was going to be a mess.
I was right: things quickly went from bad to worse. Flip called back to report that not only was the magazine writer correct about the lack of acknowledgment but that Simon & Schuster was withholding the final quarter of my fee. She reminded them that this payment was due when they signed off on the manuscript, which they had done a month earlier, before my trip. Now, suddenly, my agent was telling me the White House had instructed the publisher not to pay me.
This made no sense to me. Even if the First Lady had become unhappy with a manuscript she had worked on and approved herself, what reason would she have for telling Simon & Schuster not to pay me? It was their money, not hers; everyone involved had gone to great pains to make sure she had no financial interest in the book to protect her from the inevitable criticism if she accepted an advance or didn’t promise to donate any future royalties. The way they were treating me was not only alarming, it was puzzling. By this time I had worked on more than a half-dozen high-profile books, most of them published by Simon & Schuster. The more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that in the food chain of Washington/New York literary/politico circles, a freelance ghost/editor is expendable if a sitting First Lady, soon to be a bestselling author, wants her expended. But still, it seemed pretty harsh.
When the publishing house wouldn’t budge on the issue of the withheld payment, I called Woodward and Ben and Sally, each of whom had been published by Simon & Schuster. Woodward and Ben called the publisher. They didn’t tell me what they said, and I didn’t want to know. The whole thing was beyond mortifying.
The check arrived soon after that—which was a relief financially—but it didn’t do anything to explain my fall from grace. I went over the events of the last eight months. The deadline pressure was substantial, but we had all worked hard—the editor, a researcher, the transcribers, myself, and, of course, the First Lady. If they didn’t want me involved any longer, so be it. Given my résumé, I had been an odd choice in the first place. I assume there were plenty of people lining up in Hillaryland who wanted to leave their mark on this book. And if the First Lady felt the existing draft needed to go through another round of editing and rewriting, most books do and, besides, that was her prerogative. But this aggressive campaign to discredit my work struck me as grossly disproportionate and I racked my brain, going over the chronology of events that led me to this moment.
A few months after I was hired, now more than eight months earlier, the White House had issued a press release announcing the book project and acknowledging my involvement.
In reaction to that, the White House press corps wrote a spate of stories about the book project. The New York Times noted in April 1995: “The book will actually be written by Barbara Feinman, a journalism professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Ms. Feinman will conduct a series of interviews with Mrs. Clinton, who will help edit the resulting text.”
With no input from me (or my agent or anyone connected to me), this story and others like it implicitly set up a narrative suggesting that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t write her own book. The press release said I was hired to “prepare the manuscript,” which journalists interpreted as “write the manuscript.”
This was the middle of Whitewater and Mrs. Clinton’s popularity was suffering big time, in part because of how the press portrayed her and in part because of the way she and the White House handled various situations. For whatever reasons, she had never fit into the Washington culture. There was the gaffe during the ’92 campaign about her not standing by her man like Tammy Wynette and choosing not to stay home and bake cookies. Then the president put her in charge of a new health-care initiative, and it had not gone well. And there were allegations that she was involved in Travelgate. And I’m sure there was an element of old guard Washington not ready to accept a First Lady who wanted to redefine the scope and influence of the position.
I’ll leave it up to the historians and political scientists to sort out why she had become such a target. All I know is that when I arrived on the scene, she had an image problem, and as many political memoirs and manifestos are meant to do, this one was meant to recast her by highlighting the good work she’d done on behalf of families and children. That was a lot of pressure to put on a book and on the people charged with making it happen, namely me, our editor, our publisher, and Mrs. Clinton.
As I tried to figure out what had gone wrong I thought about how vague my original mandate was: to produce a book that would reflect the First Lady’s track record and dedication to advocacy on children’s issues. There was no title, no outline, no direction, no shape, no narrative. It was my job to figure out all of that, which is often how ghostwriting gigs go. But with so little time until our deadline and with the massive demands on the First Lady’s schedule, it was inevitable that the manuscript would need more work after such a compressed timetable.
But none of this explained definitively why I wasn’t included in the last round of edits and was suddenly regarded as persona non grata.
The book came out in early January 1996, and Mrs. Clinton embarked on a multicity promotional tour. I feared that, at least inside the Beltway, the book’s reception would be doomed from the start. The “nattering nabobs of negativism” would be nibbling before long, and I knew that even if we had produced War and Peace meets the Bible, the reactions would still be a Rorschach test of how each person felt about the Clintons and how closely aligned each person was with them politically.
I assumed that the book’s beautiful cover and lyrical title would entice admirers of the First Lady beyond the Beltway to line up to buy the book. But from where I was standing, sales seemed almost incidental.
Almost immediately Mrs. Clinton was hit with what was dubbed “ThankYouGate,” a media flap about why she didn’t she give credit to her ghostwriter. Me. As scandals go, it was a superficial one, a topic for pundits to have fun tossing around in an informal game of touch football. Nobody was saying that laws were broken or anything like that. But it still provided good political gossip.
Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times column on January 14, 1996:
A donnybrook has erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s odd decision not to give an acknowledgment to Barbara Feinman . . . and her friends feel she has been badly treated by the First Lady. Mrs. Clinton’s “acknowledgments” page is, in fact, the perfect illustration of her problem. It must be the only acknowledgments page in existence that thanks nobody in particular. “I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually,” she writes. Those nine words are seven more than it would have taken to acknowledge Barbara Feinman.
The level of vitriol directed toward Mrs. Clinton surprised me. In addition to Dowd, everyone from Rush Limbaugh, who referred to me as something to the effect of “some poor journalism professor” to Don Imus—and countless others on the political spectrum in between—weighed in on it, illustrating the clichés that Washington enemies make strange bedfellows and that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The attention was overwhelming,
and even though a lot of it was sympathetic to me, that wasn’t much of a comfort. Another popular Washington cliché goes that all publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name right (and even that proved not to matter). I guess that was true because people didn’t seem to focus on what was being said about me but just that I was in the news.
The White House keeps a log of overnight guests, and at some point, it was released as part of the Whitewater investigation, and the Washington Post, among other publications, published it, and there was my name, though misspelled, listed alphabetically between Patricia Duff (who was briefly married to billionaire Ron Perelman and who, as a Clinton supporter, went around bragging that Bill Clinton was “one full-service president”) and Jane Fonda.
Perversely, I was now getting more offers than ever to write people’s books. I had become what Tom Wolfe called “a status detail,” a telling possession or symbol that revealed a person’s position in society. Having one’s own ghostwriter in Washington was akin to driving a Ferrari Testarossa in Hollywood or owning a million-dollar parking place in Manhattan. Rising stock notwithstanding, it was mentally debilitating. It felt like I was a pawn in a game of everyone versus Hillary Clinton.
Even worse, all this sturm und drang about me not being acknowledged gave a lot of people the impression I was whining about it. And I most certainly wasn’t. I wasn’t saying anything. First of all, the fallout from me not being acknowledged by Mrs. Clinton had put me front and center, like taking out an ad in Times Square, so if attention had been what I wanted, not being acknowledged was the way to get it. I wasn’t comfortable in the spotlight. Like most ghosts, real and imagined, I sought comfort in the shadows.
A particularly low moment was when a tabloid TV show camped out on my front lawn and kept ringing my buzzer, trying to get me to agree to an interview. Finally, when I couldn’t stay inside any longer and called a friend to come rescue me, they filmed me coming out of the front door and hurrying across the front lawn to the street. Unfortunately, the grass was slippery with freshly fallen snow and, in a slapstick move worthy of Lucille Ball, I fell down on my butt.
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