As I was picking myself up, with cameras rolling, the reporter shoved a mic in my face and said, “Are you the First Lady’s ghost?” The segment aired, but someone had mercy and didn’t include the shot of me down for the count.
The media’s attention stayed trained on the lack of acknowledgment instead of the actual book. It went on for a month, references ranging from oblique to specific.
Oblique: In a New Yorker piece, “Scenes from a Scandal: Why can’t the children of Watergate get it right?,” David Remnick imagined an Oliver Stone film in which the First Lady would be played by Meryl Streep, “her hair done up in a steely flip, roaming the crepuscular halls of the West Wing, swilling Chardonnay from the bottle and shrieking to the heavens. Careering down the halls, she shreds subpoenas and abuses ghostwriters . . .”
Specific: The Washington Times ran an editorial, “The Ghost and Mrs. Clinton; or, It Takes a Village to Write a Book.” It outlined the timeline of my involvement, starting with the White House announcing that I would sit down with the First Lady to interview her and then write a draft, and so on. Then it chronicled Mrs. Clinton’s statements that she had written the entire book in longhand (she had even invited reporters over to see the handwritten draft) and that I had been relegated to being an assistant.
“This is not to say that Ms. Feinman did all the work,” the Washington Times wrote. “As could be expected of a project headlined by Mrs. Clinton, the research phase of the book was handled much like the dreaded Clinton Health Care Task Force, with hundreds of the Friends of Hillary in the kiddie-welfare establishment submitting anecdotes and policy prescriptions. It takes a village, indeed.”
Yes, there were a lot of people involved. They got that right, and I was relieved someone said that, even if the editorial’s point was to be snarky about the book’s political agenda. There was a researcher and interns and transcribers in addition to our very hands-on editor, Mrs. Clinton, and me. And though her staff wasn’t technically allowed to contribute to the book on company time—since their salaries were paid by taxpayers—they still gave advice and weighed in on various issues and offered ideas, anecdotes, and institutional knowledge.
I continued to keep my mouth shut, hoping the press attention would die down, but it did not. Which only agitated the White House more. Rumors started making their way back to me, whispers about my not getting along with the First Lady. I wondered about the origin of that because it was made up out of whole cloth; there had never been a single cross word spoken between us. But as the Washington Post noted in a piece about the authorship question, “Because Feinman signed a confidentiality statement, she declined to comment on this story. The White House, however, was eager to talk.”
You must be wondering why I didn’t simply get a copy of the book and compare it to the version of the manuscript I worked on.
I will tell you why. It comes down to one moment that is seared in my memory. I went over to Woodward’s house at some point during the media shitstorm. I was preoccupied by one question: Why was the White House trashing me?
I was sitting at Woodward’s kitchen table and he was standing. Maybe he was in the process of serving us coffee. All I remember is that he was standing and looking down at me, and he had a weird smile that I interpreted as meaning to be sympathetic but instead struck me as pleased, or relieved even. I remember thinking that what he was saying didn’t track with his facial expression.
He was telling me that a political reporter we both knew, whom I don’t want to name here, had told him that he had heard that the White House said I was “out of my league.”
I was devastated because the way he said it was as though he, Woodward, believed that was the explanation for why they had not acknowledged me, per the contract, and why they tried to withhold my final payment and why they were minimizing my role.
If this respected political reporter was buying that, and Woodward was buying it, it must have been true, right?
So when Simon & Schuster didn’t send me a complimentary copy of the book, I considered going to the bookstore to buy a copy but couldn’t get myself to do it. And when my sister bought a copy and put it on her “Barbara” shelf in her living room, I never could bring myself to open the book and look at it, except for one Thanksgiving when everyone was in the family room after dinner. I had pulled the book down and flipped it open to the table of contents. I lost my nerve and returned it to its place before anyone caught me in the act.
If I had bought the book, or even borrowed it, I would have had to confront the truth. And the truth must have been what the White House was putting out about my work not being good enough to use in the final draft; otherwise, I couldn’t imagine why Woodward would share with me what the political reporter had heard. So reading the book would be too painful. It would be too painful to see documentary evidence that nothing of my work, my heart, my intellect, or my humor made the final cut. Because even when you work on someone else’s book, you still leave behind traces of yourself, scattered throughout random cells with your own literary DNA. It’s a writer’s way of saying, I am here.
What if my fears were right, that they hadn’t used anything much of what I had contributed beyond the title? Or equally troubling, what if they had used my work and by retreating, I had allowed their false narrative to define me.
So in that moment the sense of failure and shame paralyzed me. And that moment turned into a day, which turned into a year, then five, then a decade. Then two decades. It was a classic case of confirmation bias. I had imposter syndrome and I had been discovered. And so I didn’t look.
Until I was writing this book. My book. Writing it meant that I would ultimately have to do what I had refused to do twenty years ago. I had to be honest with myself in order to be honest with my readers. I couldn’t avoid confronting the truth any longer.
I got in my car and drove to my sister’s house and asked her if I could borrow the book, the book that had become radioactive in my mind and my life.
“What are you doing with it?” my sister said, her back to me as she reached up to the shelf where she kept the book. I couldn’t see her face, but her tone was hesitant.
I held the book in my hands and marveled at how I had given over such power to such an innocuous little book with a lyrical jacket design displaying smiling children and a happy, hopeful title that was meant to evoke all that is possible in a world where children were treasured and respected. Finally, I looked at my sister. “I guess I’m going to read it. I’ve never gotten beyond the table of contents,” I said, looking back down at the book. “I need to compare it to the draft I worked on.”
“You mean you really never read this version?” She sounded incredulous. She had broached the topic a few times over the years and I had always responded vaguely, and then changed the subject.
I took the book home, made myself a pot of coffee, and sat down to confront the truth. I placed the published book and the manuscript side by side. The manuscript was musty and mildewed from twenty years of storage. The paper clips separating each chapter had rusted and orangish brown specks stained the tops of the first page of each chapter, rubbing off on my fingertips as I removed them.
I started out, going page by page. The opening was different, and my heart sank. I forced myself to keep going. And then I started to see sentences, then paragraphs, even whole pages that were identical, but for a bit of copyediting. Sometimes I would think I couldn’t find a match and a few pages later I would find that a missing section had been moved forward. The process felt oddly familiar and I suddenly recalled playing a board game called Concentration in which you matched objects.
Overwhelmed after a few hours, I called my sister, who is a tax attorney and has an analytical mind, and asked her if she would help me finish matching text between the two versions and then quantify how much of my manuscript had made it into the published book.
The next morning my sister came over and suggested we download the Kindle version so that we could put
in keywords when we came across a section in the manuscript that we couldn’t find in the published book. We worked like that for five hours, putting yellow Post-it notes on every page of the manuscript whose contents had survived in the published book. Finally, we tallied up pages with identical or similar material.
Here is what we determined: at least 75 percent of the draft that I produced with Mrs. Clinton was used in the published version—some parts intact, other parts edited or moved around. The manuscript that I turned in and that was initially accepted met the 75,000 word length that my contract stipulated. Then, the new Village people churned out perhaps as much as an additional third of the book, summarizing various policies and programs to illustrate Mrs. Clinton’s observations and findings. With the 25 percent that was not used of my version, and the new material that was added after I left, the published version ran about 90,000 words. As for the 25 percent of the manuscript that I worked on that wasn’t included in the published version, after reviewing the unused material now, two decades later, I have to wonder if much of the trimming was driven by political calculations rather than literary concerns.
In a Post piece that dealt with ThankYouGate, the writer described how the White House invited journalists over to see Mrs. Clinton’s longhand filling up hundreds of pages; the stunt was an orchestrated effort to leave the impression that my contribution was minimal. Even if that were true, which it wasn’t, to dismiss my eight months of work—starting with coming up with a powerful title, to conducting interviews with her, to doing substantial research, to drafting chapters for her to make her own and help her focus on what she wanted to say—was dishonest.
The new material that was produced and added to the final draft must have been what was in longhand on the yellow legal pads that Mrs. Clinton had shown to members of the Washington press corps. In the stories that journalists wrote about the viewing, no one mentioned being offered an opportunity to compare manuscripts, nor did any reporter apparently think to request that. One of the media outlets that reported the event was Time magazine, running a sidebar to a story about Whitewater. “The Ghost and Mrs. Clinton” noted:
Even before Hillary Clinton’s new book, It Takes a Village, hit the stores, Washington heard the rumor: the book was ghosted. The charge so exasperated the White House that several journalists, including TIME correspondent James Carney, were invited to Mrs. Clinton’s private study to check the manuscript, including legal pads covered with her handwriting. Says Carney: “There is no doubt Mrs. Clinton wrote great parts of the book.”
But as the White House acknowledged last week, there had been a collaborator. Barbara Feinman, a veteran book doctor, was hired by publisher Simon & Schuster to help organize the book and draft several chapters . . .
James “Jay” Carney, interestingly, covered the Clinton and Bush administrations until 2008 when he became Vice President Joe Biden’s director of communications secretary and later replaced Robert Gibbs as President Obama’s spokesperson, until 2014 when he went back to journalism briefly as a CNN political analyst. He’s a top-level flack for Amazon now. His seamless transitions back and forth between journalist and spin doctor speak to his suitability to buy wholesale the White House’s narrative.
As for the published version, I found that many more studies were cited and some personal anecdotes had been deleted. In the version I worked on, I had tried to present her as knowledgeable, ruminative, compassionate, and sympathetic. This is what you hire a ghost to do—to channel the best and most compelling voice of the author. In the final version, I also noticed small but telling details that didn’t take a literary forensic scholar to figure out the origins of. For instance, in a section that was in the book and not in the draft I worked on, Mrs. Clinton refers to a conversation she had in which “author and scholar Mary Catherine Bateson pointed out that when you juggle, eventually something gets dropped.”
I guess they weren’t talking about collaborators specifically, but still, it applies.
The issue of authorship was not the only controversy surrounding the book.
The Wall Street Journal was interested in focusing on the financial arrangement: “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book about children was supposed to divert attention from the ethics questions that have swirled around her. Instead the book itself is creating a bit of a flap.” This article raised the issue of whether it was improper for the publisher to pay my fee instead of the First Lady, noting that some critics felt “the publisher’s footing the bill for a writer amounts to a gift to the first family.”
The piece provided the requisite Clintonian scandal context: “Questions about Mrs. Clinton’s arrangements with the writer have arisen just as her friends, allies and the vast Clinton re-election apparatus are trying to lay in place an aggressive strategy to repair the First Lady’s image.”
The press scrutiny and criticism kept coming until the White House cried uncle, and I got a call from Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff. She told me they were going to issue a press release about my contribution to the book. Translation: The White House machine was going into damage-controlling backpedal mode. Maggie said they would fax over a draft, which she did a few minutes later. It was a cordial statement, in which Mrs. Clinton credited me with getting her started on early drafts and said I had helped for six months.
I didn’t appreciate the dismissive and lawyerly tone, but I knew that if they took their gloves off, I would be the one who got knocked out. I felt cowed by their PR machine, however inept it was. My best plan was to retreat and hope this whole thing would all blow over. I knew the rhythms of the Washington news cycle. By next week, I would be eclipsed by something else.
But facts were facts. At the very least, I said when I called back, the timeline needed to be corrected. “I worked on the book for eight months,” I told her.
And her response, just four words, was what finally drove home to me what I was dealing with.
“Would you take seven?”
“No, Maggie,” I said, steeling myself. “I’ll take eight. Because that’s how long I worked on the book.”
This haggling over the language and “facts” of that press release was a personal primer in how Washington works.
Looking back, I see that I didn’t do a good enough job advocating for myself. I should have insisted on a face-to-face meeting. They wouldn’t have told me anything and it probably wouldn’t have done any good, but at least I would have felt like I wasn’t complicit in my own erasure.
The White House press release didn’t tamp down the criticism as they hoped. The media coverage of ThankYouGate continued.
Every time I thought my Village mess was over, it seemed to pop up again, like the arcade game Whac-A-Mole. In late January 1996, soon after the book was released, Mrs. Clinton was called to testify before a federal grand jury that was looking into the possibility of whether the White House had committed any obstructions of justice regarding the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s law firm’s Whitewater-related work. After four hours of testimony, she emerged from the courthouse and told a crowd of Washington reporters, “I was glad to have the opportunity to tell the grand jury what I have been telling all of you. I do not know how the billing records came to be found where they were found, but I am pleased that they were found because they confirm what I have been saying.”
Just as her appearance before the grand jury was making headlines, I learned that the Senate Whitewater Committee wanted to talk to people whose names showed up on the visitors’ log for the White House residence between July 20 and August 15 of the previous year. It was during that time that White House aide Carolyn Huber noticed some computer printouts while straightening up “the book room,” a small space used for storage of unsolicited gifts in the residence. I worked in a room that was close to the book room, which was also near the room I slept in when I stayed overnight at the residence in late July, which I did, you may remember, because I was on crutches and Mrs. Clinton invited me to stay a
t the White House.
Just my luck, the subpoenaed Rose Law Firm billing records, missing for two years, had turned up in the room next door to where I worked. According to press reports, Huber hadn’t realized what she had found, and she packed the documents in a box and took it over to the East Wing, where they sat for months until she unpacked the box and realized what they were.
So, just as I had feared might happen, I got pulled into a serious Clinton scandal. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, colloquially referred to as the “Senate Whitewater hearings,” “invited me” to come and be deposed. I was told that if I declined their invitation, I would receive a subpoena. Subpoena is one of those words that makes your heart beat faster, especially in this town. Washington lawyers cost anywhere from $300 to $1,000 an hour. I could quickly rack up a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars, even though I didn’t know anything about Whitewater and had nothing to hide or share.
For a brief crazy moment, I considered showing up at the deposition without counsel, but I had also heard stories about people unwittingly perjuring themselves. So I hired a lawyer, a friend who had some experience in this particular brand of Washington silliness. He said it would be expensive, but that he would contact Simon & Schuster and remind them that were it not for my work on the book, I wouldn’t be going before the committee. Ipso facto: My legal fees fell under the expenses clause in my contract. He was sure they would cover it.
He was right. The same people who months before had balked at paying me my full fee were falling over themselves to pay my legal bill. Apparently, the specter (pun intended) of the First Lady’s ghostwriter being compelled to testify was a sobering thought for the White House. As for the publisher, I’m sure its executives just wanted this (and me) to go away.
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