Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  We sat there all day. Eight hours. My lawyer repeated the same instructions to me whenever I asked him what I should do when I was called to testify. He gave me a piece of paper from his legal pad and suggested I write down a few key things to remember. We had been over it a hundred times. We both knew he was suggesting this exercise just to give me something to do. Say yes not yeah. No sound bites—don’t be a wiseass. Eye contact with whoever is talking. Short answers. Poker face. Forthcoming. No attitude (underlined twice). Be boring. No sarcasm. When in doubt say, May I consult with my counsel?

  I also scribbled on another piece of paper the following: I don’t have a statement. I believe that my counsel sent a letter to your committee yesterday, which I would appreciate having entered into the record. Then, under that, was a little directional diagram with the words east executive running lengthwise and north/south/east/west noted in relationship. This, I am sure, was to calm my nerves regarding how I would answer questions that might reveal my poor navigational skills.

  As the hours ticked by, my imagination was conjuring up all sorts of crazy headlines in the next day’s papers: white house ghost needs compass to find her way out of mess.

  Finally, the dinner hour came and went. I had worn myself out worrying. I begged my lawyer to try one more time to get them to change their minds. He took out a legal pad and wrote a long note, folded it in half.

  He got up and talked to one of the Senate aides, who took the note. A few minutes later the aide came back and said we could go.

  That was it. I don’t remember what he wrote in the note. Perhaps that his client really did not know anything, and that it would be very detrimental to her career to have to speak publicly about her work in the White House.

  Maybe that worked.

  Maybe the senators were tired and were dreaming of steaks and bourbon by then. I was just relieved I made it over one more Washington hurdle and was still alive to tell the story. A story I hoped was now over. The end.

  I was sadly mistaken.

  Ten

  Giving Up the Ghost

  Writers are always selling somebody out.

  —Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  Every September, as reliable as the autumnal equinox, at least one student—usually named Ashley or Elizabeth, from Greenwich, Connecticut, or Long Island—comes into my office, throws down her Birkin, and positions her Voss bottle on the edge of my desk (leaving a water ring), sinks into the cushy well-worn armchair, looks deeply and earnestly into my eyes, and says, “I want to be in The New Yorker.”

  “Me too,” I usually reply, my drollness wasted on youth.

  The magazine was a fixture in my childhood home, and I grew up in a literate and literary household. My mom was a high school English teacher, and my dad was a Shakespeare scholar turned businessman. They each held up the magazine as the pinnacle of literary success.

  I’ve carried on the tradition and am a loyal subscriber. Our house is filled with past issues in various states of engagement. My husband leaves them opened in different spots: on his nightstand means he’s deeply involved in a story, and no one should touch the magazine; on the living room radiator means he’s in the middle of a story, but I can read it too as long as I mark the page he is on; on the coffee table in the family room means there’s something he hasn’t gotten to yet, and he may not get to it, but he isn’t ready to surrender it; on the Chinese decorative tray in the living room means he’s totally done with it, and I can give it to my sister.

  So, yes, the magazine is everywhere throughout our home, there to remind me of an article it published in February 1996, shortly after my Whitewater deposition, that I am desperate to forget. It’s my Proustian madeleine with a side of food poisoning.

  The piece was written by cultural critic and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and it was headlined hating hillary, with “Hillary Clinton has been trashed right and left—but what’s really fueling the furies?” as its subhead. The article contained a long section on It Takes a Village.

  “Hillary’s latest bouts of bad press do suggest someone whose sense of public relations is less than finely honed,” Gates wrote. “Take the miscalculation that led to what Katha Pollitt has dubbed ‘Thankyougate.’ It started with the decision to hire Barbara Feinman to help out with the research for and writing of It Takes a Village (and not since Clark Clifford’s memoirs has the publication of a book had such exquisitely bad timing). Feinman was a journalism instructor at Georgetown who had previously worked on books by Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward, among others; but although her involvement in the project was announced publicly last spring, Hillary Clinton decided not to name her—or anyone else—in the book’s acknowledgments. Sally Quinn says, ‘All she expected was “Many thanks to Barbara Feinman, whose tireless efforts were greatly appreciated.”’ She would have died and gone to heaven.”

  Let me stop here and do what my literature professor colleagues call “a close reading,” because there are so many reasons why I simply wanted to die when I read this back in 1996. First, how pathetic do I sound, the notion that a morsel of kind words would delight me?

  I was upset about the lack of acknowledgment because it signaled there was a problem that I was completely unaware of, not because I was desperate for a word of gratitude. Of course, humiliating me was absolutely not Sally’s goal. She wanted to underscore how stingy the First Lady was with thank-yous. She was trying to illustrate something about Mrs. Clinton’s character through her actions.

  “The manuscript’s original due date was Labor Day,” Gates went on. “At that point, about eight or nine chapters—which Feinman helped to organize, draft and edit—were submitted to the publisher.”

  Mr. Gates was wrong—we submitted chapters 1 through 10 and an introductory chapter that ran twenty-eight pages, as well as a three-page “interlude” to go between the introduction and the first chapter. So we submitted more than eleven chapters. And in addition to the wrong number of chapters, his implication was that somehow this was an incomplete manuscript. We submitted a complete manuscript—and it was one worked on by the whole village. And the publisher accepted that manuscript.

  “According to Feinman, she was told that her work was satisfactory . . .” Wait, wait, wait. Mr. Gates never made an effort to talk to me. So according to me according to whom? Where’s your attribution here, Dr. Gates?

  “. . . and she subsequently left for a three-week vacation in Italy.” True, and I was wishing I had stayed in Italy.

  “A White House aide says that Hillary was appreciative of Feinman’s efforts but was not fully satisfied with the direction of the book.” Wait a minute again. Why are they relying on an anonymous source? Is this a matter of national security? They don’t even call for a comment from me, and yet some “White House aide” gets to be anonymous. “Appreciative of Feinman’s efforts”—sounds like I brought home a handprint in watercolors from kindergarten and Mommy said, “Good work!” Please. Appreciation in the book business is traditionally expressed on the acknowledgments page, especially when that is stipulated in the contract, which it was.

  From what I was told and was able to piece together, Mrs. Clinton and our editor were satisfied with the book.

  “. . . and the bulk of the writing, revising, and editing took place after Labor Day—that is after Feinman’s involvement with the project had largely ceased.” Well, I worked on it through September, but we’re not in a deposition (been there . . . ) so let’s not quibble. “Then matters got a lot stickier. There were discussions between Simon & Schuster and Feinman’s agent about whether Feinman would be paid in full.” Okay, we already went over that. The publisher had every intention of paying me until they were told not to.

  Sally continued her defense of me. “‘She was absolutely distraught,’ Sally Quinn says. ‘For one thing, she is planning to adopt a baby by herself, because she’s thirty-six.’”

  Okay, here we go! Mega mega mortification! Yes, I was considering adopting
a baby. But I hadn’t planned on publishing a baby announcement in the middle of a New Yorker profile about Hillary Clinton. Particularly because, um, I hadn’t shared this news yet with everyone, like, for instance, my father.

  “‘So she’s saving up all this money to go to China and adopt a baby girl. That was part of this little nest egg that she had.’”

  OMG. Cue Sarah McLachlan singing a sad song over footage of me in a cage, looking mournfully at the camera, the starving ghostwriter who can’t adopt her baby girl. I was far from destitute. Plenty of work was streaming my way: This town is full of people who want the First Lady’s ghost to pen their memoirs and manifestos. And my involvement in this flap made me even more sought after. Welcome to Washington, the town of just-spell-my-name-right-on-the-subpoena.

  Then Gates felt obliged to point out that: “(Other associates of Feinman reject any suggestion of financial extremity.)” “Associates”? What does he think I am, a law firm? It was just me in my apartment. Oops, I’m giving away the next part.

  “. . . it’s hard to argue when Sally Quinn says, ‘Hillary versus Barbara Feinman is a big loser, P.R.-wise.’ She goes on, ‘Barbara’s a single woman, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment off Dupont Circle.’” Suddenly I’m picturing Sara Crewe in The Little Princess who ends up living as a pauper in an attic when it is believed she has been orphaned by her soldier father who is MIA. The truth is, I lived in a beautiful apartment in one of the priciest zip codes in the nation’s capital. The neighbor below me was a congresswoman. Embassies were down the street.

  “‘Not only that but she has been a researcher at the Washington Post, and all her best friends are journalists. Everyone loves her’”—they like me, they really like me!—“‘and she knows every journalist in town.’”

  Let’s unpack that, as the pundits like to say. Yes, I was a researcher at the Post. So I knew a lot of journalists. So does everyone who works in any newsroom. I knew the normal number of media people and politicos that someone who has worked in media for, by then, fourteen years would know.

  My proximity to power was because the books I had worked on made me reasonably well connected using the metrics that informed Sally’s criteria (WashPo journalists and New York publishing people). I understand that it must have been irresistible to her to defend me, someone whom she seemed to genuinely care for, and trash the First Lady, whom she had publicly criticized on several occasions and with whom she was engaging in some sort of weird power struggle.

  Mercifully, she was almost done: “‘This is what I’m saying about Hillary being book-smart and street-stupid.’” And then Gates continued, amplifying Sally’s point: “Indeed, out of all the writers and researchers for hire in this world, why choose one who is closer friends with your critics than with you? Was the choice meant, in fact, to be a conciliatory gesture, a peace offering—giving a plum and profitable assignment to a favorite of the Post’s illuminati?”

  That strikes me as way too strategic for that White House. Only someone in an ivory tower in another big city, who doesn’t really understand Washington, would think the Clinton White House would feel the need to please the “Post’s illuminati.” The truth is much more prosaic. I was hired because I had worked on other Washington books published by the same publisher producing Mrs. Clinton’s book. I was convenient.

  In any case, I was so utterly mortified by this that I hid under my bed for a week. Then, when I came out, miracle of miracles, I discovered that only a few people had noticed. The ones who had, sounding really impressed, said they saw my name in The New Yorker, though they couldn’t remember why. A few more congratulated me on my impending motherhood. Close friends plied me with liquor and made jokes, relentlessly. And then, as though etched in sand, the story was washed away by the reliable tide of the news cycle.

  Four months later, in late June 1996 on a Saturday afternoon, I got the call. It was four months after my Whitewater deposition, five months after the Village book came out, and eight months after I had returned from Italy to find things broken and missing in my apartment.

  “I need to give you a heads-up,” Woodward began. My heart started pounding so loudly I could barely hear his voice.

  “About what?”

  “An excerpt of my book is running in the paper tomorrow.” He paused while I gasped. Although I couldn’t anticipate what he was about to say, I knew it was going to be extremely upsetting. In words I can’t remember precisely because I went into a state of shock, he admitted that even though he promised not to, he had taken what I told him in confidence and gone to the other participants to confirm the story.

  Sometimes it is permissible to take information gathered from a source and pursue it through other sources. But only if the original source’s identity will not be compromised and if the source agrees to the reporter confirming the information elsewhere for the purposes of publication. I didn’t want him to pursue this line of reporting and I had made that clear. These were the conditions under which I had told Woodward what I told him. And which he failed to honor. Later, I would cycle through many emotions, but in that moment I had just two reactions, in equal measure: panic and fury.

  I began to sputter out variations of “How could you?” while my tone oscillated back and forth from stunned to distressed. His tone, though calm, belied a hint of nervousness, as he tried to assure me he didn’t use my name and that he had reported out the story through other sources, other eyewitnesses. Which I interpreted as meaning he went to Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson and the White House staffer who witnessed what I had and from them he gathered more information. He said he protected me by not naming me in what he wrote.

  I was dumbfounded. Not naming me was worse, in a way, I pointed out. There were just five people in the room, and the other four knew I was there. It was obvious who the leak was. “How could you? How could you?” I asked him over and over.

  The betrayal was devastating. It was even worse that it had been committed by someone I looked up to, by someone who had mentored me, who had sat across the dinner table from me a thousand times, who had helped me through bad times and cheered me on through the good. It was a breathtaking betrayal. And by “breathtaking” I mean literally that it took my breath away. As I type these words twenty years later, I feel my throat tighten.

  And, yes, I am embarrassed to be that person, the sort who can’t let go of old wounds. And I have allowed this wound, self-inflicted by my own bad judgment, to remain uncauterized, settling into permanent self-recrimination: I should not have shared that information and so I got what I deserved.

  If that’s so, why now, twenty years later, am I writing about this? More to the point, why am I exposing what I think Bob Woodward did to me? Because I can’t expose myself without exposing him. Writing, when committed honestly, is an act of exposing. Exposition. Think about that word. It comes from the Latin exponere, defined as “to explain or to put forth.”

  I want to explain, to tell my story, having run out of enthusiasm for telling the stories of others. Woodward is just collateral damage in my quest to set the record straight, just as I suppose he tells himself I was collateral damage in his reporting out what he considered an important news story.

  Set the record straight. Oh, how I recoil from those words even as I type them. Setting the record straight is the Washington cliché of all clichés, a peculiar compulsion and construction that allows people, usually via memoirs or op-eds or speeches, to say what’s on their minds. What makes so many people here, myself included, believe they need to write their own “rough draft of history”? In part, it’s because loyalty in this town can be bought, sold, and traded like crude oil or copper. And also because it is unbearable to accept that versions of oneself can only be authored by others whose own self-interest will live in Google searches until the end of time.

  I don’t remember how the phone call ended, just that I was in tears and he tried to reassure me that it wouldn’t be a problem for me. He sounded slightl
y sheepish but at the same time he didn’t seem to regret what he had done. He seemed focused on the big splash he was about to make. A splash in the same pool in which I was drowning.

  The next day, June 23, 1996, along with millions of other Washingtonians, I read the 154-column-inch excerpt from Woodward’s new book, The Choice, on the front page of the Washington Post. That’s when I was able to fill in the missing pieces of a puzzle that had been the last eight months of my life.

  It’s true that Woodward’s account had gone far beyond what I had told him. His reporting traced the beginning of the First Lady’s relationship with Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson back to a weekend at Camp David in late December 1994, several months before I met them. In addition to these women, other guests included self-help guru Marianne Williamson, Anthony Robbins, and Stephen R. Covey. It was a retreat of sharing and introspection, a weekend of healing.

  Woodward made it clear in his usual stark and bloodless tone that he had contempt for this sort of navel-gazing. At least it was clear to me. But his tone was irrelevant; it was the facts he had gathered, in his typical vacuum-cleaner suck-it-all-up style, that enlightened me: “Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson had followed up their weekend at Camp David with a series of letters, proposals and ideas on defining her role as First Lady and rising above the criticism and attacks. Houston had strongly encouraged Hillary to write a book, and Hillary had begun one, on children.”

  This helped me understand why Houston and Bateson appeared a bit disconcerted and annoyed when we met. Houston had previously told the First Lady she should write a book. And there I was, an unknown writer, someone outside the tribe, who seemed to appear out of thin air. I hadn’t shared their communion at Camp David. I wasn’t famous. I was nobody, an interloper.