Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  As I read Woodward’s excerpt, I was fascinated by all the details he had collected and the chronology he had constructed, complete with context and history. But what his account didn’t include was a timeline of his reporting. He most likely began the moment my plane took off for Italy. The phrase about scales falling from one’s eyes, from the biblical passage about Saul regaining his sight, comes to mind. The farther I read, following the breadcrumbs of his reporting, the more I was able to complete the picture of his betrayal. He must have contacted Houston and Bateson with questions, as well as Lissa Muscatine, Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriter, who had been a Washington Post reporter and editor. Early on in my time at the White House, she had taken me under her wing and had even talked to me about staying on there to become a junior speechwriter, to help with a weekly newspaper column the First Lady was going to be writing.

  Of course, I also flashed on the series of events that had unfolded in the last several months: the weird scene I discovered in my apartment when I got back from Italy; the press phone calls about the acknowledgments flap; my final payment being withheld. Could any of that have been caused by Woodward chasing the lead I gave him? His requests for interviews as he followed the story must have tipped off the White House that I had told Woodward about the meeting between Mrs. Clinton and Houston and Bateson.

  Predictably, the national news media ran with the story from Woodward’s book. Ghosts, spirits, and psychics in the White House makes for a great news story, one that is perennially compelling. From the widely known Mary Todd Lincoln spiritualist séances to Florence Harding’s fortune-tellers to Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, the intersection of the occult and first ladies has always been a national obsession. In Mrs. Clinton’s case, a therapeutic exercise was turned into a spooky, kooky séance that made for some pretty dramatic headlines: book says hillary talks to dead; “spiritual event” is denied—hillary clinton says she was brainstorming for a book; white house: mrs. clinton not into séances: new age sessions “brainstorming”; and fuss over first lady’s “guru” wide, not deep—hillary clinton calls it “brainstorming”—political strategists reluctant to attack.

  I was terrified that someone in the press would connect the dots to me. That it eventually came from the Washington Post was particularly painful. The paper’s grande dame of political writing, Mary McGrory, wrote:

  Unfortunately for Clinton, the proceedings of the gathering—which was attended by Houston’s colleague, Mary Catherine Bateson, several Clinton staffers, and Barbara Feinman, Woodward’s former researcher—were taped. Tape? You ask unbelievingly, with a member of the Nixon impeachment staff the principal figure? Yes, but for the benefit of Feinman, a writer-researcher who was at the time helping Clinton with her book, the subsequent bestseller, It Takes a Village. No one asked the obvious question: “How would we like to see this on the front page of The Post?”—which is of course where it ended up.

  I reached the end of her column, completely shamed by her innuendo, but also sick with wonder about the existence of a tape. It was never in my possession, nor did I even think one way or another that we were being taped. Most conversations for the book were taped so that we could capture any usable material. It was a White House tape recorder, operated by someone else, and if a transcript was made of that meeting, it wasn’t shared with me, nor was I ever told that the afternoon’s activities were fodder for the book.

  In retrospect, it’s likely that the meeting originated as simply a visit with Houston and Bateson, and I was included as an afterthought because I had been gently lobbying for more face time with the First Lady, becoming increasingly desperate to get material for the book. Merging the two meetings was probably viewed by a busy scheduler as a way of killing two birds with one stone.

  Had someone broken into my apartment because they thought I had that tape? I couldn’t really put together a plausible connection. Break-ins, missing tapes, these are the things of Washington thrillers, not real life. (In 2014, ten years after McGrory’s death, John Norris wrote a long, fascinating story in Politico about her that said she had been on a list of media people whom Nixon had instructed the IRS to go after. “The plan to audit McGrory that year backfired,” the article said. “She got a larger refund because she had under-reported her considerable charitable giving. And it certainly did not soften her coverage of the Nixon White House . . . McGrory’s apartment was also broken into a number of times during this period. She had her theory on the unsolved crimes, saying she had been ‘fooled completely’ into thinking that the break-ins had been the work of ‘honest thieves’ rather than administration henchmen.”)

  On June 25, 1996, the same day McGrory’s column ran, another Post columnist, Richard Cohen, weighed in, though he didn’t dwell on the “séance” revelation:

  Just as interesting to me is a nugget in the Woodward book that has nothing to do with the dead and everything to do with the living. It is that both of Hillary Clinton’s New Age Nudniks, Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson, helped in the writing of It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, the First Lady’s best-selling book. “So in October and November [1995], Houston virtually moved into the White House residence for several days at a time to help,” Woodward writes. “Bateson came to help, too, at the end.”

  Cohen described my reported involvement in writing the book and listed a few of Mrs. Clinton’s aides who had also, according to Woodward, helped write it. What Cohen found telling was that the White House was attempting to suggest that Mrs. Clinton had written the book without any help when “most public figures get professional help to write the books they do not have time, interest or ability to write.”

  “Who wants to acknowledge the help of two New Age specialists (What is that, anyway?) which will only produce controversy and, as we all can now see, some ridicule? (Houston once claimed to have dissolved an orange-sized lump in her right breast by going into a trance.) In the end, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged no one . . .”

  No acknowledgments page has ever been such a briar patch.

  And then Robert Sam Anson, in the New York Observer, wrote that I had told Woodward about the “séance” to get even when I wasn’t thanked in Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledgments. He got the chronology all wrong and he made assumptions that weren’t supported by the truth. In fact, he had it totally backward. I told Woodward about the “séance” because I had a big mouth and because I stupidly trusted him not to use the material. This was well before I knew anything about the lack of acknowledgment. Anson wrote: “In The Choice, Mr. Woodward notes the presence of the recorder, but doesn’t reveal to whom the device belonged. If, however, one and one still add up to two, then both Mr. Woodward and Ms. Feinman have cause to feel ashamed.”

  He was right that I should feel ashamed, but as a journalist he still had an obligation to get his facts straight. The “device” belonged to the White House. I didn’t tape the session or even realize it had been taped until I read Woodward’s book.

  Life goes on. New book projects came along, my personal life changed dramatically in the year that followed, and things happened that eclipsed and pushed to the margins the memories of that year of misery. When memories did intrude, I tried to forgive Woodward and myself. We rarely talked. I couldn’t get past the betrayal, and I suspect he was happier not to have to think of it. Out of sight, out of mind. A few years later I showed up at an Easter party he threw, a family thing, out at his vacation home near Annapolis. He smiled and was gracious, and we pretended like the whole thing had never happened. I looked for signs of remorse, and all I detected was discomfort.

  No one died, I would remind myself, and few remembered the details except for me. It didn’t matter to anyone else. Being betrayed was an occupational hazard of moving in these circles. The news cycle kept spinning, rendering my little footnote to history old news, and then finally it washed down the drain of Washington dirty laundry, as though it had never happened.

  But I couldn’t truly forget. Prot
ecting sources is a sacred cow in Washington, and Woodward was the high priest of espousing the importance of anonymous sources. Ten years after the “séance” mishegas, in 2005, Judith Miller, then a reporter for the New York Times, went to jail for eighty-five days rather than testify before a grand jury about her source in the Valerie Plame affair. Woodward was one of Miller’s most vocal and prominent supporters, dramatically offering to serve a portion of her jail time during an appearance on Larry King Live.

  “If the judge would permit it,” he said, “I would go serve some of her jail time because I think the principle is that important, and it should be underscored. It’s not a casual idea that we have confidential sources. It is absolutely vital.”

  After the “séance” flap receded from Washington’s fickle consciousness, I vowed to leave the city, this time for good. My friends saw me as the ghost who cried wolf because I had said I was doing this on at least a few other occasions. But this time I really meant it.

  I figured I could live for a while on my savings while looking for a different sort of writing or editing gig somewhere, anywhere else. The Florida Keys randomly appealed to me. The weather was balmy and everything I associated with it—Hemingway, six-toed cats, hurricanes, key lime pie—seemed so very un-Washington. I gave my landlord thirty days’ notice and began the dismantling of my Washington life. Then one morning, as I was sitting on the floor packing up my mother’s Wedgewood, the phone rang.

  I heard a friendly, familiar voice on the other end. “Hi, Barbara, it’s Michael Lewis.”

  Michael was the author of Liar’s Poker, and later Moneyball, The Blind Side, and a bunch of other bestsellers. He was a friend whose success was so stratospheric it was hard to be jealous of him. He was calling, he explained, because he had a potential writing gig for me. It was July 1996, and Bill Clinton was running against Bob Dole for a second term in office. For several months, Michael had been writing a campaign journal for The New Republic. He had started with the primaries and had chronicled the vast field of Republican contenders including Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes, and Morry Taylor.

  I know. Morry who? That’s exactly what I wondered when Michael told me Morry Taylor was looking for someone to write his political manifesto. Morry was the CEO of a tire company in Michigan, and he had entered the race when one of his factory workers challenged him to put his money where his mouth was. He had garnered .14 percent of the popular primary vote. Yes, that was point one four. He had served as great comedic relief for Michael, who wrote that his incentive for getting out of bed each morning was that every three days, he allowed himself to spend a day with “someone who was not Bob Dole.”

  While I listened to Michael tell me why I should sign on to write a manifesto by some Republican I had never heard of, I looked at the moving boxes filling my living room. I wanted to say “no thanks,” but Michael is one of the most charming people I’ve ever met in my life. Some reporters bulldoze their way to information, but Michael does it through seduction. He has a charm that is enhanced by the southern tones of his Louisiana upbringing. “If he can’t find a publisher, he’ll just self-publish. He’s willing to pay a lot of money. Maybe 150k.”

  “Could he afford that?” I asked, sitting up.

  “He just paid $7 million of his own money to run for president,” Michael said. “His company has about 80 percent of the North American construction equipment wheel market and 90 percent of the farm-equipment wheel market. A hundred fifty grand would be chump change to Morry.”

  I told him I had to think about it. I had promised myself I was giving up the ghost. I wanted to get out of Washington and away from politics. But that kind of money for four or five months’ work would buy me a lot of freedom. I could get settled in the Keys and leisurely look for work, or even put that off and take time to work on writing fiction.

  A few days later, I told Michael I would do it. I called my landlord and asked if I could stay. I unpacked the boxes. A week later, I was headed to Detroit, sitting next to Michael, getting a crash course in all things Morry Taylor.

  As we flew toward the Midwest and I listened to Michael’s enthusiasm, it was dawning on me that I had signed on not only to be Morry’s ghost but also to be a character in the New Republic campaign journal that would serve as the basis for Michael’s book, Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House. This was meta. Instead of writing about Washington characters, I was becoming one.

  We went straight from the airport to Morry’s house, and I met the great man himself. Morry was a compact, fast-talking, energetic man in his early fifties with strong opinions and a man-of-the-people style. “The Grizz,” as Morry had been dubbed by Wall Street and encouraged everyone to refer to him, was refreshingly politically incorrect and unplugged. He had pulled out of the race a few months earlier, in March, after trying to position himself as a “poor man’s Ross Perot.”

  I seriously did not share Morry’s politics. After having ghosted primarily for Democrats, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make the ideological leap. The trick was going to be balancing his style with his outrage. Michael, in his campaign journal, would later allude to my challenge: “She insists that the book must be written in the first-person singular, so that the reader experiences the full force of Morry’s personality. ‘It’s easier for me to remember what Morry is trying to say if I’m channeling him through me,’ she says. ‘That’s a frightening thought, channeling Morry,’ I say. ‘I’ve channeled worse,’ she says.”

  To paraphrase Morry would be to drain his message of its power. His style was his substance: “The Census Bureau, they count you every ten years. What do they do the other nine years?” To someone who had just gotten burned by Washington, his outsider persona was something of a relief.

  Dave Barry described Morry this way: “The Grizz has a very direct style of speech. He sounds a little like a Quentin Tarantino movie gangster who has somehow developed an intense interest in the U.S. trade deficit,” and he summed up Morry’s campaign message as two basic points: “1. The problem with this country is that the government is run by lawyers. 2. And these are stupid lawyers.”

  The whole first meeting is documented in Michael’s book, Morry’s and my interaction serving as a welcome departure from the usual political fodder that campaigns manufacture like so much raw sewage:

  By midafternoon Barbara is sitting in front of a big-screen TV clutching a Grizz T-shirt, drinking a Grizz beer (brewed by Morry in New Hampshire during the primary), and watching Morry—in a pink shirt with a cigar dangling from his mouth—fast-forwarding through a videotape of his various performances. He speeds right past his triumphant speech to the People, his various debates in Iowa and New Hampshire, his concession speech. At length he arrives at his new commercial for Titan Wheel—the one I watched him create merely a month ago. “Here,” he says. “This is the best part.” On the screen Morry morphs into a grizzly bear, and as he does he emits a roar even more menacing than the one I recall. “That’s my roar,” he shouts with glee. “My real-life roar. They just slowed it down.”

  I remember that moment vividly. It was Michael watching me watching Morry watching me watching him watching himself on TV. And I remember exactly what I was thinking. I was wondering what the heck Michael had gotten me into and how the heck was I going to make a book materialize out of this. After all, “I’m a beautician, not a magician.”

  At some point during the afternoon, Michael slipped away, saying he had some work to do. I looked at him pleadingly. Don’t abandon me, my eyes said. But Michael just smiled reassuringly and left. What I didn’t know until much later when I read Michael’s published account was that he was just outside the door, taking notes for what would become a hilarious scene in his campaign book in which Morry lectured me on the world according to Morry.

  Michael left and I stayed on to bond with Morry and to interview him as much as
possible in as short a time as possible so that I could start to write his manifesto. Given his hatred of lawyers, it occurred to me that a natural title for his book was Kill All the Lawyers, and Other Ways to Fix the Government.

  Working with Morry proved to be the antidote to my Village woes. After having been caught in and chewed up by the White House machine, I loved the zaniness of Morry’s world. I loved his eff you to political correctness, and I began to regain my sense of humor after a few days around him. He always seemed to be doing radio interviews, even though he had conceded the race months earlier, and he started mentioning the book on air. And then he started mentioning me, describing me as a “nice little Jewish girl who was mistreated by Hillary Clinton.” At first I cringed, and then I just laughed. Even if I wanted to, there was no way to stop Morry from saying whatever flew into his head at any given moment. He couldn’t be handled.

  Eventually I returned to Washington and got to work. When I ran out of ideas, I went back to the Midwest and followed Morry around for a few days, asking him to expound on everything from flag burning to campaign finance reform. I taped him, transcribed him, and then translated him into what I hoped would be an engaging narrative that he felt adequately reflected his positions. His interest in the manifesto ebbed and flowed, and I was trying to be around for the flow parts.

  One day Morry called and said I should come visit because he wanted me to attend the taping of a commercial he had scheduled for his tire company. He had rented a pair of trained grizzly bears; the female was six hundred pounds and the male one thousand pounds. Morry brought me along to the football field where the commercial was being filmed. He seated me fifty yards away because I was afraid of the bears even though he kept telling me they were trained. When Morry went to kick a field goal over the outstretched paws of one of the bears, she was stung by a horsefly and rose high up in the air, roaring so loudly it sent me running off the field.