Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  One’s rank in the academic caste system is of no interest to students; they focus only on how you can serve them, be it writing letters of recommendation, dispensing career counseling, or quelling their anxieties about grades. When one of our students asks for something in a particularly soul-sucking way (a letter of recommendation request on Thanksgiving Day, for instance), a colleague of mine invariably quotes Gabrielle Burton, the author of two books inspired by Tamsen Donner, the mother who stayed behind with her husband when her daughters were rescued from the infamous Donner Party expedition. Burton, a mother of five daughters, wrote: “The nicest husbands and children will eat you up alive if you offer yourself on the plate, and they’ll ask for seconds.” Motherhood, teaching, ghostwriting—they all are a giving away of oneself that can have great rewards but also leave one feeling diminished.

  Despite being exiled to the realm of adjuncts, I was luckier than most, tenured or untenured. I was teaching journalism in the English Department so I was left to my own devices. English literature and theory scholars regarded journalism as an unworthy academic discipline, and they paid it no attention. That autonomy was a gift that I cherished. Eventually I was able to create and build two programs, one at the graduate level and one undergraduate. I was content to do my own thing, in spite of or even because of my low profile. Particularly after the turmoil of my ghostwriting years, I welcomed the refuge Georgetown provided me.

  Most of the time I could distract myself with the tasks associated with teaching and running a program, but occasionally I was reminded that Georgetown wasn’t just any university in any campus town. One evening my husband and I went to a surprise dinner party for a friend and English Department colleague, an accomplished poet turning sixty. We didn’t know the hosts. They were the next-door neighbors of our poet friend and his wife, also our colleague. They lived in Georgetown in one of the smart brownstones typical of the exclusive neighborhood, just blocks from the university where we all teach.

  Instructed to arrive by 7:00 p.m. in order to elude detection, we knocked on the door shortly before our deadline and scurried inside. As she collected our coats and drink orders, the hostess told us apologetically that her husband had slipped on ice and was marooned upstairs in bed with a broken ankle. Throughout the night his absence provoked my curiosity. I kept picturing Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

  At about 7:45 p.m., well into our second cocktail, along with two dozen other guests, we were shepherded into the library, a book-lined, wood-paneled room with leather furniture and tasteful art. Our hostess asked us to quiet down so that David, the guest of honor, wouldn’t hear us as he approached the front door. But where was David? He had been invited over ostensibly for a drink and a bedside visit with the bedridden host, but it was now nearly a half hour beyond the appointed arrival time.

  His wife, who had gone to check on him, returned, explaining that when David had opened their front door, he noticed someone lying on the ground across the street. He ran over and found it was a teenager in the throes of a medical emergency. Another neighbor, walking her dog, rushed to the scene and instructed David not to finish the emergency call he’d begun to make. Instead, she fished around in the young man’s pockets, found his phone, went to his contacts, and called his parents. He was the son of a high-level administration official, she explained.

  It had begun to rain so David ran back into the house to get something to cover the young man. He grabbed his own teenage son’s baby blanket, a sentimental worn piece of cloth that held more memories than warmth at this point. He rushed back and covered the rain-soaked young man. Within moments, a caravan of Secret Service agents arrived with the worried parents, who were dressed in black tie, along with a private ambulance. They loaded up the patient and hurried off.

  David then crossed the street and knocked on the door. He entered to shouts and cries of “Surprise!” He looked stunned, trying to make sense of his university colleagues standing alongside his college roommate and the dozens of friends he’d made in between. Surprise parties can be a dicey endeavor, but it turned out he truly was surprised and genuinely touched.

  The party got into full swing, a catered affair with a buffet boasting a row of shiny stainless steel tureens filled with amazing Indian dishes and a well-known chef who beamed as his culinary skills were lauded by one and all. Toasts and speeches followed, and a cake. And it was all quite fun, but I felt myself slipping away, preoccupied by the scene that had just unfolded on the street and the fact that I would probably never know in totality what happened: it was just the middle of a story with an unknowable beginning and ending.

  The birthday boy, who was making the rounds during dessert, came and sat beside me, which I took as an opportunity to interrogate him. What did he think had happened? What did the man say? What did his wife say? What did the Secret Service say? Trained as a journalist I needed all the blanks filled in, but the novelist in me wanted to know what happened merely as a means to an end: I longed to imagine what could have happened. The stuff that lands on the front page or the home page no longer interested me as much as what makes a novel memorable.

  David told us what little he had gleaned.

  “It’s the beginning of a thriller,” I said, reaching for my merlot. My husband tried not to roll his eyes. I could read him as though there was a ticker running across his forehead. She thinks everything that happens is the beginning of a thriller. A Washington thriller. A thriller she would write the first three chapters of and then abandon.

  “Openings are easy, it’s the rest of the plot that is hard,” Dennis countered. “What happens next?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but you’ve got the son of [the name of whom I don’t want to reveal here because the kid didn’t choose to be in the public eye; some clichés deserve to persist] having some sort of medical emergency around the corner from Bob Woodward, the preeminent investigative reporter in the world, just outside the front door of a famous poet.”

  “Not to mention Nancy Reagan’s scheduler in the house behind this one,” David chimed in.

  Dennis shot him a don’t encourage her look, which I ignored.

  “Doesn’t that sound—” I began.

  “Like a typical Washington occurrence,” Dennis interrupted, his fork poised above his slice of birthday cake. I could see he was sizing up the icing he was about to eat and that he was merely humoring me by staying in the conversation when all he really wanted to do was become lost in the buttercream.

  Dennis is much more interested in good food than powerful people; his culinary-oriented priorities are one of the many reasons I married him. “So they both live in Georgetown,” he said. “Lots of powerful people do. Half the people in Georgetown are famous or powerful, and the other half live there because they want to live near them.”

  Dennis was right, of course, and I immediately thought of poor Viola Drath, the ninety-one-year-old socialite who had been murdered in her own house in 2011 just two blocks from here, on Woodward’s street. Upon sentencing, her husband, forty years her junior, was described by the U.S. attorney: “Albrecht Muth has pretended to be an Iraqi general, a Count, and an East German spy, but in truth he is a cold-blooded killer who strangled his elderly wife to death.”

  It was a crazy story that was crazy in a specifically Washington way. It featured an unscrupulous younger man and a sad, wealthy older woman and their very weird marriage—that part of it isn’t geographically specific. But what drove him to marry a woman four decades older was not just money but power, a certain brand of Washington power that is more about your résumé than your bank account. Muth nursed such an obsessive desire to penetrate the inner circle of the Washington elite that he took extreme measures to try to impress, making up a dossier that was part Graham Greene and part Monty Python.

  “He often wore an eye patch, and said he had lost the eye while fighting as a mercenary in South America, but he later stopped wearing the patch,” reported the Washington Post. “He had a mil
itary uniform—which prosecutors say he ordered online—and wore it on the streets of Georgetown, telling neighbors he was an Iraqi general.”

  Henry Allen, former Washington Post reporter and keen observer of this city’s inhabitants, wrote in 1999 that there is “a sense that none of us quite belong here, that we’re all obituaries waiting to happen; while at the same time the city of Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together, and nobody else in America quite understands, even though they pay for it.”

  Of course, most people don’t go to such lengths to belong as Viola Drath’s husband, but after thirty years in this town, I feel like I’ve run into more than a few Albrecht Muths. It’s a town full of posers, pretenders, inflaters, imposters, takers, and fakers. There are many facets of any city, of course, and I don’t mean to reduce Washington to a sum of its clichés. I’m talking specifically about federal Washington, political Washington, the Washington where I’ve made my life, and the Washington I’m still trying to make sense of after three decades.

  I woke up the next morning after the surprise party with a mild hangover and a nutty fixation on the whereabouts of our friends’ son’s missing baby blanket. It probably looked like an old tattered schmata to anyone else, but to David and Joy I knew it had great sentimental value. Surely they were mourning its loss. I thought of our daughter’s baby blanket, safely stowed in the back of my closet.

  But this was Washington and six degrees of separation is less a pop culture meme and more a way of doing business: one of the poet’s guests had connections to an administration connection and so it took just two phone calls through the top people network to get a message to the administration official’s Secret Service detail, “The good Samaritans in Georgetown would appreciate the baby blanket being returned.”

  The next day came an officious knock—rap rap rap—on the heavy wood front door. David opened it to find the high-level administration official, his son, and a couple of Secret Service agents on his doorstep, baby blanket in tow. The town, for all its pomp and circumstance, was just a small village, really. It was hard to get lost in the crowd, or forgotten. As I would soon enough be reminded once again.

  Thirteen

  Torches Lit

  Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you.

  —Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape

  “I found something in your old interviews with Ben.”

  I was on the phone with Jeff Himmelman. Like me, he was a former researcher for both Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee. It was March 2011, and Jeff was writing his own book—a biography of Ben.

  When I first learned about Jeff’s project a year earlier, I had fretted a bit. I wasn’t concerned that the book wouldn’t be good—Jeff is a masterful writer and reporter—but I was concerned that he might disturb the delicate ecosystem of the Washington Post legacy. Giving a journalist license to forage for material among Ben’s paper trail of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate was bound to shake loose some fact or anecdote that didn’t jibe with the mythology that had grown up around the newspaper’s rise. Though the biography wasn’t “authorized”—meaning that Ben had no veto power over what Jeff wrote—Ben had given him complete access to his private papers and encouraged others to cooperate.

  Still it seemed a tricky proposition for Jeff to write a book about someone he deeply loved and respected. Ben had been married three times, fathered and raised four children, and raised an additional four stepchildren. And as a journalist, he had also been front and center for some of the most important stories of the last fifty years. It had been a “good life,” as the title of his autobiography said, but it had also been big, complicated, and, at times, messy. Although I didn’t have anything specific in mind, I had wondered if Jeff might find something that would pit a biographer’s integrity against a friend’s personal loyalty.

  During our weekly sessions, I had on a few occasions witnessed Ben reflecting on his role during some key moments of his career. But it had been up to him what he included in his book, and very little of that survived to the written page, particularly in the sections describing the reporting of the Watergate story that secured his place in history. This did not escape Jeff’s attention as he went through the transcripts of my interviews with Ben.

  So when Jeff said he’d found something, I sat forward in my chair, listening intently as he read what Ben had said to me twenty-one years earlier: “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat. Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? . . . and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage . . . There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”

  I gulped.

  Jeff was silent, waiting for me to process what he had said, waiting while I mentally traveled back two decades. Waiting is something a reporter must become good at. We both knew the reporter’s interview trick of saying something and letting it dangle. Eventually your subject will find the silence so uncomfortable they will say something, anything. We had learned this from the same person.

  Finally, I gave in. “What are you asking, Jeff?”

  “I guess I want to know if you remember Ben saying that. It’s not in A Good Life. So do you remember if you talked about including it in the book?”

  What I remembered was an image frozen in time, and the sense that I had consciously willed myself to forget it.

  It was Ben’s face. That amazing, rugged, beautiful face, a face etched with lines that told a story, so many stories. With those warm, hazel brown eyes, which then, in this memory, were not quite seventy and still lit up like those of a much younger man, a man who could still electrify the object of his gaze. But in that moment, the look had not been electrifying. The look was somewhere between guilt and fear: guilt for thinking such a sacrilegious thought and fear that even a single detail of the Watergate story was embellished.

  I had seen that look just a few times during our interviews, usually when he was saying something very raw, something we both knew wasn’t going to make it into his autobiography. The-larger-than-life, fill-up-the-room confidence was eclipsed by a flash of vulnerability at the self-realization that he might not fully embrace every single aspect of the Watergate lore. This was not offered as a confession but rather as a statement for the record.

  I would like to say I have some skill at getting famous, powerful people to reveal things they otherwise wouldn’t, but I don’t. I’m just a competent interviewer who isn’t scary, who doesn’t intimidate, and who knows when to get out of the way and let it happen. I am reminded of something CIA director Bill Casey told Woodward: Everyone always says more than they are supposed to.

  People want to talk. It’s the lifeblood of journalism. They may not want to talk about what you want to talk about, at least not initially, but they want to talk. And Ben wanted to talk that day. To the tape recorder. Sometimes journalists believe, or at least they hope, a source will forget that a tape recorder is running. But someone with Ben’s experience and sophistication would never—could never—forget about a tape recorder. Sources are wary of tape recorders; they are concerned about what happens to their words once technology has captured them. Technology doesn’t edit on behalf of legacy or loyalty. Technology preserves. Be it a harmless truth or a dangerous truth.

  I unexpectedly found myself in the uncomfortable position of hearing something from one living legend about another living legend, and I felt an almost familial loyalty to both of them. I heard Ben say what he said, but we never revisited it, and the moment passed. After I transcribed the session, I pushed it to the back of my mind, where it stayed for two decades, until Jeff yanked it back to the forefront.

  It wasn’t my place to tell Jeff to use the reflection or not, just as it hadn’t been my place with Ben. Its absence in Ben’s autobiography was not a lie. It was, after all, just a thought Ben had had. He, like all of us, had millions of thoughts. Perhaps when he rea
d the transcript I prepared of our exchange, he decided he didn’t even agree with what he’d said.

  But Jeff had found this, and because of Ben’s role in the Watergate story and because of Watergate’s importance in the nation’s collective consciousness, plenty of people were going to talk about and evaluate whether Ben’s reflection, more than twenty years later, mattered. Ben cared deeply about the truth, finding it, protecting it, and preserving it. Wasn’t that, after all, what the Watergate story represented? That throwing a little sunshine on Nixon’s White House revealed what was really going on there?

  Ben’s agreement to give Jeff access to his papers was his way of giving the whole truth another chance. Ben recognized that Jason Robards’s portrayal of him cemented his role in the public’s mind for generations to come. But with that attention also came an uneasiness about Hollywood’s version of him and Watergate: he never wanted it to eclipse the truth, which he trusted was extraordinary enough.

  If Washington were a person, it would be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, a town that has fallen in love with itself and its own myths. This was never more true than when considering Watergate’s role in this town’s self-reverence. For the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher wrote: “As the years slip by, the Watergate story—the tale of a criminal conspiracy to cover up misdeeds by a president and his top advisers—drifts toward myth, losing some of its nuance. Fact and fiction blur. Hollywood’s rendition takes up more bandwidth than the original investigative journalism.”

  After Jeff asked me if I remembered this moment in my interviews with Ben, he said he was going to talk to Ben and to Woodward, and he would probably call me back to follow up.

  And a few days later, he did call back to say he had spoken to both men separately. One of the things Woodward wanted to know, according to Jeff, was whether Jeff had talked to me, and, if so, what I had to say about the transcribed exchange.