Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  Woodward was very concerned about Jeff including the transcribed conversation in his book, Jeff said, explaining what had happened since our previous conversation. After a few days of tense exchanges between Jeff and Woodward, they arranged a meeting at Ben’s house.

  Woodward had continued to question whether Jeff had accurately characterized the conversation that occurred more than two decades earlier. I didn’t know what else I could tell Jeff. “I stand by my interviewing and by my transcribing. I personally transcribed all those interviews.”

  But then the obvious occurred to me. My recollection didn’t matter. All the tapes were preserved; it should be easy enough to find the tape and let the past speak for itself.

  “Why don’t you just listen to the tape yourself?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” Jeff said. “All the tapes of all your interviews are there, in a box. Except that one.”

  There was no explanation for that. Even a conspiracy theorist would have a hard time explaining how someone could have gotten his hands on that particular tape or even could have known it existed. It had been stored on the seventh floor of the Post building, locked away in a room. My mind flashed on the other missing tape, the one from my interview with Hillary Clinton.

  “I just want to stay out of it,” I said finally. I told Jeff I didn’t remember that specific exchange but that it sounded like Ben. I did remember talking about Watergate and feeling upset by what Ben said. It was slowly coming back to me in bits and pieces. Meanwhile, around this time, Ben’s memory had begun to fail. I was the only one who could reliably cast doubt on the transcript’s accuracy or bolster the account with additional information. I felt pressured and wanted to distance myself.

  I didn’t want to be a footnote to a footnote in another Washington story.

  The material involving the transcript remained in Jeff’s book. It was another year and a half before Yours in Truth went on sale and was excerpted in New York magazine, which led to a quintessential Washington flap: the intersection of a tempest in a teapot and insider baseball. Woodward denounced Jeff, and it played out, among other places, in Politico’s “Playbook,” which was billed as “Mike Allen’s must-read briefing on what’s driving the day in Washington.” On April 12, 2012, Allen ran parts of an e-mail Woodward sent to him.

  Woodward accused Jeff of a “journalistic felony” because though Jeff’s book included it, the New York magazine excerpt left out a contemporary quote of Ben’s that Woodward said “undercut the premise of the piece”: “‘if you would ask me, do I think he (Woodward) embellished, I would say no.’ Ben went on to say about me, ‘He did nothing to play down the drama of all of this.’ About [Mark] Felt [‘Deep Throat’], Ben said, ‘was (there) anything that I knew about him from Bob that didn’t ring true, and I don’t know of anything.’”

  This was Woodward’s way, methodically offering up facts. But then, in a departure from his usual manner, Woodward noted sarcastically that Ben was right that he hadn’t played down the drama, and that “It was, as I recall, a pretty dramatic time.”

  Woodward was also interviewed by Dylan Byers of Politico and said: “It’s amazing that it’s not in Jeff’s piece . . . It’s almost like the way Nixon’s tapings did him in, Jeff’s own interview with Bradlee does him in.”

  A Washington Post story about the New York magazine excerpt noted that even Jeff didn’t think too much should be read into the decades-old passage. “‘I didn’t think it was a big deal.’ The author says the stir over the ‘residual doubts’ line is a result of the magazine’s excerpting: ‘The dangerous thing about an excerpt is they take the gossipiest, sexiest part of your book. I did not intend any implication that it’s about anything larger. It’s hard for me to imagine the legacy of Watergate changing much.’”

  Meanwhile, several reporters tried to contact me, and I went Greta Garbo on them all: dodging their calls, deleting their e-mails, and mostly escaping attention. In most articles, if I was mentioned at all, I was referred to as Ben’s secretary or as an unnamed interviewer or researcher.

  Ben, who, at age eighty-nine wasn’t in any condition to get involved in a public feud, stayed out of the fray. When Ben initially gave Jeff total access to his life, it must have at least occurred to him that it might result in a less than happy ending. Ben knew as well as anyone the land mines an author buries for himself when he writes about the people he loves. A decade after JFK was assassinated, Ben published Conversations with Kennedy about his friendship with the late president. Jackie Kennedy Onassis hadn’t liked the book and complained to Ben that she felt “It tells more about you than it does about him.” After that she froze him out and wouldn’t even say hello to him when they ran into each other.

  When I asked him in May 1990 whether Jackie’s rejection bothered him, I could see the pain in his eyes. It’s memorable because his was a constitution that did not hold on to sorrow and was also not built for grudges—either carrying them or being on the receiving end. “It hurts my feelings a lot,” he told me. “I don’t want to be her best friend, but I think this is shit. She can say, I really wish you hadn’t written that book. Probably somebody’s fed her some stuff. As it turns out I made quite a lot of money on that book. I have given it and much more to Harvard to the Kennedy School in his honor. Which she doesn’t know.”

  Camelot and Watergate, in sequential decades, each loomed large in Ben’s life, legacy, and psyche. For a man who revered the truth as he did, it was, in moments where he was asked to self-reflect, hard to reconcile the possibility of being complicit—even on the periphery—in any mythmaking.

  Any chronicler of this town knows the Siamese twins of Loyalty and Betrayal. When I read Jeff’s book, I was struck by his recounting of a conversation he had with Woodward, during which they discussed what Ben must have been getting at with his “residual fear” remark. Woodward speculated that Ben must have felt a bit skeptical just because he wasn’t privy to everything that went on between Deep Throat and Woodward, how the sanctity of an anonymous source is something that even an editor shouldn’t trespass upon, even if that made the editor anxious.

  “‘Did we get this right, do we have the context right? . . .’ Woodward said. ‘[Ben] was always kind of nudging me a little about it . . . but you know, and this again is this, that there was a zone of interaction between a reporter and a source where this is, you know it’s kind of hallowed ground, and you don’t step in there.’”

  The phrase “hallowed ground” stung me when I read it. I could hear Woodward’s voice in my head as though I had been there in the room with them. I knew the exact pitch of his voice, a bit leavened by his tightly controlled temperament, momentarily modulating with passion and reverence as he spoke about the compact between reporter and source. I was once again left with the unanswered question of why he hadn’t extended that to me, a betrayal I’ve obviously never moved past.

  In the summer of 2014, my father recovered from what turned out to be double pneumonia. He returned home after a two-week hospital stay and slowly regained his strength, all the while continuing his political proselytizing. Meanwhile, Ben’s health was in steady decline, and there were news reports that he was entering hospice care. On October 21, 2014, news of Ben’s passing, at age ninety-three, roiled the Washington media landscape.

  Tributes poured in from around the world. Jake Weisberg, president of the Slate Group, asked me if I wanted to write something. I told him I didn’t, that I was too upset. Which was true. Besides, so many others had known Ben better and could be more eloquent. And there was this: as public a persona as Ben had commanded, my grief for him felt very private.

  Jeff was completely crushed by Ben’s death, and by the realization he would never have the opportunity to see him again. Though Ben was not angry with Jeff, the publication of Jeff’s book had coincided with Ben’s deterioration, and it became impossible for Jeff to visit Ben without Sally’s permission. Jeff knew that wasn’t going to happen. Jeff certainly was not surp
rised but was still disappointed to receive word through Sally’s camp that he was not welcome at the funeral.

  I received my formal invitation to the funeral via e-mail, from the PR firm Campbell Peachey and Associates with the following instructions: “Due to security measures that will be in place for Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee’s funeral service at the National Cathedral, guests will need to proceed through magnetometers upon arrival. The National Cathedral will be open to the public at 9:30 a.m. to allow guests ample time to do so. All guests will need to be in their seats by 10:30 a.m. and will not be admitted after 10:45 a.m.”

  The event promised to be a Washington spectacle, and I flashed on Mark Leibovich’s This Town, which my students had just finished reading. The set pieces of NBC icon Tim Russert’s and diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s funerals paint a portrait of Washington as cynical as anything I have read. In a New York Times review of This Town, Chris Buckley noted: “These chapters are mini-masterpieces of politico-anthropological sociology. Leibovich does for Russert’s memorial service at the Kennedy Center what Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic’ did for Lenny and Felicia Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers. Holbrooke’s valedictory, also held at the Ken Cen, First Secular Megachurch of Self-Regard, reads like the funeral scene in ‘The Godfather,’ transplanted to the banks of the Potomac.”

  I didn’t want Jeff to be alone, and I didn’t want to feel alone among the more than one thousand people at the National Cathedral so I chose to be with Jeff in his house watching the service on C-SPAN. That morning, as I dressed in casual clothes, I was well aware that much of official Washington—politicos and those who cover them—would be donning their power ties and power pearls and heading over to the National Cathedral in cabs or town cars or government-issued black SUVs with tinted windows. I took the Metro over to Jeff’s house. We turned on the television and began drinking scotch in Ben’s honor, even though it was only 10:30 a.m., and I’m not much of a drinker. But I rose to the occasion.

  Soon enough we were downing shots while studying familiar Washington faces as they greeted each other with air kisses and power pats, larger than life on Jeff’s gigantic flat-screen TV, the whole thing having the air of the red carpet at the Oscars. Jeff was more tuned into current Washington gossip than I was, and he began to freeze-frame shots when I asked him who was who, and he filled in all sorts of biographical details like who had slept with whom or how this one had gotten that job. We remembered that these sorts of details lit up Ben’s face on the rare occasions we knew something before he did, proudly delivering it, like a retriever dropping a rabbit at his master’s feet.

  The New York Times noted that the funeral had the “meticulous orchestration befitting a state dinner, metal detectors, satellite trucks and live coverage on C-Span.” The vice president, the secretary of state, and a Supreme Court justice attended. This sense of orchestration was to be expected as Sally attended to the smallest of details and the largest of pomp and circumstance. She had, after all, literally written the book on parties. Word had it that the planning of this memorial service had been in the works for months. Starting out with Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” and ending with John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March,” the service had the elegiac quality that brought to mind Whitman’s tribute to Lincoln’s passing, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:

  With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,

  With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,

  With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

  With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads . . .

  Funerals in Washington have always been a pageantry that honors power and separates the insiders from the great unwashed. In Thomas Mallon’s brilliant novel Henry and Clara, about the young couple who were guests of the Lincolns at Ford Theatre the night the president was assassinated, Mallon notes that Clara, who is a good friend of the widowed First Lady, doesn’t get one of the six hundred tickets issued for the president’s funeral because only seven were dispensed to women.

  With no C-SPAN in those days, the only thing Clara could do was listen to the drums and dirges as they passed by her residence on Lafayette Square.

  The most moving eulogy at Ben’s funeral was delivered by his youngest son, Quinn, who has struggled his entire life with health issues and learning disabilities. I had known him as a young boy, and now it was satisfying to see, at thirty-two years old, he had found his place in the world as an advocate for people with similar challenges. There was no one who would miss Ben more than Quinn.

  “My father was the happiest man I ever met . . . ,” he said. “Everyone who ever met him wanted more of him. They wanted to be his best friend, they wanted to please him. They all reacted the same way. Even though he seemed to give each of them something different . . .”

  Watching Quinn heroically make it through this most public of eulogies, I flashed on a moment nearly twenty-five years earlier, when I had asked Ben who his best friend was. This was a man who had counted among his confidants a president of the United States. He had dined with kings and flirted with movie stars.

  “I’ve always had trouble with that question . . .” I remember him saying. But then he stopped and said, “It’s probably Quinn. Little Quinn.”

  I’m pretty sure my eyes welled up with tears then, as they do now.

  Epilogue

  When I first became a ghost, I got a kick out of telling people what I did for a living. But as time wore on, particularly if I found myself in the company of someone who was engaged in what I considered serious work such as foreign correspondence or humanitarian aid, I felt embarrassment admitting how I paid my bills. In their eyes, I imagined, or sometimes sensed, I was a hack. I justified to myself that most of the books I worked on dealt with important topics and that my subjects had many lessons to teach me, either directly or indirectly, and that this ghostwriting business was my own personal tutorial in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

  Besides learning a lot about the book business, I also learned a lot about Washington—some of it positive but much of it negative. It is a town built on secrets, a place where having the capacity for deception is a marketable skill. It is also a town that people flock to in order to make a name for themselves, but sometimes they lose their identity in the process. That’s what happened to me.

  In “Washington Confidential,” a hybrid literature/journalism class I taught with my colleague and friend Maureen Corrigan, we embarked on a literary quest with our students to find the text that most authentically defined “the Washington story.” It proved to be elusive, and by the end of the semester we had yet to settle on our choice. Why was this so difficult? One of our brilliant students, Caitlin Ouano, made this observation in her final paper:

  Susan Brownmiller, an American feminist and journalist, wrote in her 1984 book Femininity that “women are all female impersonators to some degree.” The question of authenticity has been raised in reading Washington literature, and perhaps the question can be framed in Ms. Brownmiller’s terms: aren’t Washingtonians all Washingtonian impersonators to some degree? Drawing this connection in the search not simply for authenticity but rather identity in the Washington story, a person who can possibly convey the experience of this search is a woman: the born impersonator, the individual constantly in search for an authentic image of self in a world where she is bombarded by multiple representations of her gender that are both like and unlike her authentic identity and individuality.

  As the class tried to determine why it was so hard to maintain an authentic self in Washington, and therefore tough to create an authentic literary representation, we kept coming back to the cliché of Washington as a swamp. If you google “Washington built on a swamp,” you will get all sorts of stories and references debunking the myth, noting that only 1 to 2 percent of the actual topography of the federal city is technical
ly swampland.

  In this Google search you will also get helpful disquisitions distinguishing “marshy low ground” from “tidal estuary” from “mudflats.” And finally, among all this talk about why Washington isn’t really a swamp, you will find quote after quote noting that the swamp motif is just too good a metaphor to abandon for the sake of geographical accuracy. That’s because we’re speaking about the intersection of politics, government, and media, and there is no better metaphor to evoke the stench, muck, and impenetrability of a culture that swallows up one’s true identity and, often, truth itself. Sometimes we get pulled in, other times we walk in of our own volition.

  At the center of my own personal swamp was an African proverb I stumbled onto long ago. It became a constant reminder of a bad time in my life and just the word village could send me into a funk. For many years I couldn’t see my way out. But life is funny like that—as it turns out, another African proverb served as the inspiration to finally pull myself up out of the muck and write my own book.

  “Until the lion has a historian,” goes the adage, “the hunter will always be the hero.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have happened without my agent Lauren Sharp of Kuhn Projects. Lauren is a gifted wordsmith, a persistent businesswoman, and a kind soul. My editor Henry Ferris at William Morrow is a magician. I am so grateful to Henry for believing in this project, for his wise counsel, attentive editing, and banana-peel navigation. My thanks to the whole William Morrow team, including Nick Amphlett, Trina Hunn, Laurie McGee, Shelby Meizlik, Kate Schafer, Kaitlin Harri, Mumtaz Mustafa, Bonni Leon-Berman, Dale Rohrbaugh, and Andrew DiCecco.

  My first agent, Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord Literistic, worked hard and skillfully on my behalf, through good times and bad. Thanks to her, always, for everything.