Ghostwriting for Washington’s powerful is a game of brittle egos
Barbara Feinman Todd pulls back the curtain in ‘Pretend I’m Not Here’
If you think being a writer is glamorous, author Barbara Feinman Todd would like to tell you otherwise. “Not to be a buzzkill but ‘being a writer’ is as much about estimated taxes, paying your own health insurance, and getting rejected on a regular basis as it is about adoring audiences, bylines, and book tours,” Todd writes in Pretend I’m Not Here
(William Morrow, 320 pp., eeeE), her account of life as a ghostwriter for Washington’s power players.
By the end of this short, engaging memoir, most readers will agree. At times, it seems Todd should have called the book Poor,
Poor, Pitiful Me, as she routinely became collateral damage in the constant picayune dramas that too often characterize our nation’s capital.
Her stint as the collaborator for then-first lady Hillary Clinton on It Takes a Village ended with Clinton stiffing her on a co-writer credit and Clinton’s staff trying to diminish Todd’s contribution to the book. Then Todd, who visited the White House during one of the numerous kerfuffles surrounding Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, ended up being subpoenaed by a Senate committee for her trouble. Todd, who started as a Wash
ington Post researcher fresh out of Berkeley, also joined the legions of figures great and small to be burned by Post reporter Bob Woodward, for whom she worked as a researcher.
Woodward persuaded her to tell about an experience while working on the Clinton book, promised her anonymity and then wrote his book The Choice, making Todd’s contribution as a source only too obvious.
“The betrayal was devastating,” Todd writes of Woodward. “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.”
Sometimes, Todd brought the problems on herself.
She helped longtime Post editor Ben Bradlee work on his 1995 memoir, A Good Life, and elicited a confession from Bradlee that he had problems with Woodward’s description of his legendary Watergate source, Deep Throat. Instead of pushing Bradlee further and persuading him to include it, she let it slide, only to have it blow up on her in 2012 when author Jeff Himmelman found the interview and used it in his Bradlee biography, Yours in Truth.
When the same Washington insider machine beat up Himmelman for sins that had little to do with the actual facts in his book, Todd took a pass. Although she had felt the sting of Woodward’s perfidy, Todd said, “I just want to stay out of it.” Sad. Todd writes crisply and has an amusing knack for capturing the good and bad of Washington. Pre
tend I’m Not Here is worth reading and is a possible boon for hygiene: After you’re done reading it, you want to take a shower.