Barbara Feinman Todd - Pretend I’m Not Here: How I Worked with Three Newspaper Icons, One Powerful First Lady, and Still Managed to Dig Myself Out of the Washington Swamp

For Dennis and Sasha

We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

Patti Smith

In the summer of 2014, my brother called to tell me hed just heard that our ninety-one-year-old father was being taken to a Miami emergency room by ambulance because he was having trouble breathing.

Find him and figure out whats going on, my brother said, explaining that the aide who called from the assisted living facility didnt have any additional information. I know you can find him faster than I can, he repeated. Thats what you do.

So I identified the hospital closest to my dads address and tracked down the ER nurse tending to my father. She said they were running tests on him and they would have some answers shortly.

Is he in pain? I persisted.

He can tell you himself, she said and handed him the phone.

Hello there, I heard my dad say, with a forced cheerfulness punctuated by wheezing.

Dad, whats wrong?

I dont know. Do I have a medical license? he said, sounding more like his ornery self.

What are your symptoms?

Theyve got me on a gurney in the hallway.

Dad, your symptomsdo you have pains in your chest? Your arm?

They say I was having trouble breathing... He launched into a long story about how he hadnt felt quite right after lunch and had sat down in the lobby when a friend came along and noticed his color wasnt good... So they called over someone else to see if they agreed that he was a little pale...

I interrupted, trying to get him to tell me exactly what he was experiencing.

Listen, he said, Harriet called me this morning and said there was a story in the paper about Hillary, and it mentioned you. I didnt know who Harriet was. I did know the story he was referring to. The Washington Post had run something about Hillary Clintons latest book, Hard Choices. The day before, Paul Farhi, a reporter at the paper, had contacted me for a comment. Nearly twenty years earlier, I had worked with Mrs. Clinton on her first book, It Takes a Village, when she was First Lady. The reporter wanted a quote from me that would provide context for the standard story he was probably writingHillary Clinton has a new book out and this time shes given her ghost credit.

Did you see that story?

Yes, Dad, the guy e-mailed me, and I said what I always say: No comment. Dad, can we please get back to your health? I tried to keep the mounting exasperation out of my voice.

I guess youll be the only one in the family who doesnt vote for Hillary, he said with a sniff. I realized then what my father was doing. It wasnt that he was faking this medical emergency; he was exploiting it, holding his condition hostage. I knew how this would end; he was a lifelong Democrat, and he wanted me to promise I would vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Right now, Dad, Im worried about your health.

No need to worry about me. I will be fine. Its this country you need to worry about. Which brings me back to my original question: Who will you be voting for in the next election... ?

Even as early as high school, like Woody Allens Zelig character, I found myself orbiting on the periphery of people in the public eye. Maybe its in the genes, as I can trace a through-line back to my great-grandfather, who was a stable groom to Czar Nicholas.

My first brush with celebrity was Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, whose five stages of grief theory gained world renown in 1969 with the publication of her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. One of my high school classmates was Dr. Kbler-Rosss son, and in the mid-1970s, I hung out frequently in the Kbler-Ross home in the suburbs of Chicago. It was a big house and we didnt go into parts of it. I knew that was because terminally ill patients stayed there sometimes. One day we went into a part of the house we didnt usually go, a room that had a sort of teepee-shaped structure, made from what looked like giant Legos. My friend said I could sit inside the structure and see if I felt anything. I sat there and sat there, waiting for something to happen. Youd be right if you thought this was a good description for my whole high school experience.

These were also the years when Dr. Kbler-Ross was beginning to participate in some unusual activities such as out-of-body experiences and spiritualism, but all I knew was that she was helping dying people and that seemed like a worthy cause. After graduation, when I was leaving to go to Occidental College in California, Dr. Kbler-Ross gave me an autographed copy of On Death and Dying, which shed inscribed To Barbara, with good wishes for your trip to California. Elisabeth K. Ross Sept. 1977.

My next brush with fame didnt even involve real contact, and I wouldnt know it until many years later. At age twenty, after my sophomore year, I transferred to UC Berkeley, leaving Occidental four months before a young Barack Obama would arrive there. I left behind some (extremely bad) poetry, which found its way into a student literary publication. I had no memory of the poetry journal, until thirty years later, when I received an e-mail from David Maraniss, whom I had known when we both worked at the Washington Post. The e-mail said he was working on a biography of Barack Obama and that during his research he had found the Spring 1981 volume of Oxys literary journal, Feast, which contained three of my poems along with one written by Obama. Yours were better, Maraniss wrote to me. And then he quoted a line from one of my poems: Ashes sleep with ashes but people dream alone. Anyway, his e-mail continued, I would love to talk to you about Oxy, that time and place, whether you actually knew Barry or not...

I wrote back, explaining that I hadnt crossed paths with the future president. Later, when I read Maranisss book, I learned that my best friend at Oxy had become close with Obama, serving as inspiration for Regina, a key female character in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

In my early twenties, I got an amazing opportunityto work for Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. I hadnt thought about becoming a book researcher, but once the seed was planted, it grew with abandon. After my stint with Woodward, research jobs on additional high-profile books quickly followed, and soon enough, with a few books on my rsum, I was under the illusion that I was running with the big dogs; I was part of the game, inside the power structure. The role I played was as varied as the books I worked on: the gig with Woodward turned out to be the first stop on a long ride that would take me from researcher to book doctor, to collaborator, to ghosta publishing insiders taxonomy that I will flesh out later. For now Ill just use ghost as shorthand to refer to my role as someone who worked behind the scenes on other peoples books. I couldnt know it then, but before I would lay to rest my ghostwriting career I would masquerade as, among others, a U.S. senator with a female problem (in a project that had failed to launch), a congresswoman who took on the male-dominated Congress, a second U.S. senator who had also been a presidential candidate, a tire magnate turned presidential candidate, and, most notably, a First Lady (who would later become a two-time presidential candidate) who wanted to reshape her image.

Few occupations allow you to see how famous people act when they arent on the public stage. My clients were people I saw on television or read about in newspapers and magazines. I was only twenty-three years old when I began working for Woodward, and the proximity to fame and power was intoxicating. I suddenly found myself interesting to people who I thought were more interesting than I was. It slowly became clear to me thatin Washington at leastmy appeal was more about who I knew than who I was.