New Book Says Bob Woodward Burned Hillary Clinton’s Ghostwriter

Bob Woodward burned the writer Barbara Feinman Todd, she writes in a new memoir about her career as a researcher and ghostwriter. Woodward, she writes, pressed her to reveal an anecdote about her time working on Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village, promised not to use it, then went ahead and reported it out for his book The Choice. The charge is contained in Feinman Todd’s new memoir, Pretend I’m Not Here, which officially goes on sale Tuesday. ...

After she finished her work on Clinton’s book in late 1995, she writes, Woodward invited her to have coffee and catch up. They went for a walk, during which he bent down and tied her shoes. And then, she writes, he began working her. He was working on a book about the Clintons and said he wanted to “understand Mrs. Clinton’s general state of mind.” She recognized the technique: “He was pressing me like a source. … The invitation to catch up, I now realized, had been a ruse because Woodward knew I was leaving town for nearly a month, and he intended to ‘empty my pockets’ while my memory was still fresh.”

Feinman Todd says she folded and gave Woodward what she calls “the pearl”: She told Woodward about a meeting she sat in on with Hillary Clinton, Mary Catherine Bateson, and the New Age author Jean Houston in the White House Solarium, where Houston guided Clinton through an exercise of imagining she was talking to Eleanor Roosevelt, then inhabiting Roosevelt’s persona and reversing the conversation. Clinton also “spoke” to Mahatma Gandhi during the exercise.

Feinman Todd says she revealed this under the condition Woodward didn’t use it, but after returning to the US after traveling in Europe, she found herself strangely frozen out by Hillary Clinton and uncredited in the book, a minor Clinton scandal that became known as “Thankyougate.”