Did you know Japanese ghosts have feet? They find it so strange that ours don’t.
—E-mail from a friend on a fellowship in Japan
Ten years earlier, when I was still in my twenties, I found myself standing on the side of the road in Lee, Massachusetts, a former mill town now billed as the “gateway” to the Berkshires.
It was Labor Day weekend, and I was with a friend and her boyfriend heading back to D.C. from her family’s farm in Vermont. The clutch had blown in their car, and they were bickering about whose fault it was. Seeing as I’m naturally conflict averse and had nothing to add to the conversation, I drifted away, unnoticed, toward an old Victorian house with a sign promising junk & antiques. Mercifully, it was open, and I decided to go in.
I wasn’t in the market for a silver snuffbox, an antique compass, or any number of ship salvage pieces, such as a mermaid masthead, which would be a cool though hardly practical acquisition. But vintage jewelry always got my attention, and soon enough I spotted a glass case containing cameos, lockets, and other trinkets.
As I took it all in, my gaze stopped on a tiny clothbound book with the word Diary embossed on its faded dark green cover. I asked the woman behind the counter if I could take a look, and she gingerly pulled it out for me.
The diary chronicled the year of 1872 in the life of a teenage girl named Elizabeth Morley. “Libbie,” as she referred to herself, had lived in Lee, and she had siblings, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, all of whom she referred to in passing. Most of the entries were one or two sentences and were written in a delicate cursive with violet ink. The shopkeeper said she’d sell it to me for a dollar so I bought it, got change for the Coke machine outside, and found myself a shady tree to sit under and let myself be transported back in time.
While my friends were busy resolving our twentieth-century problem, I got lost in the nineteenth century. At first I was disappointed because so many of the entries were mundane observations, focusing on the weather (without central air-conditioning or heat, that was understandable) and various medical ailments of hers and those in her immediate circle (toothaches, headaches, and colds). But eventually a more compelling narrative began to emerge: I noticed that Libbie took pains to note every encounter she had with the family’s pastor. A close reading of the diary revealed a fixation on him, and on her Christian faith as a means to connect with him.
I closed the diary when my friends came to say they had tracked down a mechanic who said he could replace the clutch the next day if he could get his hands on the right parts. So with no other viable options, we spent the night at a nearby motel.
The following afternoon we left the town of Lee behind us, but Libbie stayed with me. She occupied a place in my imagination as I wondered what happened to her in the years following the one she had chronicled. A year or two later, again on Labor Day weekend, the same friend and I stopped in Lee on our way back from Vermont and found Libbie’s grave site in the town cemetery, high on a hill with a panoramic view of the town. I had found out that Lee was once a paper mill town, and it supplied newsprint for the New York Times. It was also known for its marble quarries.
The more I learned about the town and what life was like for a young girl in that era, the more I yearned to know what had become of Libbie. Some years later, I returned to Lee so I could spend time in the town hall records office, the same building where folk singer Arlo Guthrie appeared before a blind judge and his seeing-eye dog for a littering charge, an incident made famous in the song “Alice’s Restaurant” and the movie that followed.
I would learn through death records that Libbie became a “carpet weaver” and that what she had written in her diary about one of her cousins was confirmed in the death records: the cousin had died because she was an “opium eater.” There was a bleakness to her diary entries, both in what she said and what she didn’t say. And that absence of information—what she chose to withhold—fueled my imagination with a certain velocity.
I created my own story of a girl, inspired by Libbie and sharing her name, who, after an inappropriate encounter with her pastor, seeks spiritual comfort in a non-Christian faith, the rising movement of spiritualism—a precursor to the women’s movement. Spiritualism was often a young woman’s ticket to freedom, a socially acceptable reason to leave home and travel to other towns, participating in séances that facilitated reunions with departed relatives. I set the story ten years earlier than the real Libbie’s so that my narrative would coincide with the Civil War.
And this is where it gets weird: my fictional character Libbie ended up in the Lincoln White House, facilitating a séance for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who, in her grief-stricken state over the recent death of her young son Willie, was desperate to commune with him.
I wrote that scene a few years before I would end up in the White House under circumstances oddly reminiscent of that.
Everything seems to start with a phone call, and this one was from an editorial assistant who told me to hang on. A moment later, Alice Mayhew came on the line. “We’ve got a very interesting project in Washington that needs a writer.” She paused as though she were choosing her words carefully. “Very interesting. But I can’t say who it is.”
My heart beat faster. Alice wasn’t prone to drama. If she said something was very interesting, that meant it was very interesting.
“I’m available,” I blurted out, as though I had to respond quickly or I could lose to a higher bidder. My mind was a blur: Am I really available? I was still working on Bob Kerrey’s war book, but that was part-time and piecemeal. I could work around that.
“Good, good,” she said, sounding, as she always did, as though she were in a hurry, probably because she always was. “It’s a very prominent woman. That’s all I can share right now.” My curiosity was increasing by the second. “Her people will contact you,” Alice continued. “Is this the best number to reach you?”
Her people. She had “people.” That meant she was big. Or at least not small. Since the project was based in Washington, it was likely someone in politics, government, or media. My mind was spinning as I thought about the women I had met during the Marjorie project. A representative or senator? Interesting, but I didn’t think Alice would think they were very interesting. Sandra Day O’Connor? Ruth Bader Ginsburg? No, it wasn’t likely that a sitting justice would write a book, at least not about the inner workings of the Supreme Court. Tipper Gore? Very interesting? Meh.
The next morning I left the house early to teach hockey stops and bunny hops to the tiny-tot skating class. Afterward I skipped my own workout, hurrying home to check my answering machine. But when I got home, the light wasn’t blinking. I made myself a sandwich and sat down to eat it, staring out at the marsh. The silence, broken only by the clock over the mantel, became more than I could bear. I thought I might go mad waiting for Mystery Woman’s “people” to call. I went outside and spent some time doing yard work even though it was still winter. I left the door slightly ajar so I could hear the phone, and finally it rang.
A young woman identified herself and said she was calling from the White House.
THE WHITE HOUSE!
She wanted to know if I was available later that day for an interview with the First Lady. And could I bring some writing samples and a résumé? I mumbled something that resembled an affirmative answer. Then I came to my senses and explained I was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and would need several hours. She suggested a time, and I agreed, scribbling down which security gate I was to report to.
To say I wasn’t dressed properly at the moment to have a meeting with Hillary Clinton was an understatement: I was wearing jeans with holes in the knees and literally had garden soil under my fingernails. But I rallied, transforming myself into a presentable professional. I printed out my résumé, rifled through my files, and gathered some bylines from the Post, throwing it all in a folder.
I jumped in my car, praying I had enough gas in the tank and that I wouldn’t hit bridge traffic. I couldn’t believe it. I had a chance to work with the First Lady of the United States.
That was a big deal, and if I got the gig, it would launch me into a whole other stratosphere professionally. But I also admired her, everything that she had done on behalf of families and children, and it would be an honor to work on her book.
A few hours later I was standing at the White House gate, feeling like an imposter when the guard asked me if I had an appointment. I replied, “The First Lady,” my voice shaking a little. He looked at his clipboard and peered at a screen inside his little glass-encased booth. It appeared he couldn’t find my name on the list and I was sure he was about to say I must be mistaken. And maybe I was. Maybe I had imagined it all.
But I also knew that people often misheard “Simon” for “Feinman” so I spelled my name slowly and loudly, over the sound of nearby protesters in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue. His face registered recognition and he waved me in, the iron gate clicking open, the kingdom beckoning.
A young staffer met me at the door where the guard had indicated I should approach, and soon enough I was walking through the halls of the People’s House, simultaneously trying to affect an air of nonchalance while taking in every single detail I could possibly register. I had been there before many times to cover state dinners for the Style section, and once for the meeting with Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, but I had never been to the first family’s residence, which is where my guide told me we were heading.
A few minutes later I found myself face-to-face with Hillary Clinton in a cozy sitting room, drinking coffee served by a White House usher. Though I had been ancillary to the interview Marjorie and I had conducted, at least I had a sense of what to expect; this time I couldn’t get away with mostly just listening, however.
I had included in my writing samples a long essay I had done for the Style section that was really a love letter to the sport of figure skating. Mrs. Clinton had been a figure skater in her youth, and I saw her pull out that clip and her eyes light up. That led to an easy conversation that moved from skating to writing and the process of book writing.
My nerves calmed down after the first few minutes, and Mrs. Clinton was cordial and had a way about her that made you feel like she was really listening. In part it was her habit of nodding, which was oddly comforting. She looked at my résumé, really just a list of the various books I had contributed to, and we talked briefly about Marjorie’s book.
We ended the meeting with her telling me they would be in touch with the people at Simon & Schuster once she made a decision. Her people would call their people who would call my people (my agent).
I waited and ruminated and brooded. Would I get the job? Who else was in the running? I couldn’t possibly get the job. I would die if I didn’t get the job. I wanted the job so much. Until I got the job.
A few days later Flip called to say that Simon & Schuster called, and that Mrs. Clinton had chosen me. I got the impression she hadn’t interviewed a lot of people. That made sense; the more people you told, the more likely the news of the book deal would leak prematurely. Alice recommended me and that carried a lot of weight, Flip explained.
As Flip was giving me the good news, all of a sudden I began to wonder if I really wanted to become involved in such a scandal-ridden administration. It was early 1995, and during the two years that Bill Clinton had been president, the press had swung from one Clinton scandal or PR disaster to the next like a kid on monkey bars: Travelgate, Filegate, Vince Foster, and Whitewater. Everyone who worked in the White House those days seemed to end up getting served a subpoena.
The president had put Hillary in charge of overhauling the nation’s health-care system, and the whole thing had been a debacle, ending in defeat in September 1994. This had left Mrs. Clinton tarnished, and whatever this book project was purportedly about, it was really about her refashioning her image. People in Washington rarely write books because the writing muse visits them; rather, they have a campaign to win, a cause to lobby for, a scandal to overcome, or an image to fix.
It’s not enough money, I said to Flip. I can’t remember what the first offer was. She went back to them, and they came back with a higher offer. She was negotiating with the publishing house because the money would be paid out directly from them to me, rather than the usual arrangement where the advance goes to the author and the author then pays the ghost. The First Lady would not be paid an advance, and any royalties would be donated to charity.
“Not enough,” I told Flip.
Long pause. “Really? Is something else going on?” Flip was both a great negotiator and a wise observer of human nature. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to,” she said. “But you need to be honest with me and with yourself.”
“I don’t know. I do want to do this. I’m just . . .”
Flip got them up to an even higher fee, more than any I had landed so far. In the end, I accepted the job because it was a lot of money, too much money for a freelance writer to turn down. And having this on my résumé would elevate me into the first tier of ghostwriters, enabling me to permanently up my rates.
The other reason I took it was that nearly everyone around me said I’d be crazy not to. When I think back to that moment, I’m reminded of John Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl. Based on a Mexican folktale, it’s the story of a poor pearl diver in Mexico who finds an enormous pearl, “perfect as the moon,” and the cascading disasters that happen in his life after he finds it. Like the difficulties of some modern-day lottery winners, his own actions as well as those of others who prey upon him make him wish he had never found the pearl.
I just couldn’t shake the bad feeling that started in my gut and settled in my chest, somewhere between anxiety and dread. I’m not saying that I foresaw that this project would become my own “pearl,” but just that I felt uneasy. Am I confusing hindsight with sensing regret? Or do I wish I had never gone down the ghostwriting path at all? I thought it was a practical application of my love of writing. When I graduated from Berkeley, I thought I was going to be a writer. As a “writer” I pictured myself writing novels in a garret and somehow magically that garret’s rent would take care of itself.
My father, who wanted me to follow my siblings to law school, warned early and often that I would struggle to make a living as a writer. He had grown up during the Depression and, though I didn’t find this out until years after I graduated from college, he wanted to be a journalist or an English professor but instead he became a salesman and eventually founded his own small company. His concern for me pursuing a career as a writer was really just his own fear projected.
When I told him the First Lady had chosen me (!) to write her book, I knew I was putting a period at the end of any sentence about law school or bad choices forevermore. He was in kvelling overdrive, bragging to everyone he met between Chicago and Miami.
During the past twenty-four years, I have counseled hundreds of students whose hearts were pulling them toward newsrooms or publishing houses and their parents were tugging them toward law school. Go to law school if you yearn to be a lawyer. Become a writer if you yearn to write. Note that the last sentence lacks parallelism. I said if you “yearn to write” not “yearn to become a writer.” There’s a difference.
If the romance of “being a writer” is what draws you, forget about it. 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. The students who have a compulsion to write are the ones who will figure out how to make a living doing it. So, yes, go try the writing thing, I tell the obsessed ones. With one caveat: Be a writer but marry a lawyer.
My students who are now successful writers and journalists thank me for that advice more than for anything else I’ve tried to impart in the classroom or during office hours. And I’ve had a few who have become lawyers or consultants and confided in me that they wished they had listened to me.
I knew right away that I would have to move back to the city. I needed to be available on the spur of the moment to work with the First Lady, and I also needed the resources of a big library. This was pre-Google so whatever I couldn’t find in the files supplied by the White House, I would need to track down through LexisNexis or some other database.
I rented an apartment in Dupont Circle, around the corner from the Washington Hilton, where President Reagan had been shot, near shops and restaurants, just a mile and a half from the White House. My agent handled the details of my book contract, including when I would be paid and by whom, what expenses would be covered, and how I would be acknowledged in the book. The contract included a confidentiality clause.
I was quickly consumed by the task at hand: to make something out of nothing. There wasn’t even a working title, much less an idea. The editor I would be working with was someone I didn’t know, but we spoke on the phone and she sounded lovely. Shortly after that she came down from New York, and we had a few meetings at the White House with the First Lady to figure out a plan.
The book would showcase Mrs. Clinton’s work on behalf of children and her commitment to various issues and policies concerning women and children. Her staff gave me copies of her speeches and other public documents so I could learn what the First Lady’s position was on various issues, and I began poring over hundreds of pages. This was all helpful, but the book’s shape, its narrative arc, and its overarching point—all that was still unresolved. We would figure all this out by my interviewing the First Lady about relevant topics—mainly what she had learned through the years in her various advocacy roles on behalf of policies related to children. I was to take what she told me, along with what I could find in her files of speeches and other written material, and cobble together first drafts. She would use those as a starting point to make it her own and then it would come back to me and then I would send it on to our editor.
I was reassured that her scheduler understood that this project was a priority and would try to fit me in accordingly so that we could make our deadline. It was February and Simon & Schuster wanted a completed manuscript by the end of the summer, if possible. Every book has its own way of coming into being and this one did not seem unusual except for the high-profile nature of its author. I knew that I needed to get down to business and not allow myself to become preoccupied by gossip and rumors.
One of the first things I wanted to do was come up with a title. Since the book didn’t really have a direction or even a thesis, I thought that a title might help us get moving. Before I got this gig, I had begun some work on a magazine piece about successful businesswomen, and I had already scheduled an interview up in New York with the head of a record label. I didn’t want to cancel the interview, even though I wasn’t sure I was going to have time to bang out a feature piece while also writing a book. During my conversation with the recording executive, I asked her how she had been so successful professionally while dealing with a lot of personal challenges. “Well, you know there’s this old African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child . . .’”
As soon as we finished the interview, I asked the record exec’s assistant if I could use a phone. I couldn’t wait to call the book editor. “I think I’ve got a great title,” I said softly into the phone. The right title, as most writers know, can be vexingly elusive. The right title can brand a book, but even more valuably, it can chart its direction and define its thesis or focus.
I was anxious to get back to D.C. and go through Mrs. Clinton’s speeches. If I could find an occasion in which she had actually used the phrase, it would indicate that the title was a good fit, that it was organically suited for Mrs. Clinton’s book.
After an hour or two combing through binders of her speeches, I found an instance where Mrs. Clinton had used the phrase. When I had called our editor and test-drove the title, she loved it, as did the First Lady. That set in motion all the things that come with a title: the book jacket’s design, promotional copy, and, most important, the book’s actual framework. Before long we were producing chapters that fit into the “village” theme. Sometimes a title can do that—help to frame and clarify a book’s overarching point. I felt like it was divine intervention—or desperation as the clock kept ticking: whatever it was, after we secured the title we were able to hammer out an outline and from there, we could figure out what direction our interviews and research should go in. Working on the book turned out to have three phases that involved me.
The first phase started in February, when I was hired, and lasted through May. During that time I would go over to the White House once or twice a week when the First Lady was in town. I would interview her for an hour or so, sometimes in the residence and sometimes in other areas of the White House, depending on what she was doing. After each interview, the tape was sent out to be transcribed and then I was given the transcript to flesh out early drafts of chapters.
I spent a fair amount of time with her during those interviews. Watching her in action over those first several months, I became fixated on her nodding habit—the thing I had found so comforting in our initial meeting when she interviewed me. I was now beginning to nod very slowly and frequently myself, much like she did. I began to wonder, as I started doing it myself, if the nodding was a way of keeping people at bay, of not letting them into her thought process. If you are listening, it means you aren’t the one offering information. Again, a politician’s instincts for self-preservation were at odds with an author’s need to reveal. Though it was ostensibly a policy book, there were also expectations that there would be a through-line running directly from the First Lady’s heart to what appeared on the page.
As I had on other book projects, I found the work to be alternatively stressful and isolating. The group of people whom a ghost has contact with is pretty limited: the subject, who is usually pretty busy and distracted with his or her own celebrity; the editor and her minions, who are usually overworked and hard to nail down; and whoever the ghost is tasked with interviewing or obtaining information from. So while this had sounded like a dream job to my friends and acquaintances, it was mostly like any other project, complete with deadlines and headaches.
There were of course some perks, like stealing White House stationery or getting to ride on Air Force One (actually referred to as Executive One Foxtrot when the First Lady was flying without her husband) to accompany Mrs. Clinton to an appearance on Oprah’s show in Chicago on Tuesday, May 16, 1995, when she said that parents in particular, and society in general, needed to get more involved in child rearing.
My father, who still lived in Chicago, had remarried and was living downtown. When he heard the First Lady would be appearing on Oprah, he called and asked if I was coming to town with her, and could he and my stepmother meet her. I knew she had been very gracious to her staffers’ families and so I asked if there was any possible way they could just stand outside the building and say hello as we were leaving the show. She said absolutely and stopped to meet them and take photographs with them. It was worth it to see my dad’s face, beaming, and know he would never, ever again question my decision to become a writer and not do something more practical with my life.
A mosaic of memories is imprinted on my mind. It was such a busy, pressure cooker time in my life that much of it is a blur. But discrete moments stand out, like one that happened early on when our editor came down from New York to work on the book with us in the White House. Mrs. Clinton was busy with an event—her schedule was always jam-packed with what seemed like an endless parade of silly and time-wasting activities that were obligations hard to dodge.
The editor and I sneaked out on a balcony where we plotted to steal a moment to smoke. Neither of us were big smokers, but circumstances made the allure of a nicotine break hard to resist. We lit up, inhaled, and just as we were blowing out smoke, we looked up to see a Secret Service sharpshooter above us, on the White House roof, checking us out. We put out our cigarettes and retreated inside, nervously giggling.
The second phase of my work with the First Lady came toward the summer, when instead of going over to the White House just once or twice a week I went over several times a week. I worked in the first family’s residence, in Mrs. Clinton’s home office. I would start the day arriving in the ushers’ office and either an usher would escort me up to the residence or they would call Capricia Marshall, who was a special assistant to the First Lady, to come get me. I liked Capricia. She was pleasant and friendly and always made me feel at home. I could see she was under a lot of pressure, but she was the type who would smile through it all.
The room I worked in was on the third floor of the residence. It was modest size with two desks and a sitting area. Sometimes Mrs. Clinton worked at the other desk, but often I was there alone. One evening when I was working late by myself, the phone rang.
I didn’t usually answer it because no one would be calling me at the White House. In general, I tiptoed around the place, terrified of making a wrong move, committing some sort of a faux pas. But the phone kept ringing and ringing, and I thought I had better pick it up. I said hello, and the woman on the other end identified herself as a White House operator. She asked if I had seen the president.
“Um, no, I haven’t,” I said, waiting to hear what she would say next.
I remembered that when I first starting working at the White House, one of the young women on the First Lady’s staff had given me an informal tour and pointed out an electronic box that tracked the president’s movements by GPS. It struck me as a bit odd that the operator was trying to track him down the old-fashioned way.
“You haven’t?” she said. Did she think I was harboring a sitting president?
“No, really, I haven’t seen him,” I insisted, and then, to underscore my statement, I added, “Ever.”
It was true. By this time, I had been working in the White House for four or five months and, much to my disappointment, I had never set eyes on him.
I had begun to worry that I would come to the end of the book without having ever gotten to meet the president. I wanted to meet him because, well, he was the president, and I had voted for him and also I was just plain curious about what he was like in person.
Soon after that exchange with the operator, I got my wish.
Mrs. Clinton and I were working in her office, and it was coming up on the dinner hour. I heard someone at the door and looked up from my screen and saw President Clinton there, smiling. Mrs. Clinton introduced me, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then he said he’d see her at dinner and disappeared. A few minutes later, she got up from her desk.
“Do you want to join us?” she asked.
“Join you?” Did she mean for dinner? And “us”—did she mean her and the president? Of the United States?
“For dinner. Would you like to join us?”
Dinner with the president of the United States and his wife. What an honor. And then I looked down and realized I was wearing sneakers. When we had first started working together, I had dressed up for the White House, but as the weeks wore on, I realized I was working mostly alone, and the days were long so I had begun to dress for comfort, seeing only an occasional aide or a researcher and the butlers who brought us lunch on a tray.
There they were. My New Balance sneakers. And they weren’t that new. I couldn’t possibly eat dinner with the president of the United States.
“I’m not really dressed for—”
“It’s fine,” she said, smiling warmly. “Please join us.”
A few minutes later, I found myself seated at a small table in the solarium with President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and Kaki Hockersmith, an interior designer friend from Little Rock who had done the Clinton White House private quarters redecoration in 1993. It reportedly cost close to four hundred thousand dollars. Like many White House decorating costs, it was criticized even though the funding had come from private sources.
The president asked how the book was going and then asked some general questions about the state of the publishing industry. I managed to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. His responses seemed to indicate that I was making sense, but I can’t swear to that.
Then Kaki presented the president with an early birthday present, a framed sketch of famous 1940s and 1950s Hollywood stars in silhouette all mingling around a pool. We spent some time trying to determine who was who. This triggered the president to talk about his love for the movie High Noon.
During all this, our food was served. Though usually I have a healthy appetite, I couldn’t possibly eat and instead pushed my food around the plate. When the butler was clearing our plates, as he took mine he winked at me.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so nervous.”
He leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about it. Most people can’t eat around the president, at least not the first time.”
Afterward we walked down the hall, and I stopped at Mrs. Clinton’s office, where I planned to keep working. The president said something about heading to the White House theater to watch a movie with “Steve.” My memory is that he indicated he meant Spielberg (!). I figured the famous director, who was a big Democratic donor, was a guest at the White House but had had a dinner engagement in the city. Maybe I would run into him getting a late-night snack.
“Are you joining us?” President Clinton said politely as we approached the office.
“I need to get back to work, but thank you,” I said quickly.
The book was due to Simon & Schuster by summer’s end, and the pressure was mounting as our deadline approached because this was an incredibly tight production schedule, tighter than any I had ever been involved with. It looked like it was going to become necessary for me to accompany the Clintons on the seventeen-day family vacation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August.
This sounds like a great trip, but I knew I would be stuck in some motel when I wasn’t working with the First Lady on the book. What followed would be the final phase of my work on the book. There would be little to no downtime, and I would be thousands of miles away from my friends and family. And that’s exactly what happened, and to make matters worse, I sprained my ankle a week before we were leaving. I was on crutches and not very adept at using them.
Mrs. Clinton saw me struggling to get to and from the White House, and she suggested I stay in one of the spare bedrooms in the residence. I slept there for three nights, in a room just down the hall from Mrs. Clinton’s home office. It was very convenient, plus it gave me bragging rights.
My ankle was healing slowly, and I dreaded going to Wyoming. The first family would be staying at West Virginia senator John D. Rockefeller IV’s eight-thousand-square-foot ranch in Grand Teton National Park. The hotel where the support staff and I stayed was not terribly far away, and someone got me a rental car so I could drive back and forth between the ranch and the hotel.
The White House staff was an insular bunch, and for the most part, they ignored me. I felt completely isolated and stressed out because of the pressure of trying to get the book finished in this insanely short amount of time. Mrs. Clinton spent much of her time working, and she was distant and preoccupied, worried about her upcoming trip to China. In addition to working on the book, she was also focused on the speech she was slated to deliver in Beijing at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in early September.
She was meant to lead the American delegation, and it was an opportunity for her to showcase her commitment to the rights of women and children on a world stage. Her speech would be the first phase of her image makeover after the health-care debacle. Her image had not recovered, in part because the Senate Special Whitewater Committee hearings had begun that summer, during which her and her husband’s business dealings would come under scrutiny once again, as would lingering questions regarding Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster’s suicide.
The book’s publication would come just four months later. But the snag in this plan was a growing controversy about whether the First Lady should attend the conference because China was holding human rights advocate Harry Wu on espionage charges. Wu had spent nineteen years in Chinese labor camps, then come to the United States and become an American citizen, where he continued his human rights activism. Just a few months before, he had been detained during a visit back to China.
Mr. Wu was convicted and then, inexplicably, deported, so Mrs. Clinton’s dilemma of whether or not to go became moot. Anyone who has studied the trajectory of her career would say that that speech was the beginning of becoming a politician in her own right and that her platform would be women’s rights. Probably the most famous line from her speech is: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
One day when I was staring out the window at the Rockefeller ranch, distracted by the natural beauty and wishing I was hiking or swimming, I received a package. The handwriting was familiar. I tore open the cardboard box and saw that Bob Kerrey had sent me a care package. We had talked on the phone the week before, and I must have sounded a bit down.
The box was filled with some small presents, mostly things to make me laugh, wacky collages he had made and gag gifts. But he had also included a letter, and its tone was somber, telling me about a friend who had just suffered the loss of a child.
“He will be thinking of death, now; wishing it would come to him, wondering why this had to happen,” he wrote. “I don’t have anything close to an answer. Sorry for the grief mixed with the gifts. I am afraid it’s hard to find a day without both. I’ll be happier when you finish the Village people.”
So will I, I thought. So will I. Or so I thought.