Pretend I'm Not Here by Barbara Feinman Todd

Author:Barbara Feinman Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

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

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