English Professor Writes Memoir About Researching for Newspaper Legends

News Archive

Barbara Feinman Todd, the director of the Georgetown College journalism program and professor of the practice, published her memoir last month to critical acclaim. (Photo courtesy Ginger Wall)
March 27, 2017 — Many Georgetown professors have old war stories from “the swamp,” “This Town,” or whatever you prefer to call the Washington politics-media complex. Here’s one you might not have heard before.
From a small office in the New North building, jam-packed with books on all kinds of writing, Barbara Feinman Todd has spent a quarter-century building up journalism education at Georgetown. She led the long crusade to develop a lonely English elective into an impressive investigate journalism project, a master’s program, and eventually an undergraduate minor. For a certain, small segment of the student population, she’s as much a Georgetown institution as the John Carroll statue.
Feinman Todd released her memoir, Pretend I’m Not Here, to widespread critical acclaim last month. The 320-page tome begins in her first few days as a 22-year-old in the Washington Post newsroom and tracks her fascinating career as a researcher for newspaper legends Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee, her ghostwriting work for Hillary Rodham Clinton, her path to Georgetown, and the lessons she learned along the way.
*******
Pretend I’m Not Here has generated more media coverage than one might expect for a writer who moved to full-time teaching 15 years ago. That’s because it contains her first public comments in years about a mini-scandal from 1996 that briefly grabbed national headlines.
While shadowing Clinton in order to ghostwrite the 1996 bestseller It Takes A Village, Feinman Todd observed a strange meeting between the First Lady and a “new age healer,” later recounting it to Woodward off-the-record. She traveled to Europe after finishing her work on the Clinton book; upon returning, she discovered that the Clinton team had frozen her out of ...

Read More