Authors Electric

Segretti flushed out of his Watergate hole, 1973 The more things change..., as the French say.... Today it's deja vu Trump-Watergate: I see a kaleidoscope of patterns each formed from the same little pieces of coloured glass.  Flashback: There is a scene in the 1976 film All the President's Men in which Washington Post investigative reporter Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) interviews then young, Nixon campaign operative Donald Segretti (played by Robert Walden) at the latter's yacht-side apartment in L.A.'s trendy Marina del Rey. The scene portrays Segretti as something of a regretful dupe recruited by a former University of Southern California buddy and Republican "dirty trickster" to head an undercover squad of self-described "ratfuckers'" to slime Democratic candidates leading up to the 1972 US Presidential election. As revealed in one of the one of the lesser known, but nastier footnotes to the Watergate scandal, it turned ou...

I have just read the best book on the writing life since William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screentrade”, which is now more than 30 years old, so this is praise indeed. The book in question is called “Pretend I’m Not Here” by Barbara Feinman Todd, who started as a journalist on the Washington Post and became a ghostwriter for Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, (as in Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men”) and for Ben Bradlee, their editor, (played in the film by Jason Robards).  She then went on to ghost for Hillary Clinton, while she was First Lady, and gives a riveting insight into life in the Clinton White House, and the back-stabbing world of Washington politics and journalism .  In the process she sheds considerable light on how Mrs Clinton came to lose the affection and respect of the American people so dramatically. The book perfectly captures the mechanics of what it is to be a ghostwriter to the very rich, the ver...