Extract from: THE INHERITANCE
Can Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., save the Times—and himself?
by KEN AULETTA
New Yorker 2005-12-19
“I should have left the paper after the editors’ note,[on the NYT's Iraq reporting] ” Miller says. “The reason I didn’t is that weeks afterward, I got a subpoena. . . . I knew I couldn’t fight on my own.” (A disclosure: My wife, a literary agent, represents both Keller and Miller.)
Miller asked why Keller wouldn’t allow her to do more reporting to uncover why the Times had been wrong. Keller was weary of the battles he had fought with Miller over the editors’ note; even when he thought she had agreed, he said, Miller would return and recycle every argument. And even after he and Abramson thought that they had restricted Miller’s reporting, she persisted. Late one night in 2004, Miller called Keller at home from the home of an Iraqi exile, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. “He was one of the most famous products of Ahmad Chalabi’s intelligence factory,” Keller said, referring to the Iraqi opposition leader. “Someone who had specifically been a source in one of Judy’s discredited W.M.D. stories.” Keller was astonished. “She was calling me up to say, ‘I’m at Haideri’s house. They’re going to deport him. I’m the only one who can report this story.’ It was just unmistakable that she saw her role here as partly the author of a great scoop, but also someone who was way too invested in her sources.” Keller told her to leave Haideri’s house. (Miller refused to comment on this incident.).....
I met Judy Miller for breakfast. She wore sunglasses, and looked pale and unusually thin. Gesticulating with both hands, she said, “I don’t know what the list of alleged journalistic shortcomings are, because the ones the Times listed have now all been shown to have been bogus, or the result of spite—envy—by former colleagues . . . or were apologized for or clarified by Bill Keller when I left. I mean, I did not ‘mislead’ anyone, it turns out. I did not have, quote, entanglements with Scooter Libby. The journalistic, quote, shortcuts I was alleged to have taken”—agreeing to identify Libby, who had once worked on Capitol Hill, as a “former Hill staffer”—“I never took. So the question is: What did I do? What did I do? I interviewed Scooter Libby and I got information for a story I wanted to do that I never wrote, was not permitted to explore. So I went to jail to protect a source, and then I came out of jail because I was persuaded he wanted me to testify.”
Of her W.M.D. stories, she said, “I was wrong because my sources were wrong”—more than she conceded at the time of the editors’ note. But, aside from faulting herself for being wrong about W.M.D.s and for not doing a better job of explaining her decision to testify, Miller accepted no blame. She did not admit the possibility that her sources, among them Ahmad Chalabi, might have been not only wrong but also skilled at manipulating her. She said she hoped that what she had done “raised the bar and will make government think before putting a journalist in jail. I hope I will be known as a reporter who helped get a federal shield law. I fear that the Times’ betrayal of me may have weakened that.”
