So Judy Miller is gone, and if there’s a goodbye party replete with affectionate toasts and going-away gifts, it won’t be at the New York Times.
Miller — a reporter who gave new definition to the phrase “gone native” — moved within the world of national security intrigue, a murky place filled, as we have recently learned, with creepy characters and self-serving careerists advancing competing agendas, most of which are only tenuously tied to reality.
Inside that world — and this is the scary part — Miller fit right in, more at home, apparently, than she was in what she now derides as “the convent” called the New York Times.
We commend the Times for lancing this boil, however reluctantly, after a long and frustrating summer and fall during which it sometimes seemed as if the newspaper itself was being run not by executive editor Bill Keller or publisher Arthur Sulzberger, but by Miller’s legal strategy of the moment.
As for Miller, she’s still spinning fantasy, denying any “insubordination” on her own part. “I have always written the articles assigned to me, adhered to the paper’s sourcing and ethical guidelines, and cooperated with editorial decisions, even those with which I disagreed,” she wrote in a letter printed on the Times editorial page.
This, from the same reporter who — as the Times put it in its own October 16th reconstruction of the Miller saga — refused to cooperate with her colleagues and “generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.”
For her part, Miller says she may yet write a book, and she told the Times’ Kit Seelye that she’s weighing job offers “of all kinds” — words that to us seem to suggest the possibility of gainful employment outside of journalism.
A couple of possibilities spring to mind.
We hear there’s an opening on Vice President Cheney’s staff.
We also hear that the notorious Ahmad Chalabi, Miller’s source for half a dozen or more fatally flawed WMD stories in the months leading up to war in Iraq, is back in Washington for the first time in two years, seeking to rehabilitate his own reputation. He met yesterday with Condoleezza Rice and national security advisor Stephen Hadley and next week plans to drop in on Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Miller is a past master at the black art of burnishing Chalabi’s bona fides. How convenient that she is suddenly available.
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.