'Vanity Fair' Offers Fresh Details on Judith Miller Saga

By: E&P Staff In a lengthy feature piece on this autumn's Judith Miller saga forthcoming in the January issue of Vanity Fair (on sale Dec. 13), writer Seth Mnookin covers much familiar ground but also reveals new details and complaints from the reporter's colleagues at The New York Times. Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. also gets a good working-over from unnamed in-house critics.

One of the fresh scoops in the piece, which is titled, "Unreliable Sources," concerns Sulzberger barring Times reporters from talking to Russell Lewis, the former president and CEO of The New York Times Co., when they were working on their extensive report on Miller going to jail and then testifying before the Plame grand jury.

Mnookin relates that according to sources, when the reporters pressed Sulzberger on why he did that, he replied with a laugh and a quip: "Because I don't know what the f---he's going to tell you." (Earlier this year Lewis co-authored with Sulzberger a Times Op-Ed piece championing Miller's cause.)

Mnookin describes step-by-step how the reporters, including Don Van Natta, Clifford Levy, Adam Liptak and Janny Scott, were picked to write that October piece and how Miller often failed to cooperate fully with them. Miller allegedly refused to talk to Scott because she had not bothered to write to her in jail. She complained about Adam Liptak's coverage of her release from jail.

Van Natta talks about Miller putting him off even as she had time to talk with Lou Dobbs and Barbara Walters. "That was pretty amazing to me," he tells Mnookin, author of "Hard News," the recent book about the Jayson Blair/Howell Raines blowout. "I'm a colleague of hers, I'm trying to get an interview, and she doesn't have time for that, but she has time for Barbara Walters."

He came to believe that what Miller was saying at the time was so "preposterous" she must be "saving it all for a book.?

The Vanity Fair article reveals that the Times team actually finished a draft of that piece exactly a week before it appeared. Liptak recalls printing it out at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning and reading it in the cab home, before deciding, "This thing sucks and I don't want my name on it. ... There was no logical reason why she couldn't tell us her testimony." So it went through another week of drafting, with Miller finally convinced, partly on the advice of her Times friend David Barstow, to reveal her grand jury testimony.

Elsewhere, Mnookin pulls no punches in alleging that over the years Miller "had built a reputation for sleeping with her sources," and "had dated Steve Rattner, one of Sulzberger's best friends when the three of them worked at the Times' Washington bureau, and had even, for a time, shared a vacation home with Sulzberger."

He hits Sulzberger hard with quotes from various unnamed Times people, who say things like, "Post-Howell, Arthur and Judy were both looking at resurrecting their reputations. And Arthur was so oblivious he didn't care about the repercussions."

Mnookin says Miller and Sulzberger refused to speak with him for this piece. He also does not quote Executive Editor Bill Keller directly.