It’s okay that the New York Times reporter got Iraq wrong—the trouble with her new memoir is she still won’t admit she actually did.
Judith Miller has returned to center stage with an autobiography, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. The Story traces Miller’s many stations of the journalistic cross—as an affirmative action hire and clueless rookie at the New York Times, as the Times Cairo bureau chief, Times Paris correspondent, Times Washington reporter, book author and, most famously, as a national security reporter whose work for the Times before and after the Iraq war drew hot fire from detractors who accused her of relying on dubious sources, and worse.
Writing with a scythe, Miller settles scores with her many foes—Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who jailed her for almost 60 days, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller who pushed her out of the paper, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Times public editor Daniel Okrent, former Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz—as well as her legion of critics in the press.
