The Story (43 page)

If he had known the details of my “entanglement” with Libby earlier, he would have been more careful about how the paper had articulated its defense, and “perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.”

I couldn't believe what I was reading. Arthur had insisted on keeping Keller informed of all key developments in my case. Neither Arthur nor he had asked to see the notebooks that Bob Bennett and others on my legal team had examined. And what was he implying by asserting I had an “entanglement” with Libby?

“I'm a publisher, not a lawyer,” Jason said coolly, reading the memo over my shoulder. “But he has just libeled you. Call Bob Bennett and tell him to get you the hell out of that snake pit now.”

Keller was in China, Diane, his assistant, told me, part of a long-scheduled tour of the paper's bureaus in the Far East. I called George Freeman, who said that he had not seen Keller's memo before its distribution. He would not have approved such a message, he assured me. I called Arthur's cell phone. An hour later, he returned my call. He knew I must be upset, he told me. We would talk in his office—Monday.

On Saturday, Maureen Dowd called me a “woman of mass destruction” who gravitated toward powerful men. She accused me of “stenography.” I was imperious. I lacked skepticism. A decade ago, I had taken her seat at a White House press briefing. I had challenged Jill Abramson.
²⁰

In describing my grand jury testimony, Dowd wrote, I had “casually
revealed” that I had agreed to identify Libby as a “former Hill staffer” because he had once worked on Capitol Hill, and that I was implying that “this bit of deception” was a common practice for reporters. It wasn't, she asserted. She did not note that I had not identified Libby at all or written about his allegations. I would never have tried, or have been permitted, to identify Libby in print as a “former Hill staffer.”

In twenty-eight years at the paper, I had never once been accused of misrepresenting a source.
²¹
I had agreed to Libby's terms to hear his version of events. If his claims could be verified, I would have insisted on a more accurate description of him or refused to publish his account. This was a fairly common technique among investigative reporters. The
Times
style and standards book permits such intricate negotiations between reporters and their sources. As the paper's policy on confidential sources states, there are occasions when “we may use an offer of anonymity as a wedge to make telephone contact, get an interview or learn a fact.”

Dowd concluded by saying that I had hoped to continue reporting on “threats to the nation.” If I were permitted to do so, she wrote, “the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.”

Because she worked for the publisher, not the news division, Arthur had to have known in advance about her column.

Public editor Byron Calame opened the third front of the paper's campaign the next day. He concluded that it would be “difficult” for me “to return to the paper as a reporter.”

Bob Bennett, Saul Pilchen, Floyd Abrams, and my entire legal team shared my astonishment. What was the paper doing? Bennett exclaimed over the phone that weekend. Why had Arthur sanctioned what he called a paperwide “war on Judy”? Why had the
Times
suddenly decided to destroy the reputation of a reporter it had just spent over a year defending?

On my way to my meeting on the fourteenth floor with Arthur, I read what my old friend the publisher had told the
Wall Street Journal
over the weekend. While Keller had spoken for the newsroom, “I concur with his position,” he said. “Some of Bill's ‘culpas' were my ‘culpas,' too.”

Already under fire for his stewardship of the paper, he, too, was now scrambling for political cover. Bob Bennett and Bill Safire had seen this drama play out before, they told me. Just as the White House and intelligence community were now blaming each other for the prewar intelligence fiasco, as politicians who had once championed the war were now claiming to have been lied to, as the analysts who had remained silent or signed off on flawed estimates now asserted they had doubted such assessments all along, Arthur, too, was trying to find someone to blame to avoid a second blogger-fueled newsroom rebellion in less than two years, Bill Safire said. He did not want to be the target of critics assailing the paper for its Iraq War coverage, or challenged from within, as were Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd.

Times
reporters were now angry and fearful. Another round of layoffs and “voluntary” buyouts was about to begin. The staff had traditionally taken pride and refuge in the paper's reputation for probity—its authority, credibility, its influence. But that, too, was under assault because of the paper's declining financial fortunes and the explosion of gossip-filled social media whose members mocked the paper's self-regard.

The impassioned pro–Iraq War editorials that Bill Keller had written before becoming executive editor were now an embarrassment; Jill Abramson's management of the Washington bureau was under assault for her alleged lack of skepticism about her reporters' “credulous” pre–Iraq War stories. Neither of them, Safire told me, wanted to become the next Raines and Boyd.

Arthur had not yet arrived when I was ushered into his inner office. In sharp contrast to the din of the newsroom, Arthur's room was a tomb. No phones rang. No computers hummed. No assistants barged in with questions that couldn't wait. The only sound I heard was the ticking of his antique grandfather clock. A few minutes later, he arrived, apologizing for having been delayed by a call. Arthur hated being late.

What the hell is going on? I asked him bluntly. Why had he permitted Keller to libel me in our paper? Was this the same Bill Keller who only six months earlier had awarded me a $21,000 bonus for my work in 2004 as a senior writer and my “efforts and energy over the years”? And why had he let Maureen Dowd write such a vituperative column?

Arthur launched into a decision “the paper” had made. I had become too controversial. I had lost Keller's confidence and the newsroom's. Given my long-standing service to the paper, however, I would be permitted to stay at the
Times
as long as I liked. A “satisfactory” job would be found for me.

I made a quick mental note: I was not being fired. I had committed no fireable offense. However, I would no longer be permitted to edit or write for the paper.

I had almost lost my capacity for surprise. What job did he have in mind? I asked.

Arthur seemed stumped. He didn't really know yet, he said, hesitating to go beyond what I assumed were his lawyers' instructions.

“If you want me to quit, Arthur, just say so,” I told him.

No, he said. He didn't want that. He repeated the offer.

I told him I would consider my options, but added that his lawyers would almost certainly be hearing from mine—the ones whose legal fees he had been paying. I didn't volunteer that Bob Bennett was so angry about the paper's attacks on me that he had volunteered to represent me for free if necessary in whatever negotiations with the paper ensued. “Pro bono publico.” And perhaps, I added, his attorneys would also be hearing from the
Times
Guild.

Arthur's face darkened at the mention of the paper's union. Recalling the family's protracted fights with the guild, a visit from its officers was the last thing he wanted.

I didn't tell Arthur that I had more or less made my decision. After such attacks on my professional integrity, I no longer wanted to remain at the paper.

I looked at him carefully. After the
Times
's board had forced him to fire Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd two years earlier, I had seen that same look: fear.

As I stood up, I asked Arthur once more what he thought he was doing. We had started at the paper together in Washington. We had shared professional and personal highs and lows. I had written literally thousands of articles over the course of twenty-eight years, many on the front page. I had nearly been killed in Afghanistan researching the Al Qaeda story,
nearly shot in Beirut, and nearly trampled by a mob at a hanging in Khartoum. I had worked extraordinary hours after 9/11 and helped win the paper a Pulitzer, a duPont, and an Emmy. I had devised new beats and talked my way into places that were off-limits to reporters. And I had gone to jail to defend the journalistic principles I thought he shared. We had been friends for years, I said. I was entitled to an explanation. What on earth had I done to offend him or betray the paper?

I hadn't stayed in jail as I had promised, he mumbled.

Was that it? I wondered. I had embarrassed him and the paper by changing my mind? “The situation changed, Arthur,” I replied. “Libby gave me a waiver that I hadn't thought possible, and Fitzgerald had agreed to our terms.”

“But that's not what you
said
you would do,” he replied. “That wasn't what you told us when this started.”

I stared at him, suddenly speechless. There was nothing more to say. Seconds later, I left the room. This time there was no hug or promise of eternal loyalty. We did not even say good-bye.

I resigned from the
Times
on November 8, 2005. My departure was announced in orchestrated statements by the paper and me, the result of negotiations between our lawyers.

Bill Safire asked my permission to approach Punch, Arthur's father. Bill had tried to intervene with Punch once before, when Arthur dismissed Abe Rosenthal as a columnist and denied him continued access to an office, secretary, and identification with the paper. Arthur had already reduced his columns from twice to once a week, humiliating for a man who had dedicated his life to the paper and whose tombstone bears only his name and proudest achievement: “He kept the paper straight.”
¹

I declined Bill's offer. I had no idea what the elder Sulzberger thought about how Arthur had handled the “Miller Mess,” as the public editor called my First Amendment stand. The masthead had forced Arthur to fire Howell and Gerald. I doubted he would have risked another confrontation with senior executives without first having checked with them.

While I could no longer imagine continuing to work for the
Times
, I was determined not to leave until Keller retracted his defamatory statements about me and the false claims about my reporting were rebutted.
²

In a letter to both Arthur and me, dated November 1, 2005, Bill said he was writing as a self-appointed “counsel for the situation.” His goal was to help avert a “train wreck.” He cautioned Arthur against trying to “threaten Judy with bondage” or let me “storm out” with “legal and union support” in “unrelenting hostility.” Severance and legal fees, retirement benefits, and the like were not the issue, he wrote, citing what I had often jokingly told him: had I cared about money, I would have become an investment banker or married one.

The core issue, he wrote, was “reputational.” The paper had not only damaged my “professional reputation” as well as its own but risked undermining my “credibility as a witness” in the impending Libby trial. Both the paper's standing and mine would take an “extended beating from gleeful critics” unless this crisis was fairly and promptly resolved. The damage was far from irreparable, provided that Keller retracted the “memo to the staff” that
Times
reporters and editors—then over 1,200 employees—had found in their email in-boxes accusing me of an “entanglement” with Libby. “That word,” he wrote, “highly charged with insinuation in the context of salacious gossip spread by bloggers,” was “laced with wrongdoing in light of accusations of felonies by the source,” by which he meant Libby. “Surely Keller, normally a careful writer, did not intend any such meaning and realized too late that he made a terrible mistake,” Bill wrote. A later version of the memo had changed “entanglement” to “engagement (hardly any better),” Bill continued. Nor could Keller turn to the word
relationship
with its “Clintonian connotation.” “Entanglement” was now “hanging around Judy's neck and won't go away.” The previous day, the
Washington Post
had quoted it on its front page, “magnified by the sly ‘enigmatically,' imputing a mystery to what the
Times
editor apparently thought was going on between reporter and source.”

Maureen Dowd's column, Bill wrote, was “the most savage denunciation” of “character and professionalism” that he had ever read at the paper. Though he had written over 1.25 million words on the op-ed page over three decades, many of which had differed sharply with editorial policy, he had never written “one word personally criticizing a colleague.”

Safire proposed that Keller “admit error” and “express regret and move
on.” He also had to “revisit” his memo's charge that I seemed to have misled Phil Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, a “stinging accusation of professional deception that does not belong in the news columns (or even in an op-ed column).” As for Judy, he wrote, once I “cooled down” over Keller's email, Maureen's op-ed, and public editor Byron Calame's column, which had falsely accused me of taking ethical “short-cuts” and not mentioned that I had just spent eighty-five days in jail, we could attempt to resolve the dispute with Jill Abramson over whether I had told her that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. He urged Arthur to let me post a dignified “Reporter's Farewell” column on the op-ed page on Sunday.

Our agreement resembled Safire's proposal. Arthur said that he respected my decision to retire from the
Times
, and expressed gratitude for my “significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle.” Keller praised me for having “participated in some great prize-winning journalism.” He also made public a letter he had written me retracting his October 21 email. In using the words
entanglement
and
engagement
in reference to my relationship with Libby, he wrote, he had not intended to suggest an “improper relationship.” While noting that he remained “troubled” by whatever had happened in the Washington bureau, he withdrew his claim that I had misled the bureau chief. The
Times
quoted me as “gratified” that Keller had “clarified” remarks that were “unsupported by fact and personally distressing to me.” The news story quoted my denial that I had been insubordinate. “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.” The article about my resignation noted that I had been “locked up longer than any other reporter in American history” for refusing to testify or reveal my sources in a leak case. Although some colleagues had disagreed with my decision to testify, the story presented my explanation: “For me to have stayed in jail after achieving my conditions would have seemed self-aggrandizing martyrdom, or worse.” In addition, the paper published my “Reporter's Farewell,” though it ran as a letter to the editor, not on the op-ed page, my sole concession.