Bill Keller on Lessons Learned And a Judith Miller Response
In preparing the Oct. 23 public editor column about the battle to protect Judith Miller's confidential sources in the Plame leak investigation, I had asked Bill Keller, the executive editor, if he would offer his thoughts on what he would do differently if faced with the same situation again. He responded Wednesday with the e-mail message below, and disseminated much the same message to The Times's staff on Friday. Ms. Miller has responded to Mr. Keller’s note, and her e-mail message follows his here:
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Barney,
As you can imagine I've done a lot of thinking -- and a lot of listening -- on the subject of what I should have done differently. Aside from a number of occasions when I wish I had kept my mouth shut or at least chosen my words more carefully, I've come up with three points at which I wish I had made different decisions. These are places where the lessons of my mistakes extend beyond this peculiar case. I'll lay them out in greater detail than you can use in your column. If you decide to post our exchanges on the Website, perhaps this will help readers understand that we hope to learn from this experience. This, of course, is all with the clarity of hindsight.
First, I wish I had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD first thing upon becoming executive editor. At the time, I thought I had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jason Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin my tenure by attacking the previous regime. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction. So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point we published that long editor's note acknowledging the pre-war journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind at least as important -- launched a body of aggressive reporting aimed at exposing how bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war. (I'm thinking of our excellent investigation of how those infamous aluminum tubes became a supposed smoking gun, the report on how the Iraqi National Congress recruited exiles to promote the notion of Saddam's WMD threat, our close look at the military's war-planning intelligence, and several other pieces. Critics sometimes overlook the fact that lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco transpired appeared in the NYT.) By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the WMD boil earlier, I suspect our critics -- at least the honest ones -- might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers.
Second, I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling to case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (After the initial leak to Robert Novak in 2003, we asked the Washington Bureau to ask our correspondents whether any of them had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have concluded that we had to fight this case in court. For one thing, we were facing an insidious new menace in these ostensibly voluntary blanket waivers Administration officials were compelled to sign. But if I had known the details of Judy's engagement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and I'd have been better equipped for the third turning point, below. Dick Stevenson, one of our White House correspondents, has expressed the larger lesson here in an e-mail that strikes me as just right:"I think there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally -- but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her. In that way, everybody knows going in to a battle exactly what the situation is, what we're fighting for, the degree to which the facts might counsel compromise or not, and the degree to which our collective credibility should be put on the line." I've heard similar sentiments from a number of reporters in the aftermath of this case, and I think this is a place where I let the paper down.
Third, when the appeals court (including one judge regarded as a friend of press freedom) unanimously rejected our case and it was clear we were going to lose in the Supreme Court, I wish I had tried to throw my weight behind a search for compromise. At the time, the fact that The Washington Post -- in particular Walter Pincus, an investigative reporter with a strong reputation for protecting his sources -- managed to negotiate a deal to testify -- briefly made me doubt our uncompromising course. But frankly by then I was pretty dug in. My initial instinct to protect a reporter against this kind of intrusion and the pernicious nature of the blanket waivers made me reluctant to back down. (Moreover, I'd grown a little complacent about the danger. Throughout most of this case I never really thought it would come to this. We get subpoenas from time to time, the lawyers fight them, and reporters don't go to jail.) By this time, I was included in a lot of meetings where the legal strategy was discussed, and I suspect if I had pressed for a compromise my view would have been taken seriously. I didn't.
There's probably more to be said, but that's enough for now. Best, Bill
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Bill, I wish you had spoken to me before accusing me of misleading Phil Taubman and of being entangled with Libby in your message to the staff.
Here is what I told Don Van Natta about what I remember telling Phil in the fall of 2003. I told him, as our story on Sunday reported, that I had discussed Wilson and his wife with government officials. But I also told him that I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson, and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it. After all, Libby and I had talked about many things, as you well know, and he had placed no special emphasis on the Wilson matter.
A special prosecutor has been investigating the existence of such a campaign for two years. Since I could be witness at a future trial, I am reluctant to say more on this subject now.
But I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him.
As for your reference to my "entanglement" with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social, or other relationship with him except as a source, one among many to whom I had pledged confidentiality as a reporter for The New York Times.
I know how important it is for the paper to protect its reputation, but I have my reputation to protect also.http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/thepubliceditor/publiceditorswebjournal/index.html |
