Vanity Fair Piece on Miller

The choice bits (pics here):

• “I don’t want to spend my life in here,” she’d told a friend while in Virginia.
  
• In the Time’s third-floor newsroom, Miller was not given a hero’s welcome. (She had been so wary of the reception she might receive that she’d asked a friend to escort her into the building.) The more than 100 reporters and editors who had gathered in the center of the room…greeted Miller with tepid applause…Bill Keller…acknowledged the tension in the room. “I know that you and our readers still have a lot of questions about how this drama unfolded…”
  
• When the reporters pressed Sulzberger on why he had refused to allow Russ Lewis, the former president and chief executive officer of the Times Company, to speak to them, Sulzberger replied with a laugh and this quip: “Because I don’t know what the fuck he’s going to tell you.”
  
• “After surveying the landscape, Keller recognized that dealing with Judith Miller would be one of his first challenges. Miller had been controversial for as long as she’d been wielding a notebook. She was relentless, indefatigable, ultra-competitive, and extremely well-connected. (She dated Steve Rattner, one of Sulzberger’s best friends when the three of them worked at the Times’s Washington bureau, and had even, for a time, shared a vacation home with Sulzberger.) She had a reputation for sleeping with her sources (in the 1980s, she both lived with then congressman Les Aspin and quoted him in her dispatches); for bigfooting her way onto other people’s beats; for raining down torrents of abuse on clerks, travel agents, and drivers land for cutting down her colleagues.
  
• “Miller, it soon became clear, was not going to be an easy source to deal with. She initially refused to speak with Liptak because, she said, his story about her release from jail implied that she hadn’t gotten a better deal from the prosecutor than the one that was available to her before she was imprisoned. She refused to speak with Scott because, she told friends, Scott had not bothered to write to her when she was in jail. (She also told people that she knew Scott was “judging” her.) At various points, she wouldn’t speak with Van Natta either. On Tuesday afternoon, Van Natta approached Miller in the Times’s newsroom. Miller immediately gave Van Natta a hug. “I’m so glad you’re involved in this,” Miller said. “Well, I’d really like to talk to you, now, if you have time,” Van Natta replied. “I can’t do it now,” Miller answered. “I’m running off to go meet with Barbara Walters.”

  “That was pretty amazing to me. 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. And that night she did another one with Lou Dobbs.” The next day, Van Natta ran into Miller again, in Bennett’s Washington office; at that point, Miller told Van Natta she couldn’t speak with him because Libby had given her permission to talk only to the grand jury. That’s odd, Van Natta told her. On Monday, in the newsroom, she had told the whole world Libby was her source.” … “Sometime during that week I began to think to myself, I get it. She’s saving it all for a book.”

• After I approached her for this story, she complained to the editor of this magazine and raised questions about my allegiances. She also write to me in an email, “Seth, I read what you wrote about me in your book. You never bothered to check any of your alleged facts about me. I have absolutely no intention of talking to you.” Three weeks later, after the story had been written and edited, she sent another email that read, “When you are finished with your research, and want my input before you write, send me a list of questions.” I sent Miller questions on two occasions, to which she never replied. Outside of noting that Miller’s pre-war W.M.D. reporting was faulty–which Miller herself now acknowledges–there are barely any mentions of Miller in Hard News, my book about Howell Raines and the Times. What’s more, while writing it, I tried to reach her numerous tiems for comment. She never responded.)

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.