The End, Continued: Judy Miller Is Still 'Retired'
Times vet Kit Seelye, who has been in the unenviable position of covering Millerpalooza for the paper, does a characteristically nice job of reporting what one hopes is its final chapter. Her comprehensive article on the "retirement," posted just minutes after its announcement, via Keller's staff memo — it's almost as though she had an inside track or something! — contains this money bit:
Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package whose details they would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper's Op-Ed page refuting the allegations against her, the lawyers said. The Times refused that demand — Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, "We don't use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another" — but agreed to let her to write the letter.
In that letter, to be published in The New York Times on Thursday under the heading, "Judith Miller's Farewell," Ms. Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case.
So Miller wanted severance and the right to tell her story in an op-ed. One can safely assume she's getting severance of some sort — maybe she's just taking the early-retirement buyout recently on offer to Times employees? — but, as editorial-page editor Gail Collins piously insists, it is entirely inappropriate to use op-ed space for such picayune purposes.
A "letter," on the other hand? That's totally different.
Yeah, well, we're calling this one for Judy.
