The Editor Who Cried 'Wolfowitz'

The Editor Who Cried 'Wolfowitz'
By Will Bunch
November 09, 2005
Editors and Publishers

Everyone knows about now-retired Judith Miller's "entanglement" with Scooter Libby, but what about the one involving her boss and one time protector, Bill Keller, and Paul Wolfowitz? Among other things, Keller in 2002 hailed Wolfowitz, the chief architect of our Iraq invasion, for his "patient logic."

As part of Judith Miller's departure from The New York Times today, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote and released a letter he had written to her clarifying his now-famous suggestion that she had an "entanglement" with I. Lewis Libby. She had complained that this word suggested a sexual relationship, and Keller finally admitted that this is not what he meant.

Keller's original statement probably was just a poor choice of words. Ultimately, the problem with the "entanglement" here had nothing to do with whether Scooter Libby was screwing Judy Miller, and everything to do with Scooter Libby and his boss using Judy Miller to screw America -- and her willingness to act as a one-note mouthpiece for a dishonest White House.


And in that sense, Bill Keller has his own "entanglement" problem.
Keller's entanglement was with Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy defense secretary and so-called "chief architect" of the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Keller's apparently chummy relationship with Wolfowitz explains a lot. It certainly explains the convuluted pieces that Keller -- who was both a columnist and author of magazine pieces for the Times in 2002 and 2003, before he was called in to replace the ousted Howell Raines -- wrote offering his support for the military action before it was launched. He called himself a reluctant "hawk" on the war at that time.

How deeply was Bill Keller in the sway of Wolfowitz & Co.? Read this small piece of Keller's 8,139-word profile of the assistant defense secretary from Sept. 22, 2002, called -- believe it or not -- "The Sunshine Warrior" (via Nexis):

"In Washington, some people go straight to caricature, without getting much chance to be interesting or complicated. Paul Wolfowitz, who is interesting and complicated, has been cast since Sept. 11 in the role of zealot... . The shorthand version of Paul Wolfowitz, however, is inadequate in important ways. It completely misses his style, which relies on patient logic and respectful, soft-spoken engagement rather than on fire-breathing conviction."

Keller described three "important" things that Wolfowitz "brings to the table," including "something of a reputation as a man who sees trouble coming before others do, his long anxiety about Iraq being one example." Another "striking thing" about Wolfowitz: "an optimism about America's ability to build a better world. He has an almost missionary sense of America's role. In the current case, that means a vision of an Iraq not merely purged of cataclysmic weaponry, not merely a threat disarmed, but an Iraq that becomes a democratic cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East."

Even after no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq after the invasion, Keller wrote a June 14, 2003 column that was called "The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz" and gives a very benign defense of the neo-cons and their feud with the CIA over pre-war intell on Iraq. He called the CIA "Team A" and the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Libby boys "Team B."

"The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions," Keller wrote. "One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime -- in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't."

Want to hear a great irony? Keller's was printed just two days after the Washington Post published a front-page article reporting that the C.I.A. had sent a retired American diplomat to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium there.

That same date, June 12, 2003, also happens to be the day when Dick Cheney spoke with Lewis "Scooter" Libby and told him where that diplomat's wife worked.

In other words, these things don't happen in a vacuum.

Keller was taken by a con artist. We don't doubt that Wolfowitz actually believed some of what he was spinning the future No. 1 editor at the Times, but he wasn't giving out the full story. In an unguarded moment, Wolfowitz did tell some of the truth, not to Keller but to Vanity Fair:

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."

The problem with Keller, as with Judy Miller and much of the New York Times as a whole, was an unwillingness to listen to other voices outside of the White House, people who were trying to throw cold water on the case for war from Day One but were ignored in all the high-level wining and dining from Wolfowitz, Libby, and the rest.

Thus, it's no accident that Keller and the Times were still offering the spin even two days after Walter Pincus of the Post was showing that a key piece of that spin was an out-and-out lie. And so it's Keller's own culpability in all this that has made him so weak in dealing with Miller's reporting -- and with the messy aftermath.

There's one more irony. Keller in his 2002 feature summarized Wolfowitz's pre-invasion view this way: "Weapons of mass destruction would not be enough to justify the deaths of thousands of Americans. And in any case, thousands killed would mean the mission had gone badly wrong."
----------------------------------------------------

Will Bunch is senior writer at The Philadelphia Daily News. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 when he was a reporter at Newsday. Bunch writes the Daily News' Attytood blog, where this column appeared today in a different form.