The story : a reporter's journey / Judith Miller.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Star reporter for the New York Times , the world's most powerful newspaper; foreign correspondent in some of the most dangerous fields; Pulitzer winner; longest jailed correspondent for protecting her sources, Judith Miller is highly respected and controversial. In this memoir, she turns her reporting skills on herself with the intensity of her professional vocation.

Judy Miller grew up near the Nevada atomic proving ground. She got a job at the New York Times after a suit by women employees about discrimination at the paper and went on to cover national politics, head the paper's bureau in Cairo, and serve as deputy editor in Paris and then deputy at the powerful Washington bureau. She reported on terrorism and the rise of fanatical Islam in the Middle East and on secret biological weapons plants and programs in Iraq, Iran, and Russia. She covered an administration traumatized by 9/11 and an anthrax attack three weeks later. Miller shared a Pulitzer for her reporting.

She turns her journalistic skills on herself and her controversial reporting which marshaled evidence that led America to invade Iraq. She writes about the mistakes she and others made on the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. She addresses the motives of some of her sources, including the notorious Iraqi Chalabi and the CIA. She describes going to jail to protect her sources in the Scooter Libby investigation of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and how the Times subsequently abandoned her after twenty-eight years.

The Story describes the real life of a foreign and investigative reporter. It is an adventure story, told with bluntness and wryness.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (p. xi)
• 1 Anbar Province, Iraq (p. 1)
• 2 Nightclub Royalty in the Shadow of the Bomb (p. 29)
• 3 The New York Times, the Token (p. 41)
• 4 The Washington Bureau (p. 53)
• 5 Becoming a "Timesman" (p. 59)
• 6 Egypt: Foreign Correspondent (p. 65)
• 7 From the Nile to the Seine (p. 81)
• 8 "Be Careful What You Wish For": Washington News Editor (p. 93)
• 9 The Gulf War (p. 101)
• 10 Terror in Tiny Packages (p. 115)
• 11 Al Qaeda (p. 131)
• 12 Ashes and Anthrax: The Shadow of 9/11 (p. 145)
• 13 The Defector (p. 153)
• 14 Phase 2: Iraq (p. 163)
• 15 "Where's Waldo?" The Hunt for WMD in Iraq (p. 173)
• 16 The Revolt (p. 185)
• 17 The War Within (p. 193)
• 18 Correcting the Record (p. 205)
• 19 Scapegoat (p. 225)
• 20 Protecting Sources (p. 239)
• 21 Inmate 45570083 (p. 255)
• 22 Departures (p. 279)
• Epilogue (p. 299)
• Acknowledgments (p. 325)
• Notes (p. 331)
• Index (p. 361)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Journalists are tasked with providing key information to the public, especially on the complicated political situation in the Middle East. Miller's reporting for the New York Times on suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq influenced American opinion and policy, and the mistakes the journalist made had consequences for both the United States and her career. Here Miller offers her version of her acrimonious parting with the Times in the context of her 27-year history with the paper. She served in the Washington Bureau, covered the Middle East, was a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team, and served jail time to protect sources related to the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Interweaving the personal and professional, the author exposes the inner workings of the paper along with the stresses of investigative reporting and its impact on her relationships. She touches on how issues of gender affected her career, from her hiring to assessments of her character. VERDICT Miller is a controversial figure, and this book is sure to get a lot of attention from her colleagues in the media. General readers will wade through detailed recounting of earlier reporting assignments to focus on the WMD debacle and the Plame controversy.-Judy Solberg, Sacramento, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Miller, a former New York Times reporter whose pre-war articles on Iraqi WMDs generated fierce controversy, ponders what she did-and, mostly, didn't-get wrong in this contentious memoir. Miller defends news articles she wrote in 2002-3 that suggested that Saddam Hussein's Iraq might have had active nuclear and biological weapons programs (it didn't), arguing that her stories were well-researched and sourced, hedged with caveats, reflective of a genuine (though mistaken) consensus of intelligence experts, and balanced by more skeptical pieces. She also gives an engrossing run-down of the 2005 "Plame-gate" scandal, when she was jailed for refusing to testify about confidential Bush Administration source Scooter Libby (she finally did so after getting his consent). Miller makes a cogent case that she was unfairly scapegoated as a warmonger and White House dupe, setting that argument in a lively, sharp-elbowed narrative of hair-raising adventures as a Middle East correspondent and in the snake-pit of NYT office politics. Still, when she describes her beat as "what the Bush Administration knew, or thought it knew, about Iraqi WMD," she inadvertently reveals a too-narrow perspective common to many journalists then. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Although Miller uses the more objective title, The Story, The should be replaced with My. Not only is this the chronicle of events as seen from the former New York Times investigative reporter's perspective, it is also her rebuttal to all those including her own newspaper who vilified her for the part she played in the run-up to the Iraq War. For the decade-plus since the war began, critics have made the case that her reporting about weapons of mass destruction helped sell what would be a disastrous war to a scared and shaken country. Miller's defense? Her reports were wrong because her sources were wrong. Though she notes this several times, she never quite gets around to explaining why she didn't dig up other sources. There's barely a mention of other media like Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Newspapers, which got it right in real time. Most of her explaining runs along the lines of after-the-fact justification: she put disclaimers in her articles; Saddam Hussein was not just a bad man but a very bad man; and everyone was surprised when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered. She goes on to spend many pages settling grudges with her New York Times editors and media colleagues, who cut her adrift after the other big event covered here, her 85-day imprisonment for her refusal to disclose her source, Scooter Libby, for an article she never wrote about the Valerie Plame affair. Miller does make a convincing case that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald overreached in his handling of the case. Still, the oddest section in the book comes near the conclusion, in which Miller seems to say that perhaps Scooter Libby didn't tell her anything about Plame after all. A dishy read for journalism and political wonks but horribly sad for anyone personally touched by the Iraq War.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Miller (God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East, 1997, etc.) offers her account of her ignominious departure from the New York Times in 2005 due to her allegedly inaccurate coverage about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, the author claims that Times editors, fellow reporters, and various other parties used her as a scapegoat after President George W. Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq on the basis of reporting by Miller (as well as various government agency assessments) that the rogue nation posed a danger to the United States. Yes, Miller reveals, she misjudged information provided to her by sources inside and outside Iraq. However, she adds, she did her best to vet her sources in an atmosphere that made separating truth from lies nearly impossible. Along the way to her qualified mea culpa, Miller shares accounts from her four decades of global and domestic journalism. As a memoir of high-stakes journalism, the book is solid. It is especially revealing about why she decided to go to prison for contempt of court rather than reveal a confidential source related to the outing of Valerie Plame, who was secretly employed by the CIA. Prior to her dismissal from the Times, Miller spent 85 days in prison because she felt a professional obligation to honor a promise of source confidentiality. When the author reveals snippets about her personal life, she admirably addresses rumors of romances with powerful men, including a member of Congress. Her occasional references to her late-in-life marriage to book publishing guru Jason Epstein reveal their sometimes-differing viewpoints about domestic life and about reporting risks. Unfortunately, the memoir is marred by frequent score-settling, especially aimed at New York Times editors and publishers. Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.