Free The Story by Judith Miller

Promises had been made, she told me years later. But although several women were subsequently hired—including me—the salary disparity between male and female reporters expanded. By the time the women finally filed suit in 1974, the gap had grown from roughly $3,000 to $4,800 a year.
    While such discrimination was fairly standard in the sixties and seventies, the Times ’s record was egregious given its sanctimonious editorials blaming others for such sins. While women composed 40 percent of the American labor force, they represented only 26.2 percent of full-time Times employees. And according to census figures, while women held 41 percent of all “editors and reporters” jobs in the nation, they held only 16 percent of these posts at the Times . 3
    I had heard little about the women’s suit when John Finney and Ihad one of our occasional lunches in May 1977 at the Army-Navy Club, a male bastion near the White House. Finney was an avuncular fixture in the paper’s Washington bureau, and we talked mostly about national security. I sought his advice on a story I was writing about Stealth cruise missile technology. Finney took pride in mentoring young reporters, most of them male. He complimented me on my recent articles about the Middle East, defense issues, and nuclear proliferation threats for the Times ’s Sunday magazine, the Washington Post , and the Progressive , the nation’s second-oldest monthly, published in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1909. That surprised me, because the Progressive , originally an organ of Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party, was left-wing, especially on national security issues. I didn’t think of Finney, a Pentagon correspondent who was rather conservative, as a Progressive reader.
    Getting a reporting job in Washington in the mid-1970s was not nearly as tough as it became later. In my case, Erwin Knoll, the Progressive ’s Washington editor, had chosen me to succeed him when he moved back to Madison to become the magazine’s editor. I had done several freelance pieces for him. The job didn’t pay much, but my association with the well-established journal guaranteed me credentials at the White House and most federal agencies—almost as valuable a commodity as money in the nation’s status- and access-hungry capital. Knoll, a fervent civil libertarian who was deeply suspicious of government, was close to I. F. Stone, the irreverent journalist whose newsletter broke many a story about political finagling in Washington. Stone’s scoops were usually based on information contained in the thousands of documents that agencies published but that few reporters had the time or energy to read. Since I shared “Izzy” Stone’s interest in Israel and the Middle East, I had sought him out for advice before my own first trip to the region. Erwin later told me that Izzy had lobbied him relentlessly to offer me the job—not the last time I would benefit from an influential man’s support.
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    Erwin knew that I had not always been so liberal. Having grown up, like Hillary Clinton, as a “Goldwater Girl,” I had inherited some of the conservativeconvictions of my parents. But the official lies told to protect atomic testing in Vegas and then the Vietnam War shattered much of my trust in the government. At Ohio State University in Columbus and later at Barnard College in New York, I came to believe, as did so many in my generation, that the war was not only unnecessary but also immoral—a betrayal of the country’s traditions, policies, and values.
    In college I devoured Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Germaine Greer (Betty Friedan was already passé), H. Rap Brown, and Frantz Fanon. Like so many others, I smoked dope and experimented with cocaine and LSD, reveling in the self-absorption that was a hallmark of the boomer generation.
    Music and the arts were then my passion. I spent part of my year abroad