Free The Story by Judith Miller Page B

magazine published it. I saw my words in print and found my calling.
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    Six years later, over our lunch at the Army-Navy Club, Finney told me that he was about to be the Times ’s Washington news editor—the second-ranking post in the bureau.
    He admired an article I had written for the Washington Post about how environmentalists had used the plight of the pink-footed booby, an endangered bird that nests on Diego Garcia, to stop the expansion of the American base on that Indian Ocean island. (I was pro-booby.) Finney, a former navy officer who had served in the Philippines, knew Diego Garcia well.
    He had also read some of my other freelance articles for Science magazine, the New Republic , and even my stories for National Public Radio, where I worked part-time as a national security correspondent.
    I greatly admired Finney for having infuriated government officials with articles about how scientific advisers to the government had subsequently gone to work for companies seeking government contracts. Many of the 2,500 articles that carried his byline in his thirty years of reporting focused on the development of nuclear weapons, the satellite technology that guided them, and the arms race they had produced. There was nothing that John did not seem to know about the Atomic Energy Commission and nuclear proliferation, my first obsession since Las Vegas.
    Despite his criticism of government, he respected Washington’s institutions and the often anonymous civil servants who sustained them. “What they are doing is so thankless,” he said, reflecting an unfashionable empathy for federal officials.
    Finney confessed that he enjoyed having lunch with me because, unlike most women, I did not seem to mind the permanent cloud of pipe smoke that enveloped him. A binge cigarette smoker, I liked the smell of pipe tobacco and even cigars.
    Would I be interested in joining the Times ? he asked, popping the question casually.
    I tried but failed to appear equally cool. Of course!
    Finney said he would recommend me to A. M. Rosenthal, the Times ’s executive editor. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, he warned, but the timingmight be propitious. The paper was hunting for “qualified” women reporters, tiptoeing around the women’s lawsuit. Though I was five years out of graduate school, had not attended journalism school, and had not worked full-time for a wire service or a daily regional newspaper—the traditional training grounds for Times reporters—I might be offered a job. I would, of course, have to spend at least six months to a year on the Metro desk in New York.
    My elation evaporated. I can’t do that, I told him.
    â€œWhy on earth not?” said Finney, a polite man who seemed stunned by my reluctance.
    The reasons were personal, I told him. I had recently become romantically involved with someone and did not want to leave Washington, I said, carefully avoiding the man’s name.
    â€œYou mean Les Aspin?” he asked. Finney had heard that I had moved into the Georgetown home of the Wisconsin Democratic congressman and Pentagon gadfly, whom I had gotten to know years earlier through my work for the Progressive .
    â€œSurely you would not sacrifice a job at the Times because of a boyfriend?” he said, a statement more than a question.
    â€œOh yes I would. You can’t take your typewriter home to bed with you at night.”
    Finney suppressed a smile. Perhaps I was not such a radical, his eyes suggested as he tamped down a wad of tobacco in his pipe. Well, he added coyly after several puffs, perhaps we could work around that “constraint.”
    â€œDon’t discuss your living arrangements with Abe when you see him next week,” he counseled.
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    Finney gave me a long list of topics I was not to discuss with the formidable Abe Rosenthal, the brilliant journalist who had revolutionized news coverage at the Times but was a polarizing figure inside the