Woman of mass derision

She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist known for her scathing critiques of successive presidents. But when Maureen Dowd denounced her New York Times colleague Judith Miller in print, she was labelled disloyal and cruel. Susie Mackenzie grills her about a very public spat

On January 26 2006, the day I arrived in New York to interview the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Oprah was the news of the day. In a public recantation as remarkable in its way as Galileo's, she appeared on television renouncing her role as High Priestess of Feeling to assume the more solemn mantle of Grand Inquisitor for Truth. This meant that Dowd - someone who has plenty to say about truth-telling - was in great demand, first to appear on Oprah's show and then to talk on a rival news chatshow about the fallout from the Oprah show.

The background to Oprah's confession goes back to September last year, when she chose for her book club a touchy-feely "memoir" by James Frey called A Million Little Pieces - the story of his addiction, his rehab and his path to redemption. Oprah's endorsement had taken the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list - only the new Harry Potter sold more - and earned its author some $2m. The problem was, it was a pack of lurid lies.

Yet, even after Frey's book was exposed as largely fiction, Oprah insisted that what she called "its underlying message of redemption" still "resonates with me". Dowd was having none of it. In a column headed Oprah! How Could Ya? on January 14, she wrote what she thought Oprah should have said: "Had I known that many parts were fake, I wouldn't have recommended the book to millions of loyal readers. I wouldn't have made this liar a lot of money." Now, 12 days later, looking into the eye of the camera, a lachrymose Oprah admitted that her feelings had betrayed her. "I left the impression that truth does not matter ... To everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right."

Dowd in person is a bit scattier than the forthright clarity of her writing - not to mention her ruthless denunciation of her New York Times colleague Judith Miller - might suggest. (Her detractors, by the way, don't label her forthright: one, who declined to be named, described her writing as "grotesquely cruel, substituting melodrama for reasoned analysis and wit for sincerity".) Dowd's handbag is an incoherent mess of papers. She can't find her phone or a piece of paper with the address of a friend's party. She chews gum as she paddles unconcernedly through Manhattan puddles in her trademark diamanté stilettos. She is not at her best, she says, in person. "I find it easier to be myself when I write."

She is not about to gloat about being right. What Oprah had done was important - "America has got itself all twisted up with truthiness." Truthiness, she says, is a term coined by television satirist Steve Colbert. "Truthiness is a good story, one that feels right, but doesn't correspond to reality. Truthiness is what you want to be true. A White House press statement saying the army's doing fine in Iraq when their own military is telling them that the army is stretched so thin ... is truthiness. Or saying it's just a group of fierce insurgents when the country is on the edge of civil war ..." And Oprah got herself caught up in truthiness. "She was confused there for a while. But she pulled it up today."

As Dowd says, Oprah had a lot to lose. In her career she has never suffered a setback. "She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president. Other successful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, had to be publicly slapped down before they could move forward. Even Condi has had to play the protege with Bush. None of this happened to Oprah - she is a straight ahead success story - so the Frey affair really put her credibility on the line. If she'd stuck with this liar, she would have lost it." Because liars, no matter how good, are always found out, Dowd says. Reality has a way of tripping you up. "If you know your Shakespeare, then you know that what starts with a lie always ends badly." Didn't happen to Clinton, I point out. But Clinton was the polar opposite of truthiness, she says. "What he said was true, but it felt like a lie."

When Dowd was given her column in the New York Times in 1995 - of eight columnists, she is still the only woman - two of her male colleagues, Bill Safire and Michael Kinsley, came to her with some advice. Don't use so much humour, they said; it makes you come across like a girl. "Well, normally I'd listen to these guys. They write great authoritative columns and I'm always eager for advice, but I just knew that, for me, they were wrong." She had a plan. "I thought I'd write a third on Washington, a third on New York and a third on Hollywood - because celebrity seemed an interesting mirror world to politics." But then the Clinton impeachment happened and she couldn't get out of Washington much. "And I looked around at this Shakespearean White House, with all these characters, and it was just such a great theatrical place." Clinton, Cheney, W, Rumsfeld, "they're all much more fascinating than Jude Law or Josh Hartnett".

She turned her columns into a comic absurdist drama, with a cast of characters driven by human appetite. She gave them all nicknames - the first was Clinton, "the Grand Canyon of need". The Lewinsky scandal was a gift - it seemed like so much fun, "like A Midsummer Night's Dream". Dowd received her Pulitzer for her coverage of the impeachment, which, incidentally, she was against. "It was like a fever, ridiculous. Politicians [have] had affairs with young aides for the whole time Washington has existed."


Her detractors say she lacks analysis and ideology. That she is a stylist, not a thinker. That she elevates personalities over ideas. Where are her values, one asked: she knocked Clinton and she knocks Bush. It's true Dowd doesn't employ hard geopolitical analysis, and that her basic premise is that man is interested in man. It's also true that it's a fundamental duty of the critic to make one's convictions clear. I don't know if she hates Bush. I do know she doesn't hate Bush Senior - they still send each other emails - and that she hates hypocrisy and liars. And that, in a world not governed by reason, reason may not be the best tool to dissect it.

Dowd was born, in 1952, a Washington insider. Washington, for her, was the real world. Her parents, Irish Catholics, brought up their five children - three boys, two girls - in the city suburbs. Dowd went to school there, attended the Catholic university, and her first job was picking up tennis balls at the local sports club. At 17 she was an intern for Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, an uncle by marriage, a political fixer whose career spanned Roosevelt to Reagan and who is credited with more or less inventing lobbying.

Dowd was still living at home, aged 22, trying to save money to travel, when her brother Kevin helped her land a position as copytaker on the now defunct Washington Star - she sat through the Watergate trial, typing it all down at her 40 words a minute. It took her two years to graduate to become a reporter - "I was the last one chosen" - and she hated it. "It was all perverted dentists and zoning stories ... Did they need more suburban malls. Rubbish." It was so depressing, it was almost a relief when it folded in 1981 and she got a job on Time magazine.

Her father was a police detective, a "quintessentially macho guy" who spent most of his career in charge of Senate security, policing the Washington stage. She grew up hearing stories of his heroism.

Everyone, Dowd in particular, stresses the importance to her of her mother, Peggy, who died aged 97 last July. Her mum was old school: she'd come of age in the 1930s, the era of the femme fatale, and thought women should be feminine, by which she meant ladylike. She was smart and funny, had ambitions to be a journalist herself, and was delighted with her daughter's success. "When the Star was failing, after Watergate, when the Post got all those awards, if she saw a pile of Posts in the drugstore, she'd cover them with a copy of the Star. That's something I do to this day." (Dowd says she wrote "daily" to Bob Woodward while she was on the Star, begging him for a job. "I think one of the reasons I didn't get a job there was that I wasn't Ivy League. I'm here now, everything worked out fine. It just took a lot longer.")

All Dowd's family were conservative, but her mum was "über-patriotic". "She'd wear stars and stripes stockings." Has Dowd ever wanted to be a politician? "I'd rather be a nun. No, seriously, I'd rather be a cocktail waitress." The trouble with power, she says, is it has a tendency to make you deaf. "It seems to have an impulse to surround itself with yes men, with sycophants who tell you truthiness, and not what you need to know."

Dowd, previously a New York Times reporter, was given her chance as a columnist by Howell Raines, then editorial page editor. He was subsequently appointed executive editor, on September 5 2001, with an agenda to reform, as he acknowledged in a long piece he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly after he was dismissed from his post in April 2003. He describes a paper at war with itself, riven with inter-departmental rivalries, resistant to change. A paper pervaded by "smug complacency", whose response to every scoop it lost was: "It's not news until we say it's news." Under Raines the paper received seven Pulitzer Prizes in 2002 - five of them for September 11 and war coverage. Then, almost impossibly it must have seemed, the Times itself became the news, an object of journalistic mockery, with the Jayson Blair affair - a young New York Times staffer was accused of plagiarising stories. The Times, which Raines had described as "the ethical keystone of American journalism", was forced to admit to 36 instances of journalistic fraud by Blair. And then the paper, which, as Raines noted, "never fired anyone", fired him.

Dowd was close to Raines, and it was to him that she went six months into her job as columnist to say she didn't think she could do it. She wasn't suited to polemics, didn't like attracting hostility. She wanted to be liked. "Howell didn't understand. He loved mixing it up, getting people upset. He said, 'That's fine. I'll find you a vacancy on the Metro section.' Well, as he knew, I'd spent five years climbing out of Metro. I said, 'Thanks, I'll give it another go.' "

After the Blair brouhaha, the next bout of introspection and breast-beating centred on what became known as the Judith Miller affair, which was detonated like a bomb by Dowd in October 2005, when she wrote a column, under the heading Woman Of Mass Destruction, attacking her colleague. Even by Dowd's lacerating standards, it was savage.

Miller was a Middle East specialist who had been on the paper for 28 years. Both before and after the war she wrote pieces supporting the administration's assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, alleging in September 2002 in a front-page story that Iraq was on a worldwide hunt for material to make an atomic bomb; in April 2003, she reported that WMD had been found in Iraq.

A little over a year later, in May 2004, the Times published an editorial, now known as its mea culpa, acknowledging that some of its Iraq coverage had relied too heavily on Ahmed Chalabi, then leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group dedicated to overthrowing Saddam, and that it had allowed controversial information to go unchallenged. The Times chose not to name a specific reporter, though many noted that of 12 articles mentioned, 10 had been written or co-written by Miller.

All this time Dowd had been quiet. What finally "did it", she says, was when Miller went to jail to protect her source, Scooter Libby, over the outing of a woman CIA agent. "And the Times staged this huge first amendment battle for her. We supported her through that, spent money on her defence. And it turned out to be bogus. She made a deal and left jail. And at that point I couldn't avoid it. People were asking questions like, 'Why aren't Times writers addressing this?' " (Miller spent 85 days in jail. Her source, she said, agreed she should name him, hence her eventual release.)

Miller, Dowd wrote in her column, had been used by the Bush administration in preparing its case for war: one of Miller's articles was cited by Rice, by Powell and by Rumsfeld as part of the case for war. She had been part of an "echo chamber" where just one source, most often Chalabi, was being cited to ratify a range of stories.

It was unusual; it could be considered disloyal. As Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation, says, "Not done, or not in the New York Times, to have a fight in public. It goes against an unwritten etiquette. That it was two women involved, that was another factor that gave it an edge of scandale, something of a sexist spectacle." Dowd says she was under no pressure to write it - "quite the reverse". The journalists I spoke to about her column were agreed that Dowd was courageous to expose Miller. And that they wouldn't have done it themselves. Michael Massing, who has written extensively on the US press coverage of the Iraq war for the New York Review Of Books, for instance, says: "I'm in two minds. She was absolutely right on Miller and captured some important aspects about her. But was it acceptable to kick her when she was down? I wonder about that."

Two weeks after Dowd's column, Miller resigned. "It's still a mystery to me how she went from being a press freedom hero to having to leave the paper a few weeks later," Massing says. Navasky thinks it has to be interpreted in the light of the Blair affair. "There was deep resentment that the reputation of the paper was being tarnished. But as for why Dowd did it, I suspect she thought Miller's continued employment would fatally wound the paper. And since the Times publisher was a friend of Miller's, maybe the only way to do it was to go public." Dowd, unsurprisingly, is not in two minds. The reason she did it is simple - Miller, she believes, was an exponent of truthiness, everything Dowd despises, everything that journalism should not be.

The reason why Dowd has written her latest book, Are Men Necessary?, in which she takes on gender politics, is less clear cut. The capricious tone that captures the caprice of her subjects in her columns here falls flat or, worse, makes her sound, in the words of feminist critic Katha Pollitt, "a bit silly". Dowd partly acknowledges this. "I wanted a tone that was light and breezy. But I think, because of all the stuff on war and torture, people expected it to be heavier." The book's basic thesis is that feminism has been defeated by narcissism; that the sexual revolution didn't work out. "Women used to demand equality, now they demand botox. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest."

I think there's a clue to her motivation in the book's underlying tone of nostalgia: "... a time, long ago ... when women didn't talk only about skin, they talked about books, plays and politics"; the references to Margo Channing, Bette Davis's character in All About Eve - remember, she's the one who sees through Eve's truthiness. There's a lot of harking back to the values of the 1940s, when women were real women. She even mentions in the book her mother, who used to warn her to stay away from married men: "They are long-tailed rats."

Dowd has never married. She's been out with a number of high-profile men - Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, Michael Douglas immediately before he took up with Catherine Zeta-Jones. One person went so far as to say Dowd sabotages herself in her choice of men. "She always gravitates towards celebrities, not serious people - Aaron Sorkin, for heaven's sake, a reformed drug addict. She chooses not-promising husband material." For herself, Dowd says, "I'm not aware that I go for any type."

"She's very brave the way she tackles this in the book," Pollitt says. "She's been given a lot of flak from the right, saying, 'Who'd want you?' But she does deal well with the imperfect fit between men and women. If she was a man, she'd have a ton of people throwing themselves at her."

Dowd says that she'd love to get married. "I think I'd be good at it." And she'd like it to be someone with children. "I'd like to be involved in bringing up kids." Marriage may be hard, "but being single is hard - it involves being judged all the time. It can be fun but it can be awful, too." She admits she's lonely, particularly now her mother has died. "I miss her insanely." She is "dating several people" and has made a list of what she requires in a man. "Integrity, a sense of humour, a lack of pretension ... Do you think that's too much to ask? Should I cut one out? But which one?" Anyway, assuming she does find him, she reckons she's worked out the secret of how to make a marriage work. So I ask her. "Truthfully?" she says. "A certain amount of acting."

· Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd is published on Monday by Headline at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (inc UK p&p), call 0870 836 0875 (guardian.co.uk/bookshop).