"It brought a lot of stuff back," Ms. Miller told The Times' Adam Liptak this weekend. "Parts of it were very disturbing to me."

Ms. Miller, who now works for Fox News, told Mr. Liptak that she had "nothing to do with the movie," but she did meet with Kate Beckinsale, who plays her sorta-kinda onscreen doppelgänger:

While she drew inspiration from Ms. Miller, according to Mr. Liptak, Ms. Beckinsale did most of her research on the news business by spending time with reporters from The Los Angeles Times.

As you may already know, the movie offers a fictionalized retelling of the Judith Miller-Valerie Plame scandal, and stars Kate Beckinsale as a journalist sent to jail for protecting her source in the outing of a C.I.A. operative played by Vera Farmiga. The film features Matt Dillon, Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, and David Schwimmer.

Also appearing in the trailer: MSNBC anchor turned flack Dan Abrams in the role of a journalist.

As Stereogum reports, a press release describes the song, simply titled, "Valerie Plame," as being told from "the point-of-view of one of Plame's inside contacts upon discovering her true identity," also stating that its "an amorous tribute to the onetime CIA operative." According to Stereogum, the track, which is part of a three-volume singles series the band will start rolling out this fall, will be available for purchase on Oct. 14. And, in a strategic move, they will perform it live on Late Night With Conan O'brien on Nov. 3, the night before the election.

Of course this is not the Decemberists' first riveting tale of espionage. Their 2005 album, Picaresque, includes a fairly epic, and also bittersweet, track called "The Bagman's Gambit" (posted below) that evokes the excitement and perils of the spying life. Although, with signature Colin Meloy alliteration like "Purloined in Petrograd," we presume the setting for that song is a bit more old-fashioned.

The Bagmans Gambit - The Decemberists

Once they were seated at the restaurant they’d been walking toward, the couple and their dinner companions “marveled over this strange request. … A request from Joe for leniency on Joe’s behalf would carry little or no weight with the presiding judge. More pointedly, it was obviously in our interest to have the reporters testify. … We wanted to know what sources in the administration had leaked my name to the media.”

Wilson doesn’t linger any further on this desperate little set piece, but it speaks volumes about how business is done among the lords of Washington consensus. The native dialect of journalists at the court society of the Bush administration such as Cooper is the argot of the deal. It was, after all, one such deal—the granting of anonymity to his own White House Source, the Plame-bashing Karl Rove—that had landed Cooper in this legal plight in the first place. One can almost hear the wheels spinning in his flailing effort to charm Wilson’s husband: Surely there’s a deal somewhere I can cut to get myself out of this mess. (It’s also quite revealing of the protocols of this deal-making set that Cooper would approach Wilson, who had only provided the inadvertent cause in the case involving his wife’s outing—a New York Times Op-Ed denouncing the Bush White House’s fraudulent claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase weapons-grade uranium from the African nation of Niger—rather than his wife, the person actually wronged in the legal proceeding. Should the jail-averse Cooper seek to win the couple’s mercy in any meaningful sense of the term, she would have been the proper target for his appeal, and his apologies.) But of course, once a gavel and a contempt citation come into play, the deal-making stops. Matt Cooper was, quite literally, spinning out of control.

Cooper ultimately was spared a jail sentence at the 11th hour, when Rove coughed up an anonymity waiver.

The entire effort to smear the Wilsons grew out of similar petty, self-interested overtures. Bush apparatchiks from the office of the vice president on down used their own access to the D.C. press corps to mount the whispering campaign against the Wilsons, which was itself predicated on the uninformed assumption that exposing the former ambassador’s wife would show Joe Wilson up as an anemic D.C. girly man.

As most Americans now know—and as Plame makes painstakingly clear across the detailed course of her “why-is-this-happening” narrative—the Plame outing, like the war that midwifed it, wound up showcasing the low-minded, truth-averse culture of imperial Washington. A career covert operations officer who went on to head the Counterproliferations Division’s search for WMD’s in Iraq, Plame would have actually supplied useful counsel to the war-making councils of the White House, had they chosen to listen; while convinced that Hussein posed an ongoing threat to regional security and U.S. interests, Plame and her division could never confirm that he had fulfilled—or really, even successfully revived—his long-standing ambitions to obtain WMD capabilities. No matter—by the reasoning of the assorted bullies and toadies making the case for invasion, the invasion would do the effective work that human intelligence and U.N. weapons inspections teams couldn’t. The unofficial Bush slogan on verifying WMD caches may as well have been “Bomb it, and they will come.”

From her perch as a professional, Plame consistently marvels at the shabby lies fueling both the war and the campaign to out her—registering, for example, genuine wonder at the first Bush White House’s premier press flak, Ari Fleischer’s trial testimony showing up his total ignorance of C.I.A. protocols and the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which he and other senior Bush officials had carelessly violated. When Fleischer announced before the court, “[Never] in my wildest dreams would I have thought the information was classified,” Plame’s reaction is admirably sharp and to the point: “If he was so surprised that his actions might have adverse national security implications, then he’s not smart enough to work at the White House. That goes for all the officials who thought that using my name as catnip was just playing the Washington game as usual.”

That would be a suitable last word to the whole sordid business—but of course that wouldn’t be in character for the D.C. deal-makers. As is the routine with all books by former intelligence officials, Plame submitted the manuscript for Fair Game to the C.I.A.’s Publications Review Board for prepublication vetting. Expecting to field—and accommodate—some agency request to suppress compromising information here and there, Plame was shocked to find that the PRB reviewers had blocked out long stretches of the book outlining the rather unexceptional events of her career prior to the period covered by her involuntary outing by the White House. After a threat to halt publication altogether, and a lawsuit from her publisher, Simon and Schuster (currently under appeal), the book was published with the redactions intact, so that the initial chapters—covering the career material the C.I.A. deemed verboten—sport page-long stretches of nothing but black bars, and the reader never hears Plame’s account of such key narrative matters as her first meetings with her husband—absurdly, he pops up initially in the biographical narrative as the father of the couple’s twins. Initially, the reader feels like the book may be a big Nabokov-style jest. But in a clever end run around the C.I.A.’s strictures, Plame’s publisher hired national security journalist Laura Rozen to compose an “afterword” that fills in the many narrative blanks with information that was already, after all, in the public record. Despite the disjointed character of the text, it serves to underline an important point: Power in Bush-era Washington is all about who gets to tell what kind of redacted story.

As he sat down with The Observer in his D.C. office suite last week, Robert Novak was still a bit guarded.

“I’m not going to tell you my darkest secrets,” he warned.

But he finally seemed completely at ease talking about the impact the most famous column he’s ever written has had on the the city, and on himself.

He started writing his memoirs in 2003 – around the time the Plame story broke – although the process actually began in earnest months before he realized how big an impact the affair might have on his legacy.

“I started writing because I’m old,” he said. “I wanted to tell my story while I was still cogent. While I could still remember what happened. … I’m worth a few million – I didn’t have to write this book. I just always knew I would do it, and I knew now was the time.”

But despite his denials, it’s clear the lingering Plame fallout, coupled with his advancing years, played a big role in his motivation to release his memoirs now.

“There’s no question if you walked out of here and I dropped dead, my obit would probably have [the Plame affair] in the lede," he said. "I don’t have too many years left, so that’s probably what it’ll be. The idea that that’s my legacy is unfortunate, but that’s the way it turned out.”

Perched in an armchair in a tiny, windowless study in his D.C. office suite – just down the hall from Newsweek’s Washington bureau and block from the White House – a shirt-sleeved Mr. Novak said he “didn’t do anything wrong” in revealing the name of the former C.I.A. operative.

His floor is littered with old typewriters, relics from an earlier phase of his career. Rows of angelic-looking grandchildren beamed from photos on the bookcase lining the wall behind him.

“People just jumped to conclusions – a couple of years ago, most of the stories they wrote about me were pretty punk. But I don’t blame them; I wasn’t talking, so they had to make stuff up. And they did… People are lazy now, and they write off of Nexis. If a fact is wrong in one story, then it’s wrong everywhere. … I broke no laws. [The Plame column] was good journalism” that became, because of passions over the war, a sort of political Rorschach test.

This week, Bob Novak is fully emerging from bunker mode for the first time since the leak investigation began – answering questions that have been circling him ever since the former C.I.A. agent’s name appeared in his column four years ago this month.

Later today, he’ll discuss his new memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, on "Meet the Press," and a book-pegged Q&A in The New York Times Magazine hit doorsteps this morning.

He just taped two C-Span specials (including an hour-long sit-down with Brian). Later this week, he’ll start making the cable show rounds, including a sitdown with his old "Crossfire" colleague and fellow CNN exile Tucker Carlson, and chats with FOX’s "Hannity & Colmes," and CNBC’s Larry Kudlow.

It’s a familiar milieu for the veteran journalist. Starting in the Reagan years, Mr. Novak was the Law & Order of political talk-television; if you turned on your TV any given day of the week, you had a decent shot of seeing him onscreen. For a quarter-century, his home base was CNN; the network's TV fortunes and his rose and fell almost in sync.

Since his bitter divorce from the network two years ago, at the height of the Plame controversy (following a dramatic on-air tiff with one-time source James Carville) he’s entered friendlier ideological territory, signing on with FOX News. But over the past few months, even those appearances have been tapering off. The journalism world, said Mr. Novak, has begun to change in ways he’s baffled by. He believes the appetite for the sort of scoop-driven analysis he’s trafficked in since the Eisenhower administration may be disappearing.

“All the programming I really liked on CNN, most of the shows I was on, they’re all gone," he said. "'The Situation Room' doesn’t have the same quality as what it replaced. The present executives don’t care about politics – they care about Paris Hilton. It’s the same at FOX. They get very invested in all these stories I’m just not interested in at all. That poor girl in Aruba – what was her name? Yes, Natalee Holloway. There’s a war on, and that’s what gets put on the air?”

But the self-described workaholic isn’t exactly disappointed. Mr. Novak the journalist may express outrage over the latest network developments; Mr. Novak the senior citizen admits he’s feeling just a bit relieved.

“I would certainly never want to go back to the schedule I was doing," he said. "I’m 76 years old.”

And then: “Of course, nobody’s asking me.”

There are other signs Mr. Novak, still powerful, may be starting to lose--or is it relinquish?--some of the unique power he’s wielded in Washington since he first teamed up with Rowland Evans in the early 60's.

Every year, Mr. Novak hosts pricey insider lunches popular with Washington insiders, featuring big names like the Speaker of the House, or a senior presidential advisor. This spring, political superstars stayed off the dais, and ticket sales lagged. It was the Washington equivalent of the Stones failing to sell out an arena show, and the blogosphere took notice.

“Mr. Novak’s a little less popular this year than he has been in any other year in his long history of being a raging prick,” wrote Wonkette editor Alex Pareene, mocking the slow sales. “While in olden days he could count on the brightest stars of both parties to attend his box social, this year he’s got… Newt 'Gringo' Gingrich. And some GOP pollster.”

Mr. Novak told The Observer that he’ll probably never retire.

“I may die at my desk… I’ll stick it out as long as I can function," he said. "Probably a few more years.”

But in the course of a half-hour interview, he mentioned his own mortality, mostly offhandedly and unprompted, several times.

Over the years, he’s survived a medical textbook’s worth of maladies, including a brush with meningitis, multiple bouts with cancer, and two fractured hips. The second break came on the campaign trail in 2004 – a traumatic incident still fresh in his mind (last week, he relayed again the harrowing scene he also describes in his memoir – when he crawled naked and alone on his hotel room floor, blinded with pain, to summon help). Now, for the first time since Kennedy-Nixon, he’s entering a presidential campaign season without plans to cover it full-time.

A few weeks ago, he marked five decades in Washington with a wistful column recalling his arrival in the city in 1957, and bemoaning the changes since. But not all of his recent strolls down memory lane have been draped in such gauzy-eyed nostalgia.

Despite his denials, his new book offers a painstaking accounting of 50 years worth of personal and professional feuds – an advanced exercise in below-the-Beltway score-settling. (The first draft weighed in at 1,400 pages before being slashed to a less-brutal – if still bloody – 600-plus.) It begins – as did this interview – with his anger over the Valerie Plame affair.

“I really resented the treatment I got” from many media superstars, he said.

And in the bookk: “The blood of ideological solidarity was stronger than the water of journalistic togetherness,” he writes. “Bill Safire came out of retirement to write this – just this mindless column that took me to task," he said. "A ridiculous piece of work. And of course he’s friends with Judy Miller – he took her to the Correspondents’ Dinner. I saw them together, and I went to him and said hi. Didn’t say anything, though. No point in whining.”

Who's whining?

With patrician reporting partner Rowland Evans by his side, Mr. Novak completed his rise from AP regional reporter and Wall Street Journal Senate correspondent to Washington journalism superpower, developing an unparalleled network of sources through sheer will-power and dogged shoe-leather reporting.

Despite his increasing conservatism, he found willing contributors on both sides of the aisle.

His column may have been the source of the controversial “acid, amnesty and abortion” tag that helped sink George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid – but the source of that anonymous quote was none other than the South Dakota senator’s one-time running mate, Thomas Eagleton.

Everyone talked to Mr. Novak.

Mr. Safire isn’t the only press figure to come up short in his recent estimation.

“Do you think you’d be a blogger if you started out today?” The Observer wanted to know.

“I don’t think so," he said. "Bloggers, it seems to me, don’t really care what the facts are.”)

Of the Associated Press when he started, and today: “I’m glad I started there … but the AP is different than it used to be," he said. "Not as closely edited. Facts, language make it in that – I wouldn’t have dreamed of using when I worked there.” And the employees at his other alma mater, The Journal, don't fare much better. Asked whether the Dow Jones union's contempt for the Rupert Murdoch bid to take over the paper made any sense, he was dismissive:

“Not really. The union’s response – I love it – has just been completely absurd."

If Mr. Novak’s enemies take some fire in the book, some former friends and co-workers tend to fare even worse.

"Capital Gang" cast-offs like Mona Charen and early colleagues like John McLaughlin are in for particular scorn in Prince of Darkness. (Mr. Novak famously told the Jesuit-turned-political talk icon to “fuck off” at their last meeting, at the New York Times party in Boston during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.)

In a recent interview he repeated, with a smile, the characterization of McLaughlin he gave PBS’s Ben Wattenberg a few weeks ago: “The closest thing on this planet to pure evil.”

He’s no longer in contact with most of his former TV colleagues, though he still works with Al Hunt and Margaret Carlson on Bloomberg broadcast projects.

Mr. Novak said he still doesn’t care what any of them think about the Plame case – and he isn’t trying to change their minds with his account. “One thing is a matter of age – at a certain age, it just doesn’t matter what people think of you.”

Still, he admits he reads his own press.

“Well, yeah. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

And a quick check of the comment thread attached to one of his recent stories on the Washington Post Web site unsettled him; he included a sample of particularly unnerving hate mail in his book.

Some of his insider fans – on both sides of the aisle – are equally passionate.

“Deep down he has a heart of pure mush,” said longtime friend and fellow conservative Mr. Wattenberg. “He has a more complicated personality than meets the eye. Part of what he does is shtick. We all have to project a personality, and this is a character he’s playing. There’s a little showbiz in all of us – I think he just embraces that side of himself a little more. But he’s just a lovely human being.”

It’s a softer version of the classic Washington take on Bob Novak, which allegedly originated with Michael Kinsley: “Beneath the asshole is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.”

It’s difficult to tell whether or how Mr. Novak’s "Prince of Darkness” image will be affected by his tendency to point to the “inner peace” that has followed his late-life conversion from non-practicing Jew to Catholic. But even Mr. Novak’s spiritual quests have been controversial in some quarters.

“I think Deb Solomon (his interviewer for today's Times Magazine) was really bothered by this – it was how she asked me about it, and kept coming back to it," he said. "I’m used to that kind of reaction. A lot of people resent my confession, especially Jews and fallen-away Catholics. It really makes them crazy … even though, yes, I still consider myself Jewish. Socially, ethnically, culturally. That will never change.”

According to a throwaway line late in his book, Jews displeased with his religious evolution include many members of his own family.

That minor personal controversy is a pale echo of the raging professional drama that has accompanied Mr. Novak for decades.

“... I have been a stirrer up of strife – for half a century,” he writes in Prince of Darkness. “But I was not merely causing trouble for trouble’s sake.

"I’d like to think I emulated Bertrans de Born in stirring up strife but not in wreaking havoc," he writes a little later, referring to a medieval monk and schismatic, "so that I will avoid an eternity in purgatory with my head in my hand.

"At least I hope so.”

Even for an administration that has made a robust cottage industry out of politicizing the law, Mr. Bush’s fiat was a stunning move. Commutations come with quite explicit guidelines of their own – promulgated by the department of Justice back in the days before it became a Rove-branded house of patronage and prosecutions to solidify G.O.P. tactics of voter suppression.

“Requests for commutation generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence,” the now-inconvenient manual for U.S. attorneys stipulates. It goes on to describe commutation as “an extraordinary remedy that is rarely granted.” Among the grounds it recognizes for a potentially legitimate commutation are “disparity or undue severity of sentence, critical illness or old age, and meritorious service rendered by the government to the petitioner, e.g., cooperation with investigative or prosecutive efforts that has not been adequately rewarded by other official action.”

Mr. Libby plainly falls under no such category. The term that judge Reggie Walton, a Republican appointee, meted out actually was on the low end of the scale for federal sentencing guidelines given the serious nature of the underlying crime in Mr. Libby’s obstruction conviction. (Glib Beltway pundits who have likened Libby’s dual conviction for perjury and obstruction to Bill Clinton’s House impeachment on the same charges tend to overlook that obstruction sentences closely track the severity of the offense that obstructers have sought to conceal. Needless to say, now that Mr. Libby’s trial has established once and for all that Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. agent he helped to out, retained her undercover status, the underlying offense is far greater here than in a duly adjudicated civil sexual harassment suit.)

What’s more, Mr. Libby’s own defense team argued strenuously in its sentencing hearings for Judge Walton to employ a more lenient sentence based on his government service, and failed; the judge replied, quite sensibly, that servants of the government should be held to a higher standard of truth-telling before a court of law, not a laxer one. For Mr. Bush now to hand down the Libby commutation on the very slender claim that Judge Walton’s sentence was excessive is to subvert—yet again—the independent rule of law with the blunt, unaccountable instrument of executive privilege, something, it need hardly be added, that he isn’t so readily up to doing for the many Americans moldering in jail cells under draconian drug interdiction and “Three Strikes” penalties.

Mr. Bush’s order is also remarkable for the many legal authorities it omitted from the process—again, in flagrant defiance of precedent in commutation cases. “There are procedures for this,” says Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University. “The key question here is the rule of law. And the rule of law is not exhausted by the president’s prerogative to issue pardons. I’m not questioning the constitutional prerogative of the president to issue pardons. But it is not the job of the president of the United States to simply exercise his power without the rigorous consultation of other authorities, and without following the procedures in place for these decisions.”

Mr. Ackerman also notes that the Libby commutation is of a piece with prior Bush White House exercises of executive fiat. Take the brutal interrogation of detainees in the war on terrorism. “To say that Geneva conventions don’t apply is one thing,” he argues. “To say it without actually going through the procedures is something else altogether.”

But as the Libby affront again shows, this presidency is nothing if not something else altogether—and as Mr. Ackerman notes, its procedural excesses are now harming the very reach of executive power it seeks relentlessly to extend.

“The fundamental problem with this administration is that it’s discrediting presidential power,” he says. “the fact that the president didn’t consult with the Justice Department on this, this sort of personalization of power—the idea that the president just decides what he wants to decide—this is all bad,” he says.

Mr. Ackerman’s lawyerly understatement here is itself rather telling—students of constitutional law have exasperatingly few reference points for this new nether realm of executive power. Which is probably why University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson cites the republic’s most forceful original dissenters from untrammeled executive powers—the so-called anti-Federalist opponents who opposed the Constitution’s ratification by the states.

“The people who opposed the Constitution were described as paranoids and men of little faith,” he says. “But a surprising number of them, including luminaries like George Mason, took what looked like a quasi-paranoid, conspiratorial view of the president’s pardoning power, arguing that a president could be involved in what they called a ‘treasonous cabal’ and would pardon one of his confederates after the fact. Now I obviously don’t think Libby was guilty of treason, and this is a commutation rather than a pardon. But lo and behold, it comes just as an appeals court refused to overturn or reduce his sentence. There’s no question but that this was designed to keep someone involved in an executive branch cabal from going to jail.”

Mr. Levinson also cautions that he “can’t really in good faith oppose the pardon power. But at the same time, it is important to realize it can be abused. I think this is a much, much more serious abuse of that power than Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, which I assume was tawdry. . . . Even if you agree to stipulate that the Libby sentence was excessive, the alternative isn’t zero.”
Nor are liberals the only legal thinkers taking vigorous issue with the commutation.

Bruce Fein, a former deputy assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan who now practices international and constitutional law with Bruce Fein and Associates and the Lichfield Group, argues that “impeachable offenses—and that’s what Libby did here—are not worthy of clemency.” Bush’s Libby dictat “again shows how Bush flouts his own promises and statements. Back when the Plame lead happened, he said ‘Anybody in my White House who’s going to be found complicit in leaking will be fired.’ And Karl Rove is right there staring him in the face the whole time. Then when the sentence came down, he said ‘I’ll let the appeals process be exhausted.' Well, when the appeals process didn’t produce the results he wanted, he decides to override it. It’s a flouting of the law. You may recall that I condemned President Clinton for perjuring himself in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Its seems to me, how can you have someone lie repeatedly and then simply exonerate him?”

Ditching the Libby sentence “makes a mockery of the conservative case to have impeached Clinton, and it makes a mockery of the whole rule of law.”

Has the pattern of abuse reached the point that Mr. Fein—who has already called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney—would support similar proceedings against the president? “Has Bush committed impeachable offenses at this moment? Yes. Will Congress have the political will and bravery to begin impeach him? No. In part it’s because they themselves don’t want to be held to higher standards. They think, ‘Well, I do this sort of thing all the time.’ ”

Though on the narrow question of the Libby commutation, Congress is largely hamstrung. The broad constitutional pardoning powers granted to the executive also leave Congress and the judiciary little maneuvering room, save to issue statements blasting the commutation and to convene public hearings on the matter—as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. is reportedly preparing to do.

And as is often the case in such moments of legal paralysis, citizens can only find meager consolation in the law of historical irony.

The first public pitch to grant a pre-emptive commutation to the felon Mr. Libby came courtesy of a Washington Post op-ed penned by William G. Otis, a former US attorney in Virginia’s Eastern district who also served as a legal counsel to George H.W. Bush and an informal campaign adviser to Mr. Bush the younger in 2000. He is now an adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law.

Many years ago, long before he became the editor in chief at Time Inc., Norman Pearlstine wrote an exposé for The Wall Street Journal about mobsters behaving badly in Las Vegas. The story relied in part on an unnamed source, whose confidentiality Mr. Pearlstine has continued to protect for decades. To this day, he still hasn’t given up the true identity of “Michelle the Chip Hustler.”

Karl Rove should be so lucky.

To wit: In the summer of 2005, Mr. Pearlstine famously decided to hand over notes to a grand-jury investigation that identified Mr. Rove as the anonymous government source who had leaked classified information to Time political reporter Matt Cooper. The move came as a major surprise.

For months, representatives of Time Inc., including Mr. Pearlstine, had joined The New York Times in publicly fighting the subpoenas of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Along the way, they had appealed to both the general public and the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the First Amendment guarantees the right of reporters to protect the confidentiality of their sources.

And then one day in June, Mr. Pearlstine did an about-face. What happened?

In his new book, Off the Record, Mr. Pearlstine defends his decision:

“Time Inc., on behalf of itself and Matt Cooper, spent millions of dollars fighting Patrick Fitzgerald in the courts, and we lost every round,” writes Mr. Pearlstine. “When the Supreme Court refused to hear our plea, I folded our hand and turned over our notes to the grand jury.”

At the time, it was a wildly unpopular decision. During the summer of 2005, everywhere you looked in American journalism, some prominent writer, publication or media organization was taking a hearty whack at Norman Pearlstine. David Halberstam, Joe Klein, Carl Bernstein, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The New York Observer—each took turns picking apart his rationale for capitulation.

The San Diego Union-Tribune lampooned Mr. Pearlstine as Time’s “Wimp of the Year.” In Off the Record, Mr. Pearlstine tries his hand at a more nuanced self-portrait.

In general, the genre of aggrieved media players fighting back against their critics is a lamentable one (see Raines, Howell). But to his credit, Mr. Pearlstine keeps the self-righteousness, the braying and the shin-kicking to a minimum. For the most part, he carries out his self-restoration project with dignified restraint.

He tells us that turning over Mr. Cooper’s notes was the hardest decision in his long and varied media career—the highlights of which he recounts in a whirlwind manner. Born in a suburb of Philadelphia to a family of lawyers, Mr. Pearlstine graduated from law school before eventually abandoning the family profession for a long, successful run in journalism. Over the years, he served as the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the executive editor of Forbes and the founder of SmartMoney. In 1995, he became the fifth editor in chief of Time Inc., charged with overlooking the editorial content of one of the largest magazine companies in the world.

From his perch at the top of Time Inc., Mr. Pearlstine had plenty of opportunities to put his legal training to good use. He devotes a portion of his book to chronicling the impressive array of court-room adversaries that Time Inc. has squared off against over the years. Aggrieved aluminum moguls. Jilted Little League coaches. Rattlesnake-wielding discontents. Ariel Sharon. The Church of Scientology.

And, beginning in May 2004, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Pearlstine writes that his deliberation about whether to comply with Mr. Fitzgerald’s subpoena requests unfolded over many, many months. There was no eureka moment. Along the way, he weighed the advice of various journalists, a former U.S. attorney and a menagerie of lawyers both inside and outside of Time Warner. He even solicited the opinion of his psychotherapist.

Somewhere along the line, Mr. Pearlstine grew disenchanted with the legal posturing of Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment guru who initially represented Time Inc. and continued to represent Judith Miller and The New York Times throughout the course of Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation. “I was worried that he was spread thin—distracted by his other cases and his desire to publicize his autobiography, which was set for publication a month before our Supreme Court petition was due,” writes Mr. Pearlstine.

“Listening to Abrams make an argument in a contempt hearing … in October 2004, Cooper had written Je Suis Fucked in his notebook,” he adds.

Mr. Pearlstine argues that what ultimately convinced him to give up his reporter’s confidential sources was his gradual understanding that Mr. Rove had never in fact explicitly asked for confidentiality. “That was my ‘tipping point’—the reason that finally changed my mind,” writes Mr. Pearlstine. “Rove wasn’t a confidential source and hadn’t asked to be one.”

Throughout Off the Record, Mr. Pearlstine compares his decision-making process with those of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Judith Miller of The Times. He suggests that in the end, Ms. Miller’s decision to go to jail to protect a confidential source was done on behalf of a source, I. Lewis Libby, who, like Karl Rove, didn’t require protection.

“[N]either her editors at the Times nor the paper’s lawyers spent sufficient time with Miller before her incarceration discussing waiver issues with her,” writes Mr. Pearlstine. “Nor did they spend enough time with her notebooks to determine whether she had anything on any other sources that truly warranted protecting. She didn’t.”

At some point, having found himself in the midst of a quintessential beltway scandal, Mr. Pearlstine must have looked around and sized up Washington, D.C., as the Galápagos of anonymous sources. Throughout Off the Record, Mr. Pearlstine attempts to do for anonymous sources what Darwin did for finches—that is, to provide an overview of their natural history, a description of their preferred habitats and a few distinguishing characteristics that separate, say, “Michelle the Chip Hustler” from Karl Rove from “Deep Throat.”

Mr. Pearlstine closes his book with a brief set of “Editorial Guidelines,” which, he believes, had they been in place, could have steered Time magazine clear of the entire Valerie Plame mess—guidelines he would no doubt like aspiring journalists to keep tucked under their pillows.

“Lovers should talk before they get in bed together,” writes Mr. Pearlstine. “So should reporters and their sources.”

Felix Gillette is a reporter at The Observer.

“All done,” said Ms. Plame.

She was interrupted by applause.

It was lunchtime at the annual BookExpo America, and a large crowd of booksellers, publishers, and publicists had paid $50 each to eat chicken-ala-something and listen to a panel of authors talk about their new books.

Alan Alda had kicked things off. Paul Krugman was on deck. Russell Simmons was closing. Now the podium belonged to Ms. Plame.

She was wearing a blue blazer over a white top. She explained that she and her husband Joseph Wilson had recently relocated from Washington D.C. to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ever since the move, she had been spending a lot of time unpacking books. “We had 12,000 pounds of household goods,” said Ms. Plame. “And six thousand of them were books.”

Ms. Plame recently finished writing a book of her own, entitled Fair Game, which Simon & Schuster plans to publish in October of 2007
(and for which they reportedly paid $2 million).

“It’s a memoir of my career with the CIA,” said Ms. Plame. “I was proud to serve my country. I was loyal. I loved my career. It was exciting. And I got to do something I thought was meaningful.”

All of which famously came to an end in the summer of 2003 when her name and professional occupation—which turned out to be classified information--was leaked to the media. Just exactly how that leak took place has since become fodder for investigations criminal and otherwise, as well as tens of thousands of news stories, endless talk show punditry, and the eventual felony conviction of vice-presidential advisor I. Lewis Libby.

Ms. Plame told the audience that she had enjoyed the process of writing Fair Game.

“For the first time I got to go through the events that have happened to me and my husband at 120 miles per hour, and actually think about them and absorb it,” said Ms. Plame. “I found that whole part of the process a catharsis in many ways.”

To date, however, the process of publishing the book has been fraught with difficulties.

To wit: This past Thursday, Ms. Plame filed a lawsuit in federal court against the C.I.A, which is blocking the publication of her memoir, on the grounds that some of the information contained therein is classified.

Like all C.I.A. employees, Ms. Plame had previously signed an agreement requiring her to submit any future writing about her career to the agency for review before publication. According to Ms. Plame, she and Simon & Schuster had been working unsuccessfully for months with the C.I.A. in the hopes of reaching an agreement. When that failed, according to Ms. Plame, she had decided to sue the C.I.A. for violating her right to free speech.

“I am not seeking carte blanche to reveal all the details of my government service,” Ms. Plame told the audience at the BEA. “Not at all. I understand my obligation and responsibilities about preserving and protecting classified information. Absolutely. But I am entitled to write about my story.”

She alleged to the audience that the C.I.A.’s actions were politically motivated. “I can tell you, this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political interference,” she said.

“This is why this suit matters so much to me and everyone in this room,” added Ms. Plame. “Because just as you have to be vigilant to protect our national security--something I believe in passionately--we have to be vigilant to protect our freedom of speech and first amendment rights.”

There was more applause. Followed by cheesecake for dessert.

Before returning to her seat, Ms. Plame acknowledged that the bulk of her writings throughout her career had been “very very dry.” Composing Fair Game, she said, had been different.

“I enjoyed writing it,” said Ms. Plame. “I hope you enjoy reading it.”

Ms. Miller—the redoubtable, doubtable New York Times scoop artist—was on the phone Monday afternoon, giving an interview on her way to get an interview. The quick-change routine is well practiced by now: from reporter to news object and back again.

But even Ms. Miller sounded a bit breathless from her latest adventures. On Oct. 7, federal judge Thomas Hogan had found her in contempt of court for refusing to discuss her confidential sources and ordered her to jail for up to 18 months—then freed her on bond pending an appeal. The next morning, it was front-page news in her own paper; two days after that, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and chief executive Russell Lewis commandeered the top of the Sunday Op-Ed page for a booming defense of Ms. Miller and, in the bargain, the freedom of the press.

“Her crime was doing her job as the founders of this nation intended,” they wrote.

In the middle of it all, on Saturday, Ms. Miller had a page-one piece of her own, a joint byline with Eric Lipton on an article about the Iraqi oil-for-food program. Her aim, Ms. Miller said, had been to “try and get a front-page story in my paper, to show people that I’m going to continue writing.”

The prospect of martyrdom seemed to have left Ms. Miller in high spirits, if not exactly glad ones; her end of the conversation was peppered with incredulous laughter. “I’ve been kind of amazed at the outpouring of support from other journalists,” she said.

Ms. Miller is in the varied collection of reporters entangled with the grand jury investigating who leaked of the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press. The leaked information was published not by Ms. Miller, but by conservative columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times, as the Bush administration attempted to (depending on who’s telling the story) rebut, intimidate or smear Ms. Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who’d criticized the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.

Till now, the W.M.D. question has done nothing to burnish Ms. Miller’s journalistic credentials. On Oct. 3, The Times ran yet another piece revising its prewar coverage of Iraq’s mass-destructive capabilities. Following the lead of The Washington Post—which had broken the same news 14 months earlier—The Times meticulously demonstrated how the Bush administration had tilted evidence so that captured aluminum tubes, meant as Iraqi artillery rocket parts, could be passed off as nuclear centrifuge components.

And if The Times was more than a year late reacting to The Post, it was more than two years late reacting to itself. Far down, the Oct. 3 piece offered an implicit confession of institutional and reportorial failure: “[O]n Sept. 8 [2002], the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program …. The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.”

The Times didn’t name the authors of the original piece, but they were Ms. Miller and Michael R. Gordon.

Yet by Monday, there was no more thought of the suspicious tubes—nor MET Team Alpha, the baseball-cap-wearing mystery scientist, or the rest of Ms. Miller’s dubious or anonymous portfolio. Ms. Miller was no longer the Belle of Babylon, the volunteer page of the Iraqi National Congress, Miss Bad Intelligence Rising herself. She was Judy again.

That was how the op-ed from Mr. Sulzberger, her old colleague at the Washington bureau, referred to her: “Judy Miller”—not “Judith.” Sending Judy Miller to jail, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Lewis argued, will threaten the press’ “ability to gather and receive information in confidence from those who would face reprisals from bringing important information about our government into the light of day.”

Ms. Miller said she was heartened by the brass’ public declaration of solidarity. “It’s less lonely,” she said, “but it makes me wonder what happens when this happens to someone who doesn’t have the power and the influence and the money of The New York Times behind them.”

Had something like this happened earlier in her career, when she wrote for the less formidable likes of The Progressive magazine, Ms. Miller said, “a lawsuit would have turned me towards being a real-estate broker.” (“Of course, I would have been richer,” she added.)

Even with the stand-up-for-the-little-man rhetoric, though, there is a certain Nazis-marching-through-Skokie tone to the present case. Ms. Miller is not going to the mat for some helpless whistleblower; she’s defending the right of high officials to try to anonymously sic The New York Times on a subordinate who bucked them. Mr. Wilson signed his own name to his criticisms, and it was the confidential sources who allegedly sought reprisal.

“For some group of people, that would be called whistleblowing,” Mr. Sulzberger said on the phone Tuesday evening—for instance, he said, people who thought Mr. Wilson’s complaints about the administration (aired in a Times op-ed) hadn’t shared all the relevant facts.

“I’m not suggesting that you have to agree every time with whether that person should have given out that information,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Floyd Abrams, Ms. Miller’s lawyer, offered a similar view. “The law can’t distinguish between good leaks and bad,” Mr. Abrams said. Mr. Abrams is also representing Time magazine’s Matt Cooper, who will be facing Judge Hogan today in his own contempt hearing in the Plame affair. Mr. Cooper appears almost certain to share Ms. Miller’s fate, in which case Mr. Abrams said their appeals will be lumped together in the Court of Appeals. If they lose, both could be in jail by Thanksgiving.

It could make a reality-TV show, Ms. Miller suggested brightly: “Matt and me and Martha.”

Unlike imprisoned journalist Ms. Stewart, neither Ms. Miller nor Mr. Cooper has been convicted of anything. Their confinement is meant to coerce them into telling the grand jury about their sources. So they would be held till the grand jury is finished—or 18 months, whichever comes first, Mr. Abrams said.

“I’ve only had one other client who was sent away,” Mr. Abrams said. That was The Times’ Myron Farber, jailed for refusing to provide evidence during a New Jersey murder trial in 1978 and held till the trial was over. “He was there for 40 days,” Mr. Abrams said. “I used to bring him donuts on Sundays.”

Now he may see two more clients behind bars—despite the reporters’ markedly different approaches to handling the Plame leak. Mr. Cooper, presented with the top-down whistleblowing, wrote an article denouncing the leakers. “I wrote the first piece saying that there was an effort to smear Joe Wilson,” Mr. Cooper said. “I shouldn’t have to go to jail for that. I shouldn’t have to go to jail for doing my job.”

But Ms. Miller can top that: She never wrote anything about Ms. Plame at all.

“Judy Miller being threatened with jail for having gotten information for a story she never wrote and we never ran is illogical to me, and dangerous,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

Would Times editors who might have known of Ms. Miller’s reporting also be eligible for a subpoena? Mr. Sulzberger said he didn’t know whether her work had even entered the editorial process, and didn’t care to explore the implications. “I think one person in jail is enough for The New York Times,” he said.

And Ms. Miller said that the differences in individual reporters’ actions are beside the point. “The last thing I want to do is start dividing journalists,” she said. “ … This is not the time to start saying, ‘Why me and not him?’”

Ms. Miller did, however, note one division between herself and other subpoenaed journalists. Some reporters, including Mr. Cooper, agreed to testify about one particular source, Vice Presidential chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, after Mr. Libby waived his confidentiality agreement with them.

Despite Mr. Libby’s apparent enthusiasm to put his remarks on the record, Ms. Miller described the waivers as a “pernicious” concept. “I do not consider these waivers voluntary,” she said.

Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Miller both argued that the case shows the need for a federal shield law, establishing legal protection for reporter-source agreements akin to that for lawyers and clients, or priests and parishioners.

“It’s not about Judy Miller,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “It’s bigger than that.”

“This is really all about the readers,” Ms. Miller said. “This is all about the public—the public’s right to know.”

Even so, a lot of it is about Judy Miller. “Keep those cards and letters coming,” Ms. Miller said.

And while the legal encroachment on anonymous sources may threaten one of Ms. Miller’s favorite reporting tools, it hasn’t cut into her ability to report. “Quite the opposite,” she said. The current case, she said, proves her commitment to her methods: “I’m willing to go to jail to protect my sources,” she said.

It also gives her a rebuttal to any “snotty” Millerologists, who’ve tried tracking the way her bylines seem to rise and fall in frequency along with the tide of W.M.D.-themed editors’ notes and follow-up stories.

“For all those people who wonder what happened to Judy Miller,” Ms. Miller said, “what happened to Judy Miller was she got involved in something called the American legal process.”

What Messrs. Corn and Isikoff reveal, among other things, is that the first official to reveal Valerie Wilson’s covert identity as a C.I.A. operative to columnist Robert Novak in June 2003 was Richard Armitage, who then served as Deputy Secretary of State. Unlike other Bush administration figures who were involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity, such as Karl Rove and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Mr. Armitage was known to be unenthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

From those two facts, numerous pundits and talking heads have deduced that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were guiltless, that there was no White House effort to expose Ms. Wilson, and that the entire leak investigation was a partisan witch hunt and perhaps an abuse of discretion by the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. The same pundits now proclaim that Mr. Armitage’s minor role somehow proves the White House didn’t seek to punish Valerie Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his decision to publicly debunk the Presidential misuse of dubious intelligence from Niger concerning Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium.

But whatever Mr. Armitage did, or says he did, in no way alters what Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby did in the days that followed, nor does it change their intentions. It’s a simple concept—two people or more can commit a similar act for entirely different reasons—but evidently it has flummoxed the great minds of contemporary journalism.

In this instance, Mr. Armitage says he was merely “gossiping” with Mr. Novak, who seems to have been primed to question him about the Wilson affair. But both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby sought to undermine Joe Wilson’s credibility—and perhaps to victimize him and his wife—by planting information about Valerie Wilson with two reporters. Mr. Rove gave that information to Time reporter Matt Cooper, who got confirmation from Mr. Libby. And Mr. Libby provided the same poisonous tip to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Almost from the beginning of his investigation in December 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald has known about the blabby Armitage, who at least came clean promptly. But Mr. Fitzgerald, a Bush appointee of impeccable reputation, understood that the Armitage confession was of limited relevance—and it didn’t discourage the special counsel from conducting a thorough probe that uncovered a secretive, high-level effort, emanating from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, to discredit Joe Wilson and to use his wife’s two decades of undercover work for her country as a weapon against him. Indeed, the only reason Mr. Armitage knew about Valerie Wilson was that he had read a negative dossier on Joe Wilson prepared at the behest of Mr. Libby.

On his blog, Mr. Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, recently responded to the opinion-makers who were so eager to misuse his reporting to exonerate the White House. “As Hubris will make clear,” he wrote, “Rove’s leak (to Robert Novak and Matt Cooper) and Libby’s leak (to Judith Miller and Cooper) were part of a campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson. That’s no conspiracy theory. The available evidence proves this point.”

According to an article published by Mr. Corn in The Nation on Sept. 5, the available evidence also proves that Valerie Wilson was not only a genuine C.I.A. undercover officer, but that she was in charge of agency operations seeking proof of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Specifically, she ran the Joint Task Force on Iraq, which was part of the Counterproliferation Division of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations. She worked overseas, including trips to Jordan and other theatres of operations, using a “nonofficial cover.” By disclosing her identity, the Bush officials ruined her career and endangered the sources and methods she had used in the President’s service. Hubris also suggests strongly that her alleged role in dispatching her husband to Niger has been exaggerated.

All this is quite contrary to the dominant right-wing perspective in Washington. So now we will see whether those who were so thrilled by the Armitage scoop are honest enough to confront more significant and embarrassing facts. But the fundamental issues have not changed.

Rather than confront Mr. Wilson’s accusations directly, the White House went after him and his wife—and then lied about the involvement of its senior officials in disclosing her identity. The perpetrators of these unpatriotic partisan acts have yet to be punished, and the President, as usual, has failed to uphold his own professed ethical standards. It is a simple matter, and yet still too challenging for the national press to understand.