After 9/11, Dowd began to write more seriously about terrorism, and she has lacerated the White House for botching the Iraq war. But critics say she keeps recycling her satiric ruminations about Bushie, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie and the neocon gang.
In 2003, conservative bloggers savaged Dowd for unfairly truncating a Bush quote about al Qaeda being "not a problem anymore," when she left out a section in which Bush talked about half the group's top operatives being jailed or dead -- and thus not a problem. Dowd, who ran the full quote two weeks later, defends the editing but says she should have run a correction.
By now she had aggravated readers of all stripes, even while making millions of others laugh. There was talk in media circles that perhaps her once-blinding star had dimmed. And then came the Judith Miller takedown.
It's Miller Time
On the morning of Oct. 22, Dowd had the town buzzing again. She took off after the embattled Times reporter who had gone to jail in the Valerie Plame leak investigation and then was criticized by management for misleading the paper about her role.
Miller, wrote Dowd, was not "credible," she wrote "bogus" stories about nonexistent Iraqi weapons, she should have been kept on a "tight editorial leash," and the Times would be "in danger" if Miller returned to the newsroom. Plus, Miller had once dared to eject Dowd from the Times seat at a White House briefing. The stiletto had struck again, this time slipped into a colleague.
The tabloids and blogs screamed "Catfight!" Don Imus asked Dowd whether she and Miller would face off in a Jell-O wrestling match. All of which Dowd found predictable.
"Guys and women just love catfights," Dowd says. "I have to keep a sense of humor about it, even though it's irritating."
She was not acting as a "management hit man," Dowd says, consulting only her friend Jill Abramson, the paper's managing editor, who warned that writing such a piece "would seem like piling on." On the other hand, Dowd figured, "having a column is piling on. That's what I've done to the Bush family for two generations.
"I had written about the WMD scam of the administration. I always felt that Judy was the missing element in some of those columns, a phantom character. I just felt that to keep trust with my readers, I needed to address her role in this thing. I knew as a woman writing about another woman I work with, there would be a catfight element, even though, as they say in 'The Godfather,' it's business, not personal. That's a penalty I have to pay."
It's the quintessential Dowd dilemma: wanting to be judged on her work, feeling that her private life is constantly being picked apart, and yet being savvy enough to mock the very thing she says drives her nuts.
There was a time when Dowd consciously cultivated an air of mystery, reminiscent, perhaps, of the old-time film stars she admires. With this book, by airing her feelings about men, women and sex, and using some words the Times deems unfit to print, she seems to be abandoning that battle.
"I do have an obsession with secrecy, and you lose some of that if you're well known or you date someone well known," she says. "It takes the sexiness away from relationships if it's just for public consumption."
She is, in the end, an elusive subject. Some women find Dowd aloof, and there is a circle of men -- she has many male friends -- who dote on her constantly. She can seem frazzled and insecure one day, asking friends and colleagues for help with a column, kittenish and confident the next.
Are men necessary? Dowd never answers the question, but they sure occupy a central place in her world: "I'm not one of these people who put my professional life first and suddenly look up and don't have a personal life. I always put my personal life first. I just don't always have a personal life to put first."
