The Reporter's Last Take

As Ibrahim recalls it, Miller told him she was "intercepting" the Boutros-Ghali interview, that she had seniority, says Ibrahim, who left the Times in 1999.

They shouted at each other, he says. He is not even sure who hung up on whom. In the end, Ibrahim got his interview -- without Miller present.

"I'm glad he has such an exquisite memory," says Miller. "I don't even remember it. But reporters fight over stories. It is not shocking, at the New York Times or any other newspaper."

Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.

Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.

To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.

"She had gotten too close to her sources," he says.

But Miller denies the episode happened.

"I doubt I would have said that," she says sardonically, "because it wouldn't have been a winning argument."

Her former colleagues use all manner of adjectives to describe Miller, but there is consensus among some two dozen people interviewed that she is, indeed, a volatile person.

Volcanic might be the better word. She erupts. She is known to holler at newsroom clerks, to berate hotel staff while on the road, several colleagues said.