<http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index3.html>
Where Miller exhibited so much hostility to other reporters, she would be fawning and generous to her sources. "Judy treats her sources well, with a sense of loyalty. She's an attentive and courteous person to them," one Times reporter says. Her strength was that she viewed the relationships as more than transactional. Her sources were her friends.
According to some of her critics, they have occasionally been more than friends. In the early eighties, she shared a Georgetown house with her boyfriend, Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin-a rising star in the Democratic Party, who went on to become Bill Clinton's first secretary of Defense. Aspin, many noted, had appeared a dozen times in Miller's pieces, offering sage words about national security. Certain catty colleagues liked to read these stories aloud. Each time the phrase "Aspin said" appeared, a reporter would add, "rolling over in bed." When Reagan nominated Richard Burt to be assistant secretary of State for European affairs, Jesse Helms and other right-wingers bludgeoned him for their relationship. "It would help [your chances for confirmation]," Orrin Hatch delicately wrote to Burt, "if you could lay to rest the rumors about Judith Miller's articles on arms control appearing so soon after your own meetings with her. . . ."
The gossip about Miller's romantic life was circulated most widely by a columnist writing in Spy magazine under the pseudonym J. J. Hunsecker. He chronicled her exploits, referring to her as "frisky deputy bureau chief Judith 'Is that a banana in your pocket . . .?' Miller." As a commentator on the mores of the Times, Hunsecker lacked a certain subtlety. "Miller has been enriching the lives of high-level sources around Washington with her own very special brand of journalistic involvement," the columnist sneered in 1988. But gradually, the allegations moved from innuendo to out-and-out rumormongering. The column reported, outlandishly, that President George H. W. Bush called his resident political genius, Lee Atwater, into his office "and informed him that it might be better if he ended his very special relationship with Miller." Hunsecker was hardly credible. He could produce some howlers, and nothing he wrote could necessarily be believed. But the point wasn't his information, but the way he obtained it. Colleagues within the Times had come to despise Miller so greatly that they apparently picked up the phone, called Spy, and dished their hearts out.