It was a casual exit interview with outgoing New York Times editor Bill Keller, but it’s almost unbelievable that the interviewer, Esquire reporter Scott Raab, posed the question so bluntly. He asked: “So you’ve got a baseball bat in your hands and one free swing — and Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, and Rupert Murdoch are lined up for you. Which one do you skull?”

Keller, the diplomat, dodges: “I think I’ve answered enough questions that I’m entitled to say ‘No comment’ to that one.”

In another question, however, Keller doesn’t dodge the topic of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Esquire: Do you leave with a sense of anything left undone, any particular regret?

Bill Keller: There is a fairly long list of things that I’ve done that were stupid.

Esquire: Such as?

BK: I came in well aware that we had published some bad stuff about WMD in Iraq. I should have written a fulsome mea culpa and put [Judy Miller] on a leash. Instead I waited a year to do that. I should have just taken that thing by the lapels and done it sooner.

It isn’t the only thing Keller mentions in this answer, but it’s by far the most important “regret” discussed. Keller of course inherited the Judith Miller disaster from executive editor Howell Raines, but the Times under his watch continued to publish Miller’s junk reporting on Iraq, and then continued to defend it long after it became clear that she was too close to Bush administration officials and, arguably, to the story itself.

Notably absent from Keller’s short list of “stupid” decisions is any mention of the Times‘ delay in publishing James Risen‘s report on the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program. (The Times had Risen’s story for more than a year before it published the report in December 2005.) Keller instead includes “Government eavesdropping” in a list of topics the paper handled “professionally and well.” But the paper, as has been well documented, actually knew of the program before the November 2004 election but chose not to publish—thereby delaying debate on the program until after Bush was re-elected. The paper then continued to refuse to run the story until Risen threatened to publish his reporting as part of his book State of War. Only then did the Times under Keller cover eavesdropping “professionally and well.”