 |
|
The President’s press briefing on Jan. 6 began like most others.
As America geared up for war in Iraq, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer gave a tightlipped rundown of President Bush’s daily schedule.
Helen Thomas, the 82-year-old godmother of the Washington media, sat in the front row when, as usual, Fleischer granted her the first question.
“You said that the president deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world?” she asked with trademark bluntness.
As Fleischer fumbled a reply, Thomas moved in for the kill.
“Why do you want to kill innocent Iraqis?” she demanded. She and Fleischer exchanged several more barbs in rapid succession, dominating the next several minutes of the meeting.
For younger reporters, the acerbic interchange might have meant blackballing by the White House. But for Thomas, who has covered the daily ups and downs of nine U.S. presidents, the exchange just meant one more coup for a woman who describes herself as the press corps’ last liberal.
“I live on outrage,” said Thomas, relishing her 3-year-old role as a Hearst columnist after nearly six decades of reporting for the United Press International. “That’s my manna from heaven. Now, I wake up every morning and say, ‘Whom do I hate today?’ ”
Earlier in her career, Thomas used the limelight of national television to ask President Clinton about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and to confront President Nixon about incriminating Watergate tapes.
As “dean of the Washington Press Corps,” she has been outspoken in her opposition to the conservative policies of the Bush Administration. In January, she told the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze that Bush is “the worst president in all of American history.”
In an interview at the Palace Hotel on Friday, Thomas’ flame-red fingernails match her lipstick, and she wears two different watches on her left hand. When asked about retirement, she sharply replies that she intends to “de with my boots on.”
Thomas was the only female journalist to travel with the White House Correspondents Association, the first female member of the Gridiron Club and the first female officer of the National Press Club.
“Helen is an icon for American women journalists,” said Charles Lewis, chief of Hearst’s Washington bureau. “She has broken through so many glass ceilings that she has earned the admiration and respect of everybody in the business—including the men.”
***
Helen Thomas was born on Aug. 4, 1920, in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants.
After college at Wayne State University, she began her career as a copygirl for the Washington Daily News making $17.50 a week.
While assigned to the White House for UPI in 1961, she began to close press conferences with “Thank you, Mr. President.”
During the Reagan Administration, the president once remarked that he would be more likely to call on reporters who wore red. Thomas came to work the next morning in a saucy red dress, which has since become her signature.
When Thomas resigned from the UPI in 2000, reporters in Washington speculated that she would lose her front-row seat. Out of respect for her experience, however, the White House allowed her to remain.
Every day, Thomas said, she checks her nametag to make sure she can still sit in her old spot.
“It’s nice to be in the front row—you can taunt them,” she said.
Ellen Shearer, who worked at UPI at the same time as Thomas, said she remembers the older woman’s practiced composure during a speech by President Carter at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, M.D.
While other reporters rushed to file their stories, Shearer said, Thomas effortlessly dictated her piece on the speech. She even managed to include historic details about the Academy’s statues, Shearer said.
But Thomas’ legendary status has earned her a fair share of detractors. In a January 2002 opinion piece, Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of the National Review, wrote that Thomas would not have received the same privileges if she were a conservative and a man.
“I always wanted some White House Spokesman—Jim Brady, Larry Speakes, Marlin Fitzwater—or even a president himself to say to her, ‘Look, lady, you may be old and a woman, but you’re an insulting, unthinking, harshly partisan so-and-so, and I’m not going to deal with your nonsense anymore.’”
Despite the criticism, Thomas said she has no plans to stop asking tough questions of U.S. president.
“If you’re afraid to ask the questions, you shouldn’t be in the business,” she said. “The people are best served with a straight news story. Let them, decide.”
