Helen Thomas, the nearly 50-year veteran of the dog-eat-dog White House press pool, is not just an extreme insider when it comes to Beltway politics—she’s an extreme competitor.
“Competitive?” Thomas asks incredulously, her eyebrows rising with her voice. “Reporters stand alone. They come bearing their own questions, and they’re lucky if they get any help at all! When it became clear that Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq, I would ask, ‘Why?’ and I would get no help from the other reporters in the pressroom. They were gung-ho to go to war because they thought it would last four days and they’d become great foreign correspondents, and that would be it. So my answer to anyone who says, ‘Why are you so competitive?’ is ‘Why not?’ But, frankly, I don’t think I am competitive. I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.”
The 88-year-old Thomas—who has covered everyone and everything from newly elected presidents (JFK to Obama) to scandals (Nixon to Clinton) to government bailouts (Chrysler in 1979 and Detroit’s Big Three in 2009)—says the roughest part of her job has not been with other ambitious journalists, but with press secretaries who don’t want to answer hard questions. “They have one credo: The best defense is offense,” she says. “When you ask a question that irritates them, they start attacking you personally. I’ve been called ‘Hezbollah’; I’ve been called this and that. They get mad because you’re truly trying to find out what the hell’s going on. There have been a few press secretaries who understood and were less defensive-offensive, but most of them have one voice. They think they are speaking for the president of the United States, and they are very, very protective.”
Thomas, who was born in Kentucky but raised in Detroit, began work as a journalist immediately after graduating from Wayne State University. “I started out as a ‘copy boy’ at the old Washington Daily News for $17.50 a week,” she says. “It was 1943 and ’44. Ernie Pyle was still covering the war for Scripps Howard.” Promoted to cub reporter, she was laid off soon after in a staff reduction but quickly found a position with UPI writing radio news. Her White House career began with president-elect John F. Kennedy in November 1960, then covering the administration for UPI after his inauguration.
“I worked under Merriman Smith, who later won a Pulitzer in Dallas and had been covering the White House since 1940 and was absolutely a crack reporter,” says Thomas. “As was my late husband, Douglas Cornell, who worked for the Associated Press and also covered the White House. He stood over a teletype machine—some people may not know what that is—for an hour and a half and dictated the end of World War II. The editor, who’d come over to look at the lead, said, ‘Let it roll.’ These days, everybody with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist.”
She stayed on with UPI for 57 years before resigning in 2000 on the day after UPI was sold to News World Communications, Inc., the media arm of The Unification Church and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Two months later, at age 80, she joined Hearst Newspapers.
Age hasn’t noticeably mellowed the fiery Thomas, though. She’s known for her opinions, and isn’t afraid to speak them. But her criticism of the Bush-Cheney administration had become increasingly blunt—even for her. “The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I’ll kill myself,” she told The Hill newspaper.
The Bush-Cheney White House was certainly not her first administration, but it may have been her most contested. For her sharp questioning of George W. Bush and his spokespeople over the war, Thomas lost her privileges of closing press conferences with “Thank you, Mr. President,” her signature line, and her front-row press conference seat. (They have since been restored.)
Asked if she’s changed her feelings about the former vice president, Thomas wasted no time in making her opinion clear: “Hell, no. He really is Darth Vader. He was quiet when he started out, working for President Ford, but when he got to Congress, he voted six times against Head Start, [taking] the conservative position on everything. I think that was the real Cheney.”
Now that there’s no doubt about her least favorite administration, was she a fan of any president in particular? “Kennedy gave us high hopes,” she says, “and I think we’re now seeing some of that enthusiasm and energy, the need for change, and people really thinking that we can do better.”
As for the new Obama administration, Thomas has toned down her opinion—at least for now. “I have to hold my judgment here,” she says. “I think he has to be very daring, [but] I think he plays it very safe, very cautious, which is probably smart, but I’m not sure he’s going to really be as bold as I want him to be. I want to see a real transformation—a caring for the people, not just giving a $700 billion bailout to Wall Street while Detroit suffers.”
If Thomas has been hard on presidential administrations, she’s been equally hard on her much-younger colleagues, the current crop of journalists. “I don’t think they’re doing what they should be doing, but I don’t know whether their publishers are trying to play ball or what,” she says. “I mean, photographers didn’t show this war at all. They didn’t show the coffins. Everybody played ball with the administration. Were they afraid they’d be called unpatriotic, un-American? Reporters should be thinking of their readers and they should be thinking of their country. The more we know, the better off we are. An informed people is very important to a democracy—and we also might be able to prevent some bloodshed.”
After all these years of having a front-row seat for history, what are Helen Thomas’ most poignant memories of her time covering Washington? “The Kennedy assassination. The Vietnam War. The Nixon resignation—first time in history. Iran-Contra. The terrible betrayals and the scandals.
“I think that all presidents start out with the best of intentions, but something happens on the way to the Forum, and they make promises they can’t keep. So many presidents do not rise to the people’s expectations, because to be president is top of the mark—ain’t no other place to go—and you should always do the right thing. It’s pretty clear what is right, but it’s also pretty clear what is wrong.”
Now that Helen Thomas has been in the sporting ring of journalism and politics for nearly 70 years, does she have any plans to take herself out of the game and retire to the sidelines? “With what’s happening in the newspaper business these days, I consider myself lucky to be working. Besides, I’ve
always intended to die with my boots on.”
Put that down as a “no.”