From her perch in the front row of the briefing room, Thomas prodded each president. | REUTERS Helen Thomas dead at 92

Helen Thomas, a longtime White House journalist whose career covering ten presidents once earned the nickname the “Dean of the White House Press Corps,” died Saturday at 92.

She died after a long illness, the Gridiron Club’s Carl P. Leubsdorf wrote in an email to members.


The bulk of Thomas’ career was marked by both her trailblazing role as a female White House reporter and her aggressive and argumentative questioning style. From her perch in the front row of the White House briefing room, Thomas prodded each president with pointed questions and a low tolerance for talking points.

In a statement, President Barack Obama called Thomas a “true pioneer,” adding, “She covered every White House since President Kennedy’s, and during that time she never failed to keep presidents – myself included – on their toes.”

Former President Bill Clinton said her work “was extraordinary because of her intelligence, her lively spirit and great sense of humor.”

The tail end of her professional life, however, was marked by controversy, as she left the White House in 2010 in the wake of remarks made about the Middle East conflict.

When asked by Rabbi David Nesenoff of the website RabbiLive.com for her thoughts on Israel, Thomas quickly shot back, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.”

The sentiment struck many as insensitive and offensive and, under an unrelenting stream of pressure, Thomas left the White House two weeks later. Her subsequent applications for White House press credentials were unsuccessful.

It represented an unfortunate chapter in an otherwise storied career of this Michigan native and the seventh of nine children of Lebanese immigrants.

Thomas decided on journalism as a career while in high school and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1942, where she was soon hired by the United Press (later, United Press International) to write radio copy on local news. Her first venture into political reporting came in 1955 when she was assigned to cover the U.S. Department of Justice and thus whetted her appetite for all things government. Thomas would remain at UPI for the next 57 years and embody many of the best characteristics of a wire reporter: Boundless energy and determination.

At a time when women journalists were often assigned with society stories, Thomas pursued hard news out of Washington with a singular focus. She could oftentimes be found at her desk before the sun rose and would accumulate a notebook’s worth of news nuggets by day’s end, which she might simply relay over the phone to copy writers who could apply some polish to the final story.

Along the way, she accumulated a long list of groundbreaking accomplishments for female journalists: The National Press Club’s first female officer, the Gridiron Club and White House Correspondents’ Association’s first female president.

Thomas left UPI in protest in 2000 after she grew uncomfortable with the wire service’s new owners, News World Communications Inc., which was owned by Unification Church leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who also owned the conservative Washington Times. She quickly joined Hearst Newspapers as an opinion columnist and was then more free to speak out on many liberal causes.

“I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die,” Thomas told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006. “That has nothing to do with whether or not this administration is telling the truth.”

She insisted that her personal views never affected her copy while at UPI.

Once at Hearst, Thomas’ open liberalism increasingly irked many conservatives, who found the notion of an outspoken liberal opinion columnist in the White House press briefings a violation of the room’s tradition of straight news reporting.

This 2007 exchange between Thomas and then-White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about Iraq troop levels and General David Petraeus illustrates the tension, especially during the Bush administration (Thomas called Bush in 2003 “the worst president ever”).

Thomas: Why should we depend on him?

Perino: Because he’s the commander on the ground, Helen. He’s the one who is making sure that the situation –

Thomas: You mean how many more people we kill?

Perino: Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front-row position bestowed upon you by your colleagues to make such statements. It is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room,and to suggest that we as the United States are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.”

Media watchers found the post-UPI Thomas unnerving as well. In 2003, Jack Shafer, writing in Slate, said “she is no longer the Helen Thomas of yesteryear, a deadline artist writing news for tens of millions of UPI readers.”

“Helen Thomas the Pundit writes a sharply partisan syndicated White House column about what she thinks—as opposed to Helen Thomas the Reporter, who wrote about what she’d learned,” wrote Shafer.

Much of this was overlooked, however, as a deference to Thomas’s long history at the White House and her impressive role as a trailblazer for female journalists, which earned her worldwide acclaim.

When asked by USA Today founder Al Neuharth to articulate the differences between Cuba and the United States’ system of democracy, leader Fidel Castro said, “I don’t have to answer questions from Helen Thomas.”

The World Almanac named Thomas one of the “25 Most Influential Women in America” in 1976. HBO produced a documentary on Thomas’ life — “Thank You, Mr. President” — in 2008. (The title was a nod to the sign-off popularized by Thomas to end presidential press conferences.) When Playboy magazine interviewed Thomas in 2011, she reflected on her legacy and her obituary.

Fighting back tears, Thomas said, “Oh, I know what they’re going to say: ‘anti-Semite.’ … I know damn well what they’re going to say because they have their print, they have their ink. They don’t give a damn about the truth. They have to have it their way, and they’ll be writing my obituary. … And I don’t care what they write about me. They’ve already written it. My family will be disappointed in me for crying.”

At 51, Thomas married fellow wire reporter Douglas Cornell, who passed away seven years later after developing Alzheimer’s. The two did not have any children.