Fidel Castro was once asked to define the difference between democracy in Cuba and the United States. "I don't have to answer questions from Helen Thomas," the old revolutionary replied.

The grand dame of the White House press corps, who outlasted nine American presidential administrations – and Castro's rule – was finally forced to halt her determined, often opinion-laden questioning and into retirement this week over comments on the issue closest to her heart, the Middle East.

There were no fond farewells for the 89-year-old reporter remembered as a trailblazer for women in journalism but also as a grumpy old contrarian. Her front-row seat in the White House briefing room, in recent years uniquely tagged with her own name rather than that of an organisation, was left empty.

Reporters who variously described Thomas as cranky, stubborn and opinionated said they weren't surprised she'd finally overstepped the mark when she told a rabbi that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Poland and Germany. But the torrent of anger and criticism was tempered by Thomas' lofty status.

By the time of her resignation she had clocked up many firsts: first female officer of the National Press Club and first female president of the White House Correspondents' Association. She worked as a White House reporter for far longer than any other – for half a century. She was probably also the first White House correspondent to have a birthday cake delivered by a president, when Barack Obama arrived bearing cup cakes (they share a birthday).

Thomas joined United Press International in 1943 when it was still a major force in American journalism. She was 23 and had not long left Detroit, where she grew up to Lebanese immigrant parents. Her first job for UPI was reporting on women's issues. She wrote a celebrity column then moved to cover the justice department, FBI and other federal agencies.

She was assigned to cover then President-elect John F Kennedy in late 1960 and so began a reputation for relentless questioning that exasperated American leaders. Kennedy said of her: "Helen would be a nice girl if she'd ever get rid of that pad and pencil."

It was a sentiment echoed down the decades. "Isn't there a war somewhere we could send her to?" Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, once asked.

Thomas's determined questioning and forthright reporting chipped away at what had long been an all-male and all-white club of reporters that was often regarded as far too cosy with the officials they were writing about, and still is. For many years she was frequently the only woman in the room.

In a photograph of White House correspondents questioning President Lyndon Johnson, Thomas is the only female face. She was also the only female print reporter among the journalists accompanying President Richard Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. Barbara Walters was there as part of the NBC television news team.

She became one of the instantly recognised faces on television at presidential press conferences. She was so well known that she played herself in two films, Dave and The American President.

Thomas quit UPI in 2000 after it was bought by the Moonie leader, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. She called the purchase "a bridge too far". She had worked for the agency for 57 years, nearly half of them as UPI's White House bureau chief. That might have been the end of her career. She said she had planned to "hang up my daily news spurs" at the time. But she was approached by Hearst newspapers with an offer to become a columnist.

"I gratefully said, why not? After all those years of telling it like it is, now I can tell it how I want it to be. To put another point on it, I get to wake up every morning and say, 'Who am I mad at today?'" she wrote in her memoir Thanks For The Memories, Mr President. Many of her colleagues were surprised to hear that she regarded herself as having held back until then.

But first there was the question of her seat in the front row of the White House briefing room. Technically it should have gone to someone from one of the major news organisations. But Sam Donaldson, the boisterous former White House correspondent for ABC news, said she kept it because no one could imagine asking her to move to the back of the room. That marked another first for Thomas – an opinion columnist in a reporter's seat in the White House briefing room. Her colleagues noticed an even more strident and opinionated tone to her questioning.

President George Bush had just taken power in a disputed election. In the coming years, Thomas made no secret of her opposition to the war in Iraq, offering a determined line of questioning that some of her colleagues appeared to shy away from in the post 9/11 atmosphere in America.

In 2002, she asked a question that few others at the White House would have dared: "Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?"

Her questions were sometimes deemed to be so laden with hostile opinion that one of Bush's press secretaries, Ari Fleischer, once said: "We will temporarily suspend the Q&A portion of today's briefing to bring you this advocacy minute."

But she has not been averse to giving liberal presidents a hard time too. Scott Wilson, White House correspondent for the Washington Post, said Thomas did not go easy on Obama. "She did have a knack for trying to hold this administration accountable, particularly for its Middle East policy. She asked the question about which countries in the Middle East have nuclear weapons," he said "They couldn't not take her seriously. Her questions demanded an answer."

Mostly they didn't get one, but that was no less frustrating for those on the receiving end. "What's the difference between your foreign policy and Bush's?" she asked the presidential press secretary, Robert Gibbs.

A fortnight ago she challenged the president over what is increasingly known as "Obama's war". "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan?" she asked. "Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don't give us this Bushism, 'If we don't go there, they'll all come here'."

She was no less forthright in offering her opinion on the recent Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla, calling it a "deliberate massacre and international crime". The New York Times said in its story about her resignation that two sets of rules applied to reporters covering the president: "those for the regular White House correspondents, and those for Helen Thomas."

But an alternative view might be that Thomas was a courageous voice in an often craven White House press corps.

Even if White House correspondents sometimes grew exasperated with her, some said they respected her pedigree and generally put her shortcomings down to age. She grew so frail that other reporters had to help her walk from her desk to her chair in the briefing room, and she would sometimes fall asleep. She appeared less and less at the daily briefings.

Perhaps the best evidence that Thomas had lost touch was her failure to understand the consequences of saying that Israel's Jews should go back to Poland and Germany to a rabbi with a video camera at a White House event to mark Jewish heritage month. It is possible that given her Lebanese background, that is what she has thought all along. But she should not have been surprised at the storm of protest.

Donaldson, who describes Thomas as a friend, said that while he would not defend her comments they probably reflect the views of many people of Arab descent. He then called her a "pioneer" for women. "No one can take that away from Helen," he said.