Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas, a trailblazing journalist who reported on every US president from John Kennedy to Barack Obama, died on Saturday at the age of 92, the Gridiron Club and Foundation said.
Thomas, who broke many barriers for female journalists during her 49 years on the White House beat for the United Press International (UPI) new agency and Hearst newspapers, died after a long illness, the Washington journalists’ organization said in a statement.
As the senior news service correspondent at the White House, Thomas ended dozens of presidential news conferences with the familiar phrase: “Thank you, Mr President.”
She was known for her straight-to-the-point questioning of presidents and press secretaries in a manner that some considered dogged. Others, including many fellow reporters, considered her style in her later years to be too combative and agenda-driven.
Obama in a statement praised “her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account,” and said that in her long tenure Thomas “never failed to keep presidents — myself included — on their toes.”
Former US president Bill Clinton and his wife, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, praised her as “a pioneering journalist” who added “more than her share of cracks to the glass ceiling.”
In the past 10 years of her career, Thomas was a columnist for Hearst, a job that allowed her opinions to surface more than in her work as a hard-news reporter for UPI.
Thomas announced in June 2010 that she was retiring from Hearst, effective immediately, after comments she made about Israel and the Palestinians were captured on videotape and widely disseminated on the Internet.
Thomas believed the Washington media had grown soft and was reluctant to challenge the US government, views she shared in her 2007 book Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public.
She was especially rough on former US president George W. Bush, whom in 2003 she described as the “worst president ever,” and the Iraq War, which she felt the media had abetted by not challenging Bush strongly enough on it.
In 2009 she asked Obama: “When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? 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.’”
Thomas was often combative in dealing with the White House, particularly when she felt she was being denied access.
Reuters White House reporter Steve Holland recalled that early one morning during Bill Clinton’s presidency, she was spotted kicking the locked door to the White House press office, demanding to speak to the staff.
Thomas grew up in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, and will be buried in the city. Middle Eastern affairs were a strong interest and the impromptu comments about Israel and the Palestinians in May 2010 were her undoing.
Asked by an interviewer from Web site rabbilive.com if she had any comments about Israel, Thomas said: “Get the hell out of Palestine.”
Jews should “go home, to Poland and Germany, America and everywhere else,” she added.
After the interview spread on the Internet, her comments were criticized by the White House, the White House Correspondents’ Association, the co-author of one of her books and the agency that handled her speaking engagements, among others.
Shortly after, she announced her retirement, two months short of her 90th birthday.
Thomas established a number of firsts for women journalists.
She was the first female officer in the White House Correspondents Association in its 50-year history and its first female president.
In 1975, she broke the 90-year all-male barrier at the Gridiron Club, an organization of leading Washington journalists, and became its first female president in 1993.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of