Helen Thomas, 1920–2013

As the first woman ever assigned to cover the White House, Helen Thomas was a journalistic trailblazer. But while she respected the office of the presidency, she famously did not always show respect for the 10 presidents she covered over half a century. When a set of fortune-telling scales printed out a note for President Gerald Ford saying, “You are a brilliant leader,” Thomas made no bones of her skepticism. “It got your weight wrong, too,” she deadpanned.

Thomas was born in Winchester, Ky., said The New York Times, the seventh of nine children born to Lebanese immigrants, and grew up in Detroit. When she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1942, “she did not last long” in the waitressing job she landed. “I didn’t smile enough,” she later said. The following year, United Press gave her a job writing copy for radio broadcasters, at a time when most female journalists “wrote about social events and homemaking.” She worked her way into covering politics, and when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 she was assigned to the White House.

Thomas’s beat at Camelot was to cover the First Lady, said the Los Angeles Times. “It was a mismatch from the start.” Along with another female reporter, Thomas staked out the White House and “shadowed Jackie on her shopping trips.” An early scoop was the death of Caroline Kennedy’s hamster. Jackie disliked the “harpies,” as she called them, and once complained to the Secret Service that “two strange-looking Spanish women” were following her. But Thomas’s tenacity and ambition soon led her to the “men’s side of White House coverage.” She was named UPI’s White House bureau chief in 1974—the first woman to hold such a position.

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Thomas gained a reputation as a fearless interlocutor, said The Washington Post, and her “pointed queries often agitated the powerful” in the White House briefing room. When President George H.W. Bush announced that the defense budget would remain unchanged after the Soviet Union’s collapse, she asked, “Who’s the enemy?” Ford said that Thomas practiced “a fine blend of journalism and acupuncture.” But her colleagues considered her the dean of the White House press corps, with the years-long privilege of calling an end to press briefings with a curt, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Thomas left UPI in 2000 at age 80, said The Guardian (U.K.), and became a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. The switch marked a “slow but significant decline in her performance.” She became more irascible and openly opinionated, making no secret of her dislike for President George W. Bush and for Israel. The 43rd president froze her out of questioning in 2003 after she was quoted calling him “the worst president in American history.” When he finally called on her three years later, she accused him of lying about why he’d launched the war in Iraq. Her career came to an ignominious end in 2010, when she said that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go home to “Germany, Poland, and America and everywhere else.” She resigned in disgrace with an apology, but later told an interviewer that she had examined her heart “to see if I was remorseful—and I wasn’t.”