Goodbye Helen Thomas

Philip M. Stone June 8, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Media old-timers around the world will remember Helen Thomas, who will be 90 this August, as the United Press International (UPI) White House correspondent for some 40 years. But after suffering one UPI bankruptcy and ownership change too much she left the news agency in 2000 and became a columnist for Hearst newspapers. Her acid tongue continued and she voiced her biases more and more and that finally caught up with her—she said in a video interview that Jews should leave Palestine and go home to Europe or America. That just doesn’t fly in official or unofficial America, and thus a sad end to an illustrious career.

She announced her retirement Monday – she had little option so massive was the wave of public and official opinion against her. No doubt her friends at Hearst counseled her that this was the end and probably told her if she did not go voluntarily then they would have had to publicly disown her and she was already being shunned by her White House media colleagues.

Thomas is one of those media people who could rightly be called “a legend in her own time”. Recognizing that, when she left UPI the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) let her keep her prized front row seat at press briefings and news conferences – a seat that should have gone to a news agency or one of the major media organizations, but not to a columnist.  Many a time in later years she embarrassed herself asking argumentative questions phrased with terrible bias which is probably one reason why Presidents over the years called on her less and less often, but when they did they usually just grinned and sucked it in with short responses before going on to the next question.

She took that step too far a few days ago at a social event telling a rabbi, of all people, in a video interview, “Jews should get the hell out of Palestine.” When the rabbi, who remained amazingly calm, asked where they should go she answered, “They should go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.”  In today’s America that’s akin to saying blacks should go back to Africa. She was done for.

The tape quickly made it to the Internet, it got picked up by such major hyperlinking sites as Drudge, and that was that. There was no support, and when former White House press spokesmen condemned her it was one more nail let alone for current White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to call her remarks, “Offensive and reprehensible.”

In America if you come clean and confess you made a mistake then it’s possible to survive, so that’s what she did within a couple of days on her web site saying, “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. She added her comments did not reflect her “heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.”

It was too little too late. Only last week at a White House briefing she phrased a question this way to Gibbs, “The initial (US) reaction to the flotilla massacre, deliberate massacre, an international crime, was pitiful. What do you mean you regret something that should be so strongly condemned, and if any other nation in the world had done it, we would have been up in arms? What is this ironclad relationship where a country that deliberately kills people and boycotts every aid and abet… the boycott?” Hamas or Hezbollah might have framed the question that way, but a revered American journalist working for Hearst?

Thus a White House career that began with coverage of President John F. Kennedy has ended 50 years on with President Obama. And she has only herself to blame. Perhaps she thought that “legends in their own time”, especially when nearly 90-years-of-age, have special privileges and safeguards. Once again Washington has shown it matters not who you are, or how old you are, – go that step too far and you are taken down.

The White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) -- Thomas had been its first female president although since she had not been a member for several years -- has been pondering what to do with her for some time because she continued to hold that prime front row, left of center seat  and yet her questioning had become an embarrassment. The Association said it had been looking into whether it was right that a columnist should be allowed such a prime seat, but everyone really knows it was hers because it has been hers for near 50 years.

Before Thomas’s resignation became known the WHCA issued a statement that said in part, “Helen Thomas' comments were indefensible and the White House Correspondents Association board firmly dissociates itself from them. Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trail blazer on the White House beat….But the incident does revive the issue of whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room. That is an issue under the jurisdiction of this board. We are actively seeking input from our association members on this important matter, and we have scheduled a special meeting of the WHCA board on Thursday to decide on the seating issue.”

She understood the writing on that wall – to be removed from that seat, even under the pretense she was a columnist, was really too big an insult. It was time to go with whatever grace she had left.

This writer was a UPI correspondent and executive for some 18 years in the 1970s and 1980s but ran into Thomas just once – at the 1975 European and North American summit held in Helsinki setting up the Commission on European Security and Cooperation in Europe.  The young correspondent had just finished writing the day lead for PM newspapers under Thomas’ byline – in those days any UPI White House story carried her byline if she was in the dateline city whether she wrote it or not – an early example of media branding --  and editorial management didn’t really care that the young Helsinki bureau manager wrote the original day lead because Helsinki was seven hours ahead of New York and the forward-looking story would be lead before hardly anyone in the prime North American market used it. Job done the young correspondent headed over to the hotel where all the UPI editorial big wigs who had flown in for the story were staying but the only one still up and perched on a bar stool was none other than Thomas.

Introductions over she asked the young man some probing questions about what he wanted out of journalistic life and then she told some amazing stories about her own experiences. That meeting must have gone on for a couple of hours before she retired and the young uplifted correspondent left with one goal – to be a news agency journalist as good as  Helen Thomas.

And in her prime she was great. What happened in the past 10 years or so is so sad – Hearst gave her a great opportunity to continue with her life’s work, but she became more and more outspoken and an embarrassment.

Well, now she is gone from active journalism – her retirement effective immediately although she still has her web site so maybe she is not completely gone – but it really is a very sad professional closing for what had been such a truly remarkable career.