TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Thank You, Helen Thomas

ADVERTISEMENT

By WALT BELCHER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 17, 2008

TAMPA - She covered nine presidents and never backed off asking the hard questions.

She grilled John F. Kennedy about the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. She pushed Lyndon Johnson to answer for his decisions during the Vietnam War. She made Richard Nixon sweat over Watergate. She asked Jimmy Carter to be accountable for the hostage crisis in Iran. She put Bill Clinton on the defensive over Monica Lewinsky.

Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes also felt the heat of a Helen Thomas question.

"I think that presidents deserve to be questioned, maybe irreverently, most of the time. Bring 'em down a size," she says in a new documentary debuting Monday on HBO.

"You see a president, ask a question. You have one chance in the barrel. Don't blow it," adds the feisty little woman whose main goal in life was to be an eyewitness to history.

"Thank you, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House" is a short, 38-minute tribute to the 88-year-old reporter and columnist whose career spans more than 60 years.

The film was produced by Rory Kennedy, daughter of Ethel Kennedy and the late Robert Kennedy. It's a respectful tribute to a pioneering reporter who is revered in Washington political circles by members of both parties and reviled by conservative pundits and bloggers.

Kennedy talked about her film at an HBO news conference held in July during the Television Critics Association's fall preview tour in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Thomas could not attend. She reportedly is recovering from an infection that sidelined her in May. Her weekly newspaper column is expected to resume in September.

"I've always lived by the credo that journalism is about truth and about asking hard questions," she wrote in a note to TV critics. "I hope this documentary will make our country understand the need for true journalists who believe in our right to know."

For much of her career, Thomas sat on the front row at White House news conferences, asking the first question and closing with "Thank You, Mr. President," a tradition she started with Kennedy.

An old school "just the facts" reporter from the 1940s through the 1990s, Thomas rarely shared her personal opinions and worked hard to be objective in her coverage.

But when her employer of 57 years, United Press International, was sold to Unification Church leader the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in 2000, she resigned.

She became a columnist and Washington bureau chief for Hearst Newspapers, and she began a weekly political column, distributed to 500 newspapers, that takes a liberal view on many issues.

Bush Won't Call On Her

She no longer sits in the front row at news conferences but is there during press briefings. Early during his second term in office, George W. Bush became obviously displeased with Thomas after she called him the "worst president in American history."

The documentary opens with Thomas making Bush uncomfortable during a 2006 news conference with a pointed question:

"Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet - your Cabinet officers, intelligence people and so forth - what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil - quest for oil; it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?"

Bush answered by saying he didn't want to go to war and talked about the war on terror in general. He has never called on her again for a question.

"There's a blackout now, I believe, until the end of his term," she says in the documentary.

Rory Kennedy says she had never met Thomas until she started work on this documentary. She spent five days interviewing Thomas about her life and career.

"When I walked the streets of Washington with her, there were always people following us, wanting to say something to her," Kennedy says. "She is like a rock star there. People tell her to keep at it. Helen represents something beyond who she is, and people are aware of that."

The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. She tells Kennedy that her parents were honest, highly ethical and hard-working people who ran grocery stores in Kentucky and Detroit.

Always inquisitive as a kid who asked pesky questions, she turned her curiosity into a quest for the truth.

'Pray For Me,' Nixon Asks

During the documentary, Thomas shares memories of each president. Most of them respected her and some of them became friends. She tells of a touching moment when she literally bumped into Nixon in a hallway as he was preparing to resign.

"I wished him luck and he said, 'Pray for me,'" she recalls.

"Access to a president doesn't mean you're gonna get the truth," Thomas adds, noting that attempts to manage the news date back to the Kennedy administration.

But access to the president has become more restricted.

"We had tremendous access when I started covering the White House," she says. "We realize now that we could walk right down the street, Main Street, with Jimmy Carter; we could walk with LBJ, side by side, even though there would be the usual Secret Service agents.

"We didn't have the same code that you wouldn't be able to get near a president, or they would feel threatened because of all of the security provisions, and so forth, that really have kept the press in their place," she adds in the film. "So, it was very different. You really felt that you got to know the person. And I think that's gone."

With each president, there are fewer and fewer news conferences. Thomas says that is a shame because the conference is one way that the public can keep in touch with a president.

ON TELEVISION

Thank You, Mr.

President: Helen Thomas at the

White House

WHEN: 9 p.m. Monday

WHERE: HBO

Reporter Walt Belcher can be reached at (813 259-7654 or wbelcher@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT