“Kings, queens & presidents––they were all just people to Helen Thomas”
Family, friends and former colleagues of veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas gathered together inside of the National Press Club building in downtown Washington, D.C. on Saturday, October 5, 2013 for a memorial service held in her honor.
Speakers for the event included Sam Donaldson, Judy Woodruff, Susan Page and Diane Ladd, among others.
It was a fitting tribute to a woman who was essentially a Washington institution unto herself, leaving her hometown of Detroit, Michigan to begin her career––under no false pretenses––as a newspaperwoman in the summer of 1942. As her longtime friend Diane Ladd declared so evocatively: “Helen Thomas emerged in a time that had tough judgments. She emerged to stir the mind and the heart of mankind.”
Established in 1908 and developing into an elite press forum, the National Press Club refused to allow female membership until March 1971, an exclusion that greatly inhibited women reporters and their ability to cover some of the top news stories of their day. Thomas, who was among the 24 original female members accepted into the club, was elected financial secretary later that same year. One couldn’t help but to occasionally stare up at the wooden balconies lining the room and genuflect on the irony, as noted by USA TODAY Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, that Helen Thomas herself would have once been relegated to sit there and remain silent, if she was allowed entrance at all.
In an August 2011 interview, Thomas took me through one of the early victories in the fight for newswomen of her day to gain access to the prestigious, men-only club.
[In 1959] I was president of the Women’s Press Club and Khrushchev was coming to town. It was the biggest story and a breakthrough in foreign relations and so forth. And the press conference was going to be had at the Press Club, which we resented because we couldn’t go to the Press Club. So we started really putting our foot down, picketing, doing everything, and we forced the Press Club to have 30 women reporters attend the Khrushchev luncheon. I was president of the Women’s Press Club, so I was at the head table as one of the hosts. We got 30 women to sit on the floor with their male colleagues with whom they had been competing for big stories and so forth. For the first time in history women were at the luncheon, the one luncheon where Khrushchev was going to be speaking. And when that was done, I got up. I didn’t sit right next to Khrushchev, but I talked to him. He said I looked like one of the Russian women from Georgia with the darker faces. And that was it. We didn’t get to go back to the Press Club—we were not accepted—until 1971. That was a one-shot deal.
In 1984, Thomas became the first woman recipient of the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award, making her the first wire service correspondent to receive the honor as well. Of the many awards that she received in her lifetime, she was particularly fond of this designation, as it put her in the same company of such former recipients as Walter Cronkite, James Reston, Theodore White, Herbert Block and Eric Sevareid.
There were some 300 people in attendance at the Saturday service, a vast swarm of new-age reporters mixed in with the many seasoned professionals of Thomas’s past; different non-profit leaders and organizers in the name of equality; friends and family, who oftentimes merged into one and the same for a woman who played the role of mentor to so many. “I don’t think I could have made it without the support and advice of Helen Thomas,” noted Judy Woodruff, who first met Thomas when she began covering the White House during the Carter years.
“Nobody fought more to hold the powerful accountable than Helen did. All of us in the press owe her an enormous gratitude. So too do all of us as citizens.”
Woodruff’s story mirrors that of so many others who nervously introduced themselves to a legend and were shocked to find that she likewise wished to introduce herself right back. “Her interests were outer-directed, never self-centered,” said present “Dear Abby” columnist Jeanne Phillips, the daughter of her close friend Abigail Van Buren.
For a woman who never had children of her own, there sure are a lot of daughters that Helen Thomas left behind.
My own story isn’t very different, in fact. As a college student attending classes in Chicago I managed to obtain her phone number the summer of 2011, little more than a year after her untimely retirement. Introducing myself as Bonnie Thomas’s youngest grandson (Bonnie being her beloved cousin who she’d grown up with in Detroit and who also displayed an early interest in journalism, both girls having written for their respective high school newspapers in the mid-1930s), I haphazardly attempted to float the idea of coming to D.C. to meet and interview her. Struggling between being too forthright or not enough, Helen quickly put an end to my hesitancy.
“Well, why don’t you, then?” she put it to me in black and white, like only she could.
Taking a seat beside me in the designated friends and family row near the front of the stage was 89-year-old Trude B. Feldman, the mysterious White House correspondent and columnist whose career dates all the way back to when Lyndon B. Johnson was in office. Ralph Nader––a former presidential candidate and vocal advocate on Helen’s behalf––could be seen just a few rows over.
It is certainly worth wondering which Washington higher-ups might have shown up, potentially, had Helen entered into a retirement befitting of her illustrious career––not to depreciate those who were present, of course. Congress members? Press secretaries? Presidents? The travel distance involved in attending her funeral in Troy, Michigan before she was laid to rest in the Detroit family plot is one thing, but holding a public ceremony right in the middle of the lions’ den itself leaves little room for excuses. It also speaks volumes.
The first speaker to take the podium was Helen’s longtime friend Sam Donaldson, who declared in high esteem that, “Presidents come and go, but Helen Thomas goes on forever,” along with citing some of his favorite questions that Helen had posed to different presidents that were––characteristic of her style––much closer to answers within themselves than actual queries to begin with.
“Sometimes the questions themselves tell the story, whether the answers do or not,” he explained.
Moments prior to the event, I was fortunate to steal a few minutes of Donaldson’s time. Informing him of my plan to continue forward on writing about the life and times of my cousin Helen Thomas, he asked if he could offer a word of advice.
“Tell the whole story,” he implored me. Don’t leave anything out, lest I should otherwise risk being stuck with the proverbial “elephant in the room.” And, when Helen Thomas is the subject, there can be little doubt as to what that elephant represents.
During an April 2011 interview with Playboy Magazine, the question of what her obituary will say made her eyes well up with tears. “Oh, I know what they’re going to say,” she replied, prophetically: “anti-Semite.”
“I’m a reporter,” she continued on, still emotional. “I know damn well what they’re going to say because they have their print, they have their ink. They don’t give a damn about the truth. They have to have it their way, and they’ll be writing my obituary.”
Certain detractors will try to focus on her less damnable offenses, such as the perception that she overly favored Democratic presidents, or even that her outspoken and opinionated technique as a reporter somehow had an adverse effect upon the present state of American journalism. As far as my own observations are concerned, such current “critiques” of her legacy, in most cases, appear to be used primarily as a way to reticently alleviate the appearance of the critics own particular bias with regard to Israeli policy in the Middle East.
Thus it was notable to see, on the opposite side of the spectrum, how her friends and admirers chose to approach the dangerous, “controversial” terrain that Helen Thomas strode upon during the last few years of her life.
“The controversy over the statements she made late in her life doesn’t and shouldn’t obscure the hard work and the significant achievements of her life,” stated Susan Page, “not to mention the path she cut for women journalists who would follow her, including me. I am in her debt and I am not alone.”
Prepared remarks from Ronald E. Cohen, who was “ostensibly” Helen’s boss at United Press International over the course of 25 years, which included stints as Washington news editor, bureau chief and managing editor, read as follows:
Sadly, near the end of her brilliant career, Helen voiced opinions that for many crossed the line of fair comment. In the ensuing controversy, she was denied the exit that she so richly earned. But Helen was a true original. Everyone in our profession––but especially women––owe an enormous debt for the ground Helen broke during seven decades at the barricades.
Appropriately so, a few news stories worthy enough of even the mainstream media broke during the service. The first came courtesy of Helen’s niece, Suzanne Geha, a former West Michigan TV anchor, who revealed that Helen had once gone on a date with John F. Kennedy. “He was too fresh,” was Helen’s post-date analysis. Doubtlessly an example of what Helen would refer to as “soft news,” the small story made it all the way to Politico, which questionably posted a photograph of a young JFK juxtaposed with an elderly Helen Thomas next to the article’s headline.
However, the bigger announcement came from actress Diane Ladd, known for her roles in such films as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and, my personal favorite, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Helen had evidently bequeathed upon Ladd, for many years, her desire that a film based on the life of Martha Mitchell be made, and that Ladd should play the lead role. Ladd announced that, just days after Helen’s passing in late July, Martin Scorsese’ s producer called to inform her that Scorsese plans to begin production on such a film in 2014, believing that “our country needs those truths now more than ever.” Ladd will play Martha, along with her daughter Laura Dern, and indeed Helen Thomas herself will be portrayed on the big screen as well.
Martha, the enigmatic wife of Nixon’s embattled Attorney General John Mitchell, had become a close confidante of Helen’s during Watergate, revealing all kinds of shocking goings-on about the Nixon administration during their late night phone sessions, alleging that, among other revelations, Nixon “knew all about the whole goddamned thing” and that she had even personally laid eyes on a leather-bound campaign strategy book for 1972 written by Nixon and H.R. Haldeman that outlined the entire Watergate break-in “from A to Zeta.”
Helen, for her part, printed every word that Martha told her, earning her a great deal of antipathy within the Oval Office, as the Nixon White House tapes revealed on more than one occasion.
“I don’t think she exaggerated a damn thing,” Helen told me during our last few days together in August 2012. “She drank a lot but she told the truth.”
Ultimately, the most pivotal revelation of all, recurrent in the narrative of everyone who spoke at her D.C. memorial service, was the culminating portrait of a woman who loved truth, equality and, above all else, human beings, the whole world over.
Kings, queens and presidents––they were all just people to Helen Thomas.
To watch a video of the service in its entirety, click here.
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Mark Mondalek – BFP contributing author, is a writer and editor based in Detroit. Follow @ Twitter
“Last Thoughts on Helen Thomas: American Icon – Part I”
LINKS:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr4MEFejnnE]
[http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/07/30/bfp-exclusive-last-thoughts-on-helen-thomas-american-icon-part-i/]
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