Thomas victim of thought police
The word and thought police finally got Helen Thomas. It had been a long time coming for the queen of the White House press corps whose passionate feelings of injustice steeped in her own ethnicity had put her on the edge of self destruction long before she was forced to resign at the age of 89. Her fall from public and professional grace came at the hands of a “man of God” who when it was all said and done had no compassion for her, choosing not to ignore the ill-advised comments he had elicited from an old woman as proud of her heritage as he was of his. He asked a daughter of Lebanese immigrants what she thought about Israel and when she told him, he ran quickly to spread on the Internet the words he had to know would burn her to the ground.
Helping him light the torch was a former White House mouthpiece, Ari Fleischer, whom she had tormented off and on with questions about the Iraq invasion and overall Middle East policy. How dare she challenge U.S. policy in the Middle East? After all these years of being on the front row of those nearly worthless presidential press conferences and briefings, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know that when it comes to political influence the American Jewish community is far greater than those of her lineage. So when the rabbi stuck a camera in her face and she responded viscerally about Israel “getting the hell out of Palestine,” and going back to Poland and Germany and the United States, Fleischer lent his voice to the mob.
For whatever reasons her colleagues left her twisting in the wind, declining to at least note that like it or not she has as much right to defend what has happened to her Arab ancestors as her detractors do theirs. But this is not the same cadre of close-knit journalists it once was. The deference that had been paid to her as a breaker of glass ceilings was done so grudgingly now. She has seemed a sometimes lonely figure in her special chair on the front row, ignored and even deprived for years of her famous press conference closing, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
I have known Helen Thomas for a long, long time. For most of her influential years we worked for the same company, she for United Press and then United Press International and I for the parent E.W. Scripps Co. We never have been close, but there was mutual respect.
Do I agree with her views as they were expressed? No. Do I understand them? Yes. I also understand why she didn’t quit 10 years ago after watching her beloved UPI disintegrate in one change of hands after another, all its clients disappearing along the way. This was her life and the White House was her sanctuary, her reason for being and the source of her fame.
So she took a job with Hearst, writing a column, which permitted her a freedom of expression prohibited throughout most of her career by the dictates of wire service journalism. That probably was not a good idea for her considering the growing frustration over the plight of those with similar heritage.
Covering the White House, despite its alleged celebrity status – mainly reserved for the television talkers who preen before the cameras for a few moments every day – is in reality one of the worst journalistic jobs in Washington. It is not for enterprising reporters. It is for those who don’t mind being spoon fed information or disinformation; who know they’re going to get used sooner or later; who relish proximity to power without really being a part of it and who are actually kept at a long distance from the object of their coverage. And it’s for those who pay a huge price in personal sacrifice for little more than the privilege of being addressed by their first name by a president and his minions before the cameras.
For whatever reason, Helen loved it and turned it into an iconic career. She just stayed too long and those who dictate our thinking got her. God bless her.
E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan@aol.com.