Helen Thomas
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Helen Thomas (born August 4, 1920) is a news service reporter and dean of the White House press corps. She was White House Bureau Chief for United Press International (UPI), where she was employed for 57 years until resigning in 2000 when UPI was acquired by News World Communications. News World is the owner of The Washington Times; Thomas claimed she resigned because of News World's ties to Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Thomas then became a White House correspondent and King Features Syndicate columnist.
Known as “The First Lady of the Press,” Thomas has covered every President since John F. Kennedy. Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Helen was raised in Detroit, Michigan where she attended public schools and later graduated from Wayne State University. Upon leaving college, she served as a copy girl on the now-defunct Washington Daily News.
After joining UPI in 1943, Thomas wrote radio news and later covered Federal government news; her beats included the FBI and Capitol Hill.
In November, 1960, Helen began covering then President-elect John F. Kennedy, following him to the White House in January, 1961 as a UPI correspondent. During this assignment, Thomas became known for closing presidential press conferences with the tagline, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
Thomas was the only woman print journalist to travel with then-President Richard M. Nixon to China during his breakthrough trip in January, 1972. She has traveled around the world several times with Presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and has covered every Economic Summit. She was named one of the “25 Most Influential Women in America.” by the World Almanac.
Helen Thomas has written three books, including her latest, Thanks for the Memories Mr. President: Wit and Wisdom from the Front Row at the White House.
During the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's resignation, Thomas was recipient of numerous late-night phone calls from Martha Mitchell, wife of then-Attorney General John Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell, in her calls to Thomas, spoke out against Nixon early in the scandal—but paid an enormous price: according to Thomas, she was cruelly discredited and abandoned by her family and she later died of cancer. But to Thomas, she was a true patriot.
“Perhaps it is fitting that she died on Memorial Day, the holiday of tribute to the nation's war dead. In a sense she was a personal victim of the political war of Watergate, and one of its very few heroines,” wrote Thomas.
In 2003, President George W. Bush stopped the tradition of allowing Thomas to end Presidential news conferences by saying “Thank you, Mr. President.” Additionally, she has been moved from the first chair of the front row of the conference room to the back, and is rarely called upon in press conferences. Bush is thought to have instituted these changes after taking exception with some of Thomas' writings regarding his presidency.
She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1986.
Criticism
Thomas has come under criticism by some, mainly conservatives, for what are perceived to be questions biased towards the left. This criticism has mainly arisen during the presidency of George W. Bush. Critics point to questions such as "...why does he [Bush] want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?" [1] (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030106-1.html#2).