There are almost as many Helen Thomas awards in journalism as
there are Robert C. Byrd federal buildings in West Virginia. The
Society of Professional Journalists, which gives out the Helen
Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement, describes Thomas as “a
living icon of journalism for her dogged pursuit of the truth in a
career that has spanned almost 60 years.” Thomas’s alma mater,
Wayne State University in Detroit, honors Thomas’s “many years of
exemplary service” with its Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity Award.
The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, a past recipient (with
husband Ben Bradlee) of the Helen Thomas Award from the American
News Women’s Club, writes that “Helen Thomas set the standard for
excellence in journalism.”
Thomas, who turned 90 in August, became United Press
International’s White House correspondent in 1961, arriving at the
executive mansion with John F. Kennedy, whose campaign she had
covered. In 2000 she left UPI to become a columnist for Hearst
Newspapers, but she kept her prized frontrow seat in the White
House pressroom. She enjoyed her new role as an opinion writer. “I
censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter,” she said in a
2002 speech. “Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate
today?’”
By answering that question, she brought her career to an abrupt
if long-overdue end. On May 27 Thomas was at the White House’s
Jewish Heritage Celebration when an amateur journalist, Rabbi David
Nesenoff, approached her with a video camera and asked, “Any
comments on Israel?”
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied.
Nesenoff was taken aback: “So where should they go? What should
they do?”
“They should go home.”
“Where is home?”
“Poland. Germany.”
“So you’re saying the Jews should go back to Poland and
Germany?”
“And America, and everywhere else.”
A week later, on Thursday, June 3, Nesenoff posted the video on
YouTube and his own website, RabbiLive.com. The Drudge Report
linked the next day, and the whole world knew. Thomas issued an
apology, claiming that her comments “do not reflect my heartfelt
belief” in “the need for mutual respect and tolerance.” Nobody
believed her. Her virulent anti-Israel views were well known,
though never before quite so crudely expressed in public. By Monday
she was history. It didn’t help that on Friday, the Israel Defense
Forces had released a tape of a man from a Turkish Islamist group
that was running a Gaza-bound flotilla in defiance of Israel’s
blockade. Ordered to dock at an Israeli port instead, the man
radioed back with a chilling echo of Thomas: “Go back to
Auschwitz.”
Journalism’s Beltway big shots mourned their profession’s loss.
But why? In her later years, Thomas was known chiefly for asking
truculent yet meandering questions, such as this one to President
Bush in 2006:
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, had 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-former cabinet officers, intelligent 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?
At least during the Bush administration, those who sympathized
with Thomas’s views credited her with asking “tough” questions. But
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and frequent critic of
conservatives, got it right when he wrote, in the aftermath of her
departure:
A tough question is a question that’s hard to answer. But any
moderately skilled flack understood precisely how to deflect Helen
Thomas’ histrionic denunciations….In fact, calling on Helen
Thomas was a notorious method for a hard-pressed White House press
secretary to evade tough questions from the rest of the press
corps. A zany, out-of-left-field protest from Thomas would disrupt
a flow of unwelcome queries, maybe spark a tension-breaking laugh,
maybe change the subject altogether.
To what, then, did she owe her reputation as a paragon of
journalism? Her output as a columnist was banal. In a column on
Michelle Obama’s antiobesity efforts, Thomas observed: “If a first
lady takes an interest in a cause, it will take off in the country.
But it won’t wipe out fascination with what she is wearing. That’s
life.” Reason’s Peter Suderman quipped that “as insights go, this
[is] about as original as you win some, you lose
some.”
DID THOMAS ever break or advance an important story? Offer a
penetrating analytical insight? Take a risk on behalf of the
public’s right to know? If so, nobody remembered. True, she became
a journalist at a time when that was arguably an accomplishment for
a woman. But being a woman was never an accomplishment for a
journalist.
Sally Quinn had this to say in an essay on the Post’s
website about why Thomas was “a legend”:
I spent many a night with Helen and her best pal, Fran
Lewine-who just happened to be Jewish and who was another female
pioneer in journalism-eating pita bread and hummus and stuffed
grape leaves and drinking wine. There was always plenty of wine and
laughter. Not only was Helen a great journalist but she loved her
friends, loved to have a good time.
Helen had a great personality and some of her best
friends were Jewish! This may be the first time in history that
these two classic excuses for ugliness have been invoked
simultaneously.
In fairness to Quinn, she described Thomas’s comments about
Israel as “shocking, appalling and indefensible,” though she also
employed the old Obama dodge: “The person who called for Israel to
get out of Palestine is not the Helen Thomas I knew.”
By contrast, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift-who has the
extraordinary misfortune of having accepted the 2010 Helen Thomas
Award from the American News Women’s Club on June 3-did attempt a
defense of Thomas’s invidious remarks: “She was talking about the
settlers,” Clift insisted, referring to Israelis who live in
territory that was occupied by Jordan before 1967. This assertion
was laughable. As Nesenoff pointed out in a Washington
Post op-ed, Thomas was not telling them to go home to Tel
Aviv, Haifa, and western Jerusalem.
Even Clift had to admit that there was little to Thomas’s
“pioneering career” other than longevity: “Woody Allen famously
said 90 percent of life is just showing up, and Thomas was there
for a huge chunk of history.” Then again, so was Rudolf Hess.
As for those awards: Wayne State announced that it would
continue to give out the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity Award,
which says a lot about what “diversity” has come to mean in
American higher education. Kevin Smith, president of the Society of
Professional Journalists, did not return my e-mails or phone
messages asking if SPJ planned any changes in its award. My call to
the American News Women’s Club was returned by a woman named Julia.
She promised to get back to me with an answer, but never did.
So goes the legend of Helen Thomas: the living icon of
journalism whose admirers cannot be reached for comment.
