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UPI’s
Helen Thomas still loves the reporter’s life
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Photo
by Jeff Watts
Helen Thomas described the changes in the working life of a
journalist. |
BY EMILY D.
JOHNSON
Helen Thomas, UPI’s reporter famous for covering the White
House from Presidents Kennedy to Clinton and for being the first
female officer of both the National Press Club and the White House
Correspondents Association, spoke to the AU campus last week. Thomas’s
talk was cohosted by the Women and Politics Institute and the Kennedy
Political Union. After sharing her emphatic opinions on a possible
war with Iraq (bad idea) and briefly listing the presidents she
worked with, (“I asked President Clinton, ‘Mr. President,
if you could take one thing from the White House that belongs to
the American people, what would it be?’ I didn’t know
he was going to bring a U-Haul”), Thomas discussed the role
of the press as self-appointed watchdogs of democracy.
“The president,” she said, “has not been interrogated.
Since April 8 he has not had a presidential news conference. A presidential
news conference is the only forum where the U.S. president can be
questioned, and without being questioned he can rule like a king.
We have to keep an eye on presidents who have power over life and
death today.”
She lamented the secrecy of the current administration and the increased
use of red tape in front of the White House Press Corps. “We
used to really know a president,” she said. For example, since
presidential motorcades have lengthened and reporters have been
moved from the third to the 25th car, “You can’t really
see what’s happening. We’re more and more remote.”
Consequently it’s hard to really understand the character of
a president through stories like the one Thomas told about an exchange
between Lyndon Johnson and one of his speech writers who had included
a quote from Voltaire in a Johnson speech: “‘Voltaire?
The people I’m going to talk to don’t know who Voltaire
is.’ [Johnson] scratched out Voltaire and wrote in, ‘as
my dear old daddy used to say . . .’”
Thomas also spoke on her struggle with the attitude that women reporters
existed in Washington to cover society and fashion. “I got
my job as a reporter because they were drafting every man with a
pulse,” she said. Women weren’t allowed into the National
Press Club (NPC) until 1971 and even then, says Thomas, “it
was because they were down on their uppers and they needed our dues.”
In 1959 Khrushchev spoke to the NPC and after much complaining,
the club allowed 30 women journalists to sit on the floor during
the speech.
“Every door had to be opened separately for women,” she
said, and lamented that even now there are few top women editors,
and that in other areas she sees gender equality slipping. “I
think it’s ter-rible that there is a conservative women’s
movement fighting Title Nine that thinks men are deprived. Women
have been deprived for many years.”
Despite the hardships, though, Thomas doesn’t regret her career
choice for a second. She tells anyone interested in journalism to
“Go for it, you’ll never be unhappy. You’ll get an
education every day, and you’ll want to interrupt your life
all the time.”
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