by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.
Author’s program note. This is an unabashed tribute to a great reporter and trenchant commentator who just happened to be a woman. Other commentators in their obituary notices will focus on the woman angle, but I believe Ms. Thomas would have disapproved of that, for she was a great journalist who just happened to be a woman; the focus always being on her work, not just her sex. And make no mistake about it, she would have been great whether she’d been man, woman, or hermaphrodite. And so this article celebrates the word slinger who made the world a better place with every story she covered, every story she wrote so well.
The sad part is Helen Thomas, brilliant writer of honest prose, would probably never get hired today… and that is part of the reason why we don’t have enough journalists of her undeniable talent educating and informing America and the world today, a situation which ought to alarm all of us.
One photograph tells the story.
Thomas, razor sharp brained, was short, squat, with the physiognomy of a gargoyle and a fashion sense reminiscent of Morgan Memorial and bargain day at Good Will. None of this should matter except the razor sharp brain; sadly today it does with extraneous factors like perfect teeth. coiffed hair, and “Muffy does journalism” overawing the stuff that matters, the stuff that Helen Thomas demonstrated every single day of her long and distinguished career.
Music to accompany this story.
For the music to accompany this article, nothing less than the Franz Waxman score to the1942 classic “Woman of the Year” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn will do. Find it in any search engine and let it transport you to the great age of Hollywood and the story of Tess Harding (Hepburn), woman and political columnist, columnist first and foremost. I’ve got to believe that Ms. Thomas kept a copy of the DVD in her sock drawer, for Tess’ priorities were hers, though sadly not her gams.
An American story.
Helen Angela Thomas was born in Winchester, Kentucky, to immigrant parents from Tripoli, Syria, now part of Lebanon. She was the seventh of nine children. The family moved to Detroit when she was 4, and she always counted Detroit, once the metropolis of America’s pride, now an urban nightmare awash in debt, as her hometown.
Her father George, she said, could neither read nor write. However he was good with numbers and ran a successful grocery business. Like Margaret Thatcher, whose father was also a small-time grocer, Thomas learned the value of good habits and responsibility while stocking cans of tuna fish and Mac and cheese. They were lessons well learned, grounding, always useful.
Her start in journalism.
Thomas got her start when like so many of us she had a story published in the school newspaper at Detroit’s Eastern High School. After graduating from Wayne State University in Detroit, she made her own luck by moving to Washington, D.C…. She knew she had to be where the action was and that was the surgent capital of the Great Republic, fighting the war that would transform it into the capital of the Free World. Had she but known it, she was in her true home, the right person in the right place at the right time. This is what is meant by destiny.
With most of male America off at war, the possibilities for women burgeoned. As a result, “The Washington Daily News”, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, hired her as a copy girl at age 22, the event Thomas cited as “getting my foot in journalism’s door.” That did not mean writing a single word; it meant making the coffee and doing anything else “what’s-’er-name?” was asked to do. She was young. She was biddable. She was in the most important city on Earth… she made it clear she’d sweep floors, do whatever to get ahead… such people, of course, quickly become indispensable as Thomas most assuredly did. This is how kismet works.
The necessary preparation.
When she wasn’t delivering copy, fetching sandwiches (“Hey, kid, don’t forget the mayo!”) or running yet another errand for the crack reporters who had the renown that comes with your own by-line, she was doing what all reporters and especially all celestial beings called commentators were doing. First, she was reading, because all successful writers read voluminously, omnivorously, with increasingly sure taste about what was worth reading and what most assuredly was not.
She was also writing, as much as she could, burning the midnight oil to produce a paragraph, even a single line that was “good”, not merely “good enough”; a line she could point to with pride, certain that it was a directional signal to the vocation she knew was hers.
And, importantly, she learned the essential business, crucial to her success, of working with editors, delivering the hard, irrefutable copy they demanded; with lordly publishers whose grandiose properties and imperial powers rivalled the Caesars, and with the sources, high and low, who needed to be persuaded, motivated, coaxed to provide the information necessary to the creation of stories that would withstand any criticism or attack, no matter who might make it.
These were the steps for success. These were the steps she mastered bit by bit, day by day, story by story. And so by dint of hard work, constant effort, and total focus on getting the story and getting it right, she became an “overnight success”…. without benefit of lip gloss, false finger nails, or blow-dry hair, every strand in place..
JFK.
On her way up, she got a job at United Press. There she filed the weather forecasts, rewrote stories for UPs radio wire, and filed the Washington city news wire designed as a tip service for other news bureaus and government offices. She was where she wanted to be but, now 40, felt something was missing… And then she met him, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the man who competed with Franklin Pierce (1853-1856) for the title of America’s Sexiest President. And so she became star-struck. It was part of that mystique thing the Kennedys had going for them; you were hooked before you knew it.
She reported his campaign, then the East Wing of the White House, the First Lady’s domain. She was a known entity in Kennedy’s Washington, underestimated only by obdurate misogynists. Helen Thomas had arrived… and when she became the first woman (in 1961) to close a presidential news conference with the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President”, the world knew it.
These were the salad days of Helen Thomas, and she used her wits, sharp elbows, and an approach that always ran perilously close to rudeness and arrogance to get what she needed to be the utter and complete professional of her imagination.
In these felicitous days she could be found walking around the White House press room muttering, “Something’s up, something’s up.” And she was usually right, her seasoned intuition helping her break important stories again and again. Presidents tried to appease her, tried to influence her, tried to ignore her… but our Helen, as American as the Statue of Liberty, stood her ground and asked the tough questions we all wanted to ask until she got the answers we needed. Oh, yes, she was “our” Helen, well and truly.
In the process awards, honors, accolades and compliments rained upon her, but the one she cherished most of all was her appointment by Hearst Newspapers in 2000 as a columnist. She now numbered amongst the stars of journalism’s firmament. God save the Queen! But God moves in mysterious ways…
Chute de l’empire!
As French Emperor Napoleon III passed into exile in 1870, prisoner of the victorious German army, he saw a newsboy hawking papers, shouting “Chute de l’empire, fuite de l’imperatrice” (“Fall of the empire, flight of the Empress”. ) These words could have as easily applied to Helen Thomas, for a handful of hasty, ill-chosen words brought an abrupt and painful conclusion to her hitherto always upward trajectory. Here’s what happened…
In an impromptu 2010 interview, the cameraman — a rabbi — asked her for career advice for two teens accompanying him. “Go for it. You’ll never be unhappy. You’ll always keep people informed and you’ll always keep learning. The greatest thing of the profession, never stop learning.” She was about to demonstrate that this advice applied to her, as much as any adolescent.
Had she quit there, all would have been well… but the rabbi asked one more question, and she, fatally, answered it.
“Any comments on Israel?”
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember these people are occupied. It’s their land.”
When the rabbi asked where they should go, Ms. Thomas added: “They can go home — Poland, Germany… and America and everywhere else. Why push people out who have lived there for centuries? I’m of Arab background.”
The reaction was swift, cruel, punishing. The Arab-Israeli conflict claimed another, unlikely victim. She apologized at once, but it was too late. Her publicity agent quit; so did her coauthor. Within hours, her carefully crafted reputation was destroyed. The fierce advocate of peace and good will died that day as the many whom she had injured exulted…. what goes around, comes around. She could have fought back… the old Helen Thomas would. But her resignation was a class-act proving that her standards were high and daunting, not just so much self-serving verbiage.
Now Helen Thomas is dead, and it is not too much to say the last great epoch of American journalism is dead, too, the Internet and its complete lack of scruples and standards pounding the last nail into the coffin. The Great Republic and all its high potentates she challenged were the better for her and the words she wielded with such mastery and joy. But now she is gone… her life’s work truly over… and we survivors must live with the results… sordid, slipshod, sloppy, slovenly, scarcely second-rate… and so very, very sad for all of us, above all for the Great Republic she served so well.
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