Helen Thomas: Asking Bush the Tough Questions

By Ann McFeatters, Ms. Magazine. Posted October 9, 2006.

It was the talk of the blogosphere: As part of Stephen Colbert's eviscerating roast of President Bush at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in April -- wonkish Washington's equivalent of the Oscars -- he showed a hilarious video that was supposedly an "audition" for the job of White House press secretary.

His costar in the satiric short: none other than the octogenarian doyenne of White House correspondents, Helen Thomas.

Using actual TV footage of the White House press corps, Colbert (of Comedy Central's Colbert Report) played a putative press secretary at a podium, ridiculing the reporters and avoiding their questions. But when Thomas asks, as she did of President Bush at a March 21 press conference, why we really invaded Iraq, Colbert feigns terror. He runs from the White House with Thomas in slow-but-relentless pursuit, notebook and pen in hand. Inside a parking garage, Colbert presses the emergency intercom to demand help, because "She won't stop asking why we invaded Iraq." The attendant responds, "Why did we invade Iraq?"

Colbert finally escapes and returns to New York City. But there, the be-capped limousine driver turns out to be... Helen Thomas -- who then urges him to "buckle up."

The video is yet another triumphant, iconic moment in the long, impressive life of the pioneering journalist, who turns 86 on August 4. The first woman to be chief White House correspondent for a major news service (United Press International), Thomas has covered every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. In 1998, the White House Correspondents' Association named its lifetime achievement award for her. Yet she's no relic -- working as an opinion columnist for Hearst Newspapers since 2000, she still has her front-row seat at White House press briefings and still shows up daily.

She remains as feisty and fearless as ever. In her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public (Scribner), she takes her colleagues to task for not asking the sort of tough questions she does. "I honestly believe," she writes, "that if reporters had put the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush administration's war policies, they could have saved the country the heartache and the losses of American and Iraqi lives."

Her anti-war, anti-Bush administration views have put her, not surprisingly, in disfavor with the president. In January 2003, she gave a speech at the Society of Professional Journalists' annual awards banquet, in which she offered her regular criticism of his presidency, particularly worrying about his intention to go to war in Iraq. Afterward, a young writer from the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze sought her out for an autograph.

"I was flattered. I preened," says Thomas, sheepishly. "I thought I was talking to my new best friend." The young man asked why she seemed sad. "'I should be,'" she recalls answering. "'I'm covering the worst president in Amerian history.'"

The White House was not amused. "I have yet to learn not to talk to reporters. I didn't realize he would quote me," she says now. "Suddenly, I was in the wilderness."

At a presidential press conference two months later, Thomas was not called on for the first time in what reporters believe was more than four decades. She wrote the president to apologize, insisting she did not mean to call him the nation's worst president, and he wrote back to accept. But it wasn't until three years later that she received absolution.

At the March 21 press conference, Bush first complimented her on her "brilliant" performance at a Gridiron Club dinner -- where she sang a song about Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions while dressed in a Scarlett O'Hara costume à la Carol Burnett (made from green drapes, the dress had a curtain rod running through it). Bush then signaled that he was ready, finally, to take a question from the veteran reporter.

"You're going to be sorry!" Thomas quipped. Bush retorted, "Well, then, let me take it back."

He didn't get a chance to. "Every reason given [for war in Iraq], publicly at least, has turned out not to be true," Thomas admonished, then accused Bush of wanting to invade Iraq "from the moment you stepped into the White House."

"To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect," Bush responded. "No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true."

Several months later, Thomas sits in the unnervingly quiet, decorator-designed conference room of Hearst Newspapers despite her professional stature, she works in a cubicle, not a private office). She wears her trademark black pantsuit and red nail polish, her fingers encircled with rings and bracelets lining her arms, her original black hair long-ago dyed bronze brown. Thinking back on her interaction with the president, she only wishes she had pressed him harder.

"The president can't even explain why we are in Iraq," she complains. "And now he wants to take on Iran?"

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Ann McFeatters is a Scripps Howard News Service columnist who has covered the White House and national politics since 1986.

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