Here's a piece on Helen Thomas by Ann McFeatters, national bureau chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade.
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The indominitable Helen Thomas
WASHINGTON - Say it isn't so, Helen. The White House press room without Helen Thomas? The concept is like the zoo without a tiger, a parade of ducklings without the mother duck, a building full of books without the librarian, Notre Dame without a flying buttress. Unthinkable.
Helen Thomas is the fourth branch of government.
As dean of the White House press corps, she's been indispensable in securing press access to officials who'd rather keep secrets than let the public know what they're doing. She's been the loudest voice of protest when Republicans or Democrats have tried to muzzle the news.
At the White House from dawn until midnight, day after day, year after year, she made the West Wing her turf. But tough as she has been on presidents, pinning them down, asking them embarrassing questions, she is always kind to fellow reporters, especially the young ones.
Her resignation takes away the best asset of United Press International, the shell of a once-mighty news organization. The news agency has just been sold to News World, founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church. Fearful that her free spirit and objectivity might be curbed by her new employers, she quit at the age of 79, an icon that would not convey with the sale.
To her dismay, televised presidential press conferences had made her a celebrity. But she turned her fame into a battering ram, never missing an opportunity to pummel her audiences with the idea they must keep an eye on their elected officials.
The "first" woman member of numerous organizations and an ardent feminist, she is respected by women around the globe as a fighter for equality. Every major world figure who held a joint press conference with any of the last eight U.S. presidents was briefed on the type of question Helen might ask.
Sometimes they tried to disparage her. Sometimes they tried unsuccessfully to flatter her into silence. Sometimes they joked with her. Sometimes they tried ignoring her.
Helen Thomas is not a woman to be ignored. When press secretaries resorted to trying to shame her for nagging them or pressing for details about the president's mood or the first lady's schedule or probing for the motivation behind a controversial decision, she was undaunted. Her needling continued.
Her stories are in her 1999 memoir, Front Row at the White House, an account of what she saw for four decades, her thoughts and feelings about her job and the remarkable peeks at history she has had.
While other reporters are loath to talk about which politicians they "like" or don't like, she is always very clear that her favorite president was John F. Kennedy, the first of the eight presidents she covered. The story of his brief presidency was fascinating to her, and the mood of the country was full of hope. She did not like Richard Nixon. She relished leaks about the Watergate scandal that she gleaned from Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon's attorney general.
Her biggest criticism of Clinton is that he has been one of the most inaccessible presidents. She bitterly complained that his aides tried to manage the news. And she never hid her distaste at the Clinton sex scandal or her belief that he wasted much of his presidency.
If she has an obsession as a reporter, beyond finding out what was going on behind the scenes, it is her passionate interest in Mideast politics and the plight of Arabs. Of Lebanese descent, she always marvels that in America a young woman from Detroit could grow up to badger presidents.
She married a rival reporter, Doug Cornell, when she was 51, after he retired from the Associated Press. But she spent most of their marriage caring for him after he was stricken with Alzheimer's disease.
People who only know Helen from television may think she is strident and pushy. But she's amazing to those of us who have watched her in awe writing lead after lead in a foreign country well past midnight only to be back on the bus at 5 a.m.
Thankfully, Helen is not going away. She has more questions to ask, more pins to prick in stuffed egos. Clinton said he will "feel a little better about my country if I know she'll still be spending some time around here at the White House."
So should we all.