Transcript
REPORTER: David Brill
It's dawn in the heart of the most powerful nation on Earth. In a Washington coffee shop, one of the world's most respected journalists is already at her usual corner table armed with a black coffee, the 'Washington Post' and the 'New York Times'. Today's feature article is about American soldiers killed in Iraq.
HELEN THOMAS, JOURNALIST: I don't know how anybody can read it and not feel so saddened.
Then it's off to her office a short stroll away.
HELEN THOMAS: Great to see you. Bye bye.
REPORTER: So how many times do you think you've walked down here into the White House?
HELEN THOMAS: 150 million times, I don't know. Ever since January 1961.
REPORTER: 1961?
HELEN THOMAS: That's how long I've been here.
Helen Thomas has reported on every president since John F. Kennedy. Over that time, almost five decades, she's come to be known as the First Lady of the press. She currently writes a syndicated column for the Hearst newspaper.
HELEN THOMAS: We've lost our honour, our integrity throughout the world.
Once inside the press room, Helen hits the phones, exchanging gossip, sniffing out fresh angles on the day's stories, she is known for her strong opinions and fearless questioning of people in power.
HELEN THOMAS: We're going to the briefing now. Everybody will just repeat what the Administration wants you to say. There is very little challenge, and even if there is, they back off. They give you the robotic answers.
Seats in the briefing room are highly sought after, at the top of the pecking order are those in the front row.
REPORTER: Do you get asked very often to ask a question these days?
HELEN THOMAS: Yes, at briefings I can. I'm not that lucky on news conferences with the President, no.
In 2003 the Bush media team began banishing Helen to the back row for some of the President's news conferences with the president.
DANA PERINO, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESWOMAN: Good afternoon. Congress is starting this week another discussion, a series of hearings looking at the FISA reforms we passed early in August.
Dana Perino, the White House spokesperson, is new to this job. Today's hot topic is the President's push to extend a controversial security law known as FISA, Helen regards it as an attack on civil liberty.
DANA PERINO: ..and we are seeking to make those reforms permanent. With that, I'll take questions.
HELEN THOMAS: Are you saying the President is going to veto any change in the FISA law, eavesdropping on all Americans?
DANA PERINO: That's kind of a loaded question. We have taken great pains to make sure that we can protect the country and also preserve our civil liberties.
HELEN THOMAS: People are unhappy with being eavesdropped on, their telephone calls and so forth. That's not the American way.
DANA PERINO: That's a gross mischaracterization of what the good folks at the National Security Agency do to protect this country, which is to focus on the threats at hand.
HELEN THOMAS: You can call it security, but it's also taking away our liberties.
DANA PERINO: Our liberties are intact.
By the time the briefing breaks up, nothing more has been revealed about the Administration's planned security laws.
HELEN THOMAS: You saw the answers. Not an answer in the book. It's so unbelievable really. I only wish that every press secretary would understand we pay them. People can handle the truth but what they can't handle is lies, one lie after another.
Each afternoon Helen makes her way to the Hearst offices.
HELEN THOMAS: Could not log in. Make sure user name... Let's see. W-E-L
Computer problems notwithstanding, it's here that she writes her weekly opinion column. Her fame is such that she's also in demand for speaking appearances and talk shows, like this one on the political cable channel C-SPAN.
HELEN THOMAS: Now, I write a column, and the editor looked at it and he said, I really was writing wire copy, and he said, "Where's the edge?" The what? "Your opinion." My what? So now I wake up in the morning and I say, "Who do I hate today?" And that's how you write a column.
REPORTER: What keeps you going?
HELEN THOMAS: Outrage. That's my adrenaline. Outrage, anger and injustice.
But taking on the powerful can also land a journalist in trouble. She has been quoted describing George W Bush as "the worst president in history."
HELEN THOMAS: And the press secretary called me and said ‘Did you say that?" And I said "I cannot tell a lie." I chopped down the cherry tree and I've been in the doghouse ever since.
REPORTER: Do you regret saying it, regret it being reported, looking back on it now.
HELEN THOMAS: Well I didn't expect to be reported on it, I regretted immediately after because I thought I had pre-judged, but I don't regret it now. Time has vindicated my own point of view.
CHUCK LEWIS, BUREAU CHIEF, HEARST NEWSPAPERS: We are talking about an icon here.
Chuck Lewis is Helen's bureau chief at Hearst newspapers, he stood by her in the face of orchestrated campaigns to shut down Helen's questioning of the administration.
CHUCK LEWIS: She alone asked the tough questions, leading up to the invasion of Iraq, I know correspondents over there who were afraid for their own professional career, to ask tough questions, because they knew that they were on TV.
HELEN THOMAS: The press conference is the only forum, the only institution we have where a president can be questioned on a regular basis and held accountable.
But Helen's tough questioning over the Iraq war came at a cost. The veteran correspondent was ignored at Bush's press conferences for three years, until this one in March last year.
GEORGE W. BUSH, US PRESIDENT: Now Helen.
HELEN THOMAS: You're going to be sorry. Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. Yet every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?
GEORGE W. BUSH: I think your premise in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist, is that I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect -
HELEN THOMAS: Everything
GEORGE W. BUSH: Hold on for a second, please.
HELEN THOMAS: Everything I've heard -
GEORGE W. BUSH: Excuse me, excuse me. No president wants war.
HELEN THOMAS: I think after 9/11 reporters again went into kind of a syndrome of torpor, a coma really, where they were afraid to ask challenging questions, afraid to be called unpatriotic and unAmerican because the country was in such crisis after this first major attack on our own soil. But I think... and therefore I think the reporters let the country down.
While I'm in Washington, President Bush holds another of his rare question and answer sessions with journalists. This time, Helen is not called on for a question.
REPORTER: Watching you on the television at the President's press conference, you were in the front row as usual, but you didn't get asked. I saw you put your hand up, he just ignores you and moved on to everybody else in the front row. What's going on?
HELEN THOMAS: He hurt my feelings, it really hurt me, cut me to the quick.
REPORTER: Does he do that all the time?
HELEN THOMAS: He's called on me on the rarest of occasions.
REPORTER: Other reporters have said that you're the only one who's really outspoken in the White House, the only reporter who is really outspoken consistently, what do you make of that?
HELEN THOMAS: That I am?
REPORTER: Yes.
HELEN THOMAS: I believe in being consistent. I'm not going to change character because I'm called names or anything. That would be ridiculous. If I wanted to suck up and belong to the club I would have done that a long time ago.
REPORTER: Even when the President gives you a look like he did earlier today?
HELEN THOMAS: Who cares? I give him a look.
REPORTER: He doesn't intimidate you?
HELEN THOMAS: No, he didn't. I felt sorry for him. If you're afraid of any question when you get to be President of the United States, you really should be able to answer anything. He can say "no comment", there isn't anything wrong with that, but to be afraid? No, that's..
Helen Thomas talks about presidents with a rare authority. She's been face to face with nine of them, travelling the globe in their entourage, observing their successes and their failures.
HELEN THOMAS: I thought that John F. Kennedy was the most inspired. I think he understood the power of the presidency to do good and I think that he uplifted us all because he had great ideas. Lyndon B. Johnson. I think he made the greatest contribution to our country in the last half of the 20th century, last 50 years, on the domestic side. But of course he was the buzz saw, was Vietnam. Then on to Richard Nixon. Nixon was tremendously brilliant in politics but he didn't really relate. He could speak to crowds of thousands but on a one-on-one basis he was very shy, very reserved and so forth. And he always took the wrong road. Jimmy Carter, I think that he did a great thing by putting human rights at the centrepiece of our foreign policy. Reagan, there was a Reagan revolution. He did turn the country to the right. It was a question of social Darwinism. If you can't make it, tough. Survival of the fittest. Clinton, I think he came in, as all presidents do, very well meant, very well intentioned but he sure missed the boat. He didn't even understand you have to know your enemy and from the second he stepped into the White House, he was always being investigated.
REPORTER: After him, George Bush Jr.
HELEN THOMAS: Black and white, dead or alive, with us or against us, the most simplistic philosophy. And in my opinion he wanted to go to war from the moment he came into office. He said in fact that he wanted to be a war president and he once told his biographer that only war presidents are remembered in history.
MARY: So this fund-raiser is to give single parents, men or women, an opportunity to go to school when they may not have had that opportunity before.
Helen Thomas still maintains a heavy schedule. This week alone she has engagements in Michigan, Florida, and this fund-raiser in Virginia. This event has drawn together the well-heeled ladies-who-lunch, from all over this part of Republican-leaning Virginia.
HELEN THOMAS: What you first learn when your covering for a wire service, you check out all the facts. Your mother says she loves you, check it out.
The audience may be Bush supporters, but, as usual, Helen Thomas is speaking her mind.
HELEN THOMAS: It's sheer madness to continue this war without end. We've lost our honour in the world. We are identified with torture of prisoners, shackling of detainees.
Not everyone appreciates the lecture. But eventually Helen gives them what they came for her unique tales from life inside the White House.
HELEN THOMAS: No president has ever liked the press, dating back to George Washington. I wasn't covering him, but President Ford likened my questions to acupuncture. He said that "If God had created the world in six days, on the seventh day he could not have rested, he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas." When President Reagan was told that the Sandinistas, the Marxist communists, had fired on a press helicopter at the Honduran border, Reagan said "There's some good in everyone." And when President Clinton was asked by a friend why the press always went along in the motorcade when he went jogging, he laughed and said "They just want to see if I drop dead." That's true. We were on what we call the body watch. Lincoln said "Let the people know the facts, the country will be safe." I believe that. So ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for all of us, let's give peace a chance, and let it begin with us. Thank you. Thank you, thank you very much.
REPORTER: What did you think?
WOMAN: I love Helen Thomas. I've followed her for years and I love seeing her sit in that front row and just give everybody the devil, y'know.
WOMAN 2: I love her strength. She is what many of us should aspire to be.
WOMAN 3: I've been looking forward to hearing you talk all week and I'm so glad I got a chance to.
HELEN THOMAS: Thank you. That's so nice of you.
WOMAN 4: I thought Helen was absolutely magnificent. I think she speaks for all of us. I really think that she speaks more for us than any president has spoken back at us.
Back at the White House, and another deadline looms. Helen's workload may have lightened a little as she approaches 90, but she's not planning to stop any time soon.
CHUCK LEWIS: I'm in touch with the up and coming journalists and I'm not sure that there's I don't see a Helen Thomas necessarily among them. Helen, in many ways, I think, is a unique person and an institution that will never be duplicated.
HELEN THOMAS: I'm running on empty too, but it isn't that I think that I have some special cause and different from anyone else, but I do think that I am such a good irritant to them to actually be around, they should know that somebody's saying 'no'.