Veteran journalist relates presidential tales

By Natalie Cortes
freedomforum.org

11.21.02

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WASHINGTON — Getting access to the president is essential for any White House correspondent. Of the many presidents she covered, veteran journalist Helen Thomas gives Lyndon Baines Johnson the highest marks for making himself accessible to the press.

“He would … take us … round and round the south lawn where he’d really let his hair down and agonize over the Vietnam War… . We would be bumping into each other falling all over each other and we called them the Bataan Death Marches,” she said.

Johnson is one of the nine presidents Thomas writes about in her new book, Thanks for the Memories, Mr. President. The former UPI reporter and current columnist for the Hearst News Service recently shared her recollections of the presidents at the program "An Evening with Helen Thomas." The program was co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates and the Newseum and held at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jefferson Auditorium.

Thomas told the audience that she considered Johnson the most effective president because of his significant legislative accomplishments.

“In the first two years in office … he had gotten through Medicare, which Truman first proposed; (the) Civil Rights Act, voting rights for blacks for the first time in the South, where they didn’t have to pay a poll tax or recite the U.S. Constitution to register to vote; federal aid to education at all levels; public housing; child (and) maternal health; national parks; you name it. … His contribution was tremendous,” Thomas said.

One of the anecdotes that Thomas shared during the Oct. 17 program was about LBJ's ability to connect with his audience. While looking at a quote with one of his speechwriters, Johnson said: ‘Voltaire, the people I’m going to talk to don’t know who Voltaire is.’ He grabbed a pen, scratched out 'Voltaire' and scribbled in ‘As my dear old daddy used to say.’”

Thomas’ favorite president was John F. Kennedy, the first president she covered for United Press International. “I thought he was the most inspired president I had ever covered… . Anyone, who would say ‘We’re going to land men on the moon in a decade.’ He didn’t live to see it, but we did it. He created the Peace Corps. He signed the first nuclear test-ban treaty. He understood what war was and he was a man of peace. He proved that in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Thomas dedicates a good part of her book to explaining how humor was used at the White House to deflect tension. She praised Kennedy for his great sense of humor and use of one-liners. She recalled one instance when she helped Kennedy at a news conference. “It was getting near the end when I knew I should jump up and say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President’ and Kennedy was involved in a question ... he kept talking, trying to hit on the answer. So I got up and I finally said: “Thank you, Mr. President.” He said, ‘Thank you!’"

Of all the presidents the long-time White House correspondent covered, she said she found Richard Nixon the least funny. “He had a certain humor, but it was so acerbic and so mean that I’m afraid I don’t think he used it often in public,” she said. “I always thought that Nixon had two roads to go and he always took the wrong road. He’s the only president in our history to be forced to resign.” Despite that, she said Nixon was a brilliant politician and deserves a lot of credit for beginning the normalization of relations with China.

Thomas remarked that after the Watergate scandal, the country needed to heal and that Gerald Ford succeeded in bringing stability to the nation. She said that Ford's pardon of Nixon so early in his term hurt him politically and contributed to his defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Carter, Thomas said, was an honest man but lacked the warmth necessary to establish good working relationships with the political establishment in Washington. “He made his biggest mistake by not really connecting with the Democratic leaders. He had a Democratic Congress but they always thought he was a little cold. They liked Reagan, because of the Irish sense of humor and so forth.” She said Carter’s greatest contribution was making the issue of human rights “the centerpiece of our foreign policy.”

Unlike his predecessor, Ronald Reagan was very well-liked. Thomas said Reagan's style of leadership also was very different from Carter’s. “He ran the White House like a chairman of the board. You know, don’t bother me with the details, the nitty gritty, but he made the big decision. I think that there certainly was a Reagan revolution and he certainly did turn the country to the right where it’s been since his era,” she said.

Thomas criticized Reagan for his relationship with the press. “His managed news was state of the art. The inner circle would decide what we could cover every day even though there were many things on his agenda that we should have been allowed to cover and weren’t... . So everything was very controlled, very manipulated.”

Thomas commended Reagan for his efforts to achieve peace with the Soviet Union. She credits his wife, Nancy, for persuading the president to go to Moscow for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. “Suddenly, the 'Evil Empire' was no more in Reagan’s eyes and he noted to us that the Russians laugh, and they cry, and they’re human. When we got back to Washington, I said to him, ‘Mr. President, do you think if you had gone to Moscow, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you might have found out they laugh, they cry, they’re human.’ ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘they’ve changed.’"

Although he had served as Reagan’s vice president, Thomas found the elder George Bush to be much more moderate and more attuned to foreign affairs. “He had had every appointed job in foreign affairs that a rich man can seek — none of it rubbed off on his son… . [But] the economy did him in.”

Bill Clinton defeated George Bush in 1992 during the recession that gripped the country. And while she believes Clinton tarnished the office of the presidency as a result of his handling of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Thomas said, “he brought prosperity, balanced the budget, created a surplus, worked for world peace in the Balkans, Ireland, the Middle East.”

During one of her last interviews with Clinton on Air Force One, she said she asked the president, "‘If you could take something from the White House that belongs to the American people, what would it be?’ Well, I didn’t know he was going to bring a U-haul. But he did say it would be the moon rock. He said that whenever tensions were high in the Oval Office and he wanted the staff to get off each other’s throats, he’d tell them to chill out, point to the moon rock and tell them it was 3.6 billion years old and that’s what we call perspective.”

One of Thomas’ harsher criticisms of the current administration is its tight grip on the press. “The president has not had a news conference, a full-scale formal news conference since last July 8th and that’s a long time … if you’re trying to get answers to very important questions. He does answer questions at picture takings but there’s no follow-up and it’s very scatter gun and so forth. And it’s just not the same thing as a formal news conference… . As for Ari Fleischer, he’s a nice man but … he’s on one page no matter what you ask him, (and) he’ll go back to that page.”

Thomas said the White House has been able to control press reports on the administration’s actions toward Iraq. “I’m not saying it (the situation in Iraq) isn’t dangerous, I don’t mean to say that at all, but all of a sudden it has become the most dangerous thing after 11 years of having it contained. And so there is a manipulative, very cynical, I think, conjuring up of this as the biggest threat now, imminent and so forth… .There’s so question that you beat the war drums and you hype a story, the reporters at the White House are at their (the administration's) mercy.”

The veteran journalist said that after the president, the press secretary has the next toughest job at the White House. “The most important thing that a press secretary has to have in my opinion is to be able to walk into the Oval Office … whenever there’s a crisis, whenever there’s something that only the president can say, this press secretary should be able to walk into the president’s office and say, ‘Mr. President, this is what’s happening. What are we gonna say about it? What are we going to do about it?’ Marlin Fitzwater was that kind of a man… . A good press secretary gets that nailed down that no chief of staff, no one else can stop you from talking to the president when it becomes very, very important,” she said.

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