Former White House correspondent and trailblazing journalist, Helen Thomas, died today at the age of 92, the Chicago Tribune reports.
She's reported on every U.S. president from John Kennedy to Barack Obama, and worked the White House for 49 years, reporting for United Press, International and Hearst newspapers. Susan Hahn of the Washington journalists' organization said in a statement that Thomas died after a long battle with illness.
Thomas ended dozens of presidential news conferences with the familiar phrase, "Thank you, Mr. President," serving as the senior correspondent with the White House. Her last 10 years of journalism were spent working for Hearst, a job which allowed her to be more opinionated than at her hard-news reporting work at UPI.
Thomas's comment captured on video in 2010 that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" was met with much dissemination online.
The journalist later issued a statement of apology: "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."
In 2003, she described George W. Bush as the "worst president ever," and criticized him on the Iraq war which she felt the media had abetted by not challenging the President strongly enough about.
In 2009, she asked President Obama, "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse and don't give us this Bushism 'If we don't go there, they'll all come here.'"
She was first assigned to the White House in 1961 by UPI after great interest was taken in her by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the new young president.
Thomas, who grew up in Detroit and was the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, felt strongly about Middle East affairs, though perhaps her comments about the conflict in 2010 were her undoing, as at the time she said the Jewish people should "go home, to Poland and Germany, America and everywhere else."
Nonetheless, Thomas broke new ground for women journalists by becoming one of Washington's best-known reporters. In 1975, she broke the 90-year all male barrier, becoming the first female president of the prestigious journalists' Gridiron Club in 1993.She announced her retirement just short of her 90th birthday.
"I have witnessed presidents in situations of great triumph and adulation, when they are riding the crest of personal fulfillment, and I have seen them fall off their pedestals through an abuse of power or what President Clinton called 'a lapse of critical judgment,'" Thomas wrote in the memoir "Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times."
Click here to see photos of Helen Thomas meeting with various presidents during her groundbreaking career.
