Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times - Hardcover

Thomas, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684849119 ISBN 13: 9780684849119

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

The Dean of the White House Press Corps describes her many years of reporting on the White House, offering a fascinating glimpse of the changing relationship between the presidency and the press as she discusses every administration, from Kennedy to Clinton, in a unique view of four decades of presidential history. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

Born in 1920, Helen Thomas was one of United Press International's very few female journalists for years. She promoted herself to UPI's White House Press Corps in 1960 ("I just started showing up every day") and has reported on eight administrations. Her episodic, old-fashioned autobiography contains anecdotes about each president, their first ladies, and their staff. Her stories are often funny, and she doesn't mind when the joke's on her: "Isn't there a war somewhere we can send her to?" Colin Powell inquired after being buttonholed at a party; President Carter's mother said the greatest lesson she learned in 80 years was, "Never to open my mouth around Helen Thomas." She's also fair: even the press secretaries get balanced treatment, though Thomas criticizes the White House's growing efforts to "manage" the news. (Her most affectionate political portrait is of the unmanageable Watergate wife Martha Mitchell.) Thomas pays loving tribute to her parents, hardworking, religious Syrian immigrants, and to her late husband, Associated Press reporter Doug Cornell, but she keeps the focus on the people and public events she covered. Scrupulously impartial when reporting the news, she feels free here to be bluntly opinionated, especially in her unrepentant advocacy of the media's responsibility to ask uncomfortable questions, even when the public condemns them as intrusive. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover

"THANK YOU, MR. PRESIDENT".

From the woman who has reported on every president from Kennedy to Clinton comes a privileged glimpse into the White House -- and a telling record of the ever-changing relationship between the presidency and the press.

Helen Thomas wanted to be a reporter from her earliest years. She turned a copy-aide job at the Washington Daily News into a powerful and successful career spanning thirty-seven years and eight U.S. presidents. Assigned to the White House press corps in 1961, Thomas was the first woman to close a press conference with "Thank you, Mr. President". She was also the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association and the first woman member, later president, of the Gridiron Club.

In this revealing memoir, which includes hundreds of anecdotes, observations, and personal details, Thomas looks back on a career spent with presidents at home and abroad, on the ground and in the air. Providing a unique view of the past four decades of presidential history, Front Row at the White House offers a seasoned study of the relationship between the chief executive officer and the press -- a relationship that is sometimes uneasy, sometimes playful, yet always integral to the democratic process.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684849119
• ISBN 13: 9780684849119
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416