Born in Winchester, Kentucky, on August 4, 1920, to Lebanese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with $17 between them, Helen Thomas was the seventh of nine children. She moved from Winchester to Detroit with her family when she was four years old. In both localities, her father owned a grocery store, for which he kept the accounts in his head because neither he nor his wife could read or write. Despite their parents╒ lack of education, however, the Thomas children were raised in an atmosphere of great respect for learning, and encouragement to ╥be somebody╙ that extended to daughters as well as sons.
While attending Detroit╒s Eastern High School, Thomas decided to become a journalist. She joined the staff of the student newspaper, and found the work to be a perfect outlet for her boundless curiosity. After graduating in 1938 she worked for the campus newspaper at Wayne University in Detroit, where she received her B.A. in English in 1942 and moved to Washington, D.C.
She worked as a waitress until she got a job as a copy girl at the now defunct Washington Daily News. She was later promoted to cub reporter but soon lost her job to personnel cutbacks. Then, in 1943, she was hired by UPI (then called United Press) to write local news for radio. Although she was originally assigned stereotypically ╥female╙ subjects, Thomas╒s responsibilities at UPI expanded throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was given a regular beat at the U.S. Department of Justice in 1955, a job that would come to include coverage of the FBI, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and Capitol Hill as well.
In November 1960 Thomas was given her first assignment related to the Presidency╤covering the vacation of president-elect John F. Kennedy and his family in Palm Beach, Florida. Along with Associated Press reporter Frances Lewine, who became a close friend, she indefatigably trailed members of the presidential family around Palm Beach, going so far as to interview Jacqueline Kennedy╒s hairdresser and employees of the company that supplied diapers for John F. Kennedy, Jr. That experience whetted Thomas╒s taste for presidential coverage. From then on, she began showing up at presidential press conferences and briefings, where she gained a reputation for asking blunt questions with an irreverent and populist flavor.
In 1970, after UPI╒s chief White House correspondent Merriman Smith committed suicide, Thomas was promoted to his position. Not long afterward, the Watergate scandal gripped the country, and she distinguished herself through a number of journalistic exclusives. Much of her information was supplied by Martha Mitchell, the wife of John N. Mitchell, who served as Richard Nixon╒s attorney general and was later jailed for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Martha Mitchell trusted Thomas and would often confess her fears and suspicions surrounding her husband╒s activities in late-night phone calls. Thomas later called Mitchell ╥perhaps the only heroine of the Watergate tidal wave.╙ Earlier, Thomas had been the only print journalist to accompany President Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972.
In 1974 Thomas became UPI╒s White House bureau chief, the first woman to hold such a position for a wire service. This was one of a number of firsts for Thomas as a woman reporter, starting in 1959 when she and some female colleagues forced the then all-male National Press Club to allow them to attend an address to the group by Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev. After the National Press Club finally opened its membership to women in 1971, Thomas became its first female officer. In 1975 the Gridiron Club, Washington╒s most exclusive press organization, invited her to become its first female member, and she became its president in 1993. She also became the first woman president of the White House Correspondents╒ Association in 1975.
Thomas╒s bold, populist style and insistence on holding presidents accountable for their actions gained her great respect among fellow journalists and the public. However, she was not without her critics. She was accused by some reporters and White House officials of being too much of an advocate for her own point of view, and by others of expressing a pro-Arab bias in regard to the Middle East, a charge she emphatically denied.
Thomas published a memoir Dateline: White House in 1975. She received many honorary doctorates and journalism awards, and in 1992 UPI established an annual internship in her name to be awarded to a female journalism student. In 1993 she completed fifty years as a reporter for UPI, thirty-two of which were spent covering the presidency. As the senior wire-service correspondent at the White House, she was known to television viewers as the reporter whose dignified ╥Thank you, Mr. President╙ signaled the end of White House press conferences.
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