Longtime
White House correspondent Helen Thomas is being celebrated today as a
trailblazer who showed the way for young female reporters and the avatar for
tough-minded journalism. Thomas deserves great credit for making her way
against the odds in a man’s world before becoming a fixture as the dean of the
White House press corps and a leading member of the once-all male Gridiron
Club. Doing so required grit, tenacity, and the kind of work ethic that enabled
her to beat out many of her colleagues and win her a place among the elites of
the Washington press corps. But even the most laudatory discussion of Thomas’s
career must mention its end when she was forced to resign from her last post
for an anti-Semitic outburst. In order to maintain the story line of Thomas as
trailblazer, obituaries like the front-page article in today’s New York Times, and appreciations like
the one in the Daily Beast by Eleanor Clift, must treat it as something that
does not detract from her significance or an understandable expression of
legitimate opinion that showed she didn’t care what others thought.
But an
honest assessment of her legacy requires us to do more than make a token
acknowledgement of the “get the hell out of Palestine” statement while lionizing
her as a symbol of equal rights for women. Thomas’s prejudice was not a minor
flaw. It was a symptom not only of her Jew-hatred but also of a style of
journalism that was brutally partisan and confrontational. We want reporters to
be tough and relentless in the pursuit of good stories and truth. Yet anyone
who watched her use her perch in the front row in the White House press room as
if it were a platform for political opposition to administrations whose
policies she didn’t like must understand that, along with her symbolic
importance, we must also give Thomas her share of the credit for the creation
of an ugly spirit of partisanship that characterizes much of the press.
As for
Thomas’s line about throwing the Jews out of Palestine, the attempts to soften
its impact by her friends still fall flat. The reporter wasn’t talking about
Jewish settlers in the West Bank. She was referring to all six million Israeli
Jews who, she thought, ought to go back where they supposedly belonged, to
Germany and Poland. We are supposed to give her a pass for that because she was
either elderly at the time or because she was the child of Lebanese immigrants,
who brought their prejudices against Jews with them. Though she subsequently
attempted to weasel her way out of the dustup with a statement that expressed
her wish for peace, it was clear that she thought such a peace ought to be
based on Israel’s eradication. This wasn’t so much, as the Times wrote, an
“offhand remark” as it reflected a deep-seated hatred for Israel and its Jewish
population that had characterized much of her reporting and writing throughout
her career. That her fans are willing to regard this as not germane to the main
story about her achievements is to be expected. But let’s ask ourselves how her
stature would be affected if her offhand remarks, even in her dotage, had been
aimed at African-Americans, rather than Israelis? Rationalizing or minimizing
her prejudices for the sake of preserving Thomas’s reputation is intellectually
indefensible.
Many
people grew to like Thomas specifically because of her unrelenting hostility to
the George W. Bush administration and her open opposition to the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Those stances are seen by some as either prescient or
praiseworthy these days, but even if you shared her political position, it’s
important to understand that her use of her front-row seat in the White House
briefing room to promote those positions represented a disturbing breakdown in
civility as well as the way the press views itself.
Thomas
made no secret of the fact that she felt the mainstream press gave too much
leeway to Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But her decision to fight her
own war against the war on terror from inside the White House wasn’t quite the
responsible position that many of her backers pretend it to be. Thomas’s point
wasn’t so much based on skepticism about whether Saddam Hussein really did
possess, as every Western intelligence agency thought he did, weapons of mass
destruction as it was on the idea that Islamist terrorists and their allies had
legitimate grievances against the United States and the West. In her view,
American attempts to defend against these threats or Israeli efforts to protect
their people against a bloody terrorist offensive were the real problems.
Moreover,
as much as the press needs to always be on guard against a tendency to be
played by the president (something that has been crystal clear during most of
Barack Obama’s presidency, as much of the mainstream media served as his unpaid
cheerleaders), Thomas illustrated the pitfalls of the opposite trend. At times,
Thomas appeared to be acting as if she thought the role of the press was to be
the mouthpiece for Bush’s detractors. In doing so, she undermined her own shaky
credibility more than she cut the president down to size.
Journalists
should recognize that Thomas helped paved the way for subsequent generations of
women in the working press. But we should also understand that the negative
lessons of her career are as instructive as the positive ones. Helen Thomas may
have been a pathfinder for women, but her prejudices and poor judgment are
textbook examples of how journalists should not behave.
Goldberg:
Helen
Thomas’s death on July 20 brought to mind my last encounter with her, a couple
of years ago, not long after she gave full vent to her almost comically hostile
anti-Israel views.
In
2010, if you recall, Thomas, a longtime reporter and columnist, was asked by a
rabbi with a video camera outside a White House Jewish heritage day celebration
(of all things) if she had any thoughts on Israel.
It
turns out she did. Here is what she said: “Tell them to get the hell out of
Palestine.”
The
rabbi, David Nesenoff, asked her where they should go.
“They
should go home,” she said. “Poland. Germany. And America, and everywhere else.
Why push people out who have lived there for centuries?”
Nesenoff:
“Are you familiar with the history of that region?”
Thomas
replied, “Very much. I’m of Arab background.”
Thomas
resigned from her job as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers shortly after the
video surfaced, though she was mostly retired at that point, anyway: Only a
handful of newspapers carried her reliably screedish columns.
Not
long after the controversy, Playboyran an interview with Thomas, who was asked
to respond to something I had written about the controversy.
Playboy:
“In the wake of your anti-Israel comments, a blogger from The Atlantic argued
there’s really no distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. He wrote,
‘Thomas was fired for saying that the Jews of Israel should move to Europe,
where their relatives had been slaughtered in the most devastating act of
genocide in history. She believes that once the Jews are evacuated from their
ancestral homeland, the world’s only Jewish country should be replaced by what
would be the world’s 23rd Arab country. She believes that Palestinians deserve
a country of their own but that the Jews are undeserving of a nation-state in
their homeland, which has had a continuous Jewish presence for 3,000 years . .
.’”
At
which point, Thomas interrupted to ask: “Did a Jew write this?”
The
interviewer gamely plowed through: “‘. . . and has been the location of two
previous Jewish states. This sounds like a very anti-Jewish position to me, not
merely an anti-Zionist position.’”
Thomas’s
reaction to my analysis of her essential atrociousness: “This is a rotten
piece. I mean, it’s absolutely biased and totally – who are these people?”
As it
happens, I ran into Thomas shortly after the Playboy interview appeared. I
couldn’t resist the urge to let her know that I was (and am, by the way)
Jewish, that the expression “these people” is not terrifically respectful and
also that telling the Jews of Israel to move to Germany, where their families
were murdered, scores fairly high on the Goldberg Insensitivity Scale. She
responded with something unprintable – not anti-Semitic, just unprintable –
which I found delightful, because I have a fondness for old people who curse
and are filled with vinegar.
I
understand the tributes to Thomas that have been issued after her death was
announced. She was a pioneer in the White House press room, and she carved a
path through Washington journalism that was followed by many other women,
including journalists of much greater talent and probity. And I understand why
obituary writers feel the need to capture her in her fullness. But I don’t
think her anti-Semitism should be treated as an afterthought, as it has been.
(This Eleanor Clift appreciation, which sanitizes Thomas’s anti-Jewish rant to
an unconscionable degree, is typical.)
The
toxic tone Thomas struck in her 2010 comments wasn’t the excusable byproduct of
old age; it was the same tone she’d been using, in her questions and her
columns, for years (this Jack Shafer column from 2003 will help you understand
the Thomas method).
Thomas’s
sympathy for the Palestinians was a blinding compassion. Her prejudices
followed inevitably from her inability to understand a competing and equally
valid – and equally tragic – national narrative.
Which,
by the way, isn’t the mark of a very good reporter.
