The woman who has been called a bigot, an anti-Semite, a racist and a “liberal loon” more times in recent days than I care to think about was the topic of a phone call with my grandfather Monday night.
My grandfather, one of the most adamantly conservative men I have ever met, had genuine sadness in his voice. It made keeping my composure an impossible task.
“Tell Helen we’ll miss her,” he told me.
The monster Helen Thomas has been made out to be is not the Helen Thomas I talk to regularly and have the honor of calling a friend.
Helen — the Hearst Newspapers columnist and former United Press International reporter who has covered presidents since John F. Kennedy — announced her retirement Monday after increased criticism for her remarks after a Jewish heritage celebration at the White House in May to a rabbi with a video camera, Rabbi David F. Nesenhoff.
Helen, 89, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was asked on the White House lawn if she had any “comments on Israel.”
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied. Pressed about where “they” should go, she said they should “go home” to “Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.”
Helen issued an apology June 4, saying she “deeply regrets” her comments, which “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.”
But that apology was not good enough. The commentators, liberal and conservative, said it was insincere. Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary for George W. Bush, spent days saying Helen was advocating “religious cleansing,” then, after Monday’s announcement, said her retirement was “tragic and sad.”
Those who have known her, worked with her and had supposedly been her companions, have publicly disowned her even after her apology, including Craig Crawford, who co-authored a book with her in 2009.
I do not support what Helen said, and I wish with all of my heart that she would not have said it. I know her words were hurtful and inappropriate.
But I know her apology was sincere. I know Helen Thomas is not a bigot. Or a racist. Or an anti-Semite. Or a liberal loon.
And it saddens me that 25 seconds of an inflammatory YouTube clip has brought down a storied, seven-decade journalism career.
Helen and I talk on the phone a few times a month. I had the honor of working with her last spring when I was an intern for the Washington bureau of Hearst Newspaper and getting to know the gracious and humble woman she truly is.
The woman who had long been my hero — the first female president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (which “firmly dissociates itself” from Helen’s “indefensible” comments) and the first woman member of the prestigious Gridiron Club — sat in a cubicle across from me.
The woman who had long been my hero gave me countless humble “thank yous” for bringing her coffee, even though it was me who owed her the thanks for the trails she blazed for women.
The woman who had long been my hero told me before one of President Barack Obama’s press conferences last spring that, if she ever had to miss a White House press briefing, I was welcome to use her seat.
As an intern, I had no place to sit, and felt it would have been more than enough of a privilege to cover the press conference from the office, watching it on a television.
But Helen Thomas told me, a lowly intern, that I was welcome to use the blue vinyl seat in the center of the front row of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. It was the only seat with an individual journalist’s name engraved on it and was surrounded by chairs for organizations like the Associated Press and the New York Times.
I never thought I would see the day when Helen — who I once overheard telling someone in the Hearst bureau that she planned to “die with her boots on” — would retire from that seat, from which she asked presidents the tough questions others were afraid to ask.
If she did not deeply regret her comments, she would not have retired. Of this I am sure.
When we first met, I awkwardly handed Helen my copy of her autobiography, “Front Row at the White House,” for her to sign.
In it, she wrote: “Let’s hope for peace and prosperity in the 21st century.”
Within that same book, she called Sept. 13, 1993 — the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord by then-Israeli prime minister Yitzak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat — “one of the most exciting moments of the Clinton foreign policy agenda.”
“There was a remarkable spirit of joy in the air with everyone hoping that the day would lead to a new era of reconciliation in the Middle East,” she wrote about the day.
I cannot say I understand why Helen said what she said to Nesenhoff because I do not.
But I know that every single time I talked to her, she said she wanted peace. For everyone.
Helen’s words to Rabbi Nesenhoff have become an immortalized sound bite on YouTube, but it was only after the controversy that Nesenhoff posted his entire conversation with Helen.
Nesenhoff — who was asked on camera by Helen if he got to meet the president — walked up to her as she was leaving the White House and asked if she had any advice for his teenage son and a friend about getting into the press corps.
“Go for it!” she told them with a smile. “You’ll never be unhappy. You’ll always keep people informed, and you’ll always keep learning.”
She pleaded with the young men to go into journalism, telling them, “All the best to you.”
Those words are missing from the news stories I keep reading and the statements from those who say her remarks are unforgivable.
But I hope she is forgiven.
I hope she is remembered for her quest for truth and for equality through her decades of journalistic service.
And I hope, more than anything, that she gets her wishes for peace.