Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times by Thomas, Helen Format: PaperbackPublished by Scribner, 2000 Helen Thomas has had an inside view of the making of history for nearly four decades. Assigned by UPI to the White House press corps in 1961, Thomas has questioned every president since Kennedy. She was the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association, the first female officer of the National Press Club, and the first woman member (and later president) of the Gridiron Club. In Front Row at the White House, she revisits her many accomplishments and offers an insider's view on the changes wrought on the office of president over the last 38 years. Publishers Weekly The veteran Washington reporter gives her account of instant history at the White House, the result of her fly-on-the-wall perch covering the administrations of every president since JFK for United Press International. Thomas is always on hand with a jaded eye, a cynical word and a probing question. And her story gives a view of the Fourth Estate surprisingly dissimilar to those that predominate today. In Thomass telling, the press is an institution, one of the many necessities of a democratic society. Gossip and scandal dont drive events, she asserts, as much as the desire to get the story and tell it first. Contained within her memoirs are remarkable recollections of Lyndon Johnson, who investigated the press as much as it investigated him; of Richard Nixon, who asks Thomas to say a prayer for me in one of Watergates darkest hours; of Martha Mitchell, a cabinet wife (of Nixons John Mitchell) who got sucked in and spat out by Beltway politics; and of First Ladies who offer birthday greetingsand others who close off their private lives. While the book is woefully thin on personal motivation and inner thoughts (one of the shortest chapters is on Thomass husband, former AP White House reporter Doug Cornell), it provides a sharp chronicle of the nations recent historyand of the crusade of women reporters to be considered the equal or better of their male counterparts.
