Reporter Helen Thomas of the United Press and the United Press International died last month and there’s been a lot of renewed talk about an offhand remark she made about Israel. She covered the presidents for more than 50 years and was the heart of the Washington press corps. For her remark she was attacked, and all sorts of evil occurred: stripping her of past honors and more. When she was interviewed a few years ago by Playboy they identified her as disgraced. Following is part of the reaction I wrote in my journal at that time and the last part I wrote while thinking about the continuing calumny heaped on her (even unto death) by jealous people. They do it because she was a highly accomplished WOMAN who rose above them. You could feel the glee and sanctimony when they heard the remarks and sprang to attack, as if they finally GOT her, as if their minds were famished from years of watching her excellence. I posted the following on the UPI Downhold wire and also in her funeral book.
"When Playboy
labeled Helen Thomas “the disgraced dean of the White House press corps,” it
bothered me in my heart.
Who is
disgraced? Justice is disgraced when a 35 year old white man is serving a
six year sentence for killing his wife while in an adjacent cell a 25 year old
black man is in the sixth year of 25 years to life for having marijuana in his
pocket.
Torture
disgraces all of humanity. Disgraces are common.
Helen Thomas
was attacked, maligned, opposed, envied, scorned. She was not disgraced.
Grace could no more be removed from her than her courage and her constant
spirit.
When she was
removed from her seat I felt a lightning quick silence, like a wave through the
air and out to the horizons and around the world. Disgrace was when humans of various
kinds hooted and reveled and sprang to opportunities to contribute to the
desire to obliterate her.
The Israeli
stuff? Quibbles like old shreds of debris blown by the wind at the feet
of a monument. Mistake or not, consider why the reaction was so vicious.
Other mistakes that result in innumerable deaths and unimaginable destruction,
mistakes that hurt the soul of the world – these in their thousands are
disregarded, discarded, tossed into the transient box, their perpetrators
allowed and welcomed into ordinary life. We must get on.
In Helen
Thomas’s case – mistake or no -- why such a reaction to such a person?
I am a very
small person compared to her but in instances when I have stood up in a very
strong way I have sometimes felt anger and rage coming at me like a blast from
a furnace. What she stood for was very simple at its core. Now the world
is inundated with the infinite verbosity of political and public relations
language, language which is dead, which does not breathe. Those who want, in
Helen’s way, to find out what happened and to report it – they are scarce on
the ground, hard to find in the noise.
What Helen Thomas did in her life will resonate – to borrow from
Rilke -- “far beyond life and far beyond time.”
She is and
always has been to me a warrior and an exemplar.”
