Last night, I attended a private event in San Francisco, a reception with Helen Thomas, the veteran UPI reporter who covered the White House for nearly 40 years.  After we mixed and mingled, Thomas gave a speech and took Q&A from the audience.

I expected Thomas’ speech to be an interesting journey through the administrations of the eight presidents she covered—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.  And while I expected Thomas’ politics to be left of center, what I was not prepared for was the vitriolic speech she gave against President Bush. 

Before Thomas started her speech, she was introduced by a founding partner of the hosting firm who reminded her that the audience was of mixed political views.  She clearly didn’t care.

She started off with a tirade against Bush, criticizing him for everything from the war in to social security.  Then she briefly moved on to some highlights of the presidents she covered.  While Thomas had nice words for every Democrat in the White House (including Clinton), she couldn’t find a kind thing to say about any Republican.  Nixon, she said, when given two roads to choose from, always took the wrong road.  Carter, on the other hand, made “human rights the centerpiece of his administration” and was later given the Nobel Peace prize, which he “so richly deserved.” 

Reagan, Thomas acknowledged, moved the country to the right.  She said he brought “Social Darwinism” to the nation:  “Can’t make it?  Tough!” 

Clinton “worked for peace.” She also talked about how impressed she was with his resilience.  And Thomas believes that Hillary Clinton has “her eye on the White House” and believes that the nation is “ready for a woman.”  Perhaps we are, Helen, but not that woman! 

But then she went back to George W. Bush: “a two-termer” who sees things in “black and white” with no middle ground.  Thomas said that he has tried more than anything to “break down the barrier between religion and the state.”

More importantly, she buys into Howard Dean’s spin that Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction just to get the nation into war.  “What he does in our name!” she lamented.

She believes that the press has fallen down on the job because they are scared of being called unpatriotic.  Thomas charged that “this Administration is the most secretive that I’ve ever covered.”  She said because of this secrecy, “Americans have been sheltered from the gruesome scenes in .”

The veteran reporter then criticized the Administration for invading the privacy of Americans under the guise of national security. She said that “people with dark skin” were being detained and held without any charges being filed, just because of their skin color. 

Remarking that are no statesmen like Khrushchev and Kennedy left in the world, she went on to say, “There are no statesmen now.  Only machismo by men who don’t have to fight.”

While the 20th century America will be remembered as a period of advancements in civil and women’s rights and technology, according to Thomas, the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the period of “man’s inhumanity to man.”

She continued to lament how divisive the country has become: “I feel that the right of dissent is being circumcised in xenophobic zeal.”

She then quoted a speech by Kennedy, given at the American University Washington D.C. in 1963, in which he said, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough — more than enough — of war and hate and oppression.”

“Would that we would hear such words today,” Thomas said.  “But don’t count on it.”

(The funny thing is, Thomas failed to complete the quote in which Kennedy went on to say:  “We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.”

Saddam’s was a world where the strong were unjust and the weak were murdered.  Today’s Iraq is in the infancy of its new democracy, which brings, among other benefits, equal rights for women.) 

Thomas mentioned Sept. 11th only once, and that was to explain why reporters were not reporting the “truth” as she sees it, about the war.  They were afraid of being called unpatriotic.  But she said later that she believed, after the Fitzgerald indictments came down, that national reporters were breaking free of their “corporate” bosses and starting to report the truth.

One person in the audience, so emotional that she was nearly in tears, asked Thomas why Colin Powell didn’t stand up to Bush and fight the war?  Why did he act as the pied piper and led us into war?  Thomas replied that Powell was simply being “the good German, really.”  She said he can’t “live that down” and that he and his former chief of staff are now loudly apologizing for their role in the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war.

She summed up her speech by trying to make the San Francisco liberals feel better about their world:  “America will survive this phase.  We shall overcome.”

People like Helen Thomas complain how the nation is so divided, but can’t seem to see their role shaping this bitter divide.  Calling Colin Powell a “good German” is inflammatory rhetoric designed to divide people and she knows it.

After Thomas spoke, a friendly liberal we chatted with over a glass of wine before the speech, stopped to ask my husband what he thought of her remarks.  When he said that he thought she gave one of the most vitriolic, partisan speeches he had heard in a long time, this woman was truly amazed.  She felt that the speech was fact-based and full of truth. 

The Democrats, led by Howard Dean, want to whine about the “divisiveness” in our national politics, but they themselves bear a great responsibility for it.  So do the Democratic members of congress who also believed that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destructions and supported the president’s decision to go to war (but are saying otherwise now). 

But if Helen Thomas thinks that the national reporters are finally ready to start telling the “truth,” the rest of us need to be ready to start reading national news stories with an even more critical eye.  It sounds to me like we’ll be getting an extra big portion of liberal bias in our national news coverage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.