Not to worry: The Scrapbook is not going to rehearse last week’s Helen “Tell Them to Get the Hell Out of Palestine” Thomas saga, since we assume our readers already know the details of Thomas’s suggestion that the Jews of Israel relocate en masse to Germany, Poland, or the United States. And her subsequent timely retirement as a Hearst columnist.
Our mission is clarification. Every-body in official and semi-official Washington seems to agree that Helen Thomas’s declaration was both grotesque and ill-informed—even insensitive, to use a formulation she would appreciate. But there is also a consensus that her bumptious remarks were some kind of tragic aberration, ending a long, distinguished career on a discordant note. The received wisdom is that 89-year-old Helen Thomas was not only a legendary journalist who asked presidents the tough questions no other White House reporter would ask, but also a trailblazer among women in journalism: the first female member of the Gridiron Club, the first female president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and so on.
Well, the received wisdom is nonsense. The fact is that, by the time Helen Thomas showed up in the White House press room in the late 1950s-early 60s, there were innumerable women in Washington journalism (Frances Lewine, May Craig, Pauline Frederick, Sarah McClendon, Mary Lou Forbes, Liz Carpenter, Lee Hall, Nancy Dickerson, Mary McGrory, etc.), reporting, writing columns, appearing on television, asking uncomfortable questions at presidential press conferences. Yes, Thomas was one of the first female members of the National Press Club, as we have repeatedly been reminded; but before the Press Club went co-ed, there was a Women’s National Press Club in Washington, with hundreds of members, who voted to dissolve their own organization and join the National Press Club. Helen Thomas went along for the ride.
Nor was she any great shakes as a journalist. Helen Thomas labored as a pool scribe for United Press International which, in the course of her tenure, very nearly became extinct. By the early 1990s, UPI had shrunk to a fragment of its onetime self and was essentially out of the North American market: While Helen Thomas was being showered with Ivy League honorary degrees in recent years, it is entirely likely that her output was never seen in any American newspaper of consequence.
In The Scrapbook’s estimation, Helen Thomas’s primary characteristic as a journalist was her dogged, some might say pathological, determination to hang on forever. She stayed for decades in the thankless task of tagging around behind presidents long after smarter reporters had moved on to substantive assignments. She did not ask “tough” questions in the press room: From her front-row seat—by grace of seniority, not merit—she made foolish, contentious statements that embarrassed most of her colleagues, and were easily dismissed by a series of White House press secretaries. Even when she quit UPI and began writing an opinion column for Hearst, no one in the press corps had the fortitude to ask what an argumentative columnist was doing among White House correspondents.
Helen Thomas’s assertion that the State of Israel should be Judenrein—the old Nazi term for a place “cleansed” of Jewish inhabitants—was not an aberration at all, but very much in keeping with longtime convictions and past statements. Helen Thomas was neither a feminist pioneer nor a journalist of weight: She was an arrogant, self-aggrandizing mediocrity whose sole distinction was the inordinate length of her tenure. She will not be missed.
Has ‘Rolling Stone’ Turned on Obama?
Besides the latest Gallup poll showing the president with a dismal 44 percent approval rating, Barack Obama is now taking friendly fire. We refer to an article by Tim Dickinson in the June 24 issue of Rolling Stone: “The Spill, the Scandal, and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years—and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.”
Yes, the piece is written from a paranoid liberal perspective—the Bush administration gets plenty of blame, the Justice Department’s criminal probe should have come sooner, and offshore drilling should finally come to an end. That said, Dickinson is merciless in exposing Obama and his staff as utterly incompetent, if not worse.
“It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office,” writes Dickinson. “But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill.”
Dickinson reminds us of Obama’s schedule in the early days of the disaster, including a trip to the Grove Park Inn resort and spa. “After returning from his vacation,” he writes, “Obama spent Monday, April 26th palling around with Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, congratulating them on their World Series victory. . . . On Tuesday the 27th, Obama visited a wind-turbine plant in Iowa. Wednesday the 28th, he toured a biofuels refinery in Missouri and talked up financial reform in Quincy, Illinois. He didn’t mention the oil spill or the Gulf.”
Even when the administration did try to get its act together, its haplessness was exposed: “The White House press office organized a show of overwhelming force, with Gibbs convening Browner, Napolitano, Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, EPA chief Lisa Jackson and Coast Guard Rear Adm. Sally Brice-O’Hara for a single press conference on April 29th. Though clearly meant to signal engagement, the all-star crew didn’t have their message straight. When Brice-O’Hara praised ‘the professionalism of our partner, BP,’ Napolitano quickly barked, ‘They are not our partner! They are not our partner!’ For her part, Napolitano revealed that she didn’t know whether the Defense Department possessed any assets that could help contain the spill, and referred vaguely to ‘whatever methodologies’ BP was using to seal the well.”
But wait, there’s more: “From the start, the administration has seemed intent on allowing BP to operate in near-total secrecy. . . . [T]he Obama administration has instead attacked scientists who released independent estimates of the spill. . . . Scientists were stunned that NOAA, an agency widely respected for its scientific integrity, appeared to have been co-opted by the White House spin machine.” And on and on it goes.
It seems like only yesterday that Rolling Stone had Barack Obama looking saintly on its cover. Reading this essay, will the president wonder, “If I’ve lost Rolling Stone, I’ve lost . . . ”
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The Not-So-Greasy Pole (cont.)
Citing safety concerns, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler, last month deep-sixed a longstanding tradition in which the plebes cap their first year by ascending a well-greased obelisk, the Herndon Monument. Our item two weeks ago recounting the sad demise of the greased pole climb provoked several outraged responses. Paul Withington, CDR USNR (Ret.) and father of an Annapolis ’10 grad and a West Point ’12 cadet, spoke for many in this letter to The Scrapbook:
If the Naval Academy were truly interested in the well-being of the midshipmen they’d do away with the Color Parade, an annual event recognizing the best performing company (130 midshipmen) of the semester. Wearing long sleeved, wool tunics with two rows of gold buttons and a tight collar, this year’s brigade marched out in the late May blazing sun and high humidity and they started fainting. The corpsmen had them laid out in the shade at the edge of the parade field for all the world looking as if they were battle casualties. Dozens went down this year. Or perhaps the Academy should eliminate “Sea Trials,” a long morning of things like mud crawling, paddling rafts in combat gear, and swimming in camos in the Severn River (at a time of year when the river is still quite cold). Some midshipmen get injured during this event, not infrequently more than during the Herndon climb. Personally, I think they should keep greasing the monument and continue with Sea Trials and Color Parade. Perhaps the real change needed is to replace the vice admiral USN [superintendent] with a lieutenant general USMC.
Rant of the Week
Barack “whose ass to kick” Obama ticked off Steve Czaban, The Scrapbook’s favorite sports talk radio host, who let loose at czabe.com:
Our president can only do so much. He’s not Aquaman. But not having run a country myself, here is what I think I would have done in Week 1. a. Tell my staff to bring me the 5 most expert, independent deep sea oil drilling engineers. b. Tell the CEO of BP to get his ass to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave ASAP. c. Have one big . . . meeting in which, I, as president, make sure to remind everybody around the table: “Look, don’t bullshit me!” Take all of the info you gather, and get a plan. Don’t piss off BP, because you now need their ass to help you fix this. But don’t coddle them either. So why then, didn’t our country’s CEO . . . decide to meet with BP’s CEO for something this basic? Oh, because our Teleprompter King was too “smart” for that ol’ ploy. “My experience is when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s going to say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.” REACT: Oh, your “experience”? Your experience at, what, exactly? Community organizing? . . . The same guy who wants to have dialogue with foreign dictators suddenly doesn’t think a meeting with the CEO of BP will be productive as the entire Gulf of Mexico turns into a fudge sundae. You know who would have been a real ace of an asset in the White House right now? A vice president with executive experience, from the state with the most oil production in the country. Oh, wait. Never mind. . . . She’s stupid, and Barry’s smart, or at least that’s what one sportswriter I know argued with me during the election. A sportswriter whose big resume item is ghostwriting a book with Shaq. He was beyond certain that becoming governor of Alaska—and running the state—took virtually no brains, but that covering the NBA made him an intellectual. Whatever. I shudder to think what Barry will be like when a real crisis emerges. Something a little more complicated, fast moving, and difficult than a big oil zit on the ocean floor. I hope we never have to find out.