Woody Allen famously said 90 percent of life is just showing up, and Thomas was there for a huge chunk of history. She is a role model, and a friend, and as she is being pilloried for voicing an unpopular opinion. I remember when she first moved from UPI to become an opinion columnist, and how she struggled with the transition. After 40 years of reporting only the facts, her editor would bounce her column back to her, saying, “This is not a column, this is a story.”
Thomas will be 90 years old on Aug. 4. She was born the year that women got the vote, and as the recipient of the Helen Thomas Award for excellence in journalism, bestowed on me last week by the American News Women’s Club, the night before all hell broke loose over Thomas’s ill-conceived comments, I would only ask that she not be judged by the last thing she said but by the pioneering career that went before. At the award dinner at the National Press Club, with everyone lauding her, she quipped, “I’ll have to adjust my halo.” Now the halo is off and replaced by a YouTube video that even her biggest admirers could not justify or excuse.
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