Front Row At The White House
My Life and Times
-
- ¥2,200
-
- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
"I'm still here, still arriving at the White House in the wee hours of the morning, reading the papers and checking the wire, still waiting for the morning briefing, still sitting down to write the first story of the day and still waiting to ask the tough questions."
From the woman who has reported on every president from Kennedy to Clinton for United Press International: a unique glimpse into the White House -- and a telling record of the ever-changing relationship between the presidency and the press.
From her earliest years, Helen Thomas wanted to be a reporter. Raised in Depression-era Detroit, she worked her way to Washington after college and, unlike other women reporters who gave up their jobs to returning veterans, parlayed her copy-aide job at the Washington Daily News into a twelve-year stint as a radio news writer for UPI, covering such beats as the Department of Justice and other federal agencies.
Assigned to the White House press corps in 1961, Thomas was the first woman to close a press conference with "Thank you, Mr. President," and has covered every administration since Kennedy's. Along the way, she was among the pioneers who broke down barriers against women in the national media, becoming the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association, the first female officer of the National Press Club and the first woman member, later president, of the Gridiron Club.
In this revealing memoir, which includes hundreds of anecdotes, insights, observations, and personal details, Thomas looks back at a career spent with presidents at home and abroad, on the ground and in the air. She evaluates the enormous changes that Watergate brought, including diminished press access to the Oval Office, and how they have affected every president since Nixon. Providing a unique view of the past four decades of presidential history, Front Row at the White House offers a seasoned study of the relationship between the chief executive officer and the press -- a relationship that is sometimes uneasy, sometimes playful, yet always integral to democracy.
"Soon enough there will be another president, another first lady, another press secretary and a whole new administration to discover. I'm looking forward to it -- although I'm sure whoever ends up in the Oval Office in a new century may not be so thrilled about the prospect."
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.
