品牌：
基本信息
·出版社：Scribner Book Company
·页码：416 页码
·出版日：2000年
·ISBN：0684868091
·条码：9780684868097
·版次：2000-05-03
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 32开
内容简介
Book Description
The author describes her many years of reporting on the White House, exploring the changing relationship between the presidency and the press.
Amazon.com
Born in 1920, Helen Thomas was one of United Press International's very few female journalists for years. She promoted herself to UPI's White House Press Corps in 1960 ("I just started showing up every day") and has reported on eight administrations. Her episodic, old-fashioned autobiography contains anecdotes about each president, their first ladies, and their staff. Her stories are often funny, and she doesn't mind when the joke's on her: "Isn't there a war somewhere we can send her to?" Colin Powell inquired after being buttonholed at a party; President Carter's mother said the greatest lesson she learned in 80 years was, "Never to open my mouth around Helen Thomas." She's also fair: even the press secretaries get balanced treatment, though Thomas criticizes the White House's growing efforts to "manage" the news. (Her most affectionate political portrait is of the unmanageable Watergate wife Martha Mitchell.) Thomas pays loving tribute to her parents, hardworking, religious Syrian immigrants, and to her late husband, Associated Press reporter Doug Cornell, but she keeps the focus on the people and public events she covered. Scrupulously impartial when reporting the news, she feels free here to be bluntly opinionated, especially in her unrepentant advocacy of the media's responsibility to ask uncomfortable questions, even when the public condemns them as intrusive.
--Wendy Smith
FromPublishers 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.
FromKirkus Reviews
A straightforward, though not reflective, memoir from Thomas (Dateline: White House, 1975) on the best beat in the worldcovering every president from JFK to Clinton for United Press International. The daughter of Lebanese parents, Thomas grew up in Detroit. She came to her passion for journalism early, having written for her high school and college papers. After covering such beats as the Department of Justice and Capitol Hill, she was assigned to the White House in 1961. As the dean of the White House press corps and the person who delivers the final Thank you, Mr. President at press conferences, Thomas has become an instantly recognized fixture among the gaggle who report on the presidency. She has won the respectand often incurred the wrathof presidents, first ladies, and press secretaries for her bulldog tenacity and her unenthralled view of their work. Many of her best stories come when she sticks to her aim to provide an impressionistic view of these remarkable men and women (e.g., a scandal-scarred Richard Nixon startling her by asking for her prayers). But her assessments of presidents are conventional, and she is rarely critical of her professions shortcomings. For instance, she acknowledges that she enraged LBJ by revealing daughter Lucis wedding plans before the latter had the chance to discuss them with her father. She fails to see that such matters have nothing whatever to do with her aim to hold government officials accountable and to explain their actions and policies. Moreover, while proud of her firsts as a female reporter (e.g., the first woman recipient of the National Press Clubs Fourth Estate Award), she reveals little about what sustained her against male chauvinists of the media. A crisply written account of jousting between presidents and press, but without much insight into these two institutions that Thomas so clearly reveres. (16 pages b&w photos)
FromLibrary Journal
Thomas was the first woman reporter to cover the Presidency, a job she has been doing since 1961.
Book Dimension:
length: (cm)19.3 width:(cm)13.9
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