Helen Thomas, Pioneering Woman Journalist , Dies at 92

Helen Thomas, the longtime White House correspondent and first woman to gain access and eventually authority in journalistic spheres traditionally reserved for men, died on Saturday at age 92 at her apartment in Washington. After wire service United Press International (UPI) assigned her to the White House in 1961, Thomas covered 10 different United States presidents, rising to fame as a legendary griller until 2010 controversy over anti-Israel comments spurred her retirement. She had battled a series of illnesses for a long time, going in and out of hospitals before coming home for good on Thursday, her friend Muriel Dobbin told the Associated Press.

Thomas' long career saw her break down barrier after barrier for women in the press. She started out writing "soft news" - covering women's news, society and celebrity profiles - the realm to which women were typically relegated then. But by 1974, she was the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service with UPI, for whom she reported for some 57 years. Thomas was also the first woman to join the White House Correspondents' Association and later the first to serve as its president in addition to the first female member of the Gridiron Club press group.

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Her barbed tongue and penchant for toothed questions made her feared among White House press secretaries, one of whom described being grilled by her as "torture", according to the AP. She clashed most famously with George W. Bush, to whom she referred as the worst president in American history. During his presidency, she went three years without being called upon to ask a question. She turned to her columns - begun in 2000 with Hearst News Service - to lambast that administration, charging they ignored "significant early warnings of an imminent strike against the U.S." before 9/11 and afterward leading the United States "into a senseless war against Iraq, a calamity still under way as he leaves office almost six years after the invasion."

"I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter," Thomas told an audience during a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. "Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'"

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But that sharp tongue got her into deeper trouble - in 2010, she made a baldly anti-Israel comment, telling a rabbi that the Jews should leave Israel. Video of her statement kicked off a firestorm and eventually forced her resignation from the White House newsroom.

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Thomas was born in Winchester, Kentucky, on August 4, 1920, to Lebanese immigrants, and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She graduated from Wayne State with a bachelor's degree in 1942.

"Former Gridiron Club president Helen Thomas, our first female member, died Saturday morning at her Washington apartment after a long illness," Gridiron's Carl P. Leubsdorf wrote in an email to members. "She would have been 93 next month."