Helen Thomas miffed over suicide quoteWhite House reporter: 'We all say stuff we don't want printed'
Posted: July 31, 2005
9:11 p.m. Eastern
Helen Thomas
Veteran reporter Helen Thomas is reportedly miffed about the publishing of her suicide threat if Vice President Cheney were to run for the presidency.
"The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I'll kill myself," she told the Hill newspaper last week. "All we need is one more liar."
According to the Drudge Report, Thomas claims she was just sounding off to her longtime friend Albert Eisele, editor of the Hill, and her comments were not meant for publishing.
"I'll never talk to a reporter again!" Thomas reportedly exclaimed. "We were just talking – I was ranting – and he wrote about it. That isn't right. We all say stuff we don't want printed."
Eisele said when he called Thomas, "I assume she knew that we were on the record." "She's obviously very upset about it, but it was a small item – until Drudge picked it up and broadcast it across the universe."
"Nobody has thinner skin than reporters," Eisele said with a laugh.
Thomas, a syndicated columnist for Hearst Newspapers, has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration.
In a May column, she wrote that Cheney "certainly could campaign on the theme that he has had experience in running the White House."
In the piece, Thomas said President Bush's not being notified of a terror scare caused by an off-course light airplane "again raises the question of who's running the show."
She's called Cheney "probably the most powerful vice president in recent times, perhaps in U.S. history."
Thomas told the Hill she thinks Cheney would like to run, "but it would be a sad day for the country if he does."
Last September, instead of criticizing Dan Rather over his use of unreliable documents about President Bush's military record, Thomas targeted Bush himself.
"To me, the real issue is why doesn't the president tell us the truth?" Thomas said at a university forum in New Jersey. "Why doesn't he put out all the documents? Because he can't, because there are too many gaps."