All: This Is My Last Day - Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15
In 2000, UPI was bought by News World Communications Inc., founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. It was the final blow for veteran UPI White House correspondent and Bureau Chief Helen Thomas. She said her good bye quietly and without fanfare – that was done by those who knew her.
Helen's departure came amid quite a bit of speculation and false claims. Arnaud de Borchgrave had been quoted as saying she would stay no matter who bought the service.
He had told the Associated Press, "She told me 48 hours ago that if I stayed, she was staying." On the following day, de Borchgrave was quoted in The Washington Post as saying of Helen: "It's a sad day. The whole country knows Helen Thomas. Those are terribly big shoes to fill. But, I'll have to move on. Everyone is dispensable.”
Grant Dillman, former Washington bureau chief and the man who hired me 31 years earlier, had this to say: "Gwen and I had Helen to dinner Wednesday night and she said flatly that she made no such statement to de Borchgrave or anyone else. In substantiation, she also said she cleaned out her White House desk five days before the announcement of the acquisition. Moreover, she said Lori Santos and her other UPI colleagues at the White House could verify it. And Helen Thomas does not lie."
Lee Katz, UPI International editor, also resigned, saying, "I simply could not work for the new ownership for a single day. Those types of affiliation should not be part of a mainstream news organization. It was hard to leave a job where you travel with the president and secretary of state, work with a legend like Helen Thomas and guide a dedicated staff. But it would be harder to stay under the circumstances."
Nice words, but I don't know who that dedicated staff was that Katz guided. The desk team of editors did everything they could to rein him in and point him in the right direction.
After much back and forth on the subject, Jennifer Brooks, who had occupied a seat very close to Helen in the UPI booth in the White House, had had enough. She sent the following on May 25, 2000:
All right! That does it! To settle, once and for all, Arnaud de Borchgrave's claim the Helen promised to go skipping hand-in-hand with him into the merger with the Moonies:
I got the word two weeks before the sale that Helen would quit if UPI sold out to the Unification Church. ... I spent seven glorious months squashed in the UPI White House booth with Helen Thomas, Lori Santos and Paul Basken. This I observed: Helen never lies. Helen never made any secret of her low opinion of the Washington Times. And Helen would never, ever embarrass UPI by resigning without good and sufficient warning (that she had good and sufficient cause goes without saying). If I knew two weeks ahead of time, Arnaud knew two weeks ahead of time.
Arnaud's broad hints that Helen had hitched her wagon to his star left me rolling on the floor in hysterics. There is no such thing as a private phone conversation in the White House booth, so I know that Arnaud's heart-to-hearts with Helen were limited mainly to efforts to scam invitations to White House galas.
His interaction with me was limited to efforts to describe a non-Helen future in which nanocomputers will be woven into our clothes so we can all read the newspaper on our sleeves. ... I never met anyone who loved her job as much as Helen did. She got to work first thing in the morning because she couldn't stand to stay away a moment longer. Some mornings she'd get there before the front gate guards and just plop down against the White House fence until someone came along to let her in. "Always remember," she'd tell me. "We have the best job in the world."
Do you have any idea what it must have cost her to give it up? Still, when her 57-year relationship with UPI turned abusive, she had the stones to walk away. You drove her away, Arnaud. Just like you drove away Lori and Paul and Dave Rosso and Don Folsum and Lisa Vandusen and Karen Byrne and Joe Warminsky and Pye Chamberlayne and every other reporter and copy editor who worked so heartbreakingly hard to keep UPI afloat for the two thankless years of your tenure. …
Jennifer, sometimes UPI White House and Capitol Hill reporter.
There was also a lot of debate over the influence the Unification Church would or would not have over UPI. At the time of the purchase, we were directed to an April 15, 1987, article in The Washington Post, which said, in part:
Washington Times editorial page editor William P. Chesire and four of his staff members resigned April 14, charging that Times editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave had allowed an executive of the Unification Church to dictate editorial policy. The Times is owned by News World Communications Inc., a corporation affiliated with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's church.
"It is no longer possible, in my judgment, for the Times to maintain independence from the Unification Church under the editorship of Mr. de Borchgrave, if it is indeed at all," said Chesire.
I weighed in with a lengthy e-mail to my colleagues in which I brought up some of the complaints that drove a wedge between me and upper management under de Borchgrave.
"Editorial judgment at UPI died a long time ago. It especially died when ADB came in and dictated what the desk would pick up. It died when he surrounded himself with such a group of incompetents that he had full control over what went out over the wire. I and my team of dedicated editors fought to keep crap off the wire. It was an uphill and losing battle, especially when ADB's hires wrote much of the crap and pretended to be reporters. ADB would call Susan Older who trembled down to the desk and said why haven't you picked up the Washington Times story on such and such. Because we had it, it needed checking, we still have a reporter in that department who can check it and get a better story if one is warranted."
I added that reporting had died at UPI and noted that the new hires at UPI, the so-called special international editors, left a lot to be desired. One of those special correspondents, I said, "was the one who screamed at our stringer overseas and told the desk to pick up a TASS story about Yeltsin bolting a meeting under his nose. That same editor/reporter sat at the State Department and finally matched a story, quoting a State Department spokesman, when every other news organization was quoting Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a news briefing at the State Department."