The Lady Who Fears No White House

White House correspondent Helen Thomas: 'A blend of journalism and acupuncture' – by Julian Borger

It is not entirely true that the White House press corps gave George Bush an easy ride on the road to war in Iraq. There was one significant exception. Almost every day the administration had to face the furious questioning of an octogenarian woman from Detroit who at times seemed to be the sole sceptical voice in the building.

At the age of 85, Helen Thomas is a little frail and her voice does not carry as well as it once did, but she cannot be easily overlooked. She has been reporting on the White House longer than most of her fellow journalists have been alive. She has interrogated every president since John F Kennedy, and she was on duty in Washington the day he was shot. She was standing in the Oval Office when Lyndon B Johnson announced he would not stand for re-election, and she accompanied Richard Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972.

Along the way, Thomas, now a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, has become an institution. Her seat is reserved with a small brass plaque in the centre of the front row in the White House briefing room, and from that perch just below the podium she stares up at the administration's mouthpiece each day and poses arrestingly direct questions.

About a month before the invasion, for instance, she demanded to know why President Bush wanted "to bomb innocent Iraqis". Ari Fleischer, the spokesman at the time, assured her that he had no such intention. Thomas remains unconvinced. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, she seldom misses an opportunity to tell the president and his aides they have blood on their hands.

"I don't think history will ever vindicate anyone who starts a war on false pretences," she said. "I think it diminished us as a people … We are despised when we were once beloved."

After avoiding her for three years, President Bush relented in March and called on Thomas at a press conference, an act of apparent recklessness that itself made news. "You're going to be sorry," she told him, before unleashing a tirade vaguely disguised as an inquiry.

Reminding the president that "your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis", she went on: "Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true … My question is: why did you really want to go to war?"

The president laid out his stock justification for the decision to invade, and joked that he "semi-regretted" calling on the doyenne of the White House scribes in the first place. Everybody laughed, but his choice of questioners may not have been as foolhardy as it seemed.

At a time when the formerly quiescent White House press corps scents blood and the president is facing a barrage of questions on a festering array of scandals, Thomas's opinionated style serves to bolster the Republican claim that the press has a liberal bias.

Thomas admits her frontal assaults are relatively easy for the White House to deflect and that it is often the more crafted questions that elicit newsworthy answers, but "that's who I am", she shrugs. After 57 years as a reporter for United Press International, she turned commentator in 2000 and is not turning back.

Even in her earlier days as a reporter, Thomas had a knack for making the powerful ill at ease. President Kennedy said she was "a nice girl if she'd ever get rid of that pad and pencil". Gerald Ford remarked that she practised "a fine blend of journalism and acupuncture" and Colin Powell, semi-joking after being cornered at a cocktail party, wondered aloud: "Isn't there a war we could send her to?"

In theory, that is how reporters are supposed to be, irritating thorns on democracy's rose. But for a while in the wake of the September 11 attacks, through the Iraq invasion and until well after Bush's re-election in 2004, Thomas found herself a lonely heckler in the press room.

"You like to feel there is some sort of support in the room and I didn't feel that way at all," she said of her colleagues. "They felt the hot presence of the corporate heads in New York. Nobody was supposed to rock the boat or cross the line, and everybody was supposed to have an American flag on their lapel."

Thomas is one of nine children from a Lebanese-American family, but she denies her vehemence over the Iraq war has anything to do with her Arab parentage. She shows as much disdain for the Vietnam war.

In fact - in one of many offhand remarks that serve as a reminder of just how long she has been around in the business - she points out that she was against colonial adventures in Indochina when the French muscled their way back in, in 1945.

Sitting in the front row of history is not always as glamorous as it might seem. The seats themselves are old and soiled, giving the appearance of having been ripped out of a 1950s cinema and not washed since. The briefing room - which was built by President Nixon on top of Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool - has seen better days. The reporters' cubicles are hopelessly cramped, a vending machine is the only source of food or drink and there is no wireless internet connection.

For all these indignities, Thomas has no plans to retire. She rises each day ahead of the pack and can be found flicking through the papers from 5.30 am at a coffee shop near the White House. She then takes her seat in good time for the "gaggle", the off-camera briefing that officially kicks off the morning.

She married once, at 51, to a fellow wire correspondent, Douglas Cornell, who developed Alzheimer's four years later and was dead seven years after that. She later called their time together "the most unexpected and wonderful thing that ever happened to me".

Both before and since, her life has been her work, and her work has been getting up presidents' noses.

"Why is it supposed to be courageous to ask questions of the president?" she wants to know. "He's a public servant … He has to explain what he does, and it's up to us to get him to do that."