Helen Thomas takes notes during an informal press briefing with President Gerald Ford, 1976. (Yes, that’s chief of staff Dick Cheney looking on at the far left.) Photo from the Library of Congress. I am old enough to have been present in the White House Briefing Room not quite 15 years ago, when Helen Thomas celebrated her 75th birthday. She was, even then, the oldest workhorse on the beat—25 years older than I am now. It was a proud moment for the free press, for the pioneering role that Helen played for women in journalism, and for that beleaguered tribe whose principal duty it was (and is) to chronicle the presidency from one of the worst possible perches on which to view it: the White House itself. When I first came to Washington, on behalf of The New York Times, at the end of 1993, a very wise man named Max Frankel (who happened, then, to be the paper’s executive editor, and my boss) told me that Washington was a wonderful place to live and work, but not the best place to spend one’s whole journalistic life. The reasons for this warning have become steadily more apparent to me in 17 years of intermittent residence. The charms of Washington for journalists are many: suburban amenities with in-town living; a supportive circle of friends who—once you’re in the club—treat you as blood kin; an automatic sense of self-importance and, thus, self-esteem. Leaving this protective nest is hard. I did it once, to my everlasting profit, to become The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, and I assume I will have to do it once more before I die. (How I will ever dislodge my books, papers, souvenirs and other artifacts is a different matter.) The list of those who have stayed too long at the capital’s fair is substantial, and depressing.

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