Lanny Davis Sad but Honest About His Friend Helen Thomas

Lanny Davis, a former White House Counsel to President Bill Clinton, now counsels people on crisis management, and had some choice words for his longtime friend Helen Thomas, who retired yesterday under pressure after making controversial remarks about Israel last week, saying that Jews should go back to Germany and Poland. 

“I’m sad about what happened to her,” Davis said, but admonished Thomas for not apologizing in a manner similar to Imus a few years ago, when he addressed the issue directly and immediately admitted wrongdoing.

“Helen really avoided the subject by talking about peace in the Middle East, where her problem for years is she’s never recognized the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland in a state called Israel, which the world recognized in 1948,” said Davis, who is Jewish. “And Helen has never recognized it.”

Thomas, who is 89 and has been a journalist for nearly 70 years, has covered every United States President since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the late 1950s. She has been a fixture in the White House Press Corps for decades, and is de facto Washington royalty. Davis did not want to see Thomas fired or repudiated forever, but her anti-Semitic stereotyping disturbed him.

Though Thomas, whose parents were Lebanese, is entitled to her opinion about Middle East politics, her comments about sending Jews back to the two countries most associated with the Holocaust struck a chord, “as if they don’t have a right to be where their ancestors were born 5,000 years ago,” Davis said. “They were thrown out of Jerusalem 2,600 years ago by the Romans, and that’s when the Diaspora began.”

A self-described “dove” on Israeli, Davis has always supported a Palestinian state. “So for me to be offended, you can imagine what an offensive remark it was to many Jews, and many Israelis,” he said.

Along with Imus, Davis has great empathy for Thomas, whose career he called “long and distinguished.” Though he hopes his outspokenness did not force her into retirement, he also wishes Thomas’s apology had been more sincere.

“I feel terribly for her, but I also do not believe that her apology even came close to acknowledging what she said, what it was about, and how she needs to search her soul and read history in order to de-offend people like me, who feel so positively for her,” he said.

Davis thinks Thomas was told to believe that Jews don’t belong in the land of Israel. After all, he added, quoting from a song in the musical South Pacific, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.”

-Julie Kanfer