Helen Thomas a journalist who broke down barriers for women

Veteran journalist and White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who has died at 92, reported on every US president from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama.

Thomas, who broke many barriers for women journalists during her 49 years on the White House beat for United Press International and Hearst newspapers, ended dozens of presidential news conferences with the familiar phrase, “Thank you, Mr President.”

She was known for her straight-to-the-point questioning of presidents and press secretaries in a manner some considered combative. President Obama, however, in a statement praised “her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account”.

In the last 10 years of her career Thomas was a columnist for Hearst, a job that allowed her opinions to surface more than in her work as a hard-news reporter for UPI.

In June 2010 she said she was retiring from Hearst, effective immediately, after comments she had made, including that Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine”, were captured on videotape and disseminated widely on the web. She later issued a statement regretting her comments, which she said “do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognise the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Thomas believed the Washington media had grown soft and was reluctant to challenge government. She was especially hard on George W Bush, whom in 2003 she described as the "worst president ever", and the Iraq war, which she felt the media had abetted by not challenging Bush strongly enough on it. In 2009 she asked Obama: "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don't give us this Bushism 'If we don't go there, they'll all come here.' "

Thomas grew up in Detroit, the daughter of Lebanese migrants. Her career began as a copy girl on the Washington Daily News and she joined what was then known as United Press in 1943. She was assigned to the White House in 1961 in part because of the great interest in first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1974, she became the first woman to head a Washington wire service bureau.

Thomas first came to public notice during the Watergate era when she started receiving late-night phone calls from Martha Mitchell, the wife of attorney general John Mitchell, discussing the scandal. "I have witnessed presidents in situations of great triumph and adulation, when they are riding the crest of personal fulfilment, and I have seen them fall off their pedestals through an abuse of power or what President Clinton called 'a lapse of critical judgment'," she wrote in her memoir Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times.

She was the first woman officer in the White House Correspondents Association in its 50-year history, becoming its first woman president.

In 1975, she broke the 90-year all-male barrier at the Gridiron Club, an organisation of leading Washington journalists, and became its first female president in 1993. Thomas married Douglas Cornell of the Associated Press, in 1971. He died in 1982.