"No president has ever liked the press, dating back to George Washington ... Kennedy said, 'I am reading more and enjoying it less.' What L.B.J. said is unprintable. Nixon looked up when we walked into the cabinet room one day and said, 'It's only coincidental that we are talking about pollution when the press walks in.' President Ford said that 'If God, had created the world in six days, he could not have rested. He would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.' Carter always seemed to be saying, 'Lord forgive them because they know not what they do.'

Helen Thomas, Champions of Choice Awards Luncheon, Washington, D.C., October 24, 2003

When President Reagan was told that the Sandinistas, the marxists, had fired on a press helicopter at the Honduran border, he quipped, 'There's some good in everyone.' And when a friend asked President Clinton why the press always went along on the motorcade when he was jogging, he said, 'They just want to see if I drop dead.' George Bush 1st used to invite my colleagues to go jogging. Better them than me. I got invited to the dedication of a horseshoe pit...."

Note: In a letter to Edmund Randolph, 26 August 1792, George Washington said, 'I should be happy in the mean time to see a cessation of the abuses of public Officers--and of those attacks upon almost every measure of government with which some of the Gazettes are so strongly impregnated; & which cannot fail, if persevered in with the malignancy they now team, of rending the Union asunder. . . . 'In a word if the Government and the Officers of it are to be the constant theme for News-paper abuse, . . . it will be impossible, I conceive, for any man living to manage the helm or to keep the machine together.' To Edmund Randolph, 26 August 1792

Helen Thomas' talk at the Champions of Choice Awards Luncheon, did not mention Thomas Jefferson's views on the press who - long before Nixon - said, 'Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.' Thomas Jefferson also said, 'the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. (Letter to John Norvell, June 14, 1807).

In a recent piece for Hearst Newspapers, Helen Thomas notes that 'Jefferson is remembered for saying he 'would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.''

According to Allen Fisher, Archivist for the L.B.J. Library, not everything Lyndon Johnson said about the press was unprintable. In remarks at a barbecue in honor of West German Chancellor Erhard in Stonewall, Texas, on December 29, 1963, he said, "Mr. Chancellor, in a few moments now I am going to turn you over to the American press, and then I think you will know how the deer feel".

In his opening remarks before the National Press Club on January 17, 1969, he said "I have never, I must say, doubted your energy or your courage or, for that matter, your patriotism. That is why I asked General Hershey [Director of the Selective Service System] to get in touch immediately with each of you", later adding, the "relationship [between the president and the press] began when the country was founded, and now for nearly two centuries the press has held the President and his family and his administration in the fixed and the constant light of publicity. And through nearly two centuries the Presidents have felt, in one degree or another, uncomfortable in that steady glare. That relationship between the President and the press has always had the nature though, I think, of a lover's quarrel. And I am not sure it is ever going to be much different."