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Sarah McClendon, 92

Published Jan. 9, 2003

If reporters go to heaven, Saint Peter is in for a rough time.

The latest arrival, Sarah McClendon, the veteran White House reporter and bedeviler of presidents, was no respecter of the great and powerful.

She covered Franklin Roosevelt but did not get assigned to the White House beat until Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated.

At Ike's first news conference she - the lone woman - was sent to the balcony and told that questions weren't prohibited but they weren't encouraged.

From her remote seat she shouted at a startled Eisenhower to ask if this was the way things were to be conducted from now on. Ike waffled a bit but later agreed to change the format. McClendon was, then, more or less the mother of the press conference as we know it today.

After the balcony episode, she made it a practice to arrive early, get a front row seat and ask a question at every news conference.

President Kennedy is said to have observed that he tried not to call on her but couldn't help himself. Her questions could be jolting, astonishingly local (she had her own syndicate that served mostly small Texas newspapers) or persistent.

She had been kicked out of the Women's Army Corps because she was pregnant. Her husband died shortly after that. She was thus a single mother in what was then - and what would remain so for another 30 or 40 years - very much a man's world.

Her most famous question was when she asked President Eisenhower what policy decisions had involved his vice president, Richard Nixon, who was then running to succeed him. Ike said he didn't know. Later he gave the jolting reply: "Give me a week, and I'll think of something."

Nixon lost that election.

The Associated Press quoted Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House for decades, as saying McClendon "was one of the greatest newspaperwomen Washington ever saw. She walked in where angels fear to tread. She had guts, she asked the questions that should have been asked, and she asked questions for people who had no voice."

So, Saint Peter, you better give that 92-year-old making her way up to the gate a seat down front.

There could be hell to pay if you don't.