White House correspondent Helen Thomas finally gets her due

At a time when United Press International was struggling to survive - sort of foreshadowing the fate of journalism to come in that regard - Helen Thomas was the one thing the wire service could always take pride in.

So what kind of a former Unipresser would I be if I didn't seize on the opportunity to write about the HBO documentary "Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House?"

Slight by definition at a mere 40 minutes, it nevertheless offers an intimate glimpse of the subject - not unlike a presidential news conference (remember those?) - when it debuts at 8 p.m. Monday on the premium-cable channel.

Thomas seems a remnant from another era, and in many ways she is. After all, she's in her 80s now and joined UPI in 1943 when it was still just United Press. After covering John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail, she followed him into office in 1961 as White House correspondent and has covered all nine presidents since, most recently as a Hearst columnist after leaving UPI eight years ago when it was bought by the Moonies.

As the representative of one of the two top wire services, Thomas by tradition got to open presidential news conferences with a question, and she invented a tradition of her own when, feeling sympathy for a floundering JFK toward the end of another conference, she excused him by saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." She closed each news conference the same way as they became increasingly rare over the next 40 years.

The prevailing mood of the documentary is a sense of loss over how things have changed in presidential politics and the media over the years, but also a sense of honor, almost of noblesse oblige. Thomas is forthright in her civic duty and in the proper way to carry it out.

"You can't have a democracy without an informed people," she says in an interview with producer-director Rory Kennedy (a niece of JFK). "If we don't ask the questions, they don't get asked."

She maintains that "presidents deserve to be questioned - maybe irreverently, most of the time. Bring 'em down to size." And that's the other main theme running through the documentary: the acknowledgment of human shortcomings, in herself, but also in the presidents.

She talks of how President Nixon lauded her at the beginning of one news conference, so that she had to force herself to then ask a thorny question on Watergate. Likewise, she speaks of getting to know each president as a person, with strengths and weaknesses, but how that sort of contact is also increasingly rare as the news and media access are more managed than ever.

"It was very different," she says of her days with JFK and President Johnson. "You really felt that you got to know the person. And I think that's gone."

The relationship between the president and the media has always been confrontational. "All presidents hate us, so you start from there," she tells "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart in an interview snippet included in the program. Yet even at that Thomas projects a sense of duty and honor that likewise seems lost among her colleagues these days in a divided partisan press that seems to take sides every bit as much as politicians do.

As a reporter who believes absolutely in the First Amendment and a free press, that puts her somewhere left of center, but she pooh-poohs the idea of a "liberal media."

"I want to find a liberal," she says. "I'm dying to find a fellow liberal. Where are they?"

Yet what one gets most of all is a sense of Thomas' duty, to herself and to her country. "Thank You, Mr. President" has a sense of decorum much as Thomas does. It doesn't get bogged down in trivia and personal minutiae. It sticks to the professional and how she does her job and, in that, how she serves the higher ambitions of her country. To that, the only reasonable response at the end of her career should be, "Thank you, Ms. Thomas."