Helen Thomas, a pioneer for women in journalism who used her seat in the front row of history to grill nine US presidents and refused to keep her strong opinions to herself, died on Saturday. She was 92.

Thomas died surrounded by family and friends at her Washington apartment, the family said in a statement. A friend, Muriel Dobbin, said that Thomas had been ill for a long time, and in and out of the hospital before coming home on Thursday.

The longtime White House correspondent made her name as a bulldog for the United Press International in the great wire service rivalries of old. She was the only reporter with her name inscribed on a chair in the White House briefing room.

Her refusal to conceal her opinions, even when posing questions to a president, and her public hostility toward Israel, caused discomfort among colleagues.

In 2010, that tendency finally ended a career that had started in 1943 and made her one of the best-known journalists in Washington.

On a videotape circulated on the Internet, Thomas, whose parents were Lebanese immigrants, said Israelis should "get out of Palestine" and "go home" to Germany, Poland or the US. The remark brought widespread condemnation and she ended her career.

In January 2011, she became a columnist for a free weekly paper in a Washington suburb, months after the controversy forced her from her previous post.

"What made Helen the 'dean of the White House Press Corps' was not just the length of her tenure, but her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account," US President Barack Obama, the last president she covered, said in a statement on Saturday.

Born in Winchester, Kentucky, to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. Her disdain for White House secrecy and dodging spanned five decades, back to President John F. Kennedy.

The Bush administration marginalized her, clearly peeved with a journalist who had challenged President George W. Bush to his face on the Iraq war and declared him the worst president in history.

After she quit UPI in 2000 - by then an outsized figure in a shrunken organization - her influence waned.

Thomas was accustomed to getting under the skin of presidents, if not to the cold shoulder.

"If you want to be loved," she said years earlier, "go into something else."

There was a lighter mood in August 2009, on her 89th birthday, when Obama popped into the White House briefing room unannounced. He led the roomful of reporters in singing Happy Birthday to You and gave her cupcakes. As it happened, it was the president's birthday too, his 48th.

(China Daily 07/22/2013 page11)