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.
