Photo credit AP/Charles Dharapak
The controversial remarks veteran White house correspondent Helen Thomas made last week have ignited a storm of coverage, and her sudden retirement from Hearst on Monday brought a decisive but unsatisfying end to her unparalleled career.
The retirement announcement itself seemed more like a last-ditch attempt to exercise some control over the chain of events, set off last week with an acidic sound bite she recorded for a rabbi right on the White house lawn.
Interestingly, Rick and Jeff forecasted an odd uptick in the political news cycle around June 5-10 as Mercury crosses into Gemini and makes a t-square to Mars and the Neptune/Chiron conjunction. This is an unexpected piece of news but will likely become little more than a blip on the radar after some time passes, given the scale and the slow burn of the stories crowding the headlines this year. It is a rather sad and unceremonious ending for a woman who broke so many professional barriers, however.
So as an astrologer, I wondered: what was the tipping point?
(birth data via Astrodatabank)
I couldn’t source a birth time, but here is a noon chart for Helen Thomas with the June 7 transits, the day she tendered her resignation and the news cycle went into full swing.
A quick survey of her natal chart: Helen Thomas is a Leo sun with four planets in Leo, and lots of water- except for Saturn in Virgo, her chart is exclusively fire and water, echoed by her sun/Neptune conjunction. Mercury is peregrine, giving her the potential to be a real loose cannon communication-wise, and retrograde at 29 Cancer; Mars conjuncts her north node in Scorpio.
This is a bold chart and it’s no surprise that she became known for her relentless quest for the truth, and her willingness to keep digging for the real story when the rest of her colleagues backed off an issue. She also has a grand trine in water, which is noteworthy because unlike the majority of grand trines, hers doesn’t involve the sun or the moon– this creates a rather detached feedback loop of emotional energy when activated. That water element is offset by her Leo stellium, though. A quote from her memoir, Front Row at the White House:
…I’m equally sure in those early days, I too struck Doug [her future husband] as brash, loud, opinionated, and passionate about a lot of things. Those opinions never showed up in my copy, but in the pressroom, like my boss, I had no qualms about expressing a few things now and then, admittedly throwing in some expletives when the spirit moved me.
Does that sound like Leo sun/Aries moon, or what?
Thomas will be turning 90 this year so her Uranus return, third Saturn return, and Neptune opposition are already behind her. She is quickly bearing down on the most rare of lifespan transits, the Pluto opposition, which will square her moon at the same time since she has a strong moon-Pluto square; but that won’t be until late January of 2012. So this fall from the heights isn’t prompted by an overt outer planet transit. What else was going on?
I collected a few significant dates in her career to see if a pattern emerged.
- 1943 – Thomas joins UPI, writing radio wire stories [haven't been able to source a month or date yet]
- January 20, 1961 – President Kennedy inaugurated (12:50pm EST), Thomas becomes first female White House correspondent
- October 1, 1971 – First Lady Pat Nixon announces Thomas’ engagement to fellow White House reporter Doug Cornell
- February 21-28, 1972 – Accompanies President Nixon to China (only female print journalist in traveling corps)
- May 17, 2000 – Helen Thomas resigns from UPI after it is acquired by Unification Church-controlled News World Communications
- July 5, 2000 – Hearst Newspapers hires Thomas as a twice-weekly nationally syndicated columnist
The arc for the current news cycle:
- May 27, 2010 – Thomas makes controversial on-camera statement on Israel and Palestine
- June 4, 2010 – Thomas publishes an apology on her personal website
- June 6, 2010 – Walt Whitman H.S. removes Thomas as speaker from June 14th commencement
- June 6, 2010 – Nine Speakers, the agency representing Thomas, drops her as a client
- June 6, 2010 – Craig Crawford, co-author of Thomas’ latest book, drops all future projects with her
- June 7, 2010 – Thomas tenders her resignation, effective immediately, to Hearst Newspapers
When President Kennedy was inaugurated, transiting Neptune was at the separating square (to the degree! 7 arc-minutes from exact) and conjunct her natal Mars/north node conjunction, Mars in Cancer was retrograding back from her natal Pluto, Mercury was sextiling her moon and opposing her sun/Neptune.
One thing that really caught my eye here was that the transiting sun directly opposed her natal Mercury. The practical effect of this is that she experienced the intensity of the sun to her Mercury on her first inauguration, and on every inaugural day for every president afterward. Thomas was originally assigned to the Kennedys the month before, to cover the stylish first-lady-to-be during their winter vacation in Palm Beach. But after the inauguration she reportedly dared her bosses to remove her from the White House beat, and there she stayed.
She covered the administrations of ten presidents, more than anyone in her field, and with her natal Mercury at that degree Inauguration Day would resonate with her and stir her mind and journalistic ethic. Of the Sun opposition Mercury transit, Robert Hand writes:
This transit is a powerful stimulus to the mind and to all kinds of communication and interchange with others. You will be engaged in an almost continuous dialogue with others today, which should tell you exactly how you stand with respect to them and how they are reacting to you… it is extremely important that you be receptive to anything that is presented to you. …if you are receptive, you will be able to learn much. At the same time you can promote your own ideas by making it clear to others that your ideas are not a threat to theirs and that you are willing to work with them as a team. (Planets in Transit)
Helen Thomas had a natural connection to this event, and it’s no surprise that she made her home in the White House press corps. With the transiting Neptune square she would be open to new directions, and having it fall on her north node, echoing her sun/Neptune conjunction, and tapping into that grand water trine Kennedy’s inauguration could really feel like a fated event to her. The transiting moon had just passed over her Uranus in Pisces too, plucking the strings of her grand trine from the other side.
When she resigned from UPI, it was the upheaval of her career– after 57 years with them, 30 as their chief White House correspondent, even then-President Clinton was saddened to see her leaving the pressroom. She left out of principle the very day after the UPI was purchased by a Unification Church corporation, although at the time she did not give a public reason for her departure.¹ Her colleague, UPI’s international editor Lee Katz, left at the same time for the same reasons.
At this time transiting Pluto had retrograded back into an exact trine to her natal sun/Neptune, with Mars sextile to them and opposing transiting Pluto. A stellium in Taurus was approaching a square to her Venus/Jupiter conjunction, and the transiting node had just conjuncted her Mercury as well, bringing a fated quality to the ownership change.
Most interesting here is that the day’s moon in Scorpio was just passing over her Mars/north node conjunction and squaring her sun/Neptune, plucking the heartstrings of that grand water trine again and setting off her Pluto transit. She didn’t waste time in making her decision to walk away.
Thomas expected to write a book, give speeches, and possibly write some columns, but she was surprised at the number of job offers she received, given her age. She accepted a position with Hearst just two months later, as a syndicated columnist.
The inner planet stellium had moved on to Cancer and crossed her natal Pluto; transiting Pluto was now joined by Chiron in continuing to trine her sun/Neptune. Uranus now opposed her Venus, while the transiting moon here was at the end of Leo and had just swept over her Leo planets, probably prompting this quote:
Outrage, that’s my adrenaline. People should be reminded of the injustices around them.”²
Helen continued to work in the White House, employed by Hearst but acting independently. All the chairs in the pressroom are assigned to news organizations except hers; front and center, it has her own name on it, rather than the outlet she worked for. Through the Bush years she retained her Scorpio-north-node reputation for going to great lengths to find the truth of a story, regardless of what the ramifications were. None of this seriously harmed her career though– to the contrary, her willingness to continue asking hard questions garnered her a new generation of admirers.
On May 27th of this year, the Obama administration hosted a White House reception for Jewish American Heritage Month. Outside on the grounds afterward, Rabbi David Nesenoff was making the rounds with a video camera and collecting sound bites for a video on the event. Thomas gave him a news clip he was not expecting.
Helen Thomas has been in the public sphere for half a century and certainly knows the power of words; what could have prompted her to take the gloves off in front of a camera?
Mercury was moving swiftly through Taurus and conjuncting her south node that day, and Mars was just conjuncting Jupiter, the last planet in her Leo stellium, after retrograding back and forth across her Sun, Neptune, and Venus, and within orb of her anaretic Mercury. All that activity squared her natal Mars/north node in Scorpio, so she was primed for a fight.
Uranus was in an exact trine to her Mercury that day too, loosening her tongue and making every conversation more of an interesting mental exercise. Having passed her Uranus return already, she had already been released from the more mundane worries about her career and public perception.
If you watch the video, she isn’t even facing the interviewer when she makes her most dramatic statement… she’s looking straight into the camera. No plausible deniability here about her faculties, or whether she was aware of being filmed.
Interestingly, the previous day the Scorpio moon transited her Mars/north node and squared her stellium, just like when she quit UPI back in 2000.
Thomas issued an apology on her website on June 4. What was the story that day? Mars had passed all her Leo planets now, and opposed transiting Neptune that day. Mars-Neptune heightens sensitivity to the reactions to your actions in general, and she would be even more sensitive to Neptune’s effects due to her natal conjunction. Reimagining what she should have said, realizing that as a journalist she had expressed a very public bias, and projections of what people might be saying or doing about her would have been filling her mind at that point, prompting her to issue an apology even before the ramifications began to rain down on her.
The moon was also in sensitive Pisces now, triggering her natal water trine again. Three days later, when she issued her resignation, the flood of news stories had already begun. Her lunar return was sometime on the 7th; those lunar events in succession may have even triggered her decision to retire.
The other question is why did this chewed up by the news machine so quickly? It appears to be as much a function of the general astrological climate as her personal transits. Uranus had moved into Aries only a few hours after her camera moment, back on the night of the 27th, putting all of society back on the rollercoaster and promising change at breakneck speed. Jupiter, the planet of publishing, moved with the moon onto the Aries point on June 6, demanding action, and Mars slipped into Virgo just after 1am EST on the morning of the 7th– the same time the enormous spike of news stories began to be filed and posted online about the previous day’s events, even before she resigned.
Jupiter caught up to Uranus on the 8th and Mercury has been pushing toward a t-square with Neptune/Chiron and Mars, so the whole affair will probably be wrapped up, career post-mortems and all, by the time Mercury enters Gemini on the 10th and we all rapidly move on to other stories.
It’s an unfortunate lesson in the relationship between personal transits and changes in the climate of society at large– we react to events based on what’s going on in our personal world at the time, but we have no control over how our actions will be interpreted by everyone else. If this ill-thought, offensive remark had taken place at some other time, it may well have ended with the apology and a light dinner of crow. But because society at large is so primed for big changes right now, and in fact demands it, Helen Thomas was swept up in those changes and it cost her her career and her until-now untarnished legacy.
