Lindy Boggs and Helen Thomas: A tale of two women EVER since Eve wheedled Adam into eating that apple, women have known how to get what they want from men. That does not mean it is easy. In particular, the smug men-only leather-bound world of Washington, DC was long resistant to their charms. Lindy Boggs and Helen Thomas set about prising it open in starkly different ways: the one with southern delicacy and charm, the other with gelignite. Together, their list of "firsts" was impressive. Ms Thomas, who spent most of her career as a reporter for the UPI wire service, was the first woman to head a White House news bureau, the first female president of the White House Correspondents" Association, the first woman member (and later president) of the Gridiron Club. She was also first-thorn-in-the flesh for no fewer than ten presidents, crouching in the front row at their press conferences, pad, pen and scowl ready, to hold the wrigglers and liars to account. Mrs Boggs was the first woman elected to Congress from Louisiana; co-founder of the congressional women's caucus; the first woman to preside over the Democratic National Convention, in 1976, and the first to have a room in the Capitol named after her. Well, sweetie, she would say, she just happened to be around at the right time. They knew each other a little. Both adored Eleanor Roosevelt; both had a penchant for pearls, though Ms Thomas, chronically untidy, rarely bothered to put a comb through her hair; and both were firmly on the left of the Democratic Party. For Mrs Boggs, brought up in old-time elegance on the cotton and sugar plantations of the deep South, this was a stranger affiliation than it was for Ms Thomas, from the car-pounding melting-pot of Detroit. But both remembered regularly putting the world to rights round the family dinner table: Mrs Boggs's family, the Claibornes, with the assurance of people who had held public office since George Washington's day, Ms Thomas's with the loud, scrappy exuberance of recent Lebanese immigrants. For Mrs Boggs, being a liberal Democrat meant extending civil rights to the blacks sweating out in the family fields and to the women, like herself, who seemed destined only to marry, keep house and live in their husbands" pockets. For Ms Thomas it meant, besides that, letting presidents know what was on the people's minds, and especially opening both barrels on warmongering Republicans. She thrust her way to the top of the Washington press corps, paying her dues with years of dawn starts and on-the-hoof reporting, because she saw no reason why women should be relegated, in the Kennedy years, to "diaper detail" and "Jackie watch." She had covered his campaign when he was a no-hoper; she demanded, and got, the right to cover him as president. Once there, insatiably curious, she determined to hold every president to account by asking hard, rude questions. "What's your plan for leaving Vietnam?" was her first question to Richard Nixon. "Why did you really want to go to war?" she asked George W. Bush - and, when he mumbled about al-Qaeda, added tartly: "I'm talking about Iraq." She was the first woman to take on the job of saying, at the end of each press conference, "Thank you, Mr President." She could make the words drip acid. Mrs Boggs, in contrast, did her bit for democracy by being niceness itself. Everyone was "Darlin" to her, swirled in southern sugar - even, when she later became ambassador to the Holy See, cardinals and archbishops. She came to Washington in 1946, gloved and veiled as need be, in the train of her congressman husband Hale; ran his office for him, and then in 1973 inherited his seat when his plane went missing over Alaska. Alone now among the Louisiana delegation, she had always treated blacks as equals and pressed for programmes that advanced them. She won their votes, and served nine terms. Her speeches were all "Hale this" and "Hale that," wifely and devoted, and at her yearly garden parties she did all the cooking. But she also got on the best committees to expand the rights of women. Her great coup was to get them included in the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 - allowing them to get credit cards and mortgages in their own names - by gently telling the banking committee that she was sure it was only an oversight that women had been omitted. She also got money for shelters for abused women by, it was said, a whisper in Speaker Tip O'Neill's ear. Damage and diplomacy Ms Thomas never whispered in anyone's ear. She demanded the whole story. During Watergate, casting caution aside, she made use of the drunken late-night telephone calls of Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney-general, to open up the scandal. When George W. Bush became president and she had left UPI, her most visceral question came roaring out: why did those jackasses keep backing Israel? In 2010 she said on videotape that Jews should "go home" to Poland, and was instantly disgraced. A lifetime of crusading for democracy suddenly counted for nothing. As a guest once at Lyndon Johnson's ranch in Texas, she had enjoyed the most tongue-singeing chili laced with minced jalapeño peppers. That was just how Lindy Boggs liked to cook and serve it, too; but so graciously, and smilingly, that you never suspected what was about to hit you.