When I was young, awards and other honors, like the naming of roads or buildings, was done posthumously. This was not done without some thought. The thinking by our forebears was to wait a given period after someone had died in order to see if something untoward came out following the death. We are all human, and even great men and women have their share of secrets. I first noticed an unsettling and perilous change in this discreet practice when Congress, in 1972, named the newly built FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. the J. Edgar Hoover building just two days after Mr. Hoover’s death. What seemed like a no-brainer turned into an embarrassment when it came out later that Mr. Hoover had a less than stellar and untarnished past. This should have been a signal to the public and government that we should heed our antecedents caution in these matters. We didn’t and in fact we did just the opposite and descended a slippery slope leading to further embarrassment and chagrin.

In a bit of irony, Ken Lay of Enron had his name expunged from the YMCA in Katy,Texas posthumously. And its not just the naming of buildings after people that can be a source of discomfiture. Enron Field, Home of the Houston Astros, was renamed Minute Maid Park after the whole Enron fiasco. One can only hope that Minute Maid keeps it’s nose clean.

The latest argument for thoughtful postmortem interval and evaluation is Helen Thomas, a veteran reporter first for UPI and later as a columnist for Hearst publishing. She has had the honor of sitting in the front and center seat during Presidential press conferences, and in fact has a brass plate on the seat ( I can only speculate in order to keep newbie cub reporters from claiming the seat for their own).

Last month during a Jewish heritage event at the White House, Helen Thomas, when asked to comment on Israel was caught on camera infamously responding “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine… Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land; its not German, its not Poland’s.” She was then asked where they should go, to which she replied: “they should go home” to “Poland, Germany.” Then, after another question she added, “America and everywhere else.” Now the venerable 101 year old Society of Professional Journalists must wrestle with the thorny question of what to do with the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award, an award that was first given to it’s namesake in 2000. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have any warning signs and were caught off-guard. Helen’s views on Israel and Palestine have been well known and voiced in public and private for years, although perhaps not in such strong and colorful language that uncomfortably conjured up the Holocaust in the public conscious.

I can also imagine a late night janitor quietly and without fanfare removing a brass plate from a chair in the White House Press Corp. briefing room.

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