Politics & Power Quote by Helen Thomas

Power, Thomas is reminding us, doesn’t just corrupt; it hoards. Her line skewers a familiar Washington magic trick: candidates run on sunlight, then treat the presidency like a gated community where facts become personal property. The phrasing is deliberately blunt - “private preserve” isn’t merely “confidential,” it’s aristocratic, a little feudal. Information is framed as land you fence off, not a public resource you steward. That choice exposes the subtext: secrecy isn’t an emergency measure, it’s an instinct of office, a reflex that arrives with the motorcade.

Thomas’s intent is less to scold one administration than to indict a bipartisan habit. “Every president” is the tell. She’s not chasing scandal-of-the-week; she’s naming a structural temptation baked into the executive branch, where control of information equals control of narrative, and narrative equals power. Her follow-up - “some are more secretive than others” - grants a journalist’s sober nuance while still landing the punch: the baseline is already too secretive, and certain presidents push it toward lockdown mode.

Context matters because Thomas spent decades in the White House press room watching access tighten or loosen depending on political fear: Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, post-9/11 surveillance, the expansion of classification, message discipline, and the slow replacement of spontaneous press engagement with managed optics. “Lock down everything” isn’t just about classified documents; it’s about controlling who gets to know what, when, and on whose terms. Her cynicism is earned reportage: openness is a campaign prop, secrecy is governance’s default setting.