Helen Thomas, the tireless White House correspondent who broke countless barriers on a male-dominated beat, died at her apartment in Washington on Saturday following a long illness. She was 93.

Thomas’ death was announced by the Gridiron Club, an exclusive organization for Washington reporters of which she was the first female member, and later served as president.

For 57 years, Thomas was a fixture in White House press briefings, hounding every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama—and countless aides—with piercing questions and razor-like wit. Thomas, who got her start as a radio writer for United Press in the 1940s, a period when most female journalists covered softer subjects like gardening, decorating, and entertaining. Not content with those assignments, Thomas worked her way into covering politics and the powerful figures who ruled Washington.

Thomas’ White House career began shortly after Kennedy’s election in 1960. And the next six decades, she was a force for presidents to reckon with. She quickly became the unofficial timekeeper of presidential news briefings, ending press conferences with her signature line, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

But behind the polite sign-off was a dogged journalist whose batteries never seemed to run out with every successive administration. Among Thomas’ many scoops were late-night chats during the Watergate crisis with Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, the Nixon administration’s attorney general. She was also the only female reporter to accompany Richard Nixon on his historic 1972 trip to China, and one of the first two reporters to interview Ronald Reagan following his 1981 shooting.

In 1975, Thomas became the first woman to be named president of the
White House Correspondents Association. But with her long career, she became as much a pop-culture staple as a political one. She popped up in films about fictional presidents, such as Dave and The American President, and had her longtime perch in the front row of the White House briefing room ribbed by The Simpsons.

Yet relentless coverage of every presidential administration since 1961 was not Thomas’ only legacy. As her career progressed, she rarely held back her private opinions, whether about her employers or about global issues. In 2000, at age 79, she resigned from United Press International after its purchase by News International, a company owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Rather than retire, Thomas popped back up within months as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, a position which allowed her to be more freewheeling than ever, blistering the George W. Bush administration—and many of her colleagues—about the rush to war in Iraq.

But Thomas’ career came to an abrupt conclusion in June 2010, when she remarked at a White House event that “Jews should get the hell out of Palestine.” She would resign from Hearst within days. Still, she wasn’t quite finished. In January 2011, she became a columnist for the Falls Church (Va.) News Press, though her contributions were sporadic, and last appeared in January 2012.

Helen Thomas was born Aug. 4, 1920 in Winchester, Ky. to Lebanese immigrants George and Mary Thomas, who had nine other children. The family moved to Detroit, where Thomas attended Wayne State University. She came to Washington in 1942 as a copygirl for the Washington Daily News, later becoming a junior reporter, but was laid off shortly thereafter, opening the door for her long career with UPI.