A Pretend Reporter Covered The White House To Age 84

WASHINGTON - She always wore black Chinese sandals and a blue dress. She always toted a luggage cart with blue bags that carried grapefruits.

She was cussing, complaining, whacking other reporters with her big purse, jabbing them with her umbrella.

She carried a tape recorder and a notebook, but hadn't written for publication in years. She "covered" the White House and Congress for the Nover News Service, which didn't have any client newspapers.

But she always managed to get a front row seat at big news events. She was always first in line to pick up a presidential proclamation. When Ronald Reagan went to China, George Bush to Turkey or Bill Clinton to New York, she was there.

And when 84-year-old Naomi Nover died last month, after collapsing in the Senate press gallery while renewing her credentials, Washington paused to remember an eccentric old lady who injected a bit of humanity into the image-conscious institutions she covered.

Presidents, White House press secretaries and congressmen knew she was a pretend journalist, but for years they went along - answering her questions and accommodating her quirkiness.

"Naomi's years of dedication to her craft, and her efforts to cover events here at the White House up until just a few months before her death, were a lesson to us all in hard work and the persistence of the human spirit," President Clinton said in a statement.

Her antics are the stuff of legend. The most famous Naomi tale, still recounted with relish a decade later, was a trip to the archaeological dig in Xian, China, with the Reagans. Naomi wanted to get closer to snap a picture with her tourist's camera, but an armed Chinese guard blocked her.

"She never accepted no," said George Condon, the former president of the White House Correspondents Association. "She butted up against him, waving her umbrella."

Gary Schuster, then a Detroit News reporter, intervened by taking out a dollar bill and saying of white-haired Naomi, who looked a bit like George Washington: "She is a very important person in our country," pointing to Old George's face.

The guard's eyes widened. He stepped aside. Naomi got her photo.

When checking out of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo, Naomi hit the roof because the bill was so high. The desk clerk said, "Ma'am you emptied the mini-bar." She said: "You mean those weren't free?" With that, she opened her bag and unloaded lots of little bottles.

Once, at the Capitol, she rushed to the ladies room, only to find all the stalls occupied. She managed to open one, ripped a woman off the toilet, and yelled: "Sorry, I'm on deadline."

But, there were no real deadlines.

Naomi wanted desperately to be part of the elite Washington scene. She and her husband, Barnet Nover, a former foreign-policy columnist for the Washington Post, came to Washington in the mid-1930s, and eventually both worked for the Washington bureau of the Denver Post. He founded Nover News Service when he retired in 1971, but died two years later.

For the past 22 years, Naomi clung to keeping his memory - and perhaps a bit of their old life - alive.

"If ever there was a love affair that didn't die with death, this was it," said Bob Peterson, superintendent of the Senate Press Gallery. "She worshipped everything about Barney."

But not everyone worshipped Naomi. At times, some reporters tried to get her credentials revoked. She tearfully protested any effort to kick her out of the pack. And successive White House press secretaries could not bring themselves to hurt her so.

"I found it abhorrent the way some callous members of the press corps treated her," said Leo Rennert, Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers. "The self-importance of some people grew to have a very dark side to it. If you strut around and inflate your ego, what the hell, OK. But when it becomes hurtful to others, that's where I draw the line."

Sam Donaldson, who used to cover the White House for ABC News, says he was a fan. He flirted with Naomi, teasing her about her "creamy white thighs."

"I liked Naomi," Donaldson said. "We had an act together. I would come screeching at her as if I was going to take satisfaction and pleasure from her, and she would squeal."

He recalls another time she got hit by a truck while crossing Pennsylvania Avenue. "The vehicle was almost totaled," Donaldson chuckled. "She walked away without a scratch."

That was Naomi, her foes and fans said: Impossible to knock down.

"In the end, everybody had to give respect, some grudging, some not, to her perseverance," said Jody Powell, former President Carter's press secretary. "She wanted to be there. She wanted to be part of it. And she did it . . .

"If you look over the crop of White House correspondents, past and current, you have to say that Naomi did much less harm to the republic than most."