Honorees and presenters alike were elegant, articulate, well prepared, and obviously very pleased to be there. The afternoon was a memorable one for all!
NYWICI Rings Closing Bell at NASDAQ!Deb Shriver, president of NYWICI, and this year's 2002 Matrix honorees and committee members, gather to ring the final bell to close trading at Nasdaq, on Matrix Monday, April 15.
PRESS EXCERPTS
Clinton Honors Helen Thomas
USA Today - Peter Johnson
Former president Bill Clinton surprised longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas on a dais Monday after she accepted a Matrix award from New York Women in Communications at a luncheon. Thomas said people often introduced her by saying she had worked "with" or "under" nine presidents, but she preferred the adversarial verb "against. I wouldn't have it any other way." Of Thomas, Clinton said that "in good times and bad, she never took a cheap shot."
Another award winner, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, said that sexist articles about women and women's magazines are "significant and unforgivable. The press has wasted far too much ink pitting me against my female peers in an attempt to create catfights where none actually existed. Much of this coverage would have never appeared had I been a man. I need only look to my male colleagues who occupy similar positions but have never been held up for such scrutiny and attack."
Recipient Kati Marton, an author who was once married to ABC's Jennings, said, "I've learned some things about men, and one of them is if they look like 007, better to leave them on the small screen than to bring them home.
Rush & Molloy
NY Daily News
Bill Clinton may have surprised Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Paula Zahn and Anna Wintour when he dropped by yesterday's Matrix Awards lunch, but it was beloved broadcaster Walter Cronkite who made them stop chewing their food. The saintly ex-CBS newscaster stunned some at the New York Women in Communications gathering at the Waldorf-Astoria when he declared that he was glad he didn't "have to murder anyone through a terrorist act to get here to heaven." The stab at humor caused nervous laughter.
Walters came to Uncle Walter's rescue, assuring Cronkite from the podium that "all the women here today consider ourselves your brown-eyed virgins," an allusion to the Al Qaeda terrorists' supposed vision of paradise.
Venerable White House correspondent Helen Thomas, the guest of honor at the lunch, was heaped with praise for half a century of reporting. "It's always hard to hear your obituary," she quipped, but she begged to differ with colleagues who say she has worked under nine Presidents. "I say I worked against nine Presidents!" she snorted.
Clinton rose to the challenge, sneaking from backstage to swipe the mike from Thomas. He recalled her spirit of "affectionate adversarialism."
"Early in my term, I used to go jogging before 7 o'clock, and the White House press would inexplicably cover me. I mean, what is there to cover?" Clinton said, laughing. "An aging, overweight man puffing along at a quarter to 7 along the highway? They thought I would be shot or drop dead of a heart attack or something? Helen was always there with her notebook, shouting some perfectly embarrassing question, when all I really needed was oxygen!"
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