WASHINGTON -- Sarah McClendon, a familiar face on the Washington news scene, died this week, but she will not soon be forgotten.

The White House correspondent was known for making presidents squirm with her tough, pointed questions that they tried to ignore. But she persisted and often made them answer her.

What a trailblazing career she had, shattering old traditions of male domination of journalism and crusading for the rights of women, veterans and the disadvantaged.

Unfortunately, they don't make many White House reporters like that any more. Too often correspondents today ask only softball questions and don't challenge the "spin" manufactured in the Oval Office. Not Sarah.

Born in Tyler, Texas, in July 1910, she took up the cudgels against discrimination at age 3 when she held a little American flag and marched with her grandmother in a hometown suffragist parade demanding the vote for women.

She never lost her East Texas drawl or forgot her roots. After graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she decided she wanted to "crusade for good causes."

Over her long career, she wrote for a number of Texas newspapers, including the Beaumont Enterprise, and for the Philadelphia Daily News. For years, starting in 1946, she ran her own business, the McClendon News Service.

Just out of college in the 1930s, she landed a job by calling up Carl Estes, editor of the Tyler Courier-Times and the Tyler Morning Telegraph.

She soon proved her worth by saving his life. Estes had written a critical editorial about an evangelical preacher, inviting him to leave town.

The preacher came storming into the newsroom, and a brawl ensued. All the male reporters scurried out, and Sarah watched in horror as the two men rolled on the floor, punching each other. Fearing that the preacher was going to win, she picked up a telephone and cracked him on the head. He ran off.

Sarah joined the Women's Army Corps in 1942 in World War II and practiced drills in high heels or open sandals since the government was not yet ready to outfit its female recruits.

She became a first lieutenant and was assigned to public relations in the Pentagon. She married John T. O'Brien, who was also in the service. But the marriage was short-lived. He walked out on her while she was pregnant.

In 1944 she went to the Walter Reed Army Hospital here to have her baby. Officials there said they would admit her only as the wife of a serviceman, but she insisted on being treated as an Army officer, and she got her way.

After her daughter was born, Sarah had to leave the Army. Hired as a Washington reporter for a number of Texas papers, she raised her child as a single mother, working all the time.

Along with other female reporters, she fought to gain the same access to news sources that male reporters had. In those days the press clubs where newsmakers often gave speeches and interviews were for men only.

Sarah applied for admission to the National Press Club, but whenever she inquired over the next 16 years, she was told that somehow it had gotten "lost." Women, including Sarah, were finally admitted in 1971.

But it was television as well as her piercing voice and offbeat questions to presidents that made Sarah McClendon a household name.

In the 1950s she boldly asked Dwight D. Eisenhower why he was out of town so much playing golf. Later, when she realized he was doing it for his health, she wrote him an apology.

Ike, she recalled in an interview in 1990, replied the same day "on a lovely piece of pale green White House personal correspondence stationery, saying it was perfectly all right, that he understood I was trying to get a story and I had a valid right to ask the question."

In 1962 she upset John F. Kennedy when she charged that two men in the State Department were security risks. Kennedy defended the men, rebuked Sarah and later said he would not take her questions again. But he did.

In 1974 she insisted to Richard M. Nixon that Vietnam veterans were not getting their G.I. Bill tuition checks to go to college. Nixon said he thought they were. "No, you're just misinformed," she told him. One male colleague wrote afterward that she was giving "rudeness a bad name."

But Nixon checked, and sure enough, Sarah was right. And Nixon saw to it that the G.I.s' checks were soon in the mail.

She also had an edgy relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson because as a fellow Texan, he resented her critical stories about him. She claimed he had her fired from a couple of Texas papers.

Sarah used to insist she was shy. No one believed her since nothing seemed to daunt her. The ridicule, insults and ostracism she encountered did hurt her. But they did not stop her.

In recent years she had slowed down but she never retired and for a long time she was still showing up at news conferences in her wheel chair.

As an Army veteran and an outstanding newswomen, Sarah McClendon deserves the nation's farewell salute.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address helent@hearstdc.com)