American journalist and syndicated political columnist based in Washington, D.C. who, for many years, was a White House correspondent. She started her career as a reporter and advanced to the role of a copy editor for a newspaper in Nebraska for a couple of years. She then relocated to Washington, D.C. where she took a position as the chief editor for a Virginia newspaper and supervised a staff of men for two years. She later transferred to Hearst Newspapers where she was a Washington bureau correspondent. She covered the reporting of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Then she reported full-time at the White House and was the first female reporter to do this. There were rumors she was one of Kennedy’s many lovers. She covered Kennedy’s assassination and the transition to the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. As a political reporter for The New York Times she reported on every presidential campaigns from Kennedy to Bill Clinton. She was an international commentator and television personality.
Means’ book The Woman in the White House, which is about the lives of 12 first ladies, including Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was published by Random House Publishing in 1963.
Means was married five times. She died at the age of 83 on 2 December 2017 in Washington, D.C.
Link to Wikipedia biography