Anita Hill vs Judge Clarence Thomas - 18 October 1991

Everyone knows the feeling of coming awake in the morning and very slowly and then very quickly being overcome by a sensation of immense relief that you're back in the real world. It may be a dull day and the objects you begin to take in tediously familiar, the old bureau, the creaking chair, a blanket fallen on the floor, but they are blessed proof that you are not being hemmed against a wall by some monster, that you'd not just heard you had no money in the bank, that nobody was threatening you with some dire punishment. That's how I think millions of Americans felt last Thursday morning, when they looked at their paper and lo, the front page headlines, only a column wide now, were reassuringly humdrum.

President's unemployment bill veto upheld, Bush nominates deputy as head of Justice Department, Mitterrand joins Kohl in proposing a European army, Britain challenges the plan. It sounds heartless to say that this old familiar news was reassuring, but even the harshest facts of the real world are more bearable than any first-rate nightmare.

And of course you guessed that the nightmare was the open televised hearings last weekend of the Senate's Judiciary Committee in the matter of Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas and her charge against him of sexual harassment. I've put it in that legal form, as it might appear on a court docket, to make the point that – although several senators kept on saying this is not a court of law, this is not a criminal case and the benefit of the doubt therefore doesn't have to go to the accused – the fact is that the 14 senators acted, challenged, questioned, orated, moralised, thundered and moaned so much like prosecuting and defence lawyers, as made no difference to the on-looking millions who eventually, in several national polls, would bring in their verdict and reveal that so far as they were concerned, they had given the benefit of the doubt to Judge Thomas, by better than two to one. Twelve of the 14 were, are lawyers, one or two of them had been district attorneys, battling DAs, that's to say, professional prosecutors and they enjoyed with obvious relish, practising their old trade again on, naturally, the accuser, Miss Hill.

Just to remind you of the two principals. Miss Anita Hill, 35, a pretty black woman, Professor of Corporation Law at the University of Oklahoma, the accuser, very reluctant, she said, because she'd never meant to come forward, if what she had to say about Judge Thomas had not been leaked to the press by some staff member, either of a senator or of the committee staff itself. Two investigations incidentally are underway, one by the Senate's Ethics Committee, to try and discover the culprit and culprit he is. Guilty, if he did leak confidential, sworn material that belonged exclusively to a Senate committee, guilty of at least contempt of Congress. If there had been no leak, there very likely would have been so special extra hearings into the fitness of Judge Thomas to become a justice of the Supreme Court. But there was and they happened and everybody agreed they were appalling, at times disgusting, but riveting, and nobody could turn them off.

The accusation: Miss Hill, 10 years ago, had been an assistant to Mr Thomas, as he then was, at the United States Department of Education and, later, at the agency that polices all forms of discrimination in employment, in the workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Way back then and for some indeterminate time later, she said that Mr Thomas kept pressing her for dinner dates and when she refused, made embarrassing remarks of a sexual kind, describing sexual scenes he'd seen in pornographic movies, some involving animals and had boasted in clinical detail about his own sexual prowess.

Well this summer somebody, a news reporter, heard somehow, the origin of the breakout is still murky, of a Miss Hill, who had a grudge against Mr Thomas, who was at that juncture about to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the regular way and be questioned about his legal competence, his opinions, his view of constitutional law and so on. Those hearings ended with the committee splitting down the middle in a strictly partisan way. Seven Republicans to recommend him to be accepted by the whole Senate, seven Democrats to urge his rejection. A hundred members of the Senate were preparing to debate and vote.

By that time though, whoever got to Miss Hill and on the telephone heard her confidential story, had leaked it to a staff member of the judiciary committee. Miss Hill was now required to make an affidavit which she begged should be kept secret and her identity protected. Three senators, Democrats, got the affidavit, the chairman, Senator Biden quite properly ordered an FBI investigation, which is always private and never published and it went in the first place to the judiciary committee and then to the president, since Mr Thomas was the president's client, his nominee.

Well eventually the report and the affidavit got to the whole committee but only 24 hours before the committee was to vote Mr Thomas's fitness. Two Republican senators demanded a pause and a delay and another hearing on these specific charges. There's been an angry tussle over the question of whether the hearing should have been in executive, that is closed, session. It simply could not have been. Imagine the howl from many women's groups for instance, if the committee had chosen to bottle up charges of this sort. So we had the hearings and what came out of them, when all was said and done, and there was an awful lot of rhetoric and manufactured indignation and hypocrisy and legal hair-splitting said and done. When it was all over the people, in Congress, in the press, in public life, who went into the whole mess most deeply and most disinterestedly, it seems to me, came to the conclusion that we do not know which of the two was telling the truth and may never know.

The argument split more cleanly than the substance of them, mainly along party lines, which is sad, suggesting that party loyalty and ideology rob a man of a mind of his own. Anyway, on the whole, the Republicans said Miss Hill was, for sure, a credible and composed witness, perhaps too composed, that she did not explain satisfactorily why she kept this foul accusation buried for 10 years, why after humiliating treatment, she followed Mr Thomas when he left education and went on to the EEOC, even though she knew she had a tenured job at education? Why did she continue to have a cordial professional relation with him, phoned him, irregularly, down the years? Some Republicans maintained that a couple of ghoulish sexual details, a particular slang term for a male and a bizarre remark about pubic hair had come, one from a book and the other from a court case that took place within Miss Hill's federal district.

The Republicans tried to boost their case by bringing on four women, black and white, who'd been very close, had a close working association with Judge Thomas and they swore, with considerable anger, that Judge Thomas was scrupulous in his dealings with women, was notably alert to sexual harassment and was indeed incapable of the language ascribed to him. Some Republicans suggested darkly that Miss Hill was unstable, a fantasiser and two of the leading Republican prosecutors insinuated all along that sure Miss Hill was a reluctant accuser, had never meant to bring this up, but that far from her coming forward, she had been cunningly, knavishly brought forward by liberal groups, who had scratched around for some dirt when they heard or feared that the vote in the Senate would go for Judge Thomas.

The Democrats, being the defenders, were understandably more pedestrian, less dramatic in their questioning. Once, Judge Thomas said, and said once for all, that he categorically denied all the charges, including ever having had dinner or lunch with Miss Hill, there was not much they could do to challenge or embarrass him. On the whole then, the Democrats maintained that there was not a shred of evidence that Miss Hill was mentally, emotionally unstable. She too had four friends who testified that she'd told them years ago about Mr Thomas's advances, that she was a totally credible witness, that she'd never wanted to be there, that she had courageously brought into the open an affliction, sexual harassment which millions of women suffer and which for many obvious reasons, they must stay quiet about.

That Judge Thomas was at a desperate dead end when he called the hearing a hi-tech lynching for uppity blacks, a dragging in of a racial issue that, by the way, even some of his supporters thought offensive and irrelevant. Some onlookers said later that this memorable line might have influenced ignorant blacks enough to tip their support of Judge Thomas from two to three to one.

Well, in the end, five votes. Democrats previously pledged to Judge Thomas turned against him. After the hearings the verdict could be seen to turn, probably on Southern senators and Democrats at that, who had in their states a heavy population of blacks. Four of the Southerners, who could probably not be elected without the black vote, are up for re-election next year. Whatever their private convictions, they were unshaken upholders of the judge. A switch of three of them would have rejected him.

Still the vote to confirm was the closest this century, 52 to 48. At nightfall on Tuesday the wiliest politician in the Senate, the minority leader, Senator Dole, noted the effect on the Senate vote of the national polls, which gave the judge a two to one edge. If, said Mr Dole, the polls had gone the other way, he wouldn't be here today. As for the main, the galling, wrenching question, who told the truth, who lied, I think the case of Hill versus Thomas may join Wallace, the Liverpool chess player, and Lizzie Borden of Massachusetts as one of the unsolved mysteries of the century.

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