COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Eminently Unqualified to Judge Thomas : Congresswomen who marched on the Senate did so with angered knowledge of its culture of coarse male vulgarity.

The nominee who survived charges of conflict of interest, evasiveness bordering on contemptuous mendacity and ignorance of the proceedings of the court that he was aspiring to join, at last had his fateful rendezvous with a matter that truly touched the public nerve. Every great issue finds its moment, and Clarence Thomas collided with Anita Hill’s charge of sexual harassment at the time that the issue has reached critical mass.

Remember first what the senators on the Judiciary Committee did not find unacceptable in Thomas’ qualifications. Though sponsored throughout his career by Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.), Thomas failed to disqualify himself from a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court considering a case in which Ralston Purina faced heavy damages. Danforth’s family has a major interest in the company. Thomas voted to reduce the penalty. Though the case received some publicity, the senators never even questioned Thomas about this conflict of interest.

Thomas’ intellectual and legal credentials have been more thoroughly explored. My view was that the record showed that Thomas is an extremely angry man who hates liberals (with some justice, it should be added) and that it was quite possible that after a few years on the bench he might have a change of heart and of intellectual posture and start issuing decisions discomfiting to the rich and powerful.

It’s conceivable that Thomas was a snitch for the FBI, though the senators failed to explore the matter. He was co-founder and treasurer of the Black Student Union at Holy Cross College in January, 1969, just when J. Edgar Hoover was pressuring the bureau to investigate black student groups on campus.

Thomas’ conversion to radicalism from his previous posture as a conservative seminarian was short-lived. He soon switched back to conservatism and appointment (at Danforth’s instigation) as assistant attorney general in Missouri.

One of Thomas’ close friends, the black conservative activist Jay Parker, was not only a registered agent for the South African government but, in the early 1970s, president of Friends of the FBI. As Chip Berlet, secretary of the National Lawyers Guild’s civil liberties committee has asked, “Did the FBI provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with the file on the Holy Cross Black Student Union. . . . If so, what’s in the file? If it wasn’t included, why not?”

Questions about the pertinacity and forthrightness of the FBI are also germane to the charges of sexual harassment. Just how hard did the bureau work to examine Hill’s accusation and to determine whether Thomas’ alleged behavior toward her was part of a larger pattern? This would not be an arduous investigation. Thomas is in his mid-40s and has worked in a relatively small number of offices, perhaps with about a hundred or so women. Did the FBI determine who his female professional associates were and then interview them about his comportment toward them? If not, why not?

The fact that the senators on the Judiciary Committee did not ask the bureau to do so is not in the least surprising. Anyone who has spent more than a day in the political and social ambience of Washington and of Capitol Hill will know very well that the culture is one of rabid sexual exploitation. Power fuels a heartless libidinal avidity that is blatant and repulsive.

I well remember a distraught woman in one senator’s office describing to me a few years ago his demands and the insouciance with which he extended them. Not so long ago the (male) aide of a senior Congressman gave a similarly unpleasing account of the coarse male vulgarity dominant in the clubrooms of the capital. The congresswomen who marched on the Senate last Tuesday did so with the angered knowledge of that culture. So are these male politicians really qualified to judge Hill’s veracity? Should not a man with Sen. Edward Kennedy’s past have disqualified himself, just as Thomas should have done in the Ralston Purina case?

The defenses put up on Thomas’ behalf were in themselves revealing. Why, asked Danforth, had Hill continued a professional association with Thomas long after the alleged harassment had taken place? It took Frances Conley, a neurosurgeon at Stanford Medical School, 20 years before she decided last spring to announce publicly that she could no longer tolerate the sexual harassment at her workplace a moment longer. The anger of Conley, of Hill, of millions of women now collides with a political culture so ingrained with male chauvinism that it did not know even how to frame the questions, let alone demand the answers.