Thomas Vows Not to Withdraw : Judge, GOP Allies Accuse Hill of Conspiracy : Hearings: The Supreme Court nominee charges that his accuser schemed with unnamed liberal opponents to ‘concoct’ the sexual harassment charges.

Defiant Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas vowed Saturday to press on with the confirmation process, despite the “living hell” that he and his family are enduring, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I’d rather die than withdraw.”

“I will not be scared. I don’t like bullies. I’ve never run from bullies. I never cry uncle--and I’m not going to cry uncle today,” he said as he began his first full day of testimony in response to allegations of sexual harassment lodged by Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill.

The pledge came as Thomas and his supporters on the panel went on a full-scale attack, accusing Hill, in ways both subtle and direct, of conspiring with unnamed liberal foes of the conservative black jurist to “concoct” the harassment charges that have provoked a national furor.

In further dramatic testimony, Thomas declared that he “died” when Hill’s charges were made public--and that the man who began the 105-day-long confirmation process no longer exists.

“I have been harmed,” he declared. “My family has been harmed, I’ve been harmed worse than I’ve ever been harmed in my life.

“I wasn’t harmed by the (Ku Klux) klan. I wasn’t harmed by the Knights of Camellia (a precursor of the klan). I wasn’t harmed by the Aryan race. I wasn’t harmed by a racist group. I was harmed by this process. This process, which accommodated these attacks on me.”

It was a theme to which he returned throughout the day, repeatedly portraying himself as a deeply wronged victim of “scurrilous” allegations that he did not understand and does not know how to combat effectively.

“I would have preferred an assassin’s bullet to this kind of living hell that they have put me and my family through,” Thomas said.

Leading the Republican offensive, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) suggested that parts of Hill’s stunning description of Thomas’ alleged sexual comments were lifted from the 1971 best-selling novel, “The Exorcist,” and from a 1988 federal court ruling in a sexual harassment case.

Denouncing Hill’s account, Thomas declared: “It was concocted. . . . I believe that someone, some interest group . . . in combination came up with this story and used this process to destroy me.”

The embattled nominee also declared that Hill’s allegations “play into the worst stereotypes about black men,” thus further injecting the issue of racial insensitivity into the already contentious confirmation process.

In a second straight day filled with raw, mortifying language, the accusations by Thomas, Hatch and other Republican allies sent Hill’s supporters scrambling to come to her defense.

They quickly rejected a suggestion by Hatch that “slick” lawyers for anti-Thomas groups planted the graphic details in Hill’s testimony and said that she had offered from the outset to take a lie detector test.

Thomas spent the entire day of the reopened hearings in the witness chair, during which he questioned Hill’s credibility and accused her of making inconsistent statements but said that he remained baffled by her motives.

“I don’t have a clue as to why she would do this,” Thomas said.

But later, he suggested several possible motives.

He said for the first time that Hill was “adamant” in her opposition to his views on affirmative action policies. “She would get a bit irate,” said Thomas, in a suggestion that Hill’s charges could have some political motive.

He also raised an issue of great sensitivity among American blacks when he testified that Hill appeared to have been bothered by his associations with several lighter-skinned African-Americans.

Thomas said that “there seemed to be some tension” with Hill after he began dating a woman with a light complexion and promoted another light-skinned woman to become his chief of staff, a position that Thomas has said Hill wanted but did not get.

Thomas called the issue “sensitive” and said that he was discussing it “reluctantly.”

As he did on Friday, the broad-shouldered nominee repeatedly spoke of the agony of the confirmation process and said he has been deeply scarred by the ordeal.

But he added: “Yes, I can heal. I’ll survive.”

The televised hearings, which will resume at 9 a.m. PDT today were convened by the Judiciary Committee after a public firestorm erupted because the Senate initially had decided not to investigate Hill’s charges when she first lodged them with FBI investigators in late September. The allegations became public just two days before the Senate was to have voted on Thomas’ confirmation last Tuesday, prompting it to delay the vote by a week.

But after two days of contradictory testimony, the outlook for Thomas’ confirmation remained unclear. The Senate is now scheduled to vote at 3 p.m. PDT Tuesday.

“I think that’s very much yet an open question,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), referring to Thomas’ chances of winning. “I’m not satisfied I know what happened.”

“We’re still in this quandary,” Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) said.

A White House spokesman said Saturday that President Bush was “monitoring” the hearings from his weekend retreat at Camp David but would be making no public comment on their progress.

The White House issued a statement after Thomas concluded his testimony saying that the nominee “once again demonstrated the qualities of determination, sensitivity and leadership that make him an outstanding nominee for the Supreme Court.”

“He has responded to the committee’s interrogation with eloquence and forthright description of his feelings and actions,” spokesman Sean Walsh said in reading the written statement.

“We look forward to the vote on his confirmation and believe he will be confirmed to the court,” Walsh said from Camp David.

The spokesman said that Bush had arisen early Saturday to go fishing on the wooded property and had watched the hearings later. Walsh added that Bush had other “recreational activities” planned for later in the day.

The White House limited its public comment to that written statement and officials declined to talk about the progress of the hearings. That unusually low profile reflects the deep-seated uneasiness among his senior advisers to Bush becoming enmeshed in the details of the seemingly unresolvable dispute between Thomas and his accuser--a dispute that involves two politically deadly topics, racism and sexism.

It was under questioning by Hatch that Thomas, referring to Hill’s allegations that he boasted of his sexual prowess, including his penis size, called them symptomatic of “underlying racial attitudes about black men and their views of sex.”

Such stereotypes of black men have been around “as long as I’ve been on the face of this earth,” Thomas said. “And these are charges that play into racist, bigoted stereotypes. And these are the kind of charges that are impossible to wash off.”

For the most part, Thomas on Saturday was far more subdued than on Friday, but he was also quick on his feet.

When Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) posed a hypothetical case of sexual harassment in which a victim does not come forward for five years, Thomas deftly used the opening to argue his own case.

“What we would generally find would be that the person involved would have engaged in a pattern of that kind of practice,” Thomas said. “And you can find more recent occurrences.”

Thomas hardly had to remind the 14 senators hearing his testimony that Hill’s charges involve alleged incidents as many as 10 years old.

“When you have a person who’s engaged in grotesque conduct or harassing conduct, you will find more than one person” who is a victim, Thomas added. “. . . You will find a series of those. You will not find generally just one isolated instance.”

One potential witness, however, has told six committee members that Thomas repeatedly asked her for dates, asked her breast size and showed up uninvited at her apartment. The woman, Angela Wright, now an assistant metropolitan editor at the Charlotte (N. C.) Observer, once worked for Thomas at the EEOC.

But whether she will testify seemed in doubt late Saturday. Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) said: “. . . We’re told that Angela Wright is getting what we in the legal trade call cold feet.”

In a preemptive strike, Thomas suggested that Wright is a disgruntled employee with a score to settle. “I terminated her very aggressively a number of years ago and very summarily,” Thomas said.

He said that she was “ineffective” and that “the last straw” was when Wright reportedly called a fellow worker a “faggot.”

“I don’t play games,” Thomas explained.

Scheduled to testify today are several of Hill’s friends in whom she reportedly confided about the alleged sexual harassment incidents. Among them are Susan J. Hoerchner, a judge in Norwalk, Calif., and a former Yale Law School classmate of Hill’s.

In previous testimony, Hill said that she followed Thomas from the Department of Education to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1982 because she was afraid of losing her job at the department. But on Saturday Thomas called that explanation “not credible,” since she was not a political appointee and thus could not have been fired or demoted.

Thomas also said that it would have been “reasonable” for her to have in some way documented the alleged instances of harassment, which she admittedly did not do.

In alleging that Thomas sexually harassed her between 1981 and 1983 while they worked together at the Department of Education and then at the EEOC, Hill said that Thomas once asked her in his private office: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” She also accused him of repeatedly describing to her scenes from pornographic movies and mentioned an actor, “Long Dong John.”

But Hatch said that name appeared in a 1988 sexual harassment court decision in Kansas that was widely available, “including at the law school in Oklahoma.”

Hatch also read a line from the 1971 novel, “The Exorcist,” that is strikingly similar to the comment Hill attributed to Thomas about his can of Coke.

In the book, author William Peter Blatty has a character saying that there seemed to be “an alien pubic hair floating round in my gin.”

Hatch suggested that it was “slick” lawyers for anti-Thomas groups who injected such details into Hill’s allegations at the eleventh-hour for credibility.

But outside the ornate Senate Caucus Room, anti-Thomas groups and Hill’s supporters quickly made themselves available to the crush of reporters in an effort to refute those charges.

Eleanor Smeal, director of the National Organization for Women, angrily denied that her group had helped Hill develop such allegations. “Women and pro-choice groups had nothing to do with Anita Hill’s testimony. We did not know her,” Smeal said. She called the issue “a red herring.”

But the anti-Thomas forces were clearly concerned about the effects of the allegations by Thomas and Hatch. “This is an attempt to seriously undermine Anita Hill’s credibility,” said Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League. “We don’t know how the American public will respond.”