5 Panelists Identify With Thomas : Congress: Several on the Senate committee have been investigated or had their character questioned. Some express empathy with the nominee.

Judge Clarence Thomas had only begun to describe the anguish that Anita Faye Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment had caused him when a voice from the Senate Judiciary Committee dais broke in. “I know exactly what you mean,” Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona blurted out.

DeConcini is a Democrat, but his exclamation of empathy for a beleaguered Republican underscored the fact that many of the senators who are about to judge Thomas’ fitness for the Supreme Court are uniquely equipped to understand what it feels like to have one’s personal character and conduct dissected in excruciating detail with the nation looking on.

In DeConcini’s case, he was one of the “Keating Five”--five senators who were accused of improperly helping fallen thrift executive Charles H. Keating. As a result, he was the subject of long and highly critical scrutiny by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded last February that some of DeConcini’s actions “gave the appearance of being improper.”

Besides DeConcini, Judiciary Committee members Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) also have been the targets of public scrutiny and criticism that left painful scars regardless of the final outcome.

And among the Senate as a whole, there are many more.

“There’s more sympathy for Judge Thomas than they can express,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor who has written a book on press attacks on politicians’ character. “You can see it in their faces--even those who will vote against Thomas.”

This sensitivity is not expected to sway any votes, particularly because both the judge and his accuser may be considered victims of unfair vilification. But the senators’ own struggles have given them a visceral understanding of what it means to be at the center of a firestorm like this one that they may not have had, for instance, concerning the problem of sexual harassment.

And it has added a tinge of dramatic irony to the hearings--particularly during the infrequent moments when attention turns to Kennedy. The Massachusetts senator has a much-discussed reputation for womanizing and heavy drinking. And he has felt the glare of the national spotlight as a result of the charges filed against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, by a woman who says that Smith sexually assaulted her at the Kennedy family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

In fact, the committee members have squabbled over which of them has been hurt the most by leaks and unfavorable public disclosures.

Biden, who was forced to withdraw from the 1988 presidential race over his unattributed use of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, insisted Saturday that he had been the most injured. “No one on this committee has been more damaged by the leak by an unethical person than me,” he asserted. “I fully understand. . . .”

But DeConcini, who has nodded and even smiled as Thomas has railed at the unfairness of his accusers, strongly disagreed. “I take exception . . . that no one has been more hurt than you,” he insisted moments later. “I thought I was going to die.”

The Republicans on the committee have had no such problems. But they also have shown an appreciation of the vulnerability of politicians. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who has taken a lead role in defending Thomas, said last Monday that the attack was similar to pre-election assaults engineered in some political campaigns.

The sex harassment charge against Thomas was an “October surprise,” Hatch said, “a last-ditch, last-second” personal political attack to which elected officials are vulnerable.

The issue clearly resonated beyond the Senate Caucus Room. Sen. Charles S. Robb, the Virginia Democrat who has battled accusations of womanizing and attending parties where drugs were used, promptly compared the attacks on Thomas to his own ordeal.

“They know they’re all vulnerable to it,” Sabato said. “They know anybody can be destroyed--anybody. We all have some embarrassing encounter, some failed relationship.”

This year, the travail of accusatory headlines has become known to Metzenbaum, one of the Senate’s most tireless critics of shady business practices. Metzenbaum and other co-owners of a restaurant in Washington, D.C., have been sued for allegedly misrepresenting the restaurant’s financial condition and for failing to pay all its taxes before selling it. He has denied the charges.

Leahy, meanwhile, resigned from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1987 after acknowledging that he showed a reporter a draft copy of a report on the Iran-Contra affair that the panel had voted not to release.

The politicians also know that once the charges are made public, they can take on a life of their own. Kennedy, whose habits have been scrutinized again this year because of the rape allegations against his nephew, has not entirely succeeded in making himself inconspicuous during the Thomas proceedings.

Members of the committee adjourned Saturday night early enough to catch the inevitable parody of their hearing on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live” show.

A skit on the show showed the panel members examining witnesses with an unseemly interest in Thomas’ alleged advances toward Hill. Perhaps the studio audience’s biggest laugh was provoked when the Kennedy character asked the Hill character: “Was he drunk?”