Unconquered Hills, Doubting Thomases

Clarence Thomas is busy writing Supreme Court opinions, Anita Hill is back in academia. But the Thomas-Hill hearings are far from over.

“I couldn’t quite figure out what the media wanted, because they never seemed to be satisfied,” she says of the days immediately preceding her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, in an interview in the March Essence.

Reporters are no longer camped out in Hill’s neighbor’s yard, but at least a few remain unsatisfied. In a cover story titled “The Real Anita Hill” in the March issue of American Spectator, David Brock makes clear what he wants: nothing less than total destruction of Anita Hill’s reputation--her legal reputation, her academic reputation and her reputation in the old-fashioned sense about which mothers used to caution their daughters.

The Spectator’s story begins with an unnamed source--”a pro-abortion socialite” who was reportedly told, three days before Hill’s allegations were leaked to the media, that the National Abortion Rights League had been “working on” Hill since July.

The unnamed sources and unsupported statements pile up paragraph by paragraph, severely undermining the story’s credibility. Which is not to say Brock’s complicated tale of deceit and buffoonery can be dismissed out of hand.

Brock’s theory is that the initial rumor that Thomas had harassed Hill was raised--soon after Thomas’ July 1 nomination--by Susan Hoerchner, a friend of Hill’s for more than a decade and a witness at the hearings. But, he contends, Hoerchner’s testimony--at least her initial testimony--reveals that the conversations in which Hill alleged harassment to Hoerchner must have occurred before Hill went to work for Thomas in late 1981.

During the time in question, Hill was employed by the law firm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross. John Burke Jr., a partner at the firm, gave Hill an unsatisfactory performance evaluation at that time. “Several” unnamed sources allegedly told Brock that “Hill had leveled a charge of sexual harassment to deflect attention from serious professional difficulties.”

According to Hill’s statements to the FBI before the hearings, she decided to come forward--but not go public--with her allegations after talking to Hoerchner. Brock speculates that Hoerchner’s misconception about the source of the alleged harassment caught Hill off guard, and that as partisan “supporters” led Hill along, she became inexorably snared in the proverbial tangled web.

Why would Hill permit this?

The Spectator attempts to answer this by portraying Hill as a maladjusted and inept person with political leanings that would make her an easy pawn.

Last November, the media reported Hills’ students honoring her with standing ovations. In contrast, Brock says that he couldn’t find a single student at either Oral Roberts University or the University of Oklahoma who had anything good to say about her. And many unnamed sources purportedly said she was a lousy teacher who sometimes behaved in a bizarre and suggestive manner.

In the strangest report, the Spectator cites a sworn affidavit by Lawrence Shiles before the Judiciary Committee in which he states that during the 1983-1984 year at Oral Roberts, he and two other named male students received graded papers from Hill with pubic hairs on them.

In a note before the article, Spectator managing editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski() says that “Thanks to the tireless sleuthing of David Brock . . . Justice Thomas and his admirers can rest assured that his good name will forever be secure, and that much of the mystery surrounding Hill has been solved.”

That’s more than slightly premature. For example, despite the Spectator’s implied dismissal of racism and sexism as bugaboos of the politically correct, most of Brock’s allegations could, in fact, be the result of either of those isms--or of simple politics. A more balanced exploration--such as an earlier article by the New Republic that covered some of the same turf--would have examined that possibility.

But then, Hill herself hardly comes out as a firebrand against either harassment or racial injustice in Essence.

In a sidebar to that interview, the magazine excerpts the advertisement by African American Women in Defense of Ourselves that was signed by 1,603 women and ran in the New York Times in November. It’s titled “Sisters in Defense of Anita Hill” and it’s a powerful statement.

As in her recent “60 Minutes” interview, however, Hill speaks only in the most obvious and unrevealing generalities: “I think it would be irresponsible for me not to say what I really believe in my heart to be true--that there are some serious inequities that we face as women and that we can work to address these inequities.”

Neither the Spectator article nor the Essence interview had seen print when the Jan./Feb. Columbia Journalism Review appeared with its post-mortem of the Thomas hearings.

The analysis, by William Boot, raises the various objections to the way the Hill story was initially broken by Timothy Phelps of Newsday and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, but ultimately argues that the reporters acted responsibly.

CJR also examines conservative allegations of media bias during the hearings, and finds that while Time magazine, for example, did let pro-Hill bias slip into at least two stories, a New Republic senior editor--to cite one example--revealed a pro-Thomas mindset. Boot cites a report by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that found overall media coverage of the hearings solidly behind Thomas.

Boot’s most cogent observation is about the importance of the “babble factor,” in which “much of the intelligent news analysis (liberal, moderate and conservative) was simply drowned out by the compulsive babbling and hyperbole that this event aroused in journalists.”

The CJR piece concludes by chastising Clarence and Virginia Thomas for cooperating in a Nov. 11 “ultimate puff piece” in People magazine. Boot suggests that this continuing “PR offensive” is a kind of “preemptive strike” against new evidence of wrongdoing that may turn up someday. The author reveals his own subtle biases in failing to predict that Hill, too, might be the subject of further unpleasant scrutiny or might herself do a PR-oriented interview for a slick magazine.

REQUIRED READING

Shame on the Senate Judiciary Committee! Shame on Clarence Thomas! Shame on Anita Hill! Shame on the media! Shame on the people! Shame on you!

Does that message hit home? Don’t feel guilty. According to February’s Atlantic Monthly, shame may be “the preeminent cause of emotional distress in our time.”

It seems that while most Americans have been shamelessly absorbed in tales about other people’s pubic hair, the psychological community has been exploring shame as a primary cause of much human misery. And man, have they been cranking out the books--”Shame, Exposure, and Privacy,” “The Mask of Shame,” “Shame and the Self,” “The Many Faces of Shame” and “Shame, the Underside of Narcissism” to name just a few published in the last 15 years.

Readers may find themselves ashamed to admit that they read all 21 pages of Robert Karen’s intriguing article, and still don’t know the apparently all-important difference between shame and guilt. Don’t worry. Shame, Karen writes, has a “confounding variability.”

Moreover, “the problem is not just among psychologists. Bring together two anthropologists, theologians, or philosophers to talk about shame, and they may seem not to be describing the same experience.”

At least philosophers don’t charge by the hour.

NEWSSTAND NEWS

Tikkun, “the bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture and society,” will sponsor a public forum on Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and “the attempts by the media to discredit it” Sunday at 7 p.m. at Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles. Admission is $12. For more information, call (510) 482-0805.