TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021102.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 9.8 KB | 200 lines

                                  ╣;                                          ╚NATION, Page 43

COVER STORIES

A Question of Character


Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were both known for truthfulness
and integrity -- until now

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by Sam Allis/Boston


    Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas raised
the question of sexual harassment to national prominence, only
to reduce it again to its toughest and most intractable kernel:
her word against his. Neither Hill nor Thomas was able to bring
decisive evidence before the committee last week to support
their widely differing versions of their dealings in the past.
Thus the evidence of character counts all the more heavily. But
even that appeared to weigh equally on both sides. Based on
their backgrounds, Hill and Thomas seemed to be the two least
likely people in the world to be involved in an exchange of
accusations about sexual misconduct or false charges. Both have
devoted their lives to hard work and public service. He is said
to be sensitive to women. She has a reputation for integrity.
One of them is lying.


    A Reputation For Integrity

    Some people have always found it hard to reconcile the
fact that Clarence Thomas is both black and a conservative. It
is harder still to match the image of Thomas offered by Anita
Hill -- of a boss who pressured and humiliated her -- with the
picture offered by friends and co-workers, who portray him as
a model of courteous and respectful relations with women. The
bedeviling paradox that emerged last week was this: How could
Thomas have been one man to the world and another to Hill?

    Even as her charges were electrifying the country, Thomas'
defenders were rushing to his side. Dolores Rozzi, director of
the office of federal operations at the EEOC, worked for Thomas
for seven years. Through hundreds of meetings together, she
says, she never saw him listen to anyone tell a dirty joke, let
alone tell one himself. "People thought he was a little uptight
and conservative," says Rozzi. "The word was, `You have to go
to Clarence with clean hands.'"

    Former colleagues insist that if anything, Thomas had a
special sensitivity toward women's concerns. Janet Brown, who
met Thomas when both were on the staff of Missouri Senator John
Danforth, recalled that when she was subjected to sexual
harassment some years ago, Thomas was the most sympathetic of
her friends. "Outside my immediate family, there was no one who
exhibited more compassion, more outrage, more sensitivity, more
caring than Clarence Thomas."

    Friends from his undergraduate days at Holy Cross College
in Worcester, Mass., maintain that Thomas tried to set an
example among the black students on the dormitory corridor where
he lived. "He was always respectful of women and critical of
those who were not," says classmate Leonard Cooper. In the early
1970s, when the campus was gripped by debate over whether to go
coed, Thomas composed a poem, "Is You or Is You Ain't a
Brother?" which he posted at the entrance to the dorm. "The
point of the poem was, if you don't respect women, you're not
a brother," recalls Edward Jenkins, a Boston attorney who was
one of Thomas' fellow students.

    In those years Thomas got the campus Black Student Union
to adopt guidelines for the behavior of men in the dormitory
who had women guests on the weekends. The code included rules
for dress, language and how to deal with the dicey bathroom
issue. "He was acutely aware of these things at 21," says
Clifford Hardwick, a friend who is now an attorney in Savannah,
"when many of us weren't even thinking about them."

    Those who know him shake their head at the idea that
Thomas has any preoccupation with porn films. At Yale Law School
in the early 1970s, Lovida Coleman, now an attorney in private
practice in Washington, belonged to a group of students, which
Thomas was also part of, who convened in the dining room at 7
a.m. She vividly recalls the morning when Thomas described the
plot of a pornographic film that she believes was Behind the
Green Door. "We were all laughing hysterically," says Coleman.
"He was talking about how absurd it was." Moreover, says an old
friend, his methods of flirtation before he remarried were
hardly those of a Lothario. "Clarence's idea of a date was to
call up a woman and ask if he can come over and have a beer and
talk," says the friend. "He wants the woman to make the first
move."

    It is just one of the ironies of his situation that while
heading the EEOC, Thomas strongly urged the Justice Department
to back the commission's sexual-harassment guidelines in
arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. But while he strongly
denies it, Thomas has been accused of dragging his feet on the
1983 case of an EEOC attorney who was accused of making
unwelcome sexual advances to several women in his office. After
an internal investigation found the charges to have substance,
Thomas urged that the attorney be fired, but the dismissal never
took place and the accused man eventually retired.

    Thomas' defenders insist that he could act decisively in
dealing with cases of sexual harassment. Rozzi cites one case
of a male field supervisor under her supervision who she felt
had been unfairly charged with harassment. "I tried to convince
Thomas that I didn't feel this gentleman was guilty, but he
wouldn't listen," she says. "He downgraded the person two
grades, which is a very severe punishment." If Thomas is the man
his friends say he is, that penalty might have been pure
justice. If he is the man Anita Hill says he is, it was pure
hypocrisy.


     A Real Straight Arrow

    If Clarence Thomas had been a woman, he might have been
Anita Hill. The childhood without much money, the hard work that
led to college and Yale Law School, the career achievements in
the private sector and public service that followed -- much of
Thomas' up-by-the-bootstraps life story has its equivalents in
hers. And just as his reputation for integrity makes the charges
against him hard to believe, her reputation makes them hard to
dismiss. "She is scrupulous, conscientious and ethical beyond
reproach," says Teree Foster, associate dean of the University
of Oklahoma's law school.

    Among most of the people whose paths Hill has crossed, she
has left behind the impression of quiet but unquestionable
achievement and a sober but not solemn disposition. She dates,
though not a lot. She enjoys a laugh, though she doesn't tell
the jokes. The youngest of 13 children in a devout Baptist
family, she grew up near Morris, Okla., a small town (pop.
1,200) where her father raised cattle and farmed cotton,
soybeans and peanuts on 240 acres. She remains close to her
family, most of whom flew to Washington last week to support
her. For her father, now 79, it was the first trip on an
airplane.

    Though reserved, Hill was popular among classmates at
Morris High School, finding time for the Pep Club and the Future
Homemakers of America before graduating as valedictorian. "She
was so smart it wasn't even funny," recalls Bill Bearden Sr.,
the former basketball coach. "She was very polite, well groomed
and never missed a day of school." At Oklahoma State University,
she majored in psychology, and graduated with honors in 1977.
"We were both country bumpkins," says former roommate Susan
Clark. "We socialized, but not to the extreme of getting rowdy."

    After earning a law degree from Yale in 1980, also with
honors, Hill spent a year in private practice in Washington
before being hired as special counsel to Clarence Thomas at the
Department of Education's office for civil rights. She had
reservations about living in Washington, which seemed too loose
and unbuckled a place. "She was a real straight arrow," says
Michael Middleton, who worked with both Hill and Thomas at the
Department of Education and later at the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. "Very proper and straitlaced. She was
certainly no bimbo."

    In 1982 Hill followed Thomas to the EEOC as his special
assistant, but surprised colleagues a year later by leaving to
take a job as law professor at Oral Roberts University. Five
years ago, she moved over to the University of Oklahoma, where
she specializes in commercial law, one of the least glamorous
subtopics of a buttoned-down field. Hill is happiest when
teaching contract law, discussing how to promote economic
development on Indian reservations, or writing papers on topics
like "The Relative Nature of Property in the Context of
Bankruptcy." She works on the faculty senate and the dean's
committee and advises minority students, often inviting them to
dinner at her modest one-story brick house.

    Hill, who is single, allows few diversions from her work.
But her friends insist that she has never been prudish or
hypersensitive. "She was not a church mouse," says William
Kennard, a Washington lawyer who was a close friend at Yale.
Bill Hassler is a Washington attorney who was a friend of Hill's
at law school, where he would confide to her the details of his
romantic ups and downs. She would listen, he recalls, without
embarrassment. "I wouldn't hesitate to invite her to an R-rated
movie," he says.

    Hill gives no signs of having a political ax to grind.
"She's a scholar in commercial law," says law professor Harry
Tepker, a colleague at Oklahoma. "That's not exactly the sort
of field that firebrands go into." Those who know her describe
her as both a conservative and a feminist but not an ideologue
in either area. "I suspect she's a card-carrying Republican,"
says Joel Paul, a friend who recalls arguments in which Hill
would loudly support Judge Robert Bork's unsuccessful nomination
to the Supreme Court. "She is cut from the same political cloth
as Thomas."