NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/activism/19021

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From: [e-mail] (Jere Jenkins)
Subject: The Real Anita Hill
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Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 02:04:08 GMT
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    The following are excerpts from the article "The Real Anita
    Hill" by David Brock, published in _The_American_Spectator_,
    March, 1992.  Mr. Brock is a Washington-based investigative
    reporter.

            The REAL Anita Hill (Part 1)


    On October 3--three days before Anita Hill's accusations against
Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas were first published in NEWSDAY
and aired on National Public Radio--Kate Michelman, the national director
of the National Abortion Rights League in Washington, called a pro-abortion
socialite about a possible contribution.  In the course of a discussion
of NARAL's activities, Michelman mentioned that the group's leaders were
"very excited because we have Anita Hill."

    The woman asked who Anita Hill was.  "She's going to come forward
with a claim of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas," Michelman
said.  "We've been working on her since July."  (Michelman would not
comment on the call.)

    The woman was subsequently moved to contact a Republican senator
after listening to the following exchange between GOP senator Hank Brown
of Colorado and Hill during the first day of the second round of Thomas
hearings:

    BROWN:  You mentioned that you talked to several staffers and
    then eventually made a decision to come forward and you
    chatted and had a variety of conversations there.  Were
    there others that you talked to after you talked to those
    two staffers and before you decided to speak to the
    committee.
      HILL:  I talked with personal friends. I talked with
    individuals that knew more about Title VII law than I did.
      BROWN:  But I take it none of these conversations included
    people who were actively opposing the nomination?
      HILL:  No.

    There are tow possible interpretations of this exchange.  One is
that Hill had talked with Michelman or other feminist activists and was
lying about it.  A more likely one is that Michelman was speaking
figuratively:  NARAL had been "working on" Hill, since July, through
Hill's personal friends, congressional staffers, and reporters.  It
is with these people, of course, that the sordid story begins.

    Despite immediate threats from the anti-Thomas camp that Thomas
would be "Borked,"  his opponents got off to a rocky start.  By the end
of July, a month after the Thomas nomination, the National Organization
for Women, NARAL, the Women's Legal Defense Fund, People for the American
Way, the Alliance for Justice, and the Congressional Black Caucus were
all allies against Thomas.  However, the Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights, the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the
National Urban League were all withholding judgement.

    This put the Black Caucus in an embarrassing position.  According
to one member, the Caucus blindly followed the lead of D.C. Delegate
Elanor Holmes Norton, who had been the EEOC chairman under President Carter
and considers herself in line to be the first black woman on the
Supreme Court.  Norton harbors a personal antipathy towards Thomas, whose
superior management of the EEOC made Norton look like a bureaucratic
bungler.  she also is infamous for her fierce intolerance of black leaders
like thomas who don't toe the line of the civil rights establishment
on questions such as racial quotas.

    By late July, panicky Black Caucus members enlisted the help of
sympathetic officials at the AFL-CIO in getting other civil-rights groups
into an anti-Thomas posture.  Although big labor, a major financial backer
of both the Leadership Conference and the NAACP, put the screws to
black trade unionists on the NAACP board, the first NAACP vote on
Thomas was split; in the second round, some pro-Thomas holdouts thwarted
a unanimous no vote.  Over at the Leadership Conference, executive
director Ralph Neas banged heads together for weeks to produce what
he called a "consensus" against the nomination.  Thus, in a pattern
familiar to dissident black academics, the civil rights leadership
coalesced, if hesitantly, to squelch Thomas and his unorthodox
views.

    With the divisions among themselves papered over, the anti-Thomas
coalition faced another hurdle:  they had little or no ammunition
with which to shoot him down.  Thomas had been the top decision-maker
at a large and closely watched federal agency for seven years.  He was
the premier black neoconservative in the Reagan Administration, having
given numerous speeches and written a host of articles on the hot-button
topics of the day.  The fact that he had been investigated by the FBI,
and confirmed by the Senate, four times and that he'd survived innumerable
contentious oversight hearings meant that there was not much ore left to
mine.  Only his tenure on the D.C. appeals court, short and unremarkable,
had been theretofore unexamined bye the opposition.

    It was perhaps inevitable that the anti-Thomas campaign
would turn to charges, true or not, of private ethics or beliefs;
the public Thomas was virtually spotless.

    Already before the first round of hearings, a pattern along
these lines had emerged in the anti-Thomas stories marketed by the
interest groups to the press.  A pre-cooked story broke once every
ten days or so, in a steady rhythm, throughout the summer.  One
negative story never sat on another.  And the stories were always
given as exclusives to one media outlet or another for maximum
play.  Thomas was a secret sympathizer of Louis Farrakhan, or
of the apartheid regime in South Africa; he'd experimented with
marijuana and watched porn films at Yale; he'd hung a Confederate
flag in his office in Missouri; he had an unpaid tax bill;
he had billed the government inappropriately for personal travel.
Questions were raised about why Thomas married a white woman, and
about Thomas's religion (a theme explored by Democratic Senator
Paul Simon of Illinois, in perhaps the lowest point of the first
round of hearings:  "He attends an Episcopal Church that has made a
crusade out of the [anti-abortion] stand").

    None of these scandal stories got up and walked, either
because they were trivial or just plain false (for example, the flag
in question, which had been fodder for a long New York Times
takeout, was a Georgia state flag).  In making his case, Thomas had the
assistance of well-organized partisans who left no challenge unmet, no
charge unanswered.  For instance, on the same day that the Women's
Legal Defense Fund announced its opposition to Thomas, and ad hoc
group calling itself Women for Judge Thomas held a press conference
to praise him.  This at least produced neutral headlines:  "Women
divided on Thomas."  Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation
matched the anti-Thomas interest groups press release by press release.
During the first round of hearings, the Thomas spokesmen huddled in the
conference room of GOP Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and at every
break they would hurry GOP Senator John Danforth of Missouri, Thomas's
chief Senate sponsor, to the set of microphones outside the hearing room.
A senator will always attract the television cameras; Danforth would
talk through the break, denying Michelman, Neas & Co. the chance to
put their spin on the story.

    Having failed to wound Thomas through two weeks of hearings,
thanks in part to the successful (but not terribly enlightening)
White House coaching, the Thomas foes faced the prospect of a 9-5
favorable vote in committee.  The committee numbers shifted to 8-6 when,
according to Senate staffers, Howell Heflin, a moderate Democrat from
Alabama, was somehow convinced by liberal black Republican Bill Colean
and NAACP lobbyist Elaine Jones that a vote against Thomas wouldn't
backfire with blacks in his home state.  Adhering to the view
that it is politically perilous to be to the right of Heflin on anything,
Biden decided to vote against Thomas, too.

    Nonetheless, after the committee vote, it was clear that the
momentum was with Thomas.  Two Republicans who had voted against Bork,
John Warner of Virginia and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, were
backing Thomas, and important Southern Democrats like Bennett Johnston
of Louisiana were announcing for him too.  So concerned were the Thomas
opponents, that work went out in the Democratic cloak room to stop
announcing before the debate.  In short, in late September, Thomas's
confirmation was a near-certainty.

    Enter Anita Hill, whose sexual harassment story had been
circulating, as Michelman averred in her fund-raising phone call, since
July.  It was a private matter, impossible to disprove--a charge tailor
made to the fix that the Thomas foes found themselves in.  For despite
the anti-Thomas camp's desperation, the Hill affair could never have
happened without the complicity of the Senate and press, both of which
unquestioningly accepted Hill's "credibility" without investigating.

    Michelman, of course, wasn't the only one who knew about
Anita Hill's story as early as July; so did some members of the press
with good connections with Senate staffers.  Timothy Phelps, the Newsday
reporter who broke the Hill story, stated on "Nightline," in a town
meeting following Thomas's confirmation, that he had heard the story
in July but that it wasn't solid enough to report.  National Public
Radio's Nina Totenberg, the other reporter who simultaneously broke
the story, said in a January Vanity Fair interview that she had known
about it in July as well.

    But how and why did the story surface for the first time in July?
the only person so far to emerge who had made a connection between hill
and Thomas and sexual harassment at the moment of his nomination on July 1
is Susan Hoerchner, a friend of Hill's who later testified publicly
on her behalf.  (Neither Hill nor Hoerchner responded to calls requesting
interviews.)  In a previously undisclosed deposition given to Senate
Judiciary Committee staffers on October 10, Hoerchner was asked:

    Q.  What were your view when Judge Thomas was nominated for the
    Court?  What were you personal views about that?
    A.  Shock.
    Q.  Why was that?
    A.  I just remember waiting for them to explain his background
    and then yelling to my husband, "He's the one."

    It seems likely from the record that Hoerchner was mistaken in
her recollection of the events of 1981, and as a result she set the
entire train of events in motion, with Anita Hill going along for
the ride.  In her staff deposition and on another occasion, Hoerchner
told interviewers that the call in which Hill was being sexually
harassed occurred before September 1981, i.e. BEFORE Hill had gone
to work for Thomas.

    In her testimony to the Judiciary Committee, Anita Hill stated:
"I began working with Clarence Thomas in the early Fall of 1981....
Early on our working relationship was positive.....After approximately
three months of working together, he asked me to go out with him
socially."  She told him no, and the first alleged incident of harassment
occurred in the "following few weeks"--i.e., in late December 1981 or
January 1982.

    Now, consider Hoerchner's deposition:

    Q. And, in an attempt to try to pin down the date a little
    bit more specifically as to your first phone conversation
    about the sexual harassment issue in 1981, the year you
    mentioned, you said the first time you moved out of Washington
    was September 1981; is that correct?
      A.  Right.
      Q.  Okay.  Were you living in Washington at the time you two
    had this phone conversation?
      A.  Yes.
      Q   When she told you?
      A.  Yes.
      Q.  So it was prior to September of 1981?
      A.  Oh, I see what you're saying.

    Moments later, Hoerchner's attorney Janet Napolitano, a feminist
activist who was also advising Anita hill, asked for a recess.  Remember,
Hoerchner had told interviewers several times that the call occurred
before September 1981.  After conferring with Nopolitano, Hoerchner,
back on the record again, was asked by a Democratic staff counsel:

    Q.  When you had the initial phone conversation with Anita Hill
    and she spoke for the first time about sexual harassment, do
    you recall where you were living--What city?
      A.  I don't know for sure.

    According to a GOP Senate staffer, such pre-interviewing of
public witnesses is somewhat unusual for the committee; it is useful
primarily as a damage control device.  In her statement to the Senate
three days later, Hoerchner made a point of disclaiming any knowledge
of the date of the conversation.  "I remember, in particular, one
telephone conversation i had with Anita.  I should say, before telling
you about this conversation, that I cannot pin down its date with
certainty."

    But immediately beforehand, Hoerchner implied that the critical
telephone conversation took place when she was speaking with Hill on
a regular basis, beginning in 1980, when the both moved to Washington from
Yale, and ending in 1981, when Hoerchner went on assignment to
California.  "We were both busy with our new jobs, so we did not
get together with great frequency.  What we did do, however, was keep
in touch by telephone.  Those conversations would often last as much
as an hour.  I remember, in particular, one telephone conversation
I had with Anita...."

    When Biden asked her, "How did you know that the problem
continued after first being made aware of it in the conversation that
you related to us, here today?"  Hoerchner responded:  "In telephone
conversations I asked and she led me to understand that it was happening,
and often would say, she didn't want to talk about it at the time."
Yet Hoerchner had described her contacts with Hill after leaving Washington
in September 1981 as "sporadic" and provided only one example in her
deposition, of meeting Hill at a professional seminar in 1984.

    If the regular telephone calls stopped when Hoerchner moved to
California, Hill could not have been referring to Thomas in those calls:
she wasn't working for him yet.