THE CLARENCE THOMAS HEARINGS
Special Sore Losers Edition
Editor's Note: Supporters of Clarence Thomas considered the leaking of last-minute charges by Thomas opponents the sleaziest kind of gutter politics, and the logical outcome of a 100-day search for any "dirt" that would deny him the nomination. After the public watched the hearings and believed Thomas, Democrats supported Hill and accused the Republicans of dirty politics. Which view did the media advocate? Read on:
Anita's Allies
"Given the detail
and consistency of her testimony, it was almost inconceivable that Hill,
rather than describing her own experiences, was fabricating the portrait of a
sexual-harassment victim....Thomas' two sessions of angry rebuttal were
compelling. But even so riveting an appearance could not mitigate the impact
of Hill's own eight hours of virtually uninterrupted testimony....her tale
struck a resonant chord with countless women across America."
- Time Associate Editor Jill Smolowe, October 21 issue.
"And then there was
Anita Hill, the poised daughter of so many generations of black women who have
been burned carrying torches into the battle for principle. The cause of civil
rights and social justice has so often fallen to them to defend. Harriet
Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by
temperament. Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who shoved history forward by
refusing to give up her seat on the bus....The latest to claim her place in
line is Anita Hill, a private, professional woman unwilling to relinquish her
dignity without a fight."
- Time Associate Editor Nancy Gibbs, October 21 issue.
"Thus did Rita
Braver look ridiculous on CBS when she told Rather, earlier, that there'd been
nothing said by Hill that was likely to have changed the mind of any Senator
who'd been watching. Hey - what about the Coke can? And what about the fact
that Hill maintained such dignity and stamina in such sordid and sleazy
surroundings? It had to occur to some viewers as they watched the way she
handled herself that she would have made a much better Supreme Court nominee
than Thomas does."
- Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, October 12.
"At the end of the
hearing, her version may have been more plausible, and she seemed to have less
to gain from lying than Thomas."
- Washington Post reporters Marjorie Williams and Joel Achenbach,
October 15.
"Well, it seems
that women have lost yet again....Here we have an example of, everyone in
America got to see what happens when one woman stands up to a man in an
all-male tribunal. She was humiliated."
- Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi on Today,
October 16.
How Many?
"No Evidence of
Thomas Harassment, 9 Women Say"
- Washington Post headline, October 11
"Seventeen women
who have worked with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas appeared at a
Capitol Hill news conference yesterday in a show of support for their former
colleague, with nine of them taking the microphone to say they had never seen,
nor heard rumors of, any improper behavior on his part."
- First paragraph of the Post story.
Clubbing Clarence
"There was plenty of reason to vote against him without this. It seems to me that if he were an experienced jurist, if he'd ever written an opinion that was notable, that we wouldn't be so obsessed with what is a marginal issue. But senators who want to vote against him have plenty of reasons. They don't have to hang it on sexual harassment....
"Using racism when
civil rights organizations oppose him, when his accuser is black, and when he
himself has walked away from the civil rights movement and affirmative action
is really intellectual dishonesty....[Anita Hill] has done nothing to suggest
she has a credibility problem, whereas Clarence Thomas has done a lot to
suggest that he can lie pretty easily."
- Newsweek's Eleanor
Clift, October 12 McLaughlin Group.
"I've despised how
some nonthinking African-Americans - who once loudly disagreed with every
personal and legal decision Clarence Thomas ever made - decided that his
merely leveling the charge of racism made him a man worth supporting....What
else do I hate? The warp speed with which bootstrapper extraordinaire Clarence
Thomas adopts the pose of black victim whenever it suits him. If anyone had
told me that a black man defended by President Bush, Sens. Strom Thurmond and
Orrin Hatch, his loyal white wife and statesmanlike white sponsor would cry
`Racism!' after an accusation by a black woman, I'd have busted a gut....There
was so much more to hate. The flowing pro-Thomas speeches by committee
Republicans that Chairman Joe Biden seldom stanched."
- Washington Post reporter Donna Britt in a "Style"
section essay, October 15.
"Judge Thomas has
consistently played the race card, in the tradition of his patron, George
Bush, whose Willie Horton commercial in 1988 touched a low point in political
campaigns....Clarence Thomas has always benefitted from his race and
victimization. It's just that he has made his case slyly, in subtext, most
recently with his sharecropper grandfather in the starring role....Who lynched
whom? Judge Thomas's appeal to that brutal imagery was at once his shrewdest
and most deplorable tactic."
- New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples, October 17.
Conventional Wisdom or Liberal Perceptions?
"C. Thomas He's Lying! (Isn't he?) Effective denials, but stop crying racism."
"A. Hill She's a
brave truth teller. (Isn't she?) Her details, lack of motive tip the
balance."
- Newsweek, October 21
"Whom do you believe is telling the truth?
[Pie chart showing] Thomas 47%
Hill 24%
Both 5%
Neither 5%
Don't Know 19%"
- USA Today poll, October 14
Dirty White House Politics
"Just as they did
in the 1988 campaign, the Republicans battered the other side by going ugly
early with nasty, personal attacks, by successfully linking the Democrats with
liberal advocacy groups and by using volatile images of race."
- New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd in a page 1 news story,
October 15.
"I think that he
[Thomas] had the advantage of prime time on Friday night. He had everything
going for him. The Democrats did not ask him tough questions about the facts
of her charge and they did, the Republicans did a great job of hammering her.
It's basically what happened in the '88 campaign. The Republicans know how to
fight dirty."
- NBC congressional reporter Andrea Mitchell, October 15 Today.
"The White House
went into those hearings with a clear strategy: they were going to get
Clarence Thomas confirmed. And the Democrats came in, having been under a lot
of heavy criticism for trying to cover up this whole story or whitewash it,
and they said `we're going to be the seekers of the truth.' And so, Clarence
Thomas has lawyers sitting on that committee who were working for him, and
Anita Hill didn't have any, and in the end, the strategy worked for the
Republicans."
- U.S. News & World Report Assistant Managing Editor
Gloria Borger, October 18 Washington Week in Review.
"Isn't this the
irony, that the White House that came in with Willie Horton, that has been
against affirmative action and quotas, has now been able to trump with race
and is even looking to the next elections as a way to perhaps induce or lure
more black votes?"
- Time reporter Julie Johnson, same show.
Arlen Specter: Source of All Evil
"The lowest point
on the first day of the hearing came when Pennsylvania Republican Arlen
Specter implied that Hill had simply fantasized Thomas' asking for dates and
his lurid remarks about pornography. It is all but inconceivable that a
similarly qualified man, black or white, would be accused not merely of lying
but of imagining things."
- Time Senior Editor Jack E. White, October 21.
"Arlen Specter took
on this role as the Great Inquisitor. Some people [feminists] think he
pilloried Anita Hill, that with his sort of low-blow hit on perjury, they're
saying to a friend in Pennsylvania, who's been pro-choice, been on their side:
'How could you do this to me?'"
- Time reporter Julie Johnson,
October 18 Washington Week in Review.
"Arlen Specter
accused her of perjury. If you read the record, Arlen Specter was the one who
distorted what she said. Orrin Hatch even suggested that she got one of her
charges by reading The Exorcist, I mean that she was besieged by
demons. Orrin should really stick to talking dirty. He does that better. Alan
Simpson, for those of us who were too young to know what Joe McCarthy was
really like, Alan Simpson showed us. `I have in my pocket two dozen
card-carrying smearers against this awful woman,' and then he produced those
smears, those bombshells, and they were duds."
- Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief Al Hunt on CNN's Capital
Gang, October 19.
Alan Simpson: Source of All Evil
"The days of
Simpson Chic are over. Now he is more often compared to Red-baiter Joe
McCarthy. The image of Simpson flinging open his jacket and declaring he had
lots of `stuff' against Anita Hill - while revealing nothing - was the
lowest of many low points in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Any Senator with a
sense of history should have said, as attorney Joseph Welch eventually did to
McCarthy, `Senator, have you no shame?'....[Simpson] is writing a book about
the media - a little like Stalin discussing intergovernmental
relations."
- Newsweek Washington reporter Eleanor Clift, October 28 news story.
"Senator Alan
Simpson, who usually manages to hide his meanness behind an Andy Rooney
facade, warned Hill that she would be `injured and destroyed and belittled and
hounded and harassed - real harassment, different from the sexual kind, just
plain old Washington-variety harassment.'"
- Time Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson, October 21.
"I've been in this
town for 21 years, and they play a vicious brand of politics in Washington.
Washington can be a mean town. This was as vicious a fight as I've ever seen
except it was totally one-sided....When you had Alan Simpson standing up there
like Joe McCarthy, reaching in his pockets and saying `I'm getting stuff
through faxes, and all over the country,' he sounded just like Joe McCarthy,
let's face it. And you had Arlen Specter, who was a prosecutor at one time,
saying that she committed perjury, when probably you couldn't find another
prosecutor in the country that would tell you that she had committed
perjury."
- Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson on Washington
Week in Review, October 18.
"You had Senators
accusing people of perjury; Senator Simpson, `I have faxes, I have letters' -
the closest thing to McCarthy that we've seen. It was not a kinder, gentler
Republican panel....George Bush called this a smear before he even heard her.
He clearly cannot win on this."
- NBC News Washington Bureau Chief (and former counselor to Mario Cuomo) Tim
Russert on Today, October 14.
Hatch and Other Republicans: Source of All Evil
"Sen. Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), whose painstaking smear of Hill had been one of the uglier aspects
of an inordinately ugly ordeal, rose yesterday to repeat gratuitously many of
the innuendoes against Hill on the Senate floor."
- Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, October 16.
"Lee Atwater must
be smiling somewhere. His fellow Republicans haven't forgotten how to go for
the jugular, as demonstrated during their `investigation' into Anita Hill's
charge that she was sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas. The Republicans
showed just how dirty and effective their throw-all-the-mud-you-can act can
be. (William Kennedy Smith's defense team might want to think about hiring
Orrin Hatch of Utah for Smith's upcoming rape trial.)"
- Boston Globe business reporter Joan Vennochi, October 16.
It's Bush's Fault
"The spectacle, however, really began with Mr. Bush's choice of Judge Thomas who, for all his virtues, was no more qualified for the Court than Dan Quayle was to be Vice President....
"But it was Mr.
Bush who carried politics too far. By trying o pack the Court with
conservatives and by seeking to predetermine rulings on the most important
issues before the nation, he robbed would be justices of their protective
dignity and the Court of if its judicial impartiality and majesty. He took the
Court into the political pit and, predictably, ignited an ugly political
brawl. For justice now, he must be made to choose another Justice."
- New York Times columnist and former national security affairs
reporter Leslie Gelb, October 13.
"I think it's
mind-boggling and appalling that the Republicans and the Administration would
regard this debacle as partisan political triumph and I suspect that they too
will pay a price for their smugness....George Bush could have done something
to improve the nomination process himself by coming up with a more credible
and impressive nomination to begin with."
- Time Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott on Inside Washington,
October 19.
The Court's Future
"Whatever happens
to the nomination of Clarence Thomas, this Supreme Court is going to stay
extremely conservative. If Mr. Bush were to follow Eisenhower's example, he
could nominate a Democrat, even a liberal Democrat and that one vote wouldn't
affect the rulings of the Court. No political damage, the President wouldn't
have to change his political stripes. But millions of Americans would know
that they had a friend on the highest court. The country's confidence in its
institutions would increase. Ike showed the way. George Bush could do
it."
- NBC Nightly News commentator John Chancellor, October 10.
"This case has
enormous implications for the almost 500 other once-segregated school systems
still under court supervision. Given the Court's increasingly conservative
makeup, it also could end the era in which the Court has led the fight against
racial injustice in this country."
- NBC reporter Lisa Myers, October 7 Nightly News.
"Under Rehnquist,
the Supreme Court no longer sees itself as the defender of civil rights and
civil liberties, the champion of the individual. Gone is the Court majority
that breathed new life into the Bill of Rights, dismantled Southern
segregation, disciplined police who violated the rights of citizens, removed
religion from the public schools, pushed a President into resignation, and
swept aside the laws forbidding women to end their pregnancies."
- Los Angeles Times Supreme Court reporter David Savage in the Los
Angeles Times Magazine, September 29.
Hammer Hands Hatch & Homicide Help
"Looking at this
hearing as it got under way this morning, one had the impression that in
terms, strictly in the narrow sense between Senators, that Orrin Hatch sort of
played the part of Mike Tyson. Before Senator Biden could sort of get off his
stool, Hatch was at him, all over him, and decked him."
- Dan Rather after the Hatch-Biden argument following Thomas' opening
statement, October 11.
"Either Clarence
Thomas is lying or Anita Hill is lying. Now, if the FBI can't determine who's
lying between the two, let's have some homicide detective out from Phoenix or
New York City to spend a few days on this."
- Dan Rather to Senator DeConcini during a Saturday morning hearing break,
October 12.
Supreme Court Sports
"Saints over
Eagles: So you want the real deal on what happened with Clarence and Anita
Hill? Here it is: She extended her hand to introduce herself to him, and he
thought she said, `I need a thrill.' Clarence, being the gentleman that he is,
sheepishly tried to accommodate her with a graphic rap about animal porn. Next
thing you know, it's 10 years later and everyone's doggin' the dude. All over
a simple misunderstanding."
- From Hondo's football picks in The New York Post, October 11.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Nicholas Damask, Sally Hood, Marian Kelley, Tim Lamer; Media Analysts
- Jennifer Hardebeck; Circulation Manager