Who Is Hill?

At the President's Prayer Breakfast I recently had the chance to meet the newest Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. It was the first time I'd met the man in person, and I was impressed. Justice Thomas and his wife struck me as deeply committed Christians. Well, meeting them made me start thinking again about the whole episode with Anita Hill. And I guess other people are thinking about it again, too. Because the cover story of the March issue of The American Spectator is all about attempts to find out who Anita Hill really is. That's right--who she is. Clarence Thomas, you see, has lived in the public eye for years. He has passed several confirmation hearings. Last fall, he was grilled for weeks. But Anita Hill turned up in the final hour, and no one really knew who she was. It's only now that facts about her life are beginning to come to light. The article in The American Spectator is a major investigative report by a Washington reporter named David Brock, and it pulls together a lot of data about Hill that was largely unknown. For example. One of the strongest arguments in favor of Hill's credibility was that she supposedly agreed with Thomas politically--that she was a conservative. The press said it again and again. But Hill never claimed that label for herself. In fact, during the hearings, she said she disagreed with Thomas over abortion. But, curiously, the issue was never pressed. For the Spectator article, Brock interviewed several people who gave evidence that Hill holds radically feminist views. Her students at Oral Roberts University remember her as being extremely sensitive to gender politics. They said Hill would go ballistic if students used the pronoun "he" when discussing hypothetical cases in class. And she would throw out lines like, "Women are always right," and "Women are always taken advantage of." Some students even remember her saying "There is nothing lower on the evolutionary scale than a white male." So much for Hill's Reaganite conservatism. But more damaging are facts coming to light relating directly to Clarence Thomas. For example, the only witness who corroborated Hill's complaint that she was harassed by Thomas was a judge, who said Hill told her about it in a phone call. However, Brock reveals that, in a Senate deposition, the judge gave the date for the call as spring of 1981. Only one problem with that date: It's before Hill ever went to work for Thomas. At the time, she was working for a law firm. So Brock interviewed several of Hill's former colleagues at the law firm. He discovered that she had complained of sexual harassment while she was there. Could it be that the phone call where Hill talked about being harassed referred to a different job? A different boss? Well, these are only a few of the facts now being published, and it will be a long time before everything is sorted out. But I, for one, hope people will continue the investigations. The hearings are over. But America still deserves to know the truth.

02/21/92