Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [50]
At that ABA meeting I revealed to only one person my doubts about Thomas’ ability to carry out the responsibilities of an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Over lunch in an Atlanta hotel, I confided in Cathy Thompson, a classmate from Yale Law School. Cathy and I shared similar backgrounds that separated us from others in our class at Yale. Both of us had attended state colleges not known for their sophistication, yet both of us had done well and made many friends among our more “urbane” classmates. Cathy grew up in North Carolina and had returned there to a successful legal practice. By the time we met in Atlanta, we were eleven years out of law school. As we had lunch at the swank Hotel Nikko, we both felt quite successful. She had served as president of her state bar association, and I was a tenured faculty member at the only state law school in Oklahoma. We were two small-town girls who had beat the odds.
Cathy and I hadn’t seen each other since the American Bar Association meeting in 1989. We spent most of our lunch catching up. The nomination of Clarence Thomas came up, as it inevitably did that week. Cathy knew I had worked in Washington but not that I had worked for Thomas. Either by nature or by experience, Cathy is a matter-of-fact, pragmatic person. She listened calmly, though I could tell that she was shocked by what I told her. Mostly, I described how Thomas had pressured me for a social relationship, deliberately omitting the graphic details, to spare myself as much as her. Those details seemed inappropriate in any context, and certainly at an ABA lunch. I was near tears even disclosing what I did. Talking to Cathy, I felt that she could have been me, that my experience might well have been hers, and maybe even had been in one form or another.
After lunch neither of us knew what to say. We left feeling a little less sophisticated, and a little less secure about the trappings of “success.” My career had been less about success than survival. Success was simple for me. It meant having work that I found meaningful, being intellectually challenged, and doing the work well. I had not set a goal of attaining a particular status within a certain time frame, as some of my peers had—partner in a major firm or full professor at a top twenty law school by age thirty. My goal for success was modest and unstructured. Yet at each turn I was hampered by obstacles that turned me away from success and drove me down the path of mere survival. I tried to remind myself that despite the obstacles, I had achieved more than my grandparents could have imagined.
A few weeks after I returned from Atlanta, another member of the press contacted me. At the urging of a relative who worked at The Washington Post, I spoke with Sharon LaFraniere, a reporter who was doing a profile on Thomas. She seemed to be focusing on Thomas as a boss, but she also mentioned some rumors she had heard about his strict upbringing of his son. I declined to comment on the latter. About the former, I contributed that while Thomas could be a demanding supervisor, I thought his professional expectations of his employees were consistent with his responsibilities. This time, when asked what I thought of Thomas’ views on civil rights, I was more critical than I had been in my conversation with Margolick. LaFraniere’s story, which ran on September 9, 1991, read:
Anita Hill, a former special assistant to Thomas at the Education Department and the EEOC, was particularly disturbed by Thomas’s repeated, public criticisms of his sister and her children for living on welfare. “It takes a lot of detachment to publicize a person’s experience in that way” and “a certain kind of self-centeredness not to recognize some of the programs that benefitted you. I think he doesn’t understand people, he doesn’t relate to people who don’t make it on their own.”
At a conference for black Republicans in 1980, Thomas had said of his sister, “She gets mad when the