Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [80]
Thomas seemed much more organized than I. I asked how the hearing would be conducted.
“Well, at this point the only thing we can do is to conduct an open hearing,” he said, almost as if I were to blame. “I give you my word that I acted only to protect your confidentiality.” He began to outline the measures he had taken to ensure that the press would not get my statement. But by now the leak of my statement was of little consequence to me. I had to begin the business of preparing to present my testimony to a hostile panel of senators.
“The only mistake I made, in my view, is to not realize how much pressure you were under. I should have been more aware,” Senator Biden confessed over the telephone line. “… Aw kiddo I feel for you. I wish I weren’t the chairman, I’d come to be your lawyer,” he added when I told him I had not secured legal counsel. I fought the urge to respond as I furiously took notes of our conversation, hoping for some useful information. Little concrete information was forthcoming. As he closed the conversation, I could almost see him flashing his instant smile to convince both of us that the experience would be agreeable.
Though Senator Biden had offered members of his staff to assist me, including Grant and Ron Klain, past experience suggested that the staff would not be very helpful. That meant that I had to contact Sue Hoerchner myself and prepare “character witnesses” for a hearing that might begin fifteen hundred miles away “as early as Friday.” Again, where process was concerned, I was at a complete disadvantage. And after making some telephone calls with very little result, I gave up. The whole thing was overwhelming. The only good news of the evening came when my brother Ray called to say that he would be in Norman the next day and would travel with me to Washington.
CHAPTER TEN
I woke early on Wednesday, October 9. I had no particular plan for the day or for the next few to follow. Though I had been getting advice from Sue Ross and Charles Ogletree, I had not approached them to represent me at the hearing. As I was not a member of the Oklahoma bar, I had very few contacts among lawyers in Oklahoma. I had long ago left Washington, and though I kept my bar membership there, I knew few practicing lawyers there either. I had no idea whom to enlist in such a situation. Nor could I even think of an analogous situation. This was not a sexual harassment claim, which would be brought in court. But I was not just a witness giving testimony to a neutral Senate committee; the campaign against my testimony had already begun. And though I had not been formally indicted, effectively I had become the accused.
At dawn I was sitting in my kitchen with my head in my hands, trying to gather the energy to move. I did not even have reservations to travel to Washington. When the telephone in front of me rang about 6:00 A.M., I took only seconds to answer it. On the other end was Emma Coleman Jordan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, whom I knew from my work with the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Jordan, a black woman, was then president-elect of that group, and an outstanding scholar of commercial and banking law.
In her calm, take-charge fashion, Emma snapped me out of the near trance into which I had fallen. “Do you have legal counsel?” she asked. “No, I don’t,” I said. Though my response must have shocked her, she remained calm. The hearing was to convene in forty-eight hours, and I had not even spoken to anyone about representing me. She told me that she had been in touch with several other law professors around the country and that they had proposed a list of people who would be good legal counsel in this situation. One of the people she spoke to was Professor Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California, whom I knew in passing from my days at Yale, where she had been on the law faculty. Judith Resnik had contacted John Frank, an Arizona lawyer whose firm would volunteer his time and the time of another lawyer to provide me representation. Frank,