The Nine [13]
Still, there was much to admire in Thomas, as the early days of his confirmation hearings showed. Thomas began his testimony with a personal story that was extraordinary by any measure. He had grown up in poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, without a father and with a mother who earned twenty dollars every two weeks as a maid. She was so poor, in fact, that she had to send her two boys to live with their grandparents. “Imagine, if you will, two little boys with all their belongings in two grocery bags.” Hard work put him through Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and he had thrived during his career in government, as an ever-rising official in the federal bureaucracy during the Reagan administration.
Still, as soon as Thomas began answering questions, problems emerged. Four years earlier, Robert Bork’s nomination had been defeated because he expounded broadly about his well-established, and very conservative, judicial philosophy. Consequently, the conventional wisdom had become that nominees should avoid taking substantive stands on most legal issues. But Thomas took the approach to an extreme. In awkward, wooden answers, he gave the impression that he had no views, not simply that he was declining to express them. In one infamous exchange, he told Senator Patrick Leahy that he had never even discussed Roe v. Wade.
Still, there was little organized opposition to Thomas, and his confirmation looked assured. On Friday, September 27, the Judiciary Committee split 7–7 on Thomas, but even that tepid nonendorsement meant that the full Senate would give him an up-or-down vote. There was little reason to think he might lose.
Then, on Saturday, October 6, the name Anita Hill leaked to the press, and the rest of the Thomas confirmation battle became a tawdry national obsession. Hill had been a young lawyer on Thomas’s staff, first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During those years, she had confided to friends that her boss had made a series of bizarre sexual comments and overtures to her. In the summer leading up to Thomas’s confirmation hearings, Hill had discussed with some of those friends whether she should come forward with what she knew about the nominee. Through these conversations, Hill’s name reached Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee and then several reporters. Once her name became public, the committee decided that she should tell her story in public.
Over seven surreal hours on Friday, October 11, Hill gave testimony that soon became part of American folklore. She said Thomas had talked about his large penis, about his skill at giving oral sex, and about pornographic films starring Long Dong Silver. There was “one of the oddest episodes,” when Thomas looked at a soda can in his office and asked, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Later that night, after Hill’s marathon testimony, in a confrontation that would become equally famous, Thomas returned to the hearing room. He denied Hill’s allegations in their entirety and denounced the proceeding as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Thomas rejected Hill’s allegations of mistreatment, but otherwise refused to answer any questions about his relationship with Hill or his personal life.
The nation watched as the hearings continued through the weekend, with Republican senators accusing Hill of “erotomania” and perjury, and of making up her testimony from her reading of The Exorcist. There were supporting witnesses for both sides, and the hearings didn’t end until 2:03 a.m. on Monday, October 14, less than forty-eight hours before the Senate was scheduled to vote.
At the Supreme Court, a handful of clerks had caught parts of the hearing on the few televisions that