The Nine [17]
But that was seventeen full days after the Senate vote—a period of time when anything could happen. Thomas’s supporters wanted him sworn in immediately. But with Nan Rehnquist’s death on October 17, the White House faced the delicate problem of intruding on the chief justice’s grief for a final act of damage control on Thomas’s nomination.
At first the administration tried to finesse the problem, by holding an unofficial swearing in—a party, in effect—on the White House lawn on Friday, October 18. The ceremony would have no legal significance, but it would contribute to an atmosphere of finality around the confirmation. Hundreds of guests, including many members of Thomas’s family (including his father, from whom he had been long estranged until shortly before his nomination) and celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Reggie Jackson, joined the president to salute the new justice.
Still, Thomas was not yet an actual member of the Court, and investigative reporters were still hard at work. White House officials decided the stakes were high enough to risk offending Rehnquist, so they asked him to administer the oath to Thomas only days after Nan Rehnquist’s death. The chief agreed, and the swearing in took place on October 23 in a conference room at the Court, the first such private ceremony in fifty years. The official explanation for the speeded-up procedure was to allow Thomas’s secretaries and clerks to get on the Supreme Court payroll—a transparent rationalization since his employees were already on the federal payroll at the D.C. Circuit.
The rushed oath turned out to be a wise move. That same day, according to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, three reporters for the Washington Post “burst into the newsroom almost simultaneously with information confirming that Thomas’ involvement with pornography far exceeded what the public had been led to believe.” They had testimony from eyewitnesses and the manager of a video store where Thomas rented such fare. But since Thomas had been sworn in, the Post decided not to pursue the issue and dropped the story.
The whole Thomas confirmation could scarcely have been a greater assault on the Court’s sense of seemliness. The crudity of the accusations, the brutality of Thomas’s response, the vindictive discourse on all sides made for a perfectly awful combination. That the White House, if not Thomas himself, had intruded on Rehnquist’s grieving for political purposes made it even worse.
O’Connor, who was considered the social as well as the political center of the Court, had a habit of dividing the world—people, buildings, controversies, issues—into two categories: attractive and unattractive. The words referred not so much to what was or wasn’t pleasing to the eye but rather to an overall level of decency and likability. To her, and her colleagues at the Court, the Thomas hearings defined unattractive.
Then, it got worse. The November 11, 1991, issue of People magazine featured a seven-page spread on Clarence and Virginia Thomas and their view of the confirmation ordeal. Ginny Thomas was a political force in her own right, a Labor Department lawyer at the time and later a senior official with the Republican congressional leadership and with conservative foundations. She said that after Hill made her claims, “the Clarence Thomas I had married was nowhere to be found. He was just debilitated beyond anything I had seen in my life. About 12:45 a.m., he said, ‘I need you to call your two friends from your Bible-study group, and their husbands, and get them here with me in the morning to pray.’ Clarence knew the next round of hearings to begin that day was not the normal political battle. It was spiritual warfare. Good versus evil. We were fighting something we didn’t understand,