"Who of a certain age could forget when a bookish black woman named Anita Hill addressed a Senate committee of 14 white men..."

"... and candidly spoke of graphic sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas? The explosive, race-tinged hearings in 1991 had all of America, especially black America, captivated. Sexual politics became part of the lexicon, and Hill became a divisive figure. We know what became of Thomas — now we get a rare glimpse into Hill's private life with friends and family, who stood by her through it all."

From "14 Films That Matter at Sundance" at The Root.

Arlen Specter has died.

He was 82.

ADDED: He played an important role in Supreme Court nominations:

Arriving on Capitol Hill in 1981, he became a dominant force during the Judiciary Committee’s rancorous Supreme Court nomination battles. More than anyone else, he helped defeat conservative nominee Robert Bork in 1987, and his aggressive questioning of law professor Anita Hill four years later — he accused her of “flat-out perjury” — helped secure Clarence Thomas’s confirmation....

“He was a Rockefeller Republican, a liberal Republican, and was willing to take on Presidents Reagan and Bush, and became a true leader in the bipartisan efforts that strengthened all the civil rights laws and defeated Bork,” said Ralph G. Neas, a longtime civil rights and health-care advocate.

“Then you had a line of demarcation,” Neas said, beginning with Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination and continuing with the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate after the 1994 midterm elections. “Arlen Specter became an especially cautious politician,” Neas said....

After Sen. Specter warned President George W. Bush not to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade — the 1973 Supreme Court case that essentially legalized abortion rights — conservative Republicans protested his appointment to the Judiciary Committee. Sen. Specter later said he would not use a “litmus test” to deny confirmation to abortion opponents.

He presided over the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and was a key force behind passage of some of the Bush administration’s controversial anti-terrorism laws, including the Patriot Act. But as controversy erupted over the government’s handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Sen. Specter became a leading proponent of habeas corpus rights for unlawful combatants.

I was just watching old clips from the Bork and the Thomas nomination hearings — because, after the VP debate, I wanted to review Joe Biden's performance.

Politico essay "Cain reaction: Not by the book" should really be titled "Cain, give up before it gets ugly."

"Herman Cain... has already broken every rule in the book on how to deal with a political scandal," says Suzanne Garment (at Politico, where the allegations were first revealed):

After 25 years of post-Watergate scandals, political people have figured out what you do about a skeleton like Cain’s: Enter crisis mode. Gather every witness and piece of paper you can. Have your story straight. Identify the holes in it and shore them up. Then get out in front with the story line—quickly, before the cold turns into pneumonia. Everybody knows this....

But what Garment really wants to talk about is — as she puts it — "what the Cain scandal... says about us." She offers 2 "possibilities." One is that the scandal confirmed what the press already thought of him, that he's got a "substandard... organization," and so the scandal works as "a hard news hook on which to hang a soft judgment." If that's what's going on, we are in the middle of ending Cain's viability as a candidate.

The other possibility is the one people mention, then recoil from as if they’d touched a hot stove: the possibility that we’re watching a Thomas. It’s no wonder they recoil. Twenty years ago, the question of whether Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made unwelcome sexual comments to Anita Hill turned into a piece of political theater that scorched not just the two principals but those who observed them and the confirmation process itself.

Even partisans of then-Judge Thomas asked themselves, if they were honest, about the climate that subjected Hill to such an unremitting attack on her character. Even partisans of Hill asked themselves, if they were honest, about the venom of the attack on a conservative black man.

Yes, we have no idea of how much or how little the particular facts of the Cain and Thomas situations resemble each other. But no one who watched the Hill-Thomas struggle can forget the sheer hatefulness exposed by the controversy, and no one who watches the Cain scandal can avoid the echoes of that memory. All one can hope is that an awareness of the past ugliness will keep us from repeating it.

What is Garment really trying to say? I find her writing a strange combination of tortured and mealy-mouthed. I think she's saying Cain is an inadequate candidate and this scandal provides an opportunity to take him down soundly and efficiently, but she's worried that people will fight for him, and she warning us not to go there. It will be ugly.

I don't know her politics, but I suspect that if she was around 20 years ago, she was one of the many people who thought that Clarence Thomas, when accused of sexual harassment, would accept the shame and quietly remove himself from the national stage. But he stood his ground, the fight took place, and he has held his position on the Court to this day.

Can Garment really think that those of us who respect Clarence Thomas wish he'd spared us that fight by departing on cue? What would have happened next? We'd have learned that opponents can take down a preferred candidate by throwing an accusation against him about something that happened without witnesses other than the accuser and the accused. How many times would that scenario play out before people would rouse themselves from that self-defeating passivity?

Garment doesn't mention Bill Clinton, but there's a man who dragged the country through an unbelievably ugly ordeal to hold onto his power, and his co-partisans supported him on that long march through the mud, even at the cost of selling out all the principle they'd seemed to care so deeply about only a few years before when they tried to take down Clarence Thomas.

"Lillian McEwen breaks her 19-year silence about Justice Clarence Thomas."

The Washington Post has the scoop, including what may be the key sentence: "She has written a memoir, which she is now shopping to publishers."

UPDATE: McEwan in a interview reveals that she had an intimate relationship with Thomas. She says he liked pornography, especially depictions of large breasts. What is the point of revealing something so incredibly banal? Does it corroborate Anita Hill's testimony in any significant way? The issue, in the confirmation hearing, was whether Thomas engaged in sexual harassment in the workplace. McEwan is talking about his private life. First, that's really creepy. Imagine if a man revealed private, sexual things about a woman. McEwan even admits that she's speaking now because she is politically opposed to Clarence Thomas. She doesn't like the way he's deciding the cases.

Since McEwan never says that Thomas talked about pornography in the office, the supposed corroboration is virtually nil. It's true that if we know a man is interested in pornography, it makes it more likely that he talked about that interest somewhere, more likely than if we didn't know whether the man liked pornography. But huge numbers of men are interested in pornography, and only  a small subset of them who pester women by talking about it graphically in the office environment. So it just doesn't matter enough to bring it up.

McEwan also talks about the way Thomas thought about women, but it comes across as sheer speculation. She somehow knows he thought about whether women he met in the office would make good sexual partners. Again, this is perfectly banal. It says little about how he might attempt to initiate a relationship with a coworker. Doesn't nearly every single adult look around at other people and think about whether they are attractive and might make a good sexual partner?

This is just sad and embarrassing.

"Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas."

"I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day."

Now, how could that kind of reaching out possibly work?

"But the ousting of a wide swath of Democratic women Nov. 2 would chip away at a generation of female politicians inspired by the 1992 election..."

"... which saw a surge of Democratic women inspired to break up the boys’ club of Congress after Anita Hill’s testimony in then-Judge Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings the previous year."

Will you shed a tear for the departure of that generation of women politicians? What did they do, what did they change, and what will we think about women — what will the press say about women — when the women in politics are — gasp! — Republicans?

With the entire C-SPAN archive up on-line, what was the first thing I wanted to re-live?

This:

ADDED: Check out the memorable moments page, which includes:

Al Gore concession in 2000 election Bill Clinton 1987 press conference where he says he will not be a candidate in 1988 Barack Obama 2004 convention speech George W. Bush announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev summit in late 1987. Clarence Thomas testifying that he did not watch Anita Hill testifying. Bill Clinton grand jury testimony Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown Medal of Freedom Award to Margaret Thatcher George H.W. Bush inviting Dana Carvey to the White House where he impersonates Bush 1992

Arlen Specter tells us about Bob Dole's penis — and other things.

From the Deborah Solomon interview:

You and Bob Dole share a hometown, Russell, Kan. What do they put in the water there?

Debaters’ tonic. Russell is famous for its high-school debate championship teams.

Did you know Dole in your Kansas days?

No. When I moved to Russell in the eighth grade, he was much older, but in the intervening years I’ve pretty much caught up to him.

I assume this was before he was appearing on television in Viagra commercials.

From reliable sources, he did not need Viagra then.

Okay, enough cock talk. Unless this counts;

Many women can never forgive you for your aggressive questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Do you regret your behavior?

No. When a serious charge is made like sexual harassment, the subject is entitled to question the accuser and find out the facts, and that’s what I did.

This doesn't count:

You’re 79 and you’ve endured two bouts of Hodgkin’s disease. Why would you want to run for re-election?

Don’t forget my brain tumors or my bypass surgery or the incorrect diagnosis of A.L.S. on the list of my maladies. But I’m full of vim, vigor and vitality....

Vanity...

Specter also accidentally says he wants Norm Coleman to win. Oops!

“In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates,” he said. “I’m ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I’ve made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”

Asked who he’s backing now in elections, Specter said, “I’m looking for more Democratic members. Nothing personal.”

And when he finds more Democratic members, may he tell us what he knows about their members too.

Tony Mauro wants to remind people that Joe Biden has treated a few Supreme Court nominees a little shabbily.

He writes:

[Clarence Thomas] has less than fond memories of his treatment by Biden, who chaired his stormy 1991 hearing. In his 2007 memoir "My Grandfather's Son," Thomas recalls that Biden initially kept Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas private. Before the firestorm began, Biden called him at home and said, "Judge, I know you don't believe me," but if the allegations come up, "I will be your biggest defender." Wrote Thomas, "He was right about one thing. I didn't believe him."

A bit more at the link. But it would be very easy to comb the old Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for loose talk that poured out of Joe Biden's mouth while an esteemed judge had to sit there and put up with it. I may go back and read the transcripts from the Reagan-Bush I era, but as for the the Roberts and Alito material, I've pre-blogged it, so let's see what I have.

There's this description, from Elisabeth Bumiller, of Biden at Day 2 of the Alito hearings:

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

To which I said:

How appalling! And complimenting himself, in the third person, in the end, as if he's being charmingly self-deprecating?

There's this from Day 3 of the Roberts hearings:

Joe Biden is hamming it up big time, dramatizing the frustration of not getting Roberts to say how he'll decide specific cases. We've been through this so many times, but Biden seems to think that, if he just emotes more than the others, the American public will finally see the outrage of a judge not committing his vote before hearing the case. Yet every time Roberts explains why he won't answer, he sounds so eloquent and even inspiring about the role of the judge, that it ends up making the Senator look childish.

None of this Roberts-Alito material is anywhere near as awful as what happened to Thomas (and Robert Bork). Biden was just talking too much, in love with the sound of his own voice, and frankly, that let the nominees off the hook.

How stupid is it for Obama supporters to question the truth of McCain's "cross in the dirt" story?

Very stupid. Checking out the story, Byron York called Mark Salter, who worked with McCain on his book "Faith of Our Fathers." Salter confirms that McCain told him the cross story, and when York presses him on why McCain didn't tell such a "pivotal" story more often, Salter says:

"That's just plain bulls—t. His pivotal experience was his refusal of early release and the three or four days of torture he took for it, his confession, and his attempted suicide. That was his pivotal experience. He's never represented [the "cross in the dirt" story] to be that."

Whatever benefit Obama supporters might get from questioning the "cross in the dirt" story, it is vastly overshadowed by the vivid and terrifying facts of McCain's imprisonment. Why are you creating more occasions for McCain supporters to repeat those facts? I should think you'd want to package his Vietnam past away with some respectful words and return the focus to the present.

But more generally, politicians, including Obama, often impose a religious interpretation on stories about themselves. They prayed, they had faith in God, Jesus led them out of whatever difficulty they encountered. What good is done by questioning that? Oh, did you really pray to God on that occasion? Prove it!

At the Saddleback Civil Forum, Obama said his religion gave him the "confidence" to run for President. You know, I don't believe that, but so what? What the hell difference does it make? I could imagine getting into a huff over the implication that atheists couldn't dare to run for President or that he's incredibly arrogant to suggest that God tapped him on the shoulder and let him know that he's the one. But I'm not in the mood. I'm tolerating all the usual religious frippery. It's the way politicians blather.

Now, yes, the "cross in the dirt" story — or as Andrew Sullivan calls it, "The Dirt In The Cross Story" — purports to describe an event that occurred in the external world, and whether it actually happened seems more specific than whether Senator X thought about Jesus one day. And it is interesting that there's a "cross in the dirt" story in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." [Or maybe not!] So did McCain lift the story from Solzhenitsyn?

A better question is: Is that the kind of attack you want to make?

You may be so in love with the a-ha you think you've found that you fail to see how ridiculous you sound to people who are not already on your side — i.e., the people you need to persuade.

To help you get a sense of your ridiculousness, let me tell you about the time, long ago, in 1991, at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, when Senator Orrin Hatch wanted to impeach the credibility of Thomas's accuser Anita Hill:

Senator Hatch ... suggested that Professor Hill's account of how Judge Thomas, in the privacy of his office, once remarked to her that someone had put a pubic hair on his can of Coke could have been inspired by a scene in the 1971 novel, "The Exorcist." In that scene a character complains of pubic hair in his glass of gin.

Whether Hill was lying or not, the issue of whether she was lifting ideas about pubic hair from "The Exoricist" was perfectly silly and only made her attackers look desperate (and a tad nutty).

Hugh Hewitt talks to Clarence Thomas about religion, Jeffrey Toobin, blogs, jihadists, Black Power, Anita Hill, George Bush....

1. Does Catholicism affect his judging? Hugh Hewitt asks Clarence Thomas. Hewitt notes that Chicago dean Geoffrey Stone of Chicago has said that Catholicism infused the the Court's recent "partial-birth" abortion decision. Answer:

Oh, no. In fact, it works just the opposite. My view is simply that the important thing that it pushes you toward is adherence to your oath, which is to judge impartially. And my view is once you start sort of putting your personal beliefs and opinions into the law, or into the Constitution, you cease to have legitimacy, and I don’t think you should be on the Bench. Now I find that fascinating, though, that people would say things like that, and in the same breath, what I get, is the criticism that I don’t judge as a black judge, you know?

I’m supposed to somehow include my race in my judging, but the religion, you don’t include in your judging. I don’t think you should include either in your judging, and I don’t. And in sixteen years on the Bench, well, I’m one week short of sixteen years. But in the almost sixteen years I’ve been on the Bench on the Supreme Court, I have never done that. And in the more than sixteen I’ve been a federal judge, I have never done that.

2. Thomas loved Justice White:

I just loved the way Byron White conducted himself. I love the fact that he felt that the job was important, he felt that the Court was important, that the Constitution and our laws were important, but he wasn’t. that he was there to do his job and go home. And that’s what he did. He was just a good man.

3. Has he read "The Nine"? No, and he won't, but he knows Hewitt didn't like it. Hewitt says he thought Jeffrey Toobin was "very unfair" to some of the Justices, the way he made the Court — after Bush v. Gore — look "dysfunctional," with "bitterness is going on and people are crying and crushed." Thomas:

I didn’t see anybody crying. And the last I can remember is that after we announced the opinion, we all went upstairs and had lunch.

HH: He writes in there that the Court’s embarrassed by Bush v. Gore. Is that fair?

CT: I haven’t seen it (laughing). Look, I suffer from the disadvantage that I’m there every day.

HH: (laughing)

CT: I mean, this would all probably make more sense to me if I wasn’t there. I’ve not seen any embarrassment, I haven’t seen any dysfunctional, any evidence that the Court is dysfunctional. And so I can’t, I really can’t comment on something that’s not happening.

4. Hewitt asks Thomas if he reads the blogs! He says "no," then backtracks":

No….some of them. You know, occasionally I’ll read something, but not that much.

HH: And do your colleagues? Or are they still practicing Supreme Court jurisprudence the old fashioned way, via the briefs and not public opinion?

Are the lawprof blogs really "public opinion"? This gets Thomas off the subject of blogs and back to the denial that he lets public opinion affect his decisions. But the law blogs contain legal arguments. Sometimes...

5. Hewitt asks Thomas if he's "aware of the war," which seems like a ridiculous question, but what he means is does the knowledge of the war affect his judging. But then, Hewitt poses a really insightful question:

HH: I was…when I was reading My Grandfather’s Son, I had an unusual question that I wrote down. Do you understand the jihadists who are these angry, young men, who are locked out of opportunity, who suffer discrimination of the worst sort, and who really have nowhere to go except into this sort of conflict?

CT: Well, I can’t say that I understand them. I do know that for example in this country, and I make this point in the whole portion of the book in 1968, when I talk about being drawn into this whole notion of black power, and that is that you know, when you feel locked out, you do gravitate toward things that feel, that seem empowering. At least that’s the way it was for me. I can’t speak for others. And so this black power notion made you feel, it was invigorating, and it made you feel empowered. And it could also be debilitating, as I found out later, or self-destructive. But I can’t speak for them, but I know in my own case, it was sort of something similar to that, but not nearly as, I guess, as universal.

6. And Hewitt's got a theory about Anita Hill:

HH: I want to try out my theory on you, and maybe you can comment or not, but that she had told little lies to explain failures that got out of hand, and she had to defend them. Does that make sense to you?

CT: That makes sense, but you know, again, I can’t, I have not gotten into whether or not…I could speculate, but I think it would probably, it would be remiss if I did so.

We don't get to hear his speculation, of course.

7. Hewitt asks him if he likes George Bush:

I admire anybody who stands up and leads. Now you can always disagree with a person here or there, but I admire anybody who gets in a position and actually tries to lead.

There's some faint praise!

"That was how I felt, and that she had draped herself in unflattering prudery, unflattering and almost pre-modern."

Marty Peretz reminisces about how he felt on watching Anita Hill testify, back in 1991. It's his strategy for writing about the Clarence Thomas memoir without reading it. And he's got a backup anecdote to flesh out his musings about the aura around the unread book:

A large Cambridge dinner party a few years ago comes to mind. I won't say at whose house. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't seated next to Al Sharpton, an interloper. (Sharpton had arrived with someone else but uninvited. The hostess was furious.) I was seated next to Anita Hill, an attractive woman and an interesting woman. We spoke about how the loss of the King James version in our culture had degraded the writing and speaking of the English language. Then, as if our conversation lacked something, she raised the name of Clarence Thomas. Sad, no?

What I really think about the Clarence Thomas book.

I've now finished the Clarence Thomas memoir "My Grandfather's Son," which I've been sort of live-blogging. You can live-blog a book! I've picked out some things that struck me as interesting as I went along. Doing this, I've been accused both of fawning over him and of obsessively hating him, because, after all, that's what you're supposed to do with Clarence Thomas. One or the other must be true.

But, no, you're wrong. I neither love nor hate Clarence Thomas. I have some strong ideas about writing, especially memoir writing, and if I'm going to read a book, I'm going to impose my standards on the writing. I'm not about promoting or indicting the writer. I'm genuinely interested in writing as writing.

Here's a post I wrote back in January 2006 about the forthcoming Justice Thomas memoir:

Jeffrey Rosen writes about judicial memoirs, which are difficult to write, because they're either going to be bland -- like Justice O'Connor's, in his view, despite the incident with the testicles -- or embarrassingly revealing -- like Justice Douglas's....

And now Justice Thomas is working on a memoir. The man has fabulous material -- he grew up in poverty and his confirmation battle was a political and cultural event unlike any other. Does he dare to really use this material, to risk his slowly accumulating somber reputation by writing a real book for us to read? Rosen cautions him not to:

[L]ike Douglas, Thomas may inadvertently harm his judicial reputation among moderates (which is, at the moment, unfairly underrated) by revealing more than he intends.

"Judges wear black robes because it doesn't matter who they are as individuals," John Roberts said during his confirmation hearings. "That's not going to shape their decision." Few people today, of course, believe that judges' personal experiences have no influence on their judicial decisions. But taken as a warning, Roberts's statement was prudent and wise. Too much revelation may undermine the public's respect for judges as apolitical authorities. And judicial celebrity can backfire: as any celebrity knows, those who live by publicity have to avoid overexposure, which can lead to the worst fate of all - oblivion.

I say: either write a book or don't write a book, but don't write a fake book. Don't put your name on a book-shaped object just because you're a celebrity and you can get publishers to publish it and publicists to get you on talk shows and lure readers to give up their money and time. If you're going to write a book, you owe your allegiance to the reader above all. If you've got a conflict of interest, recuse yourself!

(Please read David Foster Wallace's essay on Tracy Austin's memoir in "Consider the Lobster." He faults her for her allegiance to friends, family, and everyone else, and lays down the rule that the writer's duty is to the reader.)

It's one thing to embarrass yourself by making things up, like Justice Douglas and James Frey, quite another to put yourself out there and let readers see who you really are. I think the memoirist who fails to do that is the one who has embarrassed himself.

I said something similar back when Bill Clinton's book came out:

I see Clinton is getting a lot of grief for writing a boring book. But what did people expect? If you want to read a great memoir, read a memoir by someone who is in a position to follow the number one rule for writing a great memoir: tell your story without a trace of personal vanity. You have to be willing to make the character that is you look foolish, mean-spirited, selfish, petty, and everything else. There is simply no way that Clinton or any other political figure can follow this rule. So if you want to read a good memoir, read Augusten Burroughs' "Running With Scissors" or Mary Carr's "Liars' Club." If you want to read about grand historical events, don't read the story told by one of the key figures. How could that possibly be good? It would make more sense to read this as a memoir of the Lewinsky-impeachment events.

I guess, according to that, I don't really think there's much chance at all that Clarence Thomas will meet my standard. But wouldn't it be incredibly cool if he did?

So did he? He revealed plenty of negative things — rage and gloom and a serious drinking problem. But these revelations do tend to work in favor of his credibility, when he gets to the part that really matters: whether he or Anita Hill told the truth at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. And the negative material could be seen as self-indulgence: He wants — he demands — your sympathy. He has suffered terribly and his anger is righteous.

But to answer my question: Yes. It's a real memoir.

But what you really want to know isn't what I think of the book as a work of literature, right? You want to know if I think he lied — or Anita Hill lied — at his confirmation hearings. I really don't know. I want to believe him. It's hard for me to understand how Anita Hill could have manufactured the details of her story out of nothing and lied outright and under oath to the Senators and to the whole country. Thomas found himself in the middle of things, confronted with the accusations, and he determined not to give up. His memoir shows why he was the kind of person who would not give up under those circumstances.

But Anita Hill came forward and caused all the anguish. Thomas depicts her as a left-wing ideologue who was in league with other left-wing ideologues who would do anything to destroy him — as he puts it more than once: to kill him. Could individuals with that much professional status be that evil? Clarence Thomas knows the answer to that question. His book blazes with his righteous indignation. Could he be evil enough to write this if he knew he was lying?

I'm entertaining the notion that it is possible that neither one was lying — that is, neither blatantly said what he or she knew was not true. Maybe Thomas said a few little things that Hill remembered and inflated through a process of solitary brooding followed by vigorous prompting from anti-Thomas zealots. And maybe he forgot those little things. On page 221, he says that he couldn't remember whether he'd ever used illegal drugs. How can you not remember that? "I'd been a heavy drinker in college and had often been around people who smoked marijuana and hashish... I might possibly have tried them once or twice when I was drunk..." He was also drinking heavily in the period when Anita Hill worked for him. Maybe he had some alcoholic amnesia.

But he's Clarence Thomas. You've got to love him or hate him, don't you?

Clarence Thomas helps "a sister" -- Anita Hill.

In his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," Clarence Thomas repeatedly states his opposition to affirmative action, particularly because he thinks it puts a stamp of inferiority on black achievement. But he portrays his own hiring of Anita Hill as affirmative action and uses it to stigmatize her as inferior.

As assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education, he hires her because his friend (Gil Hardy) asks him to "help a sister" (page 140):

Not only did I feel I had an obligation to help my fellow blacks, but I remembered how hard it had been for me to land a job after graduating from Yale, and I didn't want to treat her as I'd been treated. I found a way to hire her without going throught the nearly impossible hiring process for political appointees. Her work wasn't outstanding, but I found it adequate.

Now, perhaps Thomas would say that wasn't affirmative action. And, in a way, he'd be right. It's not an openly declared policy designed to bring in minorities. It's the old boy network -- special treatment for people who know somebody who's already on the inside. Hire your friends. Or, more specifically: Hire your friends if they are the same race as you. Thomas makes no effort to justify his action. He only diminishes her -- she "wasn't outstanding" -- even as he admires his own feeling of "obligation to help my fellow blacks."

After President Reagan makes him the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Clarence Thomas once again hires Anita Hill. Here's how he puts it:

Anita Hill immediately said that she wanted to go with me. I said I'd think about it... (page150)

... Gil Hardy intervened yet again. I said that I needed someone with experience in the field of employment discrimination, but Gil insisted that I should "give a sister a chance"... (page 152)

... I ... had to do something about Anita HIll, who'd been pestering Anna Jenkins, my interim secretary, as had Gil. I reluctantly brought her aboard, and the first thing she did was claim the largest office in my suite. She had no experience with employment law, so I also [hired two "outstanding young career employees"]. (page 154)

We all want a nice office. Thomas himself enthuses over his office. And many of us have the nerve to push for a job where we know we lack the experience but think if we get the spot, we'll work hard and figure out what to do. Thomas himself repeatedly takes jobs that way. And it's easy to slip in words like "pestering" when you mean to disparage a person who is only doing the normal thing under the circumstances. Of course, we know Hill is Thomas's nemesis, but there is nothing that she's doing here that is wrong. The wrong is coming from Thomas. He's hiring a person he thinks is unqualified because she's black and she's friends with his friend. He therefore denied a job to someone else, someone who deserved it. And he's the one assuming the position of chairman of a commission that is supposed to be about equal opportunity.

At page 171, Thomas unleashes a flood of criticism: Hill was "a growing nuisance" who was "nagging" him about writing a letter of recommendation. She "wasn't performing up to expectations and failed to finish her assignments on time," according to his chief of staff. She'd had "quarrels" with the staff and had stopped coming to morning meetings. She was "far too interested in my social calendar." She was "sullen and withdrawn." She sought a promotion on the ground that she'd attended Yale Law School, and when he promoted another woman, she "stormed" into his office and accused him of favoring the other woman because she had light black skin (as did the woman he was dating).

I found her accusation, her attitude, and her reasoning equally irritating, and told her so.

She responded that she was going to look for another job, and he writes a recommendation letter for her. I think that this is the same recommendation letter that she was "nagging" him about on page 171. The chronology is a little confusing here. How long did he drag his feet getting out a recommendation letter when Oral Roberts Law School was recruiting her to teach law? Writing a letter like this would have been a small, routine part of his job, but he makes it seem as though her seeking it presented a big problem -- or that it was untoward to expect much of him because his grandparents had died recently:

I would have been glad to supply it, but the death of my grandparents had made it hard for me to cope with even the most important of my duties at EEOC, much less write letters of recommendation.

Justice Thomas drives south, "drinking beer and watching other cars slide off the road and crash into one another."

In the Fall of 1980, Clarence Thomas is working for the Republican Senator Danforth, and he's just registered as a Republican for the first time and voted for Ronald Reagan. On the invitation of Thomas Sowell, he attends a conference on economic policy. There, he meets the journalist Juan Williams, and he speaks freely to him -- in a way that he now portrays as naive. Williams writes a column about him -- and Thomas is not too upset about it to decline to pose for the photograph that accompanies it. But now he's publicly exposed as a black conservative -- who criticized his sister for her dependency on welfare -- and he's feeling the emotional toll:

Not long after the column appeared, Kathy [his wife] and Jamal [his son] went to Worcester to spend Christmas with the Ambush family [his in-laws]. I stayed behind in Washington. Christmas no longer meant anything to me, and I preferred putting in extra time at the office to celebrating a holiday about which I no longer cared.

Even as a time to spend with family? There's more to this than dissatisfaction with religion, but he has never even described his loss of Christian faith (though he has described many instances of race discrimination by individuals who purport to be Christians).

I started drinking as soon as they left. I woke up sick and depressed early the next morning. All I could think about was the angry reaction to the Post column.

He didn't think of his wife and child going off without him for Christmas? He didn't think about whether he wanted them gone so he could drown himself in drink? This memoir gives us the material to see how much of his problems were personal psychological problems. His grandfather abused him and deprived him of love. He seethed with anger and couldn't feel the love he wanted to feel for his family. He had a serious drinking problem. But the conscious narrative is that he was the victim of race discrimination, especially coming from liberals who wanted to herd black people and deny them their individuality.

It made no sense to me. Why was it wrong for me to speak my mind? All at once I felt an overwhelming desire to drive down to Savannah and see my family. I didn't understand why -- Daddy [his grandfather] and I were as distant as ever -- but somehow I knew I needed to be with them. I threw my clothes into a suitcase, grabbed a six-pack from the refrigerator, and headed out the door. Freezing rain had fallen during the night and the windshield of the car was thickly covered with ice, but that didn't stop me. I chipped it off and headed south, drinking beer and watching other cars slide off the road and crash into one another.

ADDED: In the next paragraph -- I'm blogging as I read -- he decides he has to leave his wife "in order to survive." He confesses to "the emotional emptiness at the center of my marriage," but he has abstained from writing one unkind word about Kathy. That's understandable, but it makes the story a little false, and I'm left wondering about how honestly he's portraying his emotional trajectory. He hasn't said anything about sex. And he began studying for the priesthood and believed at one time he had a calling into that life that demands celibacy. There are sexual themes that are utterly unexplored, and yet they will become central when Anita Hill appears on the scene.

Anita Hill reemerges, as she must, to respond to the Clarence Thomas memoir.

In an op-ed in the NYT:

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

Many people were involved in bringing Hill forward and bolstering her testimony, but it was in a situation where there was a powerful political motivation to destroy him. It was hardly the usual he-said-she-said situation. There was a huge crowd of promoters behind both of them.

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.

I don't think Thomas's quote connotes that she lacks religious belief. Take the word "religious" in context, between the adjectives "demure" and "conservative." I think he's using the word "religious" to connote a certain type of demeanor -- perhaps someone who forgives, turns the other cheek, and judges not. (Under my interpretation, you can criticize him for stereotyping religious people.)

Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers’ credibility, detractors routinely diminish people’s professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee’s work as “mediocre” or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

True and important. If only the politics could be set aside. If only Hill had also addressed what happened to our perceptions about the seriousness of sexual harassment during the Clinton era, when the politics cut the other way.

***

I'll update this post when I've read through the relevant part of the memoir. When I picked up the book yesterday, I intended to go right to the part about Anita Hill, but I let myself read the first page -- "My father had broken the only promise he ever made to us" -- and got caught up in the chronological narrative.

ADDED: Captain Ed attacks Hill.

Old, unsubstantiated allegations only have credibility among those who use them for political purposes. Contrast Hill's reception to that of Paula Jones and her allegations of indecent exposure and sexual harrassment against Bill Clinton. Unlike Hill, Jones made her complaint contemporaneously, and pursued legal action through the channels that Hill espouses in this column after the incident got publicized. All of the same people who lined up behind Hill against Thomas didn't just ignore Jones, but called her every name in the book, including "trailer trash". Hill, who thinks that she helped lead an evolution in how harrassment gets treated, somehow neglects to mention Jones as part of that evolution.

Oliver Willis attacks Thomas ("absolute filth... whose odor wafts from every case he gets his grubby little paws on").

"She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That's not the person I knew."

"She could defend herself, let's just put it that way... She did not take slights very kindly and anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly."

"Didn't take 10 years?"

"It didn't take 10 minutes."

Clarence Thomas talks about Anita Hill in his "60 Minutes" interview (to air this Sunday, leaked at Drudge).

"It simply seemed depressing, oppressive and hopeless. It seemed like a relic from the past, a buried memory."

Judith Warner rewatches "Thelma and Louise," which was screened as part of film series chosen by various politicians.

Previous choices, by male lawmakers, have included “The Candidate,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Dave.” But [Senator Susan Collins and Representative Jane Harmon], the cheery Maine Republican and tough-as-nails California Democrat, who have worked together on intelligence and homeland security legislation, broke the mold with their choice of the dystopic female buddy movie.

They wanted, they said, to showcase their against-the-odds, across-the-aisle friendship.

Bizarre. Had they seen the movie?

[I]n 1991 it was altogether understandable that a movie about sexual violence would be turned into a fable about women’s general social and political progress.

I remember that time so well.

It made perfect sense then to conflate sexual violence – in all its verbal, psychic, physical and political forms — with sexual politics. That year, the William Kennedy Smith rape case went to trial, belittling and publicly humiliating the victim; Anita Hill confronted Clarence Thomas and emerged besmirched while he reigned victorious; and Roe v. Wade seemed destined for extinction.

All the talk, nationally, was of sexual harassment, date rape and crimes against women generally...

The memory of that fear and anger and outrage – the sense of its momentous, transformative power – might have lasted longer had the “Thelma and Louise” moment not been followed, soon after, by a repudiation of “victim feminism” that was widespread and totalizing and highly welcome in the larger culture. It’s easy to forget now how vital and urgent the new focus on date rape and sexual harassment seemed, for a brief moment, back then. And yet it was, truly, transformative; the world of “Thelma and Louise,” I think it’s fair now to say, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today.

Date rape is no longer a contentious concept; it’s a known reality. Rape victims are no longer so thoughtlessly named and shamed by the media as was William Kennedy Smith’s accuser. Rape itself is down – its incidence having dropped 75 percent since the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice.

These are profound and meaningful changes, and we should celebrate them — and revel in “Thelma and Louise”’s passage into history.

Oh, isn't that lovely! Well, Judith Warner's cheery recounting of history has a gigantic glaring omission! What happened was that the Democratic President Bill Clinton got into trouble for sexual harassment, and those who had worked so hard for so many years to bring the subject of sexual violence and sexual harassment to the front of the national consciousness did a turnaround to preserve partisan power. That's why the subject changed, not because the crime statistics improved. There are various problems with "victim feminism," but you've got to face up to the part of your repudiation of it that is about contempt for Paula Jones and interest in preserving the Clinton presidency.

Solving the mystery of Clarence Thomas.

Here's a WaPo article by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher that's adapted from their new book "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas." They tell the story of Thomas's nephew, Mark Elliot Martin, who is serving a 30-year sentence for drug dealing. Thomas has custody of Martin's son, Mark Elliot Martin Jr.

When he began raising Mark -- Thomas has one adult son from a previous marriage -- he altered his Supreme Court schedule. He sent Mark to private schools, gave him extra homework to improve his math and reading, taught him to dribble with his left hand. And Mark responded. He excelled in school, became a Harry Potter fan and took up golf, and as a teenager he is comfortable around some of the most brilliant legal minds in the country.

Mark's father was another story. Thomas had tried desperately to reach him, without success. Though Martin was good with his hands and worked for a time repairing piers at a marina near Pin Point, he injured himself and lost that job. And because he was illiterate, according to his attorney, he had little means of supporting himself. He was on probation and out of work when his luck turned worse....

When the drug bust went down, Thomas was so disappointed that he offered no legal advice, no pep talk, nothing. Thomas's mother said he had tried in vain to help his nephew many times. " 'Mark, please, you got them pretty little kids. Please,' " she recalled her son pleading. But Thomas couldn't get through, and now he really was through.

This time, Uncle Clarence just kept his distance. And his sister, Emma Mae Martin, didn't say a word, "just left it alone," as she put it. She didn't even ask her well-connected brother for help. "Nope, nope, no, no," she said emphatically, signaling the strain in their relationship. "He didn't want to get involved anyway," she added....

Thomas is not popular among the other inmates, the nephew [said in an interview]...

"They always asking, 'Why he ain't got you out of this stuff?'"

And so it goes. The book is based on interviews from family and others, but not Thomas himself, who declined to talk to the authors. So we must endure grudging commentary like that from the nephew or this, from Thomas's sister:

Emma Mae Martin, who was once publicly singled out by her brother as an example of the debilitating effects of welfare dependency, is a high school dropout who later earned her diploma in night school as an adult. She and her brother don't talk politics or law or philosophy. Their conversations tend to be about, "well, not much really," Martin said. "Find out how I'm doing, what I'm up to, that's about it."

She lives her life and lets him be. "He's supposed to be a judge," she said, "but you can't judge anybody unless you judge yourself. I've never judged anybody, but people judge me all the time."

And here's Thomas's mother:

Her favorite son was Myers Thomas, Clarence's younger brother, who died in 2000 of a heart attack suffered during a morning jog. "Myers was the kindest-hearted one," she said. He called often, came to visit when she was lonely, took her for rides. "I had more dealing with Myers," she explained. "Me and Myers were more really open and close together."

I'm sure there is more in the book than this sort of thing, which is dispiriting and, it seems, unfair.

Here's Yale lawprof Kenji Yoshino reviewing the book:

We're introduced to the many Thomases we have never seen: the RV-driving Thomas, the Ayn Rand-loving Thomas, the Catholic Thomas and others.

The book's main flaw is its failure to give us more of one particular Thomas: Justice Thomas. For a biography of a jurist, Supreme Discomfort is surprisingly short on Thomas's legal decisions and philosophy....

Merida and Fletcher also fail to grapple adequately with the justice's jurisprudential methodology....

It is hard, though, to quarrel too much with a book that solves the great Thomas mystery: his legendary silence. One conventional explanation is that Thomas is still smarting from the Anita Hill scandal that occupied his confirmation hearing, an explanation that seems less plausible with every passing year. Merida and Fletcher explain his courtroom demeanor by suggesting that silence is the closest Thomas can come to opting out of the scripts that eddy around him. "If you can't be free," the poet Rita Dove writes, "be a mystery." It is a serious indictment of race relations in this country that, in 2007, the nation's most powerful African Americans are still not permitted to be individuals.

Can you "solve" a mystery by "suggesting" something? I don't think so, even if a poet's purported wisdom is tossed in. I'm not buying the theory that such an extraordinary man is "silenced" by "scripts" that are imposed on black people. The man has overcome so much in his life. It's insulting to portray him as flummoxed by "scripts," "stories," and "narratives." Yoshino is delivering a strong dose of his own theories here, and it will help you understand what he's saying here if you know what he wrote in his book "Covering."

Now, "Covering" is a terrific memoir. Thinking about it, I realize that what I want to read about Clarence Thomas is his own memoir. He has things to say, and some of them he has already told us.

Here's the best explanation I've read of why he keeps silent on the bench:

Since Justice Thomas joined the bench in 1991, he has offered limited comments about his reticence, leaving it to friends and former law clerks to defend his practice. They dismissed any suggestions that his relative silence reflected any lack of intellectual confidence. But during an informal chat with high school students the day after the court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, the justice offered his most extensive explanation.

He said his fellow justices are so talkative that if he just waits, someone will ask the questions he might have asked. ''Unless I want an answer I don't ask things,'' he said. ''I don't ask for entertainment, I don't ask to give people a hard time.''

Then he offered a reason no one had ever suggested. He said his poor upbringing in Georgia had an effect on his inclination not to ask questions. When he was 16, he said, and the only black student in his seminary class, he was used to speaking in a low country dialect known as Gullah. ''People praise it now,'' he said. ''But they used to make fun of us back then.''

As a result, he said, he ''just started developing the habit of listening.''

Why doesn't that "solve" the "mystery"?

Maybe everyone is picking the solution that works best with what they already want to say about Thomas or -- as with Yoshino -- what they've already said generally about how they think the world works.