The Real Anita Hill
Brock, David
T his is one of those rare books that is best begun—as is the Bible—last chapter first. Both books hold another similarity, to wit, both are books of revelation; but whereas the Bible is also...
...Sexual harassment has indeed, as David Brock duly notes, become an outrage, but it is indicative not of American history but of recent liberal history...
...2) Her case, "uncorroborated and unsupported by any co-worker, or anyone else," was not a typical harassment case...
...7) The Justice Department had suggested Hill as a character witness, and the innocent Thomas "encouraged the idea...
...The Real Anita Hill is one of themost carefully researched and lucidly written pieces of investigative journalism written in this century, and Brock put it all together in eleven months...
...Clarence Thomas told the truth...
...2) Nothing Thomas said was "at variance with the established facts of the case...
...For that matter, think of the present president...
...A fumbling Senate panel and an incompetent press beclouded this point, leaving millions to believe that no one can ever know who lied...
...7) Of her statements regarding the FBI's interview with her, some are thoroughly contradicted by the agents who conducted the interview...
...When those of a prudish cast of mind objected, the left raucously derided them...
...The innocents in the press missed the entire story...
...A fter pondering Brock's conclusions, readers will want to read earlier chapters, where, with the utmost intelligence and insight, Brock adduces his evidence...
...Since then this woman of destiny has taken on mythic qualities...
...8) She was deceitful and mendacious about her work record as a lawyer for the firm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross, about her work in government at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, about her hiring and behavior at Oral Roberts University Law School, and about her record at the University of Oklahoma Law School...
...but whereas the Bible is also a book of piety, The Real Anita Hill is a book of the utmost impiety...
...5) All who knew both Hill and Thomas believed Thomas...
...The Real Anita Hill questions the veracity, the character, the whole public persona of she who would be our own Joan of Arc if various women of fevered brow had had their way...
...Brock's conclusions about Thomas amount to this: (1) Prior to Hill's charges Thomas had been found morally fit by four Senate confirmation hearings and five FBI investigations...
...Like so many other contemporarythat demonstrated by any of the mediocrities in the United States Senate...
...I will never be able to get my name back...
...Twenty-four hours later she was a media giant...
...Anita raised—so legend has it—"sexual harassment" to its rightful eminence atop the left's catalogue of American outrages...
...I have never been accused of sex harassment...
...it was far flimsier...
...In fine and in sum: St...
...Well, I havechecked the conservative ideological agenda, and nowhere is it mentioned that we conservatives approve of lying under oath...
...In a masterly narrative, Brock demonstrates that Clarence Thomas is a resourceful, intelligent man who for the most part plotted his own defense...
...6) At the time Thomas was alleged to have been pursuing Hill he was seriously involved with another woman and at the point of engagement with her...
...The Real Anita Hill is a work of scholarship, superb journalism, and profound respect for those values that liberals of a better vintage struggled for several centuries to engraft on the American polity...
...Even now there are bookstores that have banned it...
...I think it's hurt me and I think it's hurt the country...
...I am certain conservatives are against it, but does this mean the American left favors it and exalts Anita Hill for her courageous dishonesty...
...In its final three pages, Brock itemizes those of his conclusions that reveal the fundamental point about l'affaire Hill-Thomas, namely: St...
...Anita are grimmer: (1) St...
...He is a congenital liar, and we know where he got his political support...
...Brock shows that there are in and around Capitol Hill left-wing partisans who will undertake every low scheme, no matter how dishonorable, to achieve their idiotic political purpose...
...Now the American left would trample all these values: due process, the rules of evidence, of objectivity, of fair play, the principle of innocence until proven guilty, the rules of the United States Senate, and the institution of a judiciary independent from politics...
...Anita had become indignant, Brock demonstrates a far-ranging understanding of human psychology, far keener than she was "outed" by opponents of Thomas's nomination...
...And anyone who knows me knows I am adamantly opposed to that, adamant, and yet, I sit here accused...
...Now let me explain why The Real Anita Hill is best read from back to front...
...Brock's conclusions regarding St...
...Anita lies, and in this imperfect world of imperfect human beings Clarence Thomas is thus far a moral exemplar...
...You have your name back, thanks to your courage and integrity and to David Brock's industry and intelligence...
...Or the benighted condition of American education—begotten by endless experimentation in our schools...
...They denounce their opponents in terms of indignant righteousness that are as preposterous as those of now-defunct Nazis and Communists...
...4) More than a dozen people refuted parts of her testimony—either they lied or she did...
...I think it's wrong for the country...
...5) St...
...Once again they made the Republic look infantile to the world...
...He does this through a meticulous reading of testimonies, through interviews, judicious reportage, and a high regard for justice...
...They missed St...
...Anita gave "differing and inconsistent" explanations of her contacts with Thomas after leaving his employment...
...Consider the homeless: most are the result of such left-wing reforms as rent control and deinstitutionalization...
...Others in the press, such as Nina Totenberg, fell in with the partisans...
...One week after that she was The Hope of all American women down there in the dungeon, rattling their chains so piteously while we guys up here laugh it up...
...Clarence Thomas, Brock argues, did so, and in his speculations as to why St...
...Anita did not voluntarily come forward, as her dubious supporters sing...
...8) Once Hill had made her charges behind closed doors Thomas could have withdrawn with his reputation intact and his place on the D.C...
...Anita's left-wing politics, her record of incompetence, even her membership in a pornographic reading circle at the University of Oklahoma, which must be one of the most useless universities in the land...
...I don't think this is right," Thomas declares, "I think it's wrong...
...Such reflections lead to a second axiom of mine: any institution that comes under the dominance of liberal reformers eventually loses all sight of its original purposes, along with its capacity to accomplish them...
...Circuit Court secure, but Thomas went through with renewed hearings, apparently either "power-mad" or confident of his innocence...
...Yet here again the American left has demonstrated its amazing knack for transforming a simple matter into a fecund breeding ground of vexed issues, bizarre legends, monumental moral causes, and ideological jihads...
...6) She said she had agreed to be identified as Thomas's accuser when she made her initial complaint to the Judiciary Committee, though in fact she had not so agreed...
...I have an axiom: most of the outrages that American leftists are most ardent to reform are, in truth, the unanticipated consequences of prior left-wing reforms...
...This the record makes clear...
...Tread carefully, Clarence...
...L'affaire Hill-Thomas revolves around a very simple question: Who lied...
...9) The record is clear that she was dishonest about her feelings toward Thomas as a boss and as a political thinker...
...As Brock proves, they took a mediocre affirmative-action casualty seething with left-wing feminist rage and foisted her on the world as a moral and intellectual colossus...
...No one will successfully refute its major revelations...
...Well, Brock has rescued us from the clouds of unknowing...
...3) Thomas's opponents could not find anyone to challenge even his so-called "evasion" that since the Roe v. Wade decision he had not discussed its essentials...
...Well, on that point and on that point alone you have been proved wrong, Justice Thomas...
...When some feminists, however, noted that sexual utopia made them at times uncomfortable, the left was moved to action—not against the sexual revolution, which could stay in place, but against any American man who in any way had crossed an indignant woman...
...In the 1960s, the left led the way in breaking down barriers against sexual restraint, indecent language, and lascivious manners...
...I know it...
...3) During the period that Anita Hill claims she was being harassed by Thomas, there is no record of such grievances emitting from her—only statements that Thomas was the "ideal boss," who "did not even notice me...
...On October 11, 1991, Anita Hill was nobody...
...The left has taken some very strange positions in the past, and remember the honor it accorded Alger Hiss...
...In a particularly important chapter, demonstrating the seriousness of sexual harassment and debunking the myth that Anita Hill's charges constitute a typical harassment case, Brock quotes the indignant Thomas's moving statement to Senator Hatch...
...According to such sages as Anna Quindlen, Jane Mayer, and Jill Abramson, The Real Anita Hill, which originated in David Brock's March 1992 essay in this magazine, is a product of conservative ideology...
...Anita lied...
...Or urban poverty—begotten by decades of good-government reforms that have made the plight of the poor more wretched and intractable than ever in this century...
...outrages, sexual harassment is the unanticipated consequence of a congeries of reforms that the left was once fain to boast of as The Sexual Revolution...
...And thank you for reminding us that your enemies hurt the country...
...4) His testimony about his office behavior was supported by "practically every woman who had ever worked for him...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
