Alarm Bell
Caldwell, Christopher
BOOK REVIEW Alarm Bell THE BELL CURVE: INTELLIGENCE AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray The Free Press / 845 pages / $30 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER...
...She said she had told Schwartz of the Playboy magazines and two pinups, one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom...
...November's electoral blowout and a bevy of polling data show that Americans have finally lost patience with the largely black 62 The American Spectator January 1995 BOOK REVIEW Alarm Bell THE BELL CURVE: INTELLIGENCE AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray The Free Press / 845 pages / $30 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions...
...spatially [and] will grow...
...Mayer and Abramson believe that Wright's account is strong corroboration for Hill's, because Wright was interviewed before Hill testified...
...And Schwartz made notes of this conversation, too, which Mayer and Abramson obtained...
...Here we have an allegation of perjury lodged against Linda Jackson...
...Apparently Carr had enjoyed teasing Hill about Thomas's contrary ways...
...Abramson didn't say what it was...
...At Rice, Asians must score 70 points above the norm to stand an equal chance of admission, at Harvard 65 points, Johns Hopkins 55 points, Stanford 58 points—not to mention Brown, which recently acknowledged an "extremely serious situation" after a report from its Asian students' association...
...When I reached Paul, he said, "We have nothing to talk about," and hung up...
...Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer also had private swearings-in...
...Jews of European descent, when extracted from the white control group, scoreabout a standard deviation (or 15 points) above it...
...Many of the errors concern the public record of the hearing...
...They urge a "valued place for everyone...
...Hatch mentioned to Thomas that he was going to bring up the subject, but the questions were far from coordinated...
...Kaus—who even used Herrnstein' s controversial assertion that social status was Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Mayer and Abramson apparently have the wrong "faggot...
...Mayer and Abramson have obtained the notes of Brudney's conversation with Hill...
...Herrnstein and Murray give the best explanation yet of how IQ translates into productivity, doing a mathematical calculation to show that the difference between the average dentist and a superior one is $30,000 a year, while the difference between the average secretary and a superior one is only $750...
...Jackson told me this isn't how it happened at all...
...federal government at exactly the moment when distrust of it is higher than in living memory...
...The book says that when Ginni Lamp first moved to Washington she took a job "in the Senate office of Republican Hal Daub of Nebraska...
...According to Savage, she reported Playboys and two pinups to Schwartz and to Mayer and Abramson (andnow to me), and Mayer and Abramson grossly distorted her observations in their book...
...H owever this dispute between the reporters and their source gets resolved, there is another problem with Savage's story even as she now presents it in a much scaled-down form: It is not clear that there is any truth to it...
...It gives a fair hearing to those who dissent scientifically from its propositions—in fact, it bends over backward to be fair...
...she told me they were in five separate stacks so she assumed there were five years' worth...
...Nonetheless, it is worth combing through them once more to dispel the notion that there is anything even approaching a pattern of sexual harassment in Thomas's personal history...
...There is also nothing unusual about this practice, as the authors imply...
...One theory that seemed especially appealing to Thomas was the idea that God-given 'natural law' should take precedence over man-made law," the book explains...
...A decade later, Thomas 70 The American Spectator January 1995 denied having made it when Hill attributed it to him...
...Most dramatic are those figures where what appears racism against blacks may actually indicate racism on their behalf: • The probability of graduating from college is 27 percent for whites, 11 percent for blacks...
...Is this such a big deal...
...IQ across large population groups...
...They then approached Savage for confirmation and published the above passage...
...His wife, Donnelly, remembers only an unnamed individual telling her that Thomas had said it...
...Michael Middleton, a former Thomas aide whom the authors misidentify as a professor of law at Missouri North Central University (there is no such institution), also Race even creeps into the authors' analysis of Thomas's record on the Supreme Court...
...The sections on the witness Joel Paul, the American University law professor, further underscores the sheer idiocy of what is passed off as serious reporting in this book...
...may have lower IQs than the norm...
...T hough a side issue during the hearings, the circumstances of Wright's firing by Thomas take on a new importance here...
...Why was what was okay for Reich and Kaus to say an outrage for Herrnstein and Murray...
...Thomas, in fact, had already met McEwen by the time his marriage finally dissolved in August 1981...
...Both in her interview with Senate Judiciary Committee staff and later in her testimony, Hoerchner said that she was unsure of the date of the conversation with Hill...
...Likewise, according to Mims's account, he had just met Hill when she supposedly told him of Thomas's "talking wild...
...It goes on everywhere, and we believe is increasingly shaped by privately held beliefs about the implications of genetic differences that could not stand open inspection...
...Regarding another important discrepancy, the authors report from their interview with Anita Hill a new variation on her purported complaint to Hoerchner...
...They describe the results as "worth worrying about and worth trying to do something about...
...telephoned Savage for an explanation...
...On the other hand, if society resists the temptation to "improve the race"—which seems less likely in an age when politicians of both left and right advocate forcing the longterm contraceptive Norplant on inner-city women—dysgenesis will create problems enough...
...When Hill's initial charges against Thomas were leaked, Simon, in order to force a further hearing, claimed that he had not known about them at the time the Judiciary Committee voted and that he would have sought a postponement had he been told of them...
...Using "standard deviation"—a measurement of probability—Murray and Herrnstein separatethis curve into five groups, determined by IQ percentile: very dull (0-5), dull (5-25), normal (25-75), bright (75-95), and very bright (95-100...
...And this book does both...
...Modify affirmative action so that it truly benefits the underprivileged...
...Strict policing and custodial responses to crime will become more acceptable and widespread...
...Mayer and Abramson add little to what has been previously published about this subject...
...Brudney—a friend of Hill's from Yale who spoke to her more than a dozen times before she filed her allegations with the Senate—watched Anita Hill testify under oath without mentioning Jackson...
...Paoletta, however, told me, "I don't know anyone at the New York Times...
...Mickey Kaus's The End of Equality (1991) was devoted to formulating a program of "civic liberalism" to prevent widening money inequality, which he saw as both inevitable and linked to intelligence, from creating widening social inequalities...
...Thomas was a 34-year-old bachelor in 1982 and we are, after all, talking only about Playboy, not hard-core pornography...
...Savage said that she confirmed on an off-the-record basis the existence of two pinups and the Playboys to Jane Mayer in 1992, because Mayer already had Schwartz's notes...
...But in the end, they have to live with themselves...
...District Court in California struck down the banning of Playboy magazine on the premises of a Los Angeles firehouse on the grounds that it did not contribute to a sexually harassing environment...
...Note that this is sourced from Hill and unidentified "others...
...for whites and blacks of average intelligence the figures are 6 percent and 11 percent...
...As Snidemian and Pia77a have pointed out in The Scar of Race (1993), such "anti-black" feeling as persists in America today is more a political movement against such programs as affirmative action than an antipathy against blacks per se...
...Hatch buys all of his suits at Mr...
...Strengthen marriage...
...Simon's remarks have been wrongly construed, by the Journal's Al Hunt, among others, to mean that he would have switched his vote on the confirmation if Wright had testified...
...For example, we learn for the first time that the witness John Carr—the New York corporate lawyer who was unable to state under oath that Hill had named Thomas as her victimizer in 1983, only that she had referred to an unnamed supervisors—had an ideological motive in concluding a decade later that Hill has been referring to Thomas all along...
...Need I say more...
...A civil service worker in the Carter years, Savage accepted a low-level staff job in the Reagan White House on civil rights matters, which brought her into contact with both Thomas and Hill, first at the education department and then at the EEOC...
...Middleton said that during the time Hill worked at the Education Department and the EEOC she was "totally loyal" to Thomas...
...The fact that Hoerchner was working in Washington at the time of Hill's complaint, now reconfirmed by Hoerchner herself, is precisely the reason that her original testimony has been discredited...
...How could they do otherwise...
...The second problem is that both Danoff and Middleton were fired by Thomas, and so they aren't the best witnesses against him...
...But over the last thirty years, society has been increasingly organized to favor racial rights over individual rights, and a share of our national wealth that dwarfs the S&L bailout (according to a February 1993 Forbes article) has been spent to reshape (and often misshape) pre-existing social institutions in order that the revolution in race-based rights might go forward...
...As EEOC chairman, Thomas had taken the position that certain affirmative action plans were illegal...
...It is thus cause for relief that certain politicians—like J.C...
...She isn't there either...
...The conversation ended and no questions ever arrived...
...The question of why Wright and Jourdain didn't testify has been a matter of heated debate ever since they didn't...
...There is also the matter of Savage's statement in the book and on "Turning Point" that she was "aghast" at seeing the pinups and Playboys, and found it "a little crazy...
...Hardnett wasn't even working at the agency in the spring of 1982...
...and circumvent public institutions, such as the postal service, through fax machines...
...This carries two unstated implications that will resonate in the rest of the authors' argument: First, intelligence may not be decisive for success in life, but if it isn't, then being "privileged" or "underprivileged" is even less decisive...
...It turned out this was a lie: Simon later admitted that he not only had read the FBI report about Hill's charges, but had actually interviewed her over the telephone before voting...
...This section does two interesting things that lend real power and credibility to its conclusions: it limits the analysis to white Americans, removing whatever effects of racism still The American Spectator January 1995 63 exist to skew the results...
...News and World Report published a cover story that gave prominent play to Wright, Jourdain, and Hardnett...
...The authors see a silver lining in the fact that that would still leave 100,000 blacks in the country with IQs over 125—that is, in the authors' "very bright" class...
...Until reading it in the book, I never suspected—or would have cared about—Joel Paul's alleged homosexuality...
...Perhaps because Hill is now seeking to counter inconvenient information divulged long after the hearings were over...
...Maybe it doesn't matter much for policy, but it matters a great deal for politics: If the most often adduced factor—racism—turns out to be the culprit, then the right solutions are the ones we're already trying...
...When the New Republic opened its pages to Murray and two dozen social critics, the latter were unanimous in their disapproval, save a few who wrote away from the argument as fast as they could...
...Wright did not respond to messages left at the Observer...
...She found it the next morning," Ramon said...
...In any event, the evidence about this anecdote, such as it is, could be entirely valid and still bring us no closer to proving that Thomas ever said it...
...Thus the implication left by Mayer and Abramson—that Jackson was informed of the substance of what Hill had said and hung up rather than deny it—is entirely false...
...Jaime Ramon, now a lawyer in private practice, was the chief legal adviser to EEOC commissioner Tony Gallegos during Wright's tenure at the EEOC...
...That would at first seem like cause for optimism, except that political anger is far more volatile than mere distaste or even sentiments of racial superiority...
...It is the diagnostic side of the book that is its raison d'etre, however, and as such The Bell Curve is a comprehensive, responsible treatment of its subject, never mean-spirited or gloating...
...Not only does Hill claim that the 1983 conversation with Jackson was so memorable that it kept her silent for a decade...
...On the contrary, it is here that the first note of hedging and conciliation creeps in, as they try to gloss over the gravity of the experimental data: "The facts are not as alarming as many people seem to fear .. ." they write...
...In discussing the infamous pubic hair affidavit from Hill's former students, the authors report that "Senate aides arranged for [Lawrence] Shiles to make his statement legally binding with a notarized signature...
...These consequences are plausible: Child care in the inner city will become primarily the responsibility of the state...
...But in her interview with the Senate staff, Jourdain remembered Wright telling her about comments Thomas made about different parts of her anatomy (her legs), and that Wright was very upset by these comments...
...is over 30 million, that would leave society with the depressing prospect of little more than a Talented Three-Hundredth...
...In no jurisdiction does the notarization or lack of notarization of a statement affect its binding nature...
...Savage told me that Mayer pushed her to identify herself as a Republican so she would appear more credible in attacking Thomas...
...With the abolition of racenorming under the Bush Civil Rights Act, it has become necessary in some cases to lower standards for all applicants down to the level of the least qualified minority hired...
...If Savage was really "aghast" at Thomas's "crazy" behavior, why would she think Hill's position working closely with him was so "terrific...
...Of the three, only Woman Number One—Angela Wright—claims first-hand knowledge that Thomas ever did anything untoward in the workplace, though she does not believe she was ever sexually harassed by him...
...Herrnstein and Murray thus reveal the dead-earnestness of their preoccupation: low intelligence is a threat not just to the quality of life in this country, but to the viability of the United States as a free nation...
...The dispute is over how well those scores reflect intelligence...
...The papers contained the affidavit submitted by John Doggett...
...By the 1960s, these forces left the average Ivy Leaguer in the top hundredth...
...When I asked Savage if she'd kept copies of the proofs, she became visibly nervous...
...Why was what was okay for Reich and Kaus to say an outrage for Herrnstein and Murray...
...The authors say that it doesn't really matter whether the difference is genetic or environmental, as long as it's persistent...
...1 n a world where everyone was judged as an individual, none of this would matter much...
...and (c) the Judiciary Committee lawyers who were prompting Wright with questions had already read Hill's statement...
...She now maintains that she followed Thomas because: According to Hill and others, his relationship with [Lillian] McEwen was an on-and-off again affair that, at least when it began, in the spring of 1982, allowed Hill to feel "relief and hope" [that the harassment had ended...
...At another point, she snapped, "He's no Thurgood Marshall, you know...
...O The American Spectator...
...Paul, who is gay, apparently harbored fears about being "outed" by the Republicans during the hearings...
...The claim that Senator Howell Heflin bungled his questioning of Thomas regarding the latter's possible familiarity with Long Dong Silver is also wrong...
...I have this vision of Clarence at the EEOC picking up a Coke and saying, 'Who put this pubic hair on my Coke...
...As Herrnstein and Murray cover the subject of crime and civility, we begin to hear the apocalyptic strain that has certainly been overstressed in reviews but exists in the book nonetheless: As crime grows, society must substitute coercion for cooperation...
...The poverty rate for whites is 7 percent, for blacks, 26 percent...
...The evidence of a genetic explanation includes the twin studies mentioned earlier, which show a .78 correlation between the intelligences of identical twins reared apart—its implications cannot be expected to disappear just because one is discussing race...
...Jim Dire should be Jim Dyer...
...There's no indication the authors made any effort to confirm any of this with Republican staffers—even the existence of the dossiers, let alone the information about Paul's personal life...
...With 22 percent of white births illegitimate, and perhaps twice that many in poor areas, and with most of those illegitimate births coming from the lowest part of the cognitive continuum, the authors expect a white underclass to form...
...Controlling for IQ does not diminish the black-white disparity in welfare recipiency for poor mothers, for example, and reduces the number of black illegitimate babies only marginally (from 62 percent to 51 percent for a black of IQ 100...
...Berry-Myers also denied this account...
...All Rights Reserved...
...Of this group, only Singleton and Williams were interviewed for the book, and neither recalls being asked anything about the contents of Thomas's apartment...
...He said the Republicans behind the campaign to confirm Thomas had compiled briefing books, which he described as being two inches thick, filled with detailed information on the backgrounds of Hill's potential witnesses, including Joel Paul...
...Moreover, in light of the baselessness of the foregoing indictment against Thomas, Savage's account is the only thing standing between Thomas and total vindication...
...If the pinups are in question, so too are the Playboys...
...Middleton is quoted as saying...
...11 The American Spectator January 1995 67 DAVID I3ROCK (continued from page 41) It is now quite evident why Anita Hill has avoided for three years doing precisely the kind of interview she has done with Mayer and Abramson, commenting on the facts of the case...
...In October 1994, a U.S...
...at the level of 100 IQ, 50 percent of whites get college degrees and 68 percent of blacks...
...The notes indicate no better sourcing for this passage 8 Hill had an EEOC supervisor other than Thomas in 1983 who was a known sexual harasser...
...Though the interview was done under carefully controlled circumstances—lawyers for Hill were present, and she reserved the right to pre-screen the questions as well as review her quotations before publication—she wasn't quite careful enough to avoid shedding light on her motives...
...Such disparities transform our universities into assembly lines for turning out racists, as white students, some meeting black people for the first time, come to see them as incompetents to whom the state has given special privileges...
...A rise in (a) meritocratic admissions, (b) the ability of standardized tests to measure intelligence, and (c) the sheer volume of applications for the fixed number of places in elite universities, led sometime in the 1950s to a revolution in who went there...
...See Terry Eastland's "Back to Bakke" on page 58...
...it is a completely unremarkable fact...
...Second, if IQ measures something other than "general intelligence," then whatever that something is is formidably important...
...There is also nothing new in the statements of Woman Number Three, Sukari Hardnett, whose affidavit hit the Associated Press wire at the time of the hearings: Hardnett stated that there was a "sexual dimension" to serving on Thomas's EEOC staff, but she didn't define the situation further...
...The dispute is over how well those scores reflect intelligence...
...In 1984, when he supported the presidential candidacy of Gary Hart, he had attended the Democratic National Convention as a gay delegate...
...They therefore miss the target...
...While Kaus and Reich have been among the few American political commentators to consistently and proudly describe themselves as "liberal" over the last half-decade, the anger over The Bell Curve was not limited to the center and left...
...That given, we can now only hope that The Bell Curve's insights will help us solve some of the most troubling problems of race relations and income stratification...
...He had called her in to chew her out about the press conference...
...There is now evidence that Hill had told Brudney of a second person mere weeks before saying on three different occasions—a sworn affidavit, an interview with the FBI, and her sworn Senate testimony—that she remembered telling only one person...
...Many of Herrnstein and Murray's critics argue that we cannot finally know whether such a difference exists until we have discovered the actual genes that determine intelligence...
...The journalistic consensus that IQ describes nothing real or important is diametrically opposed to the consensus in the scientific world, the authors show...
...In her testimony, Hill stated that she had feared for her job, a claim later contradicted by Singleton...
...In her Senate testimony, she said: "It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my closest friends...
...This test has been shown to predict g remarkably well...
...Neither of these incidents is mentioned in this book...
...T he authors have about as much success trying to find new corroborators for Hill...
...Many of these observations are commonsensical almost to the point of redundancy: higher-IQ people tend to have lower dropout rates, more years of schooling, lower rates of poverty...
...Watts in Oklahoma or Roy Innis in New York—are in their very different ways charting (for blacks and whites) an escape route from the self-serving politics of demand and defiance...
...Astute viewers of ABC's "Turning Point," which featured an interview with Savage, noticed that the story she told wasn't the same as the one that had appeared that very 74 The American Spectator January 1995 morning in the Journal excerpt, whose language tracked closely with the above passage...
...Hill testified that the behavior began three months or so after she first went to work for Thomas at the Education Department in September 1981...
...The accounts of three of these women—Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett—had been reported and refuted before the Ginni Thomas is depicted as a psychotic: a sunny, trusting, sweetly naive, invariably warm and cheerful woman who spends her time taking homeless strangers to lunch and attending a church that was a "center of anti-abortion political activity...
...HOERCHNER: She did not ask for advice...
...On "Turning Point," she spoke of only one, in the kitchen...
...He was our only hope and he was against us," she said...
...76 The American Spectator January 1995 edly a lawyer...
...We met at the downtown Marriott for lunch...
...Then, in a subsequent description designed to paint Paul as a committed civil rights activist, the authors wreck their own plot line: Paul was open about his sexuality to his friends and family and in the past had championed a number of gay rights issues, including the effort to admit gays to the military...
...Yet even if the claim of Savage of a couple of pinups and some Playboys is accepted as valid—despite the fact that it is completely uncorroborated and indeed flatly contradicted by a half-dozen others—it seems hardly enough to prove anything, certainly not anything like Anita Hill's allegations...
...And before that he had headed a gay bar association in San Francisco, called Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom...
...Soon enough it's also clear that Mayer and Abramson will conduct no such cross-examination...
...The liberals who have addressed the issue of national atomization have not done much better, but one can admit this and still say that Hennstein and Murray's prescriptions are seldom worthy of their diagnosis...
...They acknowledge that the jury is still out on the issue, yet they assemble evidence against the competing "environmentalist" argument with a thoroughness verging on obsession...
...William Clark was nominated by Reagan to be the deputy secretary of state, not the secretary...
...But in her interview with the Senate staff, Hoerchner was sure about one thing: She was living in Washington at the time the two had spoken...
...That never happened...
...For instance, Hill offers a completely new explanation of why she followed Thomas from Education to the EEOC while she was allegedly being harassed...
...Daniel Seligman addressed the racial IQ difference in A Question of Intelligence (1992) and was all but ignored...
...The authors speculate, with less evidence, that immigrants now coming to the U.S...
...When the New Republic opened its pages to Murray and two dozen social critics, the latter were unanimous in their disapproval, save a few who wrote away from the argument as fast as they could...
...A young White House intern who drove to National Airport to ferry one potential Thomas witness to the hearing is called a member of the "prestigious White House Fellows program...
...The outrage over The Bell Curve has more to do with the way its arguments meshed together, the longtime political preoccupations of its authors (particularly Murray), and the state of race relations—which are more fractious today than they were even three years ago when Kaus and Reich were writing...
...There was no inkling of anything beyond a professional relationship...
...Phyllis Berry-Myers has said that she received a telephone call on the day Wright was fired in which Wright had told her to tell Thomas to "watch his back...
...No conspiracy was necessary...
...this was evident, as the authors themselves later note, when Thomas took such a long time to understand where Hatch's questioning was going...
...Herrnstein and Murray then review the long track record of efforts to boost IQ environmentally, such as Head Start, and find them wanting...
...In every case that a correction was requested, it was made...
...The probable results: a growing identification of native intelligence with socioeconomic standing, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a stratification of America into intellectual castes, with a few hi-tech communications wizards living in privately policed suburbs and a horde of unskilled Calibans trapped in rotting cities and rural areas...
...The lumpen class the authors envision will be disproportionately black, while there will be more whites and Asians among the symbolic analysts...
...It was almost unusually professional...
...Instead, he covered up his knowledge of Anita Hill's perjury...
...When one charts people along an axis by intelligence, the resulting distribution is the "bell curve" that gives its name to this book: the vast majority of people stacking in the middle range, with two slopes of significantly dumber and significantly smarter people leading to respective far edges of geniuses and mental defectives...
...If affirmative action really is "leaking poison into the American soul," might national strife—or even resurgent racism—be a price worth paying for its dismantling...
...HOERCHNER: She did not ask for advice, and I did not give her advice...
...In the next paragraph, however, we learn that Middleton "can't say for sure whether he witnessed Thomas's saying it or just had it described to him back then...
...It remains more or less constant throughout a subject's life...
...In other words, the entire "outing" issue was phony to begin with: Paul isn't a closeted gay...
...if someone else had witnessed it and told them...
...Cheif Justice William Rehnquist was sworn in that way as an associate justice...
...As she told Brudney, she "felt if my friend reacted this way, others on his side would react [the] same way...
...After conceding that the foregoing statements "do not necessarily corroborate [Hill's] account," the authors conclude: What seems unlikely, however, is that three senior lawyers in the agency could remember the same statement coming from a man who says he never uttered it to Hill or anyone else...
...While Kaus and Reich have been among the few American political commentators to consistently and proudly describe themselves as "liberal" over the last half-decade, the anger over The Bell Curve was not limited to the center and left...
...Savage said she objected and was then presented with a second set of page proofs that she found more accurate...
...In its less benign forms, the solutions will become more and more totalitarian...
...At the other end of the spectrum, the underclass will grow and will come to embrace whites (this returns to the theme of a famous Wall Street Journal article by Murray...
...I'd never say that—I'd put my hand on a stack of Bibles...
...They thus explain how the intellectual elite becomes a financial elite as well...
...Most notable is the opportunity given Susan Hoerchner, the California workmen's compensation claims mediator who was given the honorific title of "judge" throughout the hearing, to correct the record on when she supposedly received a telephone call from Hill complaining about Thomas's harassing behavior...
...The authors also show that intelligence testing as administered today has been cleared of internal bias (questions on which certain races score disproportionately poorly) and external bias (tests that predict intelligence less reliably for certain groups...
...Under affirmative action and the political correctness that is its consequence, prejudice (primarily a social phenomenon) has combined with preference (a political act) to form a brand-new kind of anger-inducing politics...
...For a nation predicated on a high level of individual autonomy, this is a fact worth knowing...
...But to make matters far, far worse, blacks have come to be identified with the U.S...
...N ext we meet Bradley Mims, who is presented as one of two new "witnesses" for Hill...
...A former EEOC employee who now works as a journalist, Wright was the first "other woman" to surface in the case...
...That is because of political correctness, of course, which is merely another name for what the authors call the "cognitive dissonance" between the rhetoric of affirmative action and the realities pointed out above: Just beneath the surface of American life, people talk about race in ways that bear little resemblance to the politically correct public discussion...
...The rate of incarceration is 2 percent for whites, 6 percent for Latinos, 13 percent for blacks...
...The relationship was very serious from the time it began," he said...
...Charles Rangel (D-N.Y...
...It is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences in intelligence and not run screaming from the room...
...The behavior of Simon, who announced his retirement as soon as the Republicans took control of the Senate, is especially noteworthy...
...Mayer and Abramson and their publisher have refused to give me access to these documents and to the Schwartz notes...
...They fail to note that the U.S...
...In our interview, she seemed certain of one as well, but it was in the bathroom...
...among those of average intelligence, it is 2, 3, and 5 percent respectively...
...The homeless will vanish...
...And Savage was never a Thomas employee...
...A far more curious aspect of Middleton's history,however, is not treated...
...it was odd, he believed, for a black man to be so conservative, Republican, and outspoken against traditional civil rights remedies...
...According to her, Abramson telephoned and said that she wanted Jackson to confirm or deny something that Abramson had heard...
...The American Spectator January 1995 75 Savage seems unsure of whether there were one or two pinups...
...The authors rely heavily on this study, which records IQ, socioeconomic status, occupation, income level, criminal behavior, and other traits—and they cross-reference dozens of other studies done this century...
...So much for Wright and Jourdain, the sole corroborator for Wright, who was also fired by Thomas...
...And Nat Turner's rebellion was in 1831, not 1832...
...But despite Mayer and Abramson's best efforts, it still isn't...
...the fact remains that the Democrats (i.e., the Thomas opponents) controlled the Senate and the Judiciary Committee, and established all of the rules and procedures that governed the hearings...
...in fact, they have scored lower than whites on "every known test of cognitive ability that meets basic psychometric standards of reliability and validity...
...Thomas testified that he fired Wright because she had called a co-worker "faggot...
...Ten years later she seized on it, claiming to be its original source, thinking that it would be somehow corroborable...
...It's ironic, then, that the late Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray should have become the focus of the most vituperative debate over a book in a generation...
...Harry Singleton, for one, confirmed to me in a recent interview that Thomas was involved with McEwen, then an aide to Senator Biden, before Hill went to work for him in September 1981—not 1982...
...There was no basketball game on television that night...
...This is happening most notably at universities...
...There was absolutely no on-and-off quality to it...
...Each of these claims is false...
...On the word of a single source with only second-hand knowledge of the alleged remark, Mayer and Abramson identify former EEOC employee John Seale as the person to whom Thomas was referring when he testified that Wright had called someone on the staff "faggot...
...Afterwards Thomas stopped me in the hall and said, 'Why weren't you guys there?' I told him because we weren't invited...
...But this is not really news, either...
...Finally, they cite button-pressing tests of mental reaction time, on which blacks register significantly slower...
...Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared on the book, none has successfully refuted any of its science...
...We are now told that Donnelly may have heard something about such a story, and so may have Middleton, Maybe Hill did too...
...Subsequent discussions I had with Anita also yielded no mention of anything improper on the part of Clarence Thomas...
...In retrospect, this was unfortunate, because it was inevitable from the very moment that Wright did not testify that Thomas's opponents would forever promote her story as the one that would have changed the course of history...
...later, she said she couldn't locate them...
...I have now located the only source to emerge so far claiming to have been an eyewitness to the events surrounding Wright's firing, including the anti-gay slur...
...Anger and defensiveness are sure to greet a book that sees such impatience as well-founded, or further undermines the rationale for those programs...
...The walls of the apartment were also memorably covered...
...Jackson, it may be recalled, testified for Thomas at the hearing: "Anita referred to Clarence with admiration...
...The authors portray this as an unprincipled reversal of position on Thomas's part, when in fact he was simply upholding the law...
...Typically, the authors never confront the Williams story...
...The authors do not announce this news with glee...
...the Wall Street Journal's excerpt of the book led with her story...
...He makes the leap from Hill's alleged comment about Thomas's "talking wild" to the conclusion that Hill meant Thomas was using sexually explicit language...
...Murray, in turn, has already written of his worries that the new American cognitive classes will form into a Latin American-style elite, isolated in walled mansions from the tumult of the rabble below...
...she barely knewhim when she supposedly told him of the harassment in the summer of 1987...
...In fact, (a) Nina Totenberg had gone on the air three days before the Wright interview and read Hill's detailed statement virtually verbatim...
...On page 97, they report: [Hoerchner] acknowledged that her recollection, particularly when it came to the timing of events, was hazy, but she said she distinctly remembered that at some point after Hill began working for Thomas, she had asked Hill in one of their many phone conversations how things were going...
...Simplify rules...
...Pat Buchanan called its emphasis misplaced, and both John McLaughlin and Jack Kemp trashed it as "pseudoscientific...
...The authors have no road map out of the territory they are describing...
...The statement is also wrong, as Thomas's votes in Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, United States v. Burke, William v. United States, Rowland v. California Men's Colony, and Evans v. United States demonstrate...
...As a starting point, the authors reproduce average racial IQ scores: Whites' average IQ is about 101-102...
...Janet Brown, who testified for Thomas, is listed in the index as referenced on page 345, but she is nowhere to be found on that page or anywhere in the text...
...Except for the last two, the recommendations are soft and unsatisfying—almost as if the authors were spending their closing pages trying to establish that their hearts are in the right place...
...The authors report that after testifying Friday morning, Thomas "repaired to Danforth's office" where he remained during Hill's testimony...
...But by their own reporting it is clear that three senior lawyers did not remember the statement coming from Thomas...
...The "witness" then goes into hiding, never to be heard from again...
...It was thus a combined decision of the Democrats (who had legitimate fears that Wright's manifest credibility problems would hurt Hill) and Wright (who wished to spare herself the personal embarrassment of cross-examination) that stopped Wright's testimony...
...On the one-year anniversary of the hearings, U.S...
...The authors see affirmative action as "leaking poison into the American soul," and this extremist language puts affirmative action in its proper context, as the most divisive and dangerous issue in American politics—more important than taxes, crime, or abortion...
...Jackson said she didn't want to be interviewed but would be willing to answer questions in writing...
...No such article appeared in the Spectator, nor was Garment cited or quoted in the Spectator on Hill—then or ever...
...In my book, I suggest that Hill had perhaps complained to Hoerchner not about Thomas but about a boss at Wald, Harkrader, where she was working during the time that Hill and Hoerchner were speaking regularly on the phone in Washington...
...In fact, Sniderman and Piazza note, people opposed to affirmative action and other race-based programs show up in polls as less "racist" than the public at large...
...Its crucial data are supplied in appendices for the reader's independent examination...
...This is an entirely new explanation by Hill of why she stayed quiet for ten years: the conversation with Jackson traumatized her...
...Pat Buchanan called its emphasis misplaced, and both John McLaughlin and Jack Kemp trashed it as "pseudoscientific...
...The American Spectator January 1995 69 describes a "quite hazy" memory...
...The authors hold that huge interracial differences in conditions, achievement, and social behavior—which have been presented by liberal social scientists as prima facie evidence of racism—become far less mystifying, if no less serious, when intelligence is factored in: • The gap in the average wage of whites ($27,372) and blacks ($20,994), for instance, is 23 percent...
...Savage's allegation boils down to one incident on a Saturday in the summer of 1982, when she says she volunteered to pick up Thomas at his Southwest Washington apartment and take him shopping for running shoes...
...Herrnstein received some warm reviews for Crime and Human Nature, in which he and co-author James Q. Wilson drew many of the same kinds of IQ/behavior correlations that this book does...
...According to Savage—who five days later faxed a written statement to me from her office summarizing our discussion—Mayer and Abramson substantially distorted the information she had reported to the Judiciary Committee back in 1991...
...It's ironic, then, that the late Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray should have become the focus of the most vituperative debate over a book in a generation...
...The fact that it went completely unremarked in the last election is only evidence of the size of the stakes...
...Meanwhile, Asians are penalized at most universities, where admissions hurdles are becoming reminiscent of the anti-Jewish quotas of the 1920s...
...Similarly, on ABC's "Turning Point," Simon claimed that had he known that Wright had a corroborating witness, he would have insisted that Wright and Jourdain be called...
...Mayer and Abramson say Savage signed off on the description of the completely covered walls...
...Worse still, some of her new statements can be proved false...
...Julianne Malveaux, a PBS commentator, recently said of Thomas: "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, as many black men do, of heart disease...
...He wasn't...
...When he died, Thomas attended the funeral).'° Senator Biden and Angela Wright continue to offer conflicting accounts as to why Wright wasn't called to testify, with each wishing to lay the ultimate decision on the other...
...The Republican staff then—and now—contained gay staffers...
...Her best guess was that the call had occurred in the spring of 1981...
...Society's institutions—universities, businesses, government—are selecting the brain-workers they need with increasing accuracy, and compensating them with increasing largesse...
...That would be a problem in political discourse at any time...
...She was his confidential assistant and she performed her job in an exemplary fashion...
...A few days after Hill's charges first broke publicly, Wright wrote a draft column for the Charlotte Observer in which she said that personal experience led her to believe Thomas capable of doing what Hill was claiming...
...Odder still is that Hill apparently did not even recognize Mims's name when Mayer and Abramson asked her about him...
...However, Meese's notion had nothing whatsoever to do with natural law...
...Already its signs are with us in what Robert Reich has called "secession of the successful": rich people abandon public transportation and schools...
...During our interview, she became emotional in telling me that Thomas "was against everything he should have been for" in the Reagan adrninistra11 More than 2.6 million copies of Playboy go through the U.S...
...For this argument is not new...
...Given that the black population of the U.S...
...and it controls for such variables as socioeconomic status and education, filtering out other factors to leave a raw relationship of IQ alone to these problems...
...T he authors also appear to be attempting to strengthen the recollections of Hill's panel of witnesses long after they gave what was presented by Hill's lawyers as corroborating testimony in the Senate hearing...
...The lumpen class the authors envision will be disproportionately black, while there will be more whites and Asians among the symbolic analysts...
...While her possible appearance made front-page news and network headlines throughout the country—thanks to a briefing given for numerous reporters by Senator Joseph Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee—she never testified...
...It is as muddy to me as it is to anyone," he said...
...When Anita Hill's allegations became public, Savage, after first speaking with Joel Paul's lawyer (she had met Paul through Hill in 1987), contacted the Judiciary Committee...
...They allow Angela Wright to deny Williams's account entirely and create a very different conversation in which Williams essentially threatens her to keep her mouth shut about Thomas...
...The authors report that Thomas's Supreme Court votes rarely go against the position of "the state...
...five years' worth of them, organized by month and year...
...Later they write, "For much of the day he had been closeted in Danforth's office...
...We certainly did hear about it back then," Danoff says...
...For this argument is not new...
...My impression of him was that he was one of the most upright people around...
...and she told me she bent down and flipped through the stacks...
...Moving up the social ladder, in fact, can be a mixed blessing: with IQ held constant, self-reported criminality rises with socioeconomic status...
...Daniel Seligman addressed the racial IQ difference in A Question of Intelligence (1992) and was all but ignored...
...There is also a good deal of evidence in the public domain that after she was fired by Thomas, Wright promised several former colleagues she would get revenge...
...Once again buried in the notes, however, there surfaces a witness to the Thomas-Hardnett conversations, one Aysa McCullough, who did not consider the informal "chitchat" before or after working hours to be inappropriate at all...
...Before working for Thomas and being fired by him, Wright had been fired from two jobs and had quit the Agency for International Development just as she was about to be fired...
...Savage is the sole source—and she does not appear to be a credible one...
...At some point after Hill first named Jackson to Brudney as a corroborator and before she went on to tell another Senate staffer and the FBI that she had told only Hoerchner, Jackson disappeared from the story...
...or if they were told about it by Hill, then Hill's account of the incident is false...
...T his would seem the least diplomatic moment for the authors to bring race into their discussion, but given that the "national context" they will be describing has a major racial element (and that any solutions to the social problems described would certainly affect some races more than others), they broach it here...
...at that point, she was hoping to take out Thomas with an anonymous charge and needed it to sound as convincing as she could make it...
...The authors describe Hill as a "civil rights scholar," but as she testified she teaches contracts and business law, also the subjects of her scholarly articles...
...Woman Number Four is Kaye Savage, the only woman presented in the book who tells a story that had not been previously published...
...Mayer and Abramson seem unaware that they've stumbled on a significant revelation...
...The average Ivy League student in 1926 had an IQ among the top fifth of Americans...
...And she currently lives in Laguna Beach, not Los Angeles, which is 65 miles away...
...When other witnesses came forward of their own volition before the hearing, contradicting what Hill had told the FBI, she then claimed that she had "repressed" the fact that she had told others of the harassment contemporaneously...
...Unless one is willing to argue this point to the end, one risks being accused of frivolity...
...Wright is then The American Spectator January 1995 73 quoted as saying, "The faggot line was made up out of thin air...
...Though the authors interviewed Williams about other matters, they never asked him about this supposed conversation...
...While this quotation has been snidely cited by some of Herrnstein and Murray's critics, many whites know it to be true...
...Corroboration usually works the other way...
...Wrong on both counts...
...Their testimony must have ended up on the cutting room floor...
...Hannah Arendt H ere is the central argument of The Bell Curve: Intelligence is important to success, and emerging technologies and global trade make brainpower more important today than ever...
...They do not quote Savage directly, which may be a sign that they've embellished her story...
...The question this raises is why Middleton didn't say something about it at the time...
...Unlike the phantom "corroborator," Bradley Mims, Savage was available for an interview...
...government's or state's position rarely loses at the Supreme Court, or in lower courts for that matter...
...Not incidentally for the authors' purposes, one can see what has happened to all the "role models" whose absence from the inner city the sociologist William Julius Wilson finds so destructive in The Truly Disadvantaged...
...Thelma Duggin, a mutual friend of Thomas and Wright, told the FBI that as recently as two months before Hill's charges were made public, Wright told her that she was looking for a way to avenge her firing...
...She reprises that interview in this book, maintaining that she took Thomas's alleged conduct so much in stride that she never once "ruminated" on it...
...The press reported that Thomas actually returned immediately home to Virginia upon finishing his testimony, where he smoked cigars in his driveway with a security guard as his wife watched Hill's testimony on television in an upstairs bedroom...
...Mickey Kaus's The End of Equality (1991) was devoted to formulating a program of "civic liberalism" to prevent widening money inequality, which he saw as both inevitable and linked to intelligence, from creating widening social inequalities...
...In the 1920s, few Americans from any walk of life went to college, and, as the authors put it, "the valedictorian in Kalamazoo and the Kansas farm girl with an IQ of 140 might not even be going to college at all...
...Mims says that he "knew" that "talking wild" meant using explicit sexual language...
...In The Work of Nations (1991), now-Labor Secretary Robert Reich foresaw a gargantuan program of "positive economic nationalism" as necessary to heal the economic rift between well-compensated "symbolic analysts" (brain-workers) and the latter-day lumpenproletariat left behind in the "old economy...
...Seale may be right about this, but Wright surely isn't...
...There was a bed on a frame, not on the floor...
...This must be another lie: It is impossible that Simon did not know of Jourdain, who was mentioned in various news accounts and referred to as "your corroborating witness" in Biden's letter to Wright regarding her decision not to testify, which Biden read aloud to the committee...
...Racism will emerge in a new and more virulent form...
...inherited genetically as a trellis on which to garland many of his book's central arguments—has called Herrnstein and Murray's book not merely "dishonest" but "repellent...
...She says that she can corroborate Wright's story...
...Kaye Savage confirmed this, saying that she recalled Hill's confiding that she was looking for work elsewhere and even thinking about returning to Oklahoma—a plan that to Savage, at least, seemed to make no sense, given Hill's terrific position...
...BIDEN: Did you say, you should complain...
...Gil Hardy, we are told, died in a diving accident off the coast of Aruba...
...This is completely incorrect...
...The major counterintuitive insight here is that not only the poor but also the violent, the dishonest, and the irresponsible are disproportionately bunched at the stupider end of the curve...
...If either Donnelly or Middleton witnessed it...
...The probable results: a growing identification of native intelligence with socioeconomic standing, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a stratification of America into intellectual castes, with a few hi-tech communications wizards living in privately policed suburbs and a horde of unskilled Calibans trapped in rotting cities and rural areas...
...Mims is apparently unable to corroborate any of the specific language Hill attributed to Thomas in her testimony, let alone to state that Hill told him Thomas was using sexually explicit language...
...inherited genetically as a trellis on which to garland many of his book's central arguments—has called Herrnstein and Murray's book not merely "dishonest" but "repellent...
...If the 1.2-standard-deviation gap that shows up in the NLSY holds water, this would mean that the average white is at the 91st percentile of black intelligence, while the average black falls at the 11th percentile of whites...
...p erhaps Hill did forget telling Mims something about Thomas, but the second new witness presented in Strange Justice is one Hill is not allowed to have forgotten: Linda Lambert Jackson...
...I was never afraid of Clarence Thomas," Wright is quoted as saying...
...In 1938, the English psychometrician Raymond Cattell predicted that dysgenesis would lead to growing dependency and "delinquency against society...
...And most of them challenged the description of the apartment as barely furnished...
...According to her testimony, she began making discreet inquiries about other employment...
...The biggest chunk of the book focuses on IQ's impact on social behavior—specifically, on such social problems as crime, welfare dependency, and family breakup...
...There weren't any...
...Former White House aide Ede Holiday's first and last names are misspelled twice...
...The authors are not claiming that many blacks do not live in unconscionable misery—only that the programs to alleviate that misery are based on faulty assumptions...
...We now learn she spoke in more 10 Florence George Graves made the same misidentification in reporting about Wright's case in the October 9, 1994 issue of the Washington Post...
...but it would appear that 66 The American Spectator January 1995 once a microsociety begins to function at a lower cognitive level, a new culture is effectively created, and that culture has a substantial independent role of its own in creating pathology...
...The underclass will become even more...
...He didn't return a call seeking comment...
...As Bush got ready to board a helicopter for Camp David, he was given some papers by an aide to Boyden Gray," the book says...
...While blacks maintain their unenviable position at the bottom of society's ladder, they also receive special privileges from the state that cause boiling resentment...
...Furthermore, the existence of a differential between white and black scores is a datum that not even Herrnstein and Murray's sharpest critics dispute...
...at best it would be a retroactively created deposition...
...This is nonsense: if true, the statistics are disorienting beyond one's worst fears...
...A black physicist with an IQ of 140 is still a black physicist with an IQ of 140, no matter what the distribution of smarts across races...
...He was against everything—minority set-asides, goals and timetables—everything...
...Like Hardnett, she spoke to Schwartz...
...We are suddenly in the territory of classical eugenics, where all known solutions have typically been worse than the problem itself...
...The Schwartz notes would establish what sort of allegation Savage made to the committee in the first place...
...Consistent majorities of Americans now judge such explicitly racial programs as affirmative action, and such implicitly racial ones as AFDC, as failures...
...But Savage is no Republican...
...Williams told me it's an utter fabrication...
...Yet only one "other" is identified in the notes: Sukari Hardnett, who surfaces later to accuse Thomas of having been interested in her...
...Herrnstein received some warm reviews for Crime and Human Nature, in which he and co-author James Q. Wilson drew many of the same kinds of IQ/behavior correlations that this book does...
...She did not mention this conversation—when she testified under oath just a few weeks after she told Brudney about it—in any of her various explanations as to why she stayed quiet: that she feared for her job...
...As this book went to press, the average IQ of mothers in the NLSY was 95.7...
...The claim that a private swearing in for Thomas at the Supreme Court was "the first such in 50 years" is also incorrect...
...Indeed, the authors themselves admit at one point, "No one else has the hearings, much less about Hill's credibility...
...And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modem race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous...
...None of the three claims to have heard the remark personally or to recall exactly how the remark came to their attention...
...Civil"-ized people do not need to be tightly constrained by laws or closely monitored by the organs of state...
...T he rest of the bloopers—and this is by no means an exhaustive list—may owe to sloppiness...
...She told me that she asked Thomas about them and that's what he told her...
...And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modem race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous...
...She came flying out, looked at Denaro Sims, and said, 'You faggot.' Thomas wrote out a note firing her right then and there and put it on her chair...
...Finally, a note to the epilogue reads: "Suzanne Garment, `Confirming Anita Hill?,' American Spectator, January/February 1993...
...Certainly I couldn't...
...In The Work of Nations (1991), now-Labor Secretary Robert Reich foresaw a gargantuan program of "positive economic nationalism" as necessary to heal the economic rift between well-compensated "symbolic analysts" (brain-workers) and the latter-day lumpenproletariat left behind in the "old economy...
...12 VI...
...At the very least, the fact that it was written is a profile in courage...
...Nobody but Hill recalls Thomas saying it, and nobody claims Hill told them of it...
...None addressed the book's science directly...
...She told me the apartment walls were not covered in pinups, as Mayer and Abramson report her having said...
...Thomas had moved into the apartment soon after his marriage ended the prior summer...
...The American Spectator January 1995 77...
...One of the many cheap aspects of this book is that supposed new evidence is presented by a "witness" who has never appeared under oath to have his story cross-examined...
...A t the other end of this bell curve, intelligence is decisive for a lot more than the doling out of society's goodies...
...Kenneth Duberstein's office is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not K Street...
...b) Hill held a nationally televised press conference the next day in which she publicized her charges...
...Sims, a male secretary who worked for Thomas, was known within the agency to be sick with AIDS at the time Wright insulted him...
...First up are two former EEOC colleagues who claim to remember a story about pubic hair and a Coke can making the rounds at the office...
...There are measurable intelligence differences between the races that education can narrow only slightly, if at all...
...For IQ has momentous implications for a whole range of behaviors, including many traits that would seem to have little to do, prima facie, with intellect...
...if he had seen or heard Thomas make the gross pubic hair remark—or he now sees it as in his interest to allow Mayer and Abramson to present a faint recollection of a story about Thomas, pubic hair, and a Coke can as support for Hill's allegations...
...99-Percent Fact-Free / f all of Mayer and Abramson's key points are riddled with errors, there remains the question of how careful they were to get the smaller points right...
...There was only one main room, but all of its walls—as well as the walls of the little galley kitchen and even the bathroom door—were papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women...
...She then quickly hung up...
...Not so...
...The authors report that Lovida Coleman, a friend of Thomas and the daughter of William Coleman of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, prevailed upon her father to write a letter endorsing Thomas's circuit court nomination...
...There will surely be some to argue, Why stop there...
...The American Spectator January 1995 65 This is not to exclude cultural possibilities beyond the purview of the book—blacks of IQ 117 could work harder than whites, for example—but a more likely cause is affirmative action, which the authors show to have gone far beyond the mere "nod" that Civil Rights legislation envisioned to a full-blown system of racial preference...
...And Middleton isn't sure whether he remembers the statement coming from Thomas or Hill or someone else...
...Five percent of whites and 3 percent of blacks work in what the authors call "high-IQ" jobs...
...There were posters on the wall, one of a Rolls Royce...
...B ut that won't make solving the specific problems of the underclass any easier...
...Mayer and Abramson report that during the hearings, Middleton supposedly turned to his wife "and asked her if she remembered the [pubic hair and Coke] story, and she told him that she did...
...Herrnstein and Murray assert the "classical" understanding of intelligence, which commands majority agreement among psychometricians...
...Most of them mentioned that Thomas's son Jamal, then nine, was a frequent visitor to the apartment and that Thomas would not have exposed his son to that sort of environment...
...Yet on page 106 the authors themselves give an account of the same exchange in which they show Heflin correctly propounding the question about "Long Dong Silver" and Thomas answering it...
...He told me that Wright, the public affairs director, had angered Thomas one morning by failing to invite certain commissioners, including Gallegos, to an important commission press conference...
...I have spoken to a number of people who were in Thomas's apartment in the summer of 1982, each of whom has denied to me seeing any pinups or Playboys: Harry Singleton, Armstrong Williams, Clifford Faddis, and the Thomas witnesses J.C...
...The first casualty is not just freedom but the bonds that make community life attractive...
...But asserting this won't make it so...
...But this is not really news, either...
...Eliminate AFDC...
...Here is how Mayer and Abramson describe the scene: He had only recently set up housekeeping, and the place, as she recalled, was still underfurnished: there was little more than a mattress on the floor and a stereo...
...Did you give her any advice...
...There is also the inconvenient fact that Anita Hill said in her affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then to the FBI, that Susan Hoerchner was the only person she had told of Thomas's harassment between 1981 and 1983...
...the average black at the 2nd percentile of Jews...
...Armstrong Williams, yet another former EEOC colleague of Wright's, had disclosed that in 1989 he had dinner with Wright, and she told him that someday she would get back at Thomas for the firing...
...There wasn't even a Spectator issue bearing that date...
...As Thomas Byrne Edsall has noted in Chain Reaction, much of the talk about taxes, rights, and the role of government in people's lives is merely coded talk about black-white relations...
...Attorney General Edwin Meese, who headed a pornography commission for President Reagan, said in 1987 that he had read both Playboy and Penthouse, determined that they were not obscene, and did not believe efforts should be undertaken to thwart their sale...
...And once reminded of him, Hill confirmed his account," they report...
...Hill tells Mayer and Abramson of her reaction to this testimony: "I don't know how people can go to sleep at night having lied as some of them did...
...So does job idleness, while the likelihood of embracing "middle-class values" falls...
...On its face, Mims's account doesn't add up to much...
...Hill later explained that she had hoped Hoerchner might have some 68 The American Spectator January 1995 ideas on how she could get Thomas to stop," they write...
...One lawyer, Danoff, heard about it only from his wife...
...but at the average IQ for such occupations (117), 10 percent of whites and 26 percent of blacks work in those positions...
...In the summer of 1993, Savage said, Mayer sent her page proofs of Strange Justice that contained a colored-up, sensationalized interpretation of what she had told Schwartz...
...It had to do with the separation of powers...
...The only plausible explanation for this would be that Hill never intended the original conversation with Brudney to go as far as it did...
...Notarization's purpose is to answer any doubts as to the identity of the person who signed, should that become an issue...
...The white cognitive elite is unlikely to greet this development sympathetically," the authors write, but the results will not be pretty for the underclass of any race: What will become of the poor...
...Court of Appeals, the automatic acceptance score for blacks has been lower than the automatic rejection score for whites...
...Within the space of a couple of minutes, Savage gave me three answers as to how she knew the stacks of magazines were all Playboys, going back five years...
...He also worked with Hill, and it is possible she may have told him about it herself—although he doubted it and she bad no recollection of it...
...Its science is never fuzzy or self-contradictory...
...increasingly hire private police forces...
...The authors make an important distinction at the outset: intelligence is not an all-determining factor for any given individual, but predictable behavioral patterns emerge when one studies...
...The Senate, supposedly repentant for abusing Anita Hill, is said to have passed legislation "aimed at helping women—overriding President Bush's veto of family leave legislation...
...My wife and I had dinner there several times during that period and we sat at a table on chairs," Stewart said...
...9 / n her interview with Senate Judiciary Committee lawyers, Wright stated that Thomas had asked her for dates and made comments about the size of her breasts...
...is being demagogic when he claims that tax cuts equal racism, but he is correct in envisioning that attempts to remove social programs that support the underclass will be an all-out attack on one culture by another...
...Other friends of Thomas and McEwen with first-hand knowledge of this history, including Barbara Lawrence, a former Biden staffer, and Carlton Stewart, corroborate Singleton's recollection and strongly dispute Hill's unsubstantiated suggestion...
...Such a group has been made available by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a federally funded study of 12,686 students who were age 14 to 22 in 1979, and have been followed ever since...
...BOOK REVIEW Alarm Bell THE BELL CURVE: INTELLIGENCE AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray The Free Press / 845 pages / $30 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions...
...yet even if they can prove that they reported Savage's account accurately and to her satisfaction, they still have a problem in that Savage has told me in writing that the story as it appears in Strange Justice isn't true...
...Reporting on their interview with Carr, Mayer and Abramson write: "He remembered that rather than thinking less of Hill, he decided that this proved he had been right all along about how strange Thomas was...
...While the column was never published, it was leaked to the Democratic Judiciary Committee staff, which then interviewed Wright and subpoenaed her to testify...
...It is the difference between the bachelor apartment of any young heterosexual man and the apartment of a sex-obsessed weirdo...
...A final issue bearing on her credibility as a witness concerns Savage's views about Thomas's politics—which seem to mirror those of Anita Hill, who had maintained a friendship with Savage for more than a decade...
...Doesn't sterilization of criminals, with their average IQ of 84, provide the chance to kill two birds with one stone...
...Maybe that's the origin of the bizarre story in the first place: Hill heard the story just as Donnelly and Middleton did: as it made the rounds of office gossip...
...The suggestion that Thomas is not living up to a supposed commitment that "as a black man he would bring empathy to the high court" is not only a racist and non-legal critique but wrong as a factual matter...
...Mims and Hill had met in 1982 in a night class for federal employees who wished to improve their writing skills...
...The difference between the two versions, of course, is immense...
...For both academic and occupational success, g is highly predictive—more predictive, in fact, than interviews, transcripts, personal recommendations, or tests that purport to identify specific job skills...
...Mayer and Abramson try to confront the Hoerchner problem, but they don't seem to understand what the problem is...
...In the book, Jourdain takes this a bit further, describing how Wright allegedly came to her office in tears on several occasions seeking her advice on how to get Thomas to stop...
...The authors further report: This conversation with Lambert became seminal in her thinking about whether to discuss the experience with anyone ever again...
...Meese argued that the president has an independent authority and responsibility to carry out his duties as he believes the law requires...
...The outrage over The Bell Curve has more to do with the way its arguments meshed together, the longtime political preoccupations of its authors (particularly Murray), and the state of race relations—which are more fractious today than they were even three years ago when Kaus and Reich were writing...
...But the effects "fade out" as years pass, and adult IQ reverts to childhood IQ...
...To repeat: Hill at that time wasn't working for Thomas, so how could he have been the one she told Hoerchner about...
...The authors allege that GOP Senator Orrin Hatch "coordinated" his line of questioning on pornography and the negative stereotyping of black men with Thomas...
...The underground conversation is not limited to a racist minority...
...Finally, IQ is largely passed on from parents to children, with a genetic component ranging somewhere between 40 and 80 percent...
...For example, two sources in my book were quoted as saying that Thomas would not have asked Hill for dates because he was in a serious relationship with McEwen during the entire time that Hill worked for Thomas...
...One can only await a more detailed disentangling of the respective roles of IQ and culture in underclass society...
...But when she saw the book, the apartment was wrongly described as having been covered in pinups...
...There is a good-faith way of raising this objection and a bad-faith way, for we will begin to know the genes that determine intelligence with the completion of the Human Genome Project in a decade's time...
...This sorting continues in the job market, where this elite is steered increasingly into a narrow range of high-intellect professions, where IQ averages 117...
...She is as credible as she appeared on TV, and he is as credible as he appeared in the hearings...
...The quotes don't indicate that he knew anything about the pubic hair remark in 1991 that would implicate Thomas in any way...
...72 The American Spectator January 1995 This book sets out to advance the strongest such revisionist claim yet...
...and that despite prior Senate confirmations of Thomas, no one had ever asked her for information about the nominee until Brudney did in 1991...
...Here is how our credulous reporters describe the moment: Soon Paul had even more reason to worry...
...As Mims tells it, only a couple of weeks after they met, Hill confided to him that Thomas had begun saying "really crazy stuff to her—talking wild...
...detail to Biden staffer Mark Schwartz at the time, telling him that she was "forced to have coffee with Thomas," according to the contemporaneous notes of Schwartz, which Mayer and Abramson obtained...
...Nor would its later notarization make Angela Wright's committee interview "an affidavit," as is claimed...
...There was a Soloflex machine...
...tion...
...As soon as the news broke, [Boyden] Gray's deputy, Mark Paoletta, arranged for [Phyllis] Berry to speak to thenation's most influential newspaper, the New York Times," Mayer and Abramson report...
...Hill had forgotten that she had also confided in a fifth person...
...that she feared Thomas would exact retribution on her when she returned to Oklahoma and worked for Dean Kothe, a Thomas associate...
...Over the next decades, it will become broadly accepted by the cognitive elite that the people we now refer to as the underclass are in that condition through no fault of their own but because of inherent shortcomings about which little can be done...
...Literary books...
...They [Mayer and Abramson] never called me and asked...
...And this becomes especially problematic when they begin to talk about dysgenesisthe worsening of the American gene pool...
...This makes no sense, since Simon had come out against Thomas even before Anita Hill appeared...
...On Saturday night in her hotel room, the authors report Anita Hill turned the channel on her TV to a basketball game for relief...
...The gentlemanly southern judge stumbled badly, referring to the character as Long John Silver," it is reported on page 305...
...These conversations with Thomas made her uncomfortable, she said...
...Jackson is quoted by Hill as having said in 1983, "I don't believe it...
...The ironies abound...
...Too little attention has been given to one of the best documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence...
...But the persistence of the link, in areas that would intuitively seem only marginally related to intelligence, is news...
...But whites and blacks of average intelligence (100 IQ) earn $25,546 and $25,001 respectively, for a gap of 2 percent...
...It is among the very few people at respective ends that the predictive power of IQ becomes problematic for policy...
...Hoerchner further stated that she had left Washington for California in September 1981, and at that point had no further contact with Hill until a chance meeting in 1984...
...Mims refused to be interviewed for this article...
...Mayer and Abramson have informed me that "all of the named women who were in contact with the Senate Judiciary Committee as possible witnesses but were not called, were given the opportunity to review the sections in this book about themselves in advance, and to correct any factual inaccuracies...
...T he authors' most depressing observation has to do with race only marginally: Americans are getting stupider, since lower-intellect individuals—of all races—are having babies earlier and more frequently than their more intelligent contemporaries...
...9 Shortly after the close of the hearings, Spy magazine and the "Doonesbury" comic strip started arguing that history would have been different had the Judiciary Committee called Wright and her corroborating witness, Jourdain...
...From these quotes, we can deduce that Middleton was either misleading the press in 1991—surely he would not be as perplexed as he professed to be about which witness was telling the truth...
...And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modem race relations so difficult, for there urban underclass and with the government social programs that many blame for its existence...
...than the unidentified sources of an unidentified friend of Joel Paul's lawyer...
...Affirmative action's effects are no less extreme in the workplace, where it not only creates resentments but also fosters mediocrity outside of the minority pool, as the authors show...
...If you narrow down the groups further (as the authors don't), you get even more dizzying results: The average Ashkenazi Jew would be around the 98th percentile of black intelligence...
...But Joel Paul was not a friend of Hill's...
...Senator Hatch, according to the book, is "known for his Savile Row suits...
...So, for nearly a decade, she "never brought it up again...
...Either Hill or Hoerchner is wrong about this, and the entire point is lost on Mayer and Abramson...
...But Hoerchner did no such thing...
...After Hill's testimony, such recollections as Mims's are inevitably tainted by what she said...
...mail each month...
...Another woman who testified for Thomas, Pam Talkin, is also listed in the index as appearing on page 345...
...At other schools, like Rice (271 points) and Berkeley (288 points), the difference is so huge that, in terms of IQ, the white student body is practically stacked on top of the black student body...
...One GOP aide on the Judiciary Committee told me: "We had no such dossiers and almost no information on these witnesses—only what their depositions revealed, i.e., very little...
...Middleton's firing is noted, but only much later in the book...
...First, there is such a thing as "general intelligence" (or g), which is more than just a multiplicity of intellectual skills...
...Nancy McPhail, an EEOC colleague of Wright's, also recently confirmed this to me: "I remember Phyllis saying back then that she had gotten this call, the weirdest call, from Angela, threatening Thomas...
...Certain extraordinarily expensive (and extraordinarily intrusive) programs have succeeded in raising the IQ scores of the underprivileged by a handful of points...
...Starting at the smart end, Herrnstein and Murray supply a statistical backbone to the Kaus thesis that American society is being pulled centrifugally into castes by intellect...
...Hardnett was also dismissed by Thomas...
...That this is merely a clumsy patching job, however, is exposed in the prior paragraph, where we find this sentence: "As Thomas's behavior caused her increasing distress, Hill confided in one of her closest friends from law school, Susan Hoerchner, who was also working for the government in Washington...
...Second, g is measured accurately by IQ tests, which, as administered today, are not demonstrably biased against ethnic groups...
...Then, reverting to Jekyll-Hyde optimism in their final chapter, the authors say that this needn't be the end result...
...They were actually doing it in August...
...he may now intend for the words "talking wild" to take on a meaning that they may or may not have had at the time Hill allegedly spoke of them...
...If Savage is right, maybe Mayer and Abramson should find another line of work...
...These incidents are glossed over in a couple of sentences...
...It turns out that while Middleton didn't say anything about the pubic hair remark, he did have quite a bit to say to the press after he heard Hill's testimony about the remark and Thomas's denial of ever having made it...
...It would either have been football or baseball...
...The authors have obtained SAT data that show that the lowest difference in the caliber of white and black students is at Harvard, where there is a gap of 95 points...
...It certainly is worth worrying about...
...At University of Texas Law School, according to papers filed in the Hopwood affirmative action case that will shortly come before the U.S...
...Why did Hill never previously mention that Thomas was dating another woman if that is what allowed her to believe she could safely follow him from one job to another...
...I have spoken with most of the Republican staff in preparing this review and have found no evidence whatsoever to support these allegations...
...Daub was a representative, not a senator...
...A story about pubic hair and a Coke can may have made its way through the EEOC gossip mill in the early 1980s...
...It was Morocco...
...As Mayer has said in justifying her assault on Thomas, "All of the evidence points one way...
...H errnstein and Murray start with some general propositions about intelligence...
...Under almost any behavioral rubric, the authors state, if one could choose between privilege and brains, the right choice would always be brains...
...He said the idea of Clarence Thomas describing the viewing of a pornographic movie as part of a come-on was "almost ridiculous...
...In the TV interview, suddenly the pinups plastered all over the apartment had become only one pinup, in the galley kitchen...
...But that doesn't make its data anything less than profoundly worrisome...
...Gary Bauer and Bill Kristol are shown plotting confirmation strategy at the beach in July 1991...
...Danoff's firing isn't mentioned in the book, nor is the fact that Danoff was quoted at the time of the Supreme Court nomination battle harshly criticizing Thomas's record at the agency...
...Today, with about half the country going to college, elite schools suck the intelligent out of every nook and cranny in every neighborhood in the country...
...V. The "Other" Women T he final attempt to bolster Hill's case consists of the testimony of four "other women," whom the authors present as providing proof that Thomas exhibited a pattern of behavior consistent with Hill's charges of sexual harassment...
...In other words, if Mayer and Abramson are right, then Savage has lied to me and they don't have a witness worth fighting over anyway...
...Alvarez, Carlton Stewart, and Stewart's wife, Barbara...
...When she was first interviewed by Metzenbaum staffer James Brudney in September 1991—six weeks before her public testimony—Anita Hill appears to have told him that in 1983, soon after leaving the EEOC, she told her friend and former EEOC colleague Jackson about Thomas's "two-year-long campaign of sexual harassment...
...Later, when told by the Biden staff that she would have to name herself and allow her witnesses to be interviewed by the FBI, Hill, knowing that Jackson would not back her up, said only Hoerchner knew of the harassment...
...If the account in the Brudney notes is correct, Hill's "repression" explanation—which could conceivably cover Carr, Paul, Ellen Wells, and even Mims, since they all contacted Hill, offering to testify—doesn't work for Linda Jackson...
...Woman Number Two, Rose Jourdain, was an EEOC co-worker of Wright's who makes no first-hand claims about Thomas's behavior...
...Documentation of this process exists, and has been reviewed by Houghton Mifflin...
...Blacks, according to the NLSY and literally dozens of psychometric studies, score about 85...
...Society's institutions—universities, businesses, government—are selecting the brain-workers they need with increasing accuracy, and compensating them with increasing largesse...
...Where old-fashioned race hatred combines with a political rage against a privileged class created by affirmative action, the result is something more dangerous than the sum of its parts...
...The veto wasn't overridden...
...She also said the comments did not disturb her...
...An interesting irony is that the notorious practice of "race-norming," by which minorities' scores were multiplied so that they were in synchrony with whites' and Asians', was among the least unfair ways of administering affirmative action...
...Lacking such civility, they do, and society must over time become much less free...
...Take the following passages in the Chicago Tribune: University of Missouri law professor Michael Middleton, who worked with Thomas and Hill at the Department of Education and the EEOC, said he cannot reconcile the conflict between the stories...
...they depict Biden as the initiator of the decision and imply with no basis that he was doing the bidding of the Republicans, who are said to have feared Wright's testimony...
...disregard liberal Supreme Court rulings if they disagreed with them, this view of a higher legal authority than the written law was radical indeed...
...Many of the aspects of this elite seem merely to be an intellect-based reversion to the "blood"-based pre-industrial aristocracy: for one thing, the cognitive giants of the business, political, and communications worldbegin to have more in common with their opposite numbers in other walks of life than with the lower orders of their own occupation...
...We talked about this kind of stuff all the time, and I would have known about rocky periods...
...The answer, as anyone who has followed the controversy knows, is a second conclusion of The Bell Curve: that the intellectual stratification described above has a racial dimension...
...Since Murray has been among the leading such naysayers, it's only natural that heand Herrnstein should seek a reason for that failure in the assumptions about groups on which the programs are based...
...Mayer and Abramson either don't notice the plain discrepancies between the Wright and Jourdain statements, or they pretend not to...
...To warn of the dangers of even minor dysgenesis, the authors show the hypothetical behavioral fallout of a 3-point drop in the mean of the NLSY: an 11 percent increase in the poverty rate, an 8 percent rise in children born out of wedlock, a 13 percent rise in jailings...
...Before then, studies of the brain itself 64 The American Spectator January 1995 will be able to measure mental reaction times with sufficient accuracy to resolve these ambiguities...
...One is Marguerite Donnelly, a former EEOC attorney who "distinctly recalled being told by a co-worker in the early 1980s that Chairman Thomas `had said—and I thought it was in the presence of several people—that there was a pubic hair on his can of Coke.' " Donnelly says she told her husband, Allan Danoff, also a former EEOC attorney, about the comment contemporaneously...
...In determining the likelihood of being in poverty, of being out of the work force for a month, of getting divorced within the first five years of marriage, of bearing a child out of wedlock, of having a low-birthweight baby, IQ is a better predictor than socioeconomic status—and on all of these measures high-IQ individuals score better than low-IQ ones...
...A friend of his lawyer's who was close to Republicans on the Judiciary Committee called with a warning...
...Thomas had sold his car to pay for his son's tuition...
...If Edsall is correct, there is a large body of white voters in the country who will put a black face on every fault they find with the government...
...Mac's, a well-known high-volume off-the-rack discount store in Utah, and he makes a point of publicly touting this fact at election time...
...One also finds several interpretive mistakes, which are particularly surprising in the case of Abramson, who is purport12The hatred that many liberal blacks feel toward Thomas can't be emphasized enough...
...Ten years later, during the hearing, he was working in a civil service job at the Smithsonian Institution and stayed quiet because the "Republicans headed the government," according to Mayer and Abramson...
...When the choice is between either policies that are guaranteed to produce social conflict or social conflict to change policies, one must grant the left's point that these questions are scary even in the asking...
...Her written statement to me a few days later then claimed two, the number she had used in her statements to the Judiciary Committee...
...The first is that Anita Hill testified that the remark was made to her by Thomas when the two were alone in his office, and that she never told anyone about it...
...At a time when Attorney General Meese was encouraging conservative politicians to...
...There are other problems with these passages that go unacknowledged by the authors...
...Surely if he was interested in investigating the truth of the allegations rathercome forward during the hearings or since to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment...
...Either they can prove this or they can't...
...Two sources had told me that when Hill joined Thomas at Education, she told co-workers she had left Wald because she'd been sexually harassed...
...For the record, the entire encounter that Hill described is also fake, according to Jackson...
...It seems that she would have mentioned something if she were having problems at the office, even if she did not name a specific person...
...Murray and Hermstein have never denied a role for culture, and here, obviously, we are back to square one...
...There are plenty of indices where controlling for intelligence does little or nothing to square the numbers...
...A smarter population is more likely to be, and more capable of being made into, a civil citizenry...
...None addressed the book's science directly...
...There are measurable intelligence differences between the races that education can narrow only slightly, if at all...
...The Supreme Court upheld them, and Thomas went along...
...Herrnstein and Murray accept the prevailing academic view that these IQ differences are largely genetic...
...Hoerchner confirmed this early discussion to congressional investigators, to the FBI, and in her testimony...
...Later in the day, after speaking again with Thomas on the matter, Ramon was standing outside Thomas's office when Wright emerged...
...One of the explanations for their failure to appear has to do with their credibility as potential witnesses, an issue that gets short shrift from Mayer and Abramson...
...What skepticism exists towards g is an artifact of politics, not of science although the authors freely admit that political worries over intelligence testing, given the excesses of the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement, are not misplaced...
...Lovida Coleman told me, "I had nothing to do with that letter...
...Thomas had compiled and placed on the floor "a huge, compulsively organized stack of Playboy magazines...
...Both Timothy Phelps and Senator Paul Simon made the same claim in their books...
...Hannah Arendt H ere is the central argument of The Bell Curve: Intelligence is important to success, and emerging technologies and global trade make brainpower more important today than ever...
...I wouldn't have exposed my wife to the apartment [Savage] describes...
...As for doing something about it, however, one can go back to the status quo ante Great Society—reducing, or even eliminating, AFDC to take away the incentive for a raft of low-IQ babies—but what if that is not sufficient to bring the gene pool up to snuff...
...Mayer and Abramson report: The American Spectator January 1995 71 Later, Jackson, who still worked for the EEOC during and after the hearings, refused to comment on the telephone when asked whether Hill hadn't told her of the harassment years before...
...They note that blacks do just as well as whites at repeating strings of digits, but far less well at repeating such strings backwards...
...The authors use two types of test that are free of cultural bias...
...Furthermore, the existence of a differential between white and black scores is a datum that not even Herrnstein and Murray's sharpest critics dispute...
...But one feature made a lasting impression on Savage...
...They imply that the four were generally unknown to the public at the time of the hearings and were prevented from testifying by a sinister conspiracy of pro-Thomas forces...
...In order to demonize the Republicans for allegedly plotting to "out" Paul, Mayer and Abramson go ahead and "out" him...
...After learning that she was about to be fired at AID, Wright made an unsupported charge of racism against her boss, Kate Semerad, which later made its way to a Senate committee when Semerad was up for confirmation to a new post...
...F finally, the authors don't seem to appreciate the issue raised by this new information about Brudney's conduct duringthan conspiring with Hill in a false account, he would have forwarded those notes to his colleagues in the Senate and seen to it that both Hill and Jackson were asked about the supposed conversation when they appeared to testify...
...Law school admissions data from the late 1970s show admitted blacks averaging below the 1st percentile of white test performance...
...Then it ended a few years later [in August 1985j...
...appearance of Strange Justice...
...Asians' is a few points higher (the authors estimate 3 or 4...
...Such conclusions have been drawn through intelligence tests of identical twins reared apart, which on a scale of -1 to +1 show the extraordinarily high correlation of +.78...
...Hence this twisted "on-again, off-again" story...
...The authors' data on illegitimate births show that many problem phenomena in the black inner city are the function not of cognitive differences but of cultural ones...
...Yet in the book we find this passage: In January, Hill made a New Year's resolution: to get a new job...
...A s with Hoerchner, the authors simply make matters worse for Anita Hill in writing about her other witnesses...
...Hoerchner stated just the opposite in her sworn testimony: BIDEN: Did you advise her to take any action...
...By custodial state, we have in mind a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business...
...This memory lapse is perfectly understandable, given that the call had allegedly taken place some ten years ago...
...One conceivable motive for the latter possibility: It has been publicly reported that Middleton has been under consideration to be named general counsel of the EEOC under Clinton, though the authors don't say so...
...Ever since the Supreme Court's 1971 Griggs decision outlawed most intelligence testing where it had a "disparate impact" on minority hiring, race-norming has been the most efficient way to select the most qualified off the top of the candidate pool for each race...
...And there were lots and lots of books...
...Thus her testimony can't possibly corroborate Hill's account of harassment by Thomas...
...Kaus—who even used Herrnstein' s controversial assertion that social status was Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...The Danoff firing was one of the most celebrated firings during Thomas's stormy tenure—he fired lots of people in a bid to professionalize the agency—and the matter ended up in the courts...
...Thus Savage holds a very special status in Strange Justice...
...November's electoral blowout and a bevy of polling data show that Americans have finally lost patience with the largely black 62 The American Spectator January 1995 BOOK REVIEW Alarm Bell THE BELL CURVE: INTELLIGENCE AND CLASS STRUCTURE IN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray The Free Press / 845 pages / $30 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions...
...if bias does not affect the abilities of blacks counting forward, why should it affect their abilities counting backwards...
...They call Seale, who tells them that he has no recollection of being called "faggot" by Wright...
...The authors also state that this important exchange took place on Friday evening, when in fact it occurred on Saturday morning...
...A well-known photograph was taken of this event: it was Gray himself, not an aide, who handed the papers to Bush...
...The answer, as anyone who has followed the controversy knows, is a second conclusion of The Bell Curve: that the intellectual stratification described above has a racial dimension...
...if few blacks do, then that in itself is cause for alarm, because it constitutes a de facto repudiation of one of our noblest projects—uniting all of us in one political conversation...
...If Wright is to be viewed as another Anita Hill, of course, the idea that she uttered an insensitive remark must be expunged from the record...
...Mims was working on Capitol Hill for a Democratic congressman and Hill was working for Thomas at the education department...
...She told me she was so offended that she ended her acquaintanceship with Thomas...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
