The Anita Hill case - fallacious logic underlying uncomplimentary reviews of David Brock's 'The Real Anita Hill,' a book about Hill's sexual harassment charges against US Supreme Justice-designate Clarence Thomas - Editorial

National Review, June 7, 1993

After admiring reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post, The New Yorker has unloaded the first attack on David Brock's The Real Anita Hill. The review, written by two women who are working on a competing book on the subject, begins by attacking Mr. Brock's argument that the key testimony of Judge Susan Hoerchner, a friend of Anita Hill, could not possibly be true in the way it was interpreted. Judge Hoerchner told the FBI that Miss Hill told her, in the spring of 1981, about a supervisor, whom she assumed to be Clarence Thomas, who had been sexually harrassing Miss Hill. However, that placed the alleged harassment some months before Miss Hill went to work for Mr. Thomas. Judge Hoerchner later amended her estimation of the date. Maybe she simply "got the date of the conversation wrong by a few months," write Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Maybe. And maybe not. For David Brock - contrary to the flat statement of the New Yorker writers - did consider the possibility that Miss Hoerchner got the date wrong. But s4e repeated the date several times under hostile questioning and changed her story only after Anita Hill's lawyer, seeing its implications, intervened to halt the interrogation, took her aside, and was allowed to go off the record in advising her. Judge Hoerchner then returned and in reply to a helpful question that would establish the date for certain, replied: "I don't know for sure." In other words, the balance of probability is on the side of David Brock's conclusion rather than that of his two critics.

As evidence that Mr. Brock is not merely mistaken but dishonest and biased, the reviewers offer the fact that The American Spectator, where Mr. Brock works, is funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation, which, with the Olin Foundation, also helped pay for the researching of his book. So what? Harper's is funded by the liberal MacArthur Foundation. Surely The New Yorker would consider it foul play to question the integrity of a writer for Harper's merely because he works for that magazine. Or what about Miss Mayer and Miss Abramson? Do they expect us to believe that because they do not reveal their views, they have none?

We will not assume, however, that because they write for The New Yorker and because they have a professional interest in trashing David Brock, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson intentionally overlooked the main contribution of The Real Anita Hill. That contribution, as readers of our excerpt from the book (NR, May 10) will know, is to demonstrate the diverse contradictions in Miss Hill's testimony, which the reviewers' compilation of nitpicking minor points does nothing to weaken.