The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. - book reviews

National Review, July 5, 1993 by Jacob Cohen

The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story, by David Brock (Free Press, 438 pp., $24.95)

FOR David Brock, the issues in the face-off between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas are issues of stark fact, permitting little interpretive extenuation. Either Thomas said the filthy things Miss Hill says he did, or he did not. If he did, then unarguably, in Brock's view, Thomas is a sexual harasser and a despicable liar into the bargain for he denied everything, utterly, citing God as his witness. Such people should not sit on the Supreme Court, Brock stipulates. On the other hand, if Thomas did not say those very things to her, as Brock ardently argues, then Anita Hill and those who consciously abetted her detailed perjury are either villainous, or pathological, or both.

To paraphrase Senator Karl Mundt commenting on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers 45 years ago, one of these two is the biggest liar of the century. Brock himself sees similarities between the two cases but should have added that in the matter of Thomas and Miss Hill we are seeking to ,find the factual truth about alleged conversations that were completely private. Chambers produced secret documents to support his allegation that ten years earlier Hiss had given him secret documents; Miss Hill (who has to be Chambers in this analogy) produces only her highly detailed recollection of decade-old conversations. Seeking to conclusively resolve factual issues which he insists are of the essence, but which, by their very evidentiary nature, are almost impossible to resolve, Brock is pushed to make several startling and explicit accusations against Miss Hill.

The point needs to be stressed. Brock is not simply defending Thomas in the ordinary manner of defense attorneys for whom "not proven, therefore not guilty," is defense enough. If this were his important but limited objective, his book would be victorious. (And indeed in these terms, and others, it is, as I shall discuss below.) But Brock goes beyond that, trying to prove, conclusively, that throughout her professional life Miss Hill has lied over and over, in small ways and large, and therefore that she lied egregiously about the dirty talk, thereby activating an already latent conspiracy against Thomas, in order to keep him off the Supreme Court. It is with regard to these central assertions, which by the end of the book become as lurid as those made by Miss Hill against Thomas, that I must demur.

It is worth noting that these accusations against Anita Hill are Brock's, not Thomas's. Unlike Hiss, who confected a tale of homosexual fratricide to explain why Chambers, on brief acquaintance, would lie so egregiously about him, Thomas made no effort to explain why Miss Hill, a long-time friend and protegee, would take such pains to destroy him. Neither does Brock do much to explain Thomas's silence in this regard. Thomas didn't even reflect on a possible political motivation, which, if Brock is right about Miss Hill's open and long-standing opposition to his civil-rights conservatism and about her not-so-secret feminism, was there for the speculating. Hearing about her accusations more than a week before they became public knowledge, Thomas did not call his old friend to ask what in God's name she was talking about. He did not even seem angry at her, though she was the prime cause of his pain. (Neither did Hiss seem angry; he kept saying how much he pitied Chambers and Nixon.) Surprisingly, Thomas did not listen even one minute, he said, to her testimony or study the transcripts, a fact that gives pause since one would think that an innocent man, a lawyer, would have scoured the transcripts seeking insights into his accuser and ammunition for his defense. For all the fervor of his proclamations of innocence and his inapposite railings against a "high-tech lynching" (confusingly, but effectively, playing the race card), there seemed something suspiciously passive and fatalistic about Thomas's response to accusations which Brock contends were totally off the wall.

And while Brock is at great pains to discount the significance of this point, it must be noted that Thomas (like Hiss) refused to take a lie-detector test, while Miss Hill (like Chambers) agreed to submit to one and apparently passed. True, the test makes mistakes when pathological liars elude its physiological monitors or when it is conducted by an incompetent. True, innocent people sometimes appear guilty, and perhaps Thomas, who like many men seems to have had a taste for porn films in his youth, feared that guilty feelings about matters pornographic would distort his honest responses to questions about the alleged dirty talk. But Brock's suggestion that the test was rigged and the tester an incompetent, and that Miss Hill had nothing to lose in taking the test because a failed test would never be reported by her lawyers, seems a bit of a stretch to me. The point is in no way decisive, but Miss Hill's apparent willingness and Thomas's reluctance to take the test ought to count somewhat against him.