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

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 17, 1993 | by Florence King

Ever since Eve, Delilah and Helen of Troy, woman-as-destroyer has been described in harsh but glamorous terms such as femme fatale. With her monotonic voice, Anita Hill doesn't lend herself to scintillating classical allusions, and neither do her defenders. Rep. Patricia Schroeder recommended her for attorney general. Gloria Steinem has a dream: "After Clarence Thomas is impeached, President Eleanor Holmes Norton will name Anita Hill to the Supreme Court." And Nina Totenberg said that Hill would eventually join the Supremes if we elected a Democratic president.

Well, now we have, and since he can't sleep, he ought to sit up with the fascinating book The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (Free Press) and learn something from author David Brock, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Anita the Brave, who risked it all to "come forward" and do battle for harassed womanhood, did not come forward at all, Brock maintains, but was "sucked into the borking machinery." Anita the Lawyer did not understand the constitutional prohibition against anonymous charges or the difference between anonymity and confidentiality. As for Anita the Professor, her first statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee had to be refiled because of the many grammatical errors and misspellings.

To salvage her self-esteem, Anita the Truthful had to blame her professional failures on something other than incapability, so she picked sexual harassment, fabricating so many stories about lustful unnamed supervisors that "it would have been hard for her to keep her stories straight in her own mind," Brock writes.

This made it easy for Anita the Friend simply to let the confusion she had generated take on a life of its own in the minds of her devoted supporters. Her corroborating witnesses, all lawyers, testified that she had complained of sexual harassment by an unnamed boss, that she had brought charges against Clarence Thomas, and therefore that she must have been referring to him.

When she taught at Oral Roberts University Law School, her student evaluations said: "She didn't know where she was going; she was hard to follow and unprepared." She was hired, Dean Charles Kothe conceded, to enhance the school's image with the American Bar Association: They needed a black, and she was a twofer. Said Kothe's successor, Roger Tuttle: "I had a line of students outside my office complaining every time she taught. ... She stayed ahead of the students by one week."

She was saved only when bankrupt Oral Roberts University closed the law school. Next she landed at the University of Oklahoma, where a student complained: "She was unable to take you to the logical point in an argument. She never took you through the thought process."

A former colleague of Hill's at Oklahoma, William Michael Roberts, said, "She came out of Yale with huge gaps in her understanding of the law. She's fluent on public policy, but she doesn't know how you put on proof, or the law of torts. I taught contracts too, and her students would come to me panicked that she wasn't teaching them anything. One time, I looked at some of their notes to see what the problem was. It was politics, not law."

Painted by Totenberg & Co. as a conservative, Hill is actually a red-in-tooth-and-claw libber who never saw a women's resource center she didn't like, and who shares the view of feminist legal scholars that, as Brock explains it, "objective reality is a myth." (She tried to apply this in her contracts class, but was unable to explain it clearly.)

In a sworn statement that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee ignored lest it arouse the wrath of feminists, one of Hill's students collected multiple accounts of her militantly antimale classroom behavior. Brock says that several male students "attempted to write their tests in a fashion that made the writing appear to be written by a woman. They also used only the pronoun |she' in their tests."

These students said she was subject to wild mood swings, throwing tantrums and hurling accusations of racism and sexism. When her commercial law class, frustrated by her teaching, went on strike and refused to prepare, she said, "You have stopped reading because I'm black," and stormed out.

At the Washington law firm of Wald, Harkrader, which fired her, a former partner recalled: "Hill did not write well and was not thorough. Sometimes I would ask her to do something and get no response at all. Just a blank look."

As for government service, a veteran of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stated: "My clearest recollection is of her sitting on a couch outside [Thomas's] office, very nicely dressed, flipping through magazines."

Brock attributes Hill's arrogant defensiveness to insecurity. "Anita Hill was a black woman who knew perfectly well that she had been admitted to Yale Law School under a program of affirmative action," and who thus was plagued by doubts. These doubts dissipate in minority-group members who measure up, such as Clarence Thomas, but in those who don't success becomes a dirty little secret.