He Said, They Said:

In the past year an uncommon amount of literary limelight has been cast on Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court associate justice most uncomfortable in its glare.
      First came Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, which bills itself as Thomas's "definitive biography."
      Having noted that journalists "lie" and "are deceptive," Thomas refused to talk with the authors, both Washington Post reporters, while they researched and wrote the book?so its sources were his relatives, colleagues, and coworkers, as well as his writings and legal opinions. Though most critics hailed Supreme Discomfort as evenhanded and thorough, the portrait that emerges from the hundreds of interviews underlying it is a fairly consistent one of an isolated, brooding, angry man.
      Six months after that book's release, Thomas took the relatively rare step for a sitting justice of publishing his own autobiography, My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir. Recapping his life from childhood in rural Georgia to his confirmation as the 106th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas recalls a life marked by financial hardship, drinking problems, and recurrent racism.
      Both books concentrate?with clashing perspectives?on a few common themes that make Clarence Thomas a polarizing conundrum on the Court.
     
      IMPOVERISHED ROOTS?
      During both his confirmation hearings and in the rare public appearances Thomas makes these days, he is often quick to recall his hardscrabble roots. Born in the tiny town of Pinpoint, Georgia (pop. 275) in 1948, Thomas and his brother were later taken in by his grandparents in Savannah when the boys were small.
      He said: Thomas recounts icons from an early life of roughshod poverty: an outdoor toilet with a cracked and rusted bowl, breakfasts of cornflakes moistened with watered-down condensed milk, a hard wooden chair for a bed. "Savannah was hell," a kind of "urban squalor" where cruel classmates dubbed him "ABC?America's Blackest Child," he writes. While Thomas recalls his childhood most unfondly as the first time he was made to endure racist taunts, he returns to racism as the driving force for many later decisions in his life.
      They said: Merida and Fletcher offer interviews from relatives and friends that paint Thomas's upbringing as less bleak. "His life wasn't no struggle," says a high-school friend, adding: "He always had money to go to the store to buy ice cream and candy." And none of his childhood friends or acquaintances, or even his own mother, could recall the mean-spirited schoolyard nickname.
      However, many recall his early aspiration: to become Savannah's first black priest. But Thomas left religious studies after less than one year, angered and frustrated by his fellow seminarians' alleged racism. He then applied to the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, a benefactor of a new affirmative-action program that offered a scholarship, a loan, and a job to successful black applicants. His later legal opinions would deplore such programs for others.
     
      THE CONFIRMATION HEARINGS
      For most of the public, Thomas is still best remembered for his part in the sad spectacle that was the Senate hearings that led to his confirmation as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The television coverage of the hearings riveted the world as "he said/she said" charges of sexual harassment played out before viewers.
      Thomas, however, curi-ously claims he refused to watch Anita Hill's testimony. And he most famously labeled the probe into her sexual-harassment allegations as "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves."
      They said: Merida and Fletcher recall how Thomas's lynching analogy froze the Senate Judiciary Committee?and posit that that's what allowed him to be confirmed. But they also ferret out information the committee members and the captivated viewing public did not hear. They claim one former classmate recalled hearing Thomas make an off-color remark about finding a pubic hair on a Coke can, a comment almost identical to the one Hill alleged Thomas made to her. They also cite a former coworker of Thomas who recalled his penchant for renting X-rated videos and then discussing them at length on the job. And the writers introduce comments from several senators who voted to confirm Thomas?including David Boren, John Breaux, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, Warren Rudman, and Arlen Specter?all of whom said years later that they came to regret their votes.
      He said: When finally confirmed by the full Senate 52 to 48, the smallest margin of victory for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee in more than a century, Thomas recalls his own petulant reaction as "Whoop-dee damn-doo." He notes: "Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me."
     
      HIS LEGAL LEGACY
      Many would say that Thomas carried this chip on his shoulder to the Court, where it morphed into a mental block of his own roots and history as he ruled on cases involving affirmative action, school busing, voting rights, and prisoners' rights?always taking views adverse to most liberals and black activist groups. This voting history further underscores the inevitable ideological comparisons between Thomas and the man he replaced, civil rights legend and first black justice Thurgood Marshall. And on the topic of abortion, particularly held out as a litmus test during his confirmation hearings, Thomas remained particularly confounding, claiming he paid Roe v. Wade no heed when the decision came down while he was a law student at Yale.
      He said: "The fact was that I'd never been especially interested in the subject of abortion," writes Thomas, claiming that he didn't read the decision until prepping for his confirmation hearings. Several months after he was seated, the Court heard arguments in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which Thomas joined a dissent opining that Roe should be overruled.
      They said: Merida and Fletcher note that the dissent "led his critics to say, told you so, that all along Thomas had been hiding strongly held anti-abortion feelings, even if he would not acknowledge them under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee."
     
      HIS SIGNATURE SILENCE
      During oral arguments, Thomas most often looks detached and distracted, frequently fidgeting as if bored, or staring?trancelike?at a distant spot in the back of the courtroom. But most famously, he is silent. In fact, he's posed questions to counsel during argument only a few times in his tenure on the Court, prompting his clerks to organize an informal betting pool as to whether he would speak on cases being heard.
      They said: Merida and Fletcher report that many of those who observe the austere U.S. Supreme Court are confused by Thomas's demeanor. One, a high-school classmate who watched Thomas during oral argument along with visiting schoolchildren, says: "He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling the whole time, playing with his pencil. ... I was so mad at him."
      He said: Thomas himself does not address the issue of his own reticence. But he often recalls that in his early schooldays, a rector took him aside and told him he needed to improve his spoken English and get rid of the Geechee/Gullah accent common to his childhood region.
      Readers searching for a softer side of Clarence Thomas, or an explanation for why he seems to remain in so many ways uncomfortable in his own skin, will not find it in any of these pages?either in those written by him or about him. ?Barbara Kate Repa, author of Sexual Harassment on the Job: What It Is and How to Stop It (Nolo), reported on the U.S. Supreme Court for many years and is now legal editor of California Lawyer.
     
      SHE SAID?AGAIN
      Shortly after Thomas's memoir was released, Anita Hill, now a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University, weighed in with an op-ed article in the New York Times reacting to it. In her piece, titled "The Smear This Time," Hill avers: "I stand by my testimony"-and then catalogs Thomas's retelling of the Senate hearings as "a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears" made by a still-angry man. She cites "blatant inconsistencies" in Thomas's decrying her as a mediocre worker but nevertheless hiring her twice and later writing a glowing letter recommending her for her first law school post.
      Hill reports she has seen similar incidents of character attacks against those who complain of harassment and discrimination on the job but she ends on a nearly upbeat note. "My belief is that in the past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these issues an honest search for the truth which is, after all, at the core of all legal inquiry," she writes. "My hope is that Justice Thomas's latest fusillade will not divert us from that path."
     
     
     

---