The latest Clarence Thomas biography.

Andrew Peyton Thomas, the author of the most recent Clarence Thomas biography, is a white dude who, so far as I know, is not related to Clarence Thomas. To prevent confusion between the two Thomases, I will say “Thomas” when I mean Clarence, and I will say “the author” when I mean Andrew.

It is clear from the author’s book, and also from a glowing 1999 article about Thomas that the author wrote in the conservative *Weekly Standard,* that the author is ideologically akin to Thomas, even if not related by blood. The author thinks that Thomas is the most philosophically sound justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. In his *Weekly Standard* article, the author says that Thomas is the best defender of conservative principles on the high court-better than Rehnquist, whom the author accuses of unwillingness to roll back liberal precedents, and in some ways better than Scalia himself.

With this background, we might expect that Andrew Thomas would write a purely hagiographic biography of Clarence Thomas. The reader will be pleasantly surprised, however, to learn that Andrew Thomas has actually written a balanced, warts-and-all account of Clarence Thomas’ life. Andrew Thomas’ biography defends Clarence Thomas in some important respects-most notably in relation to the Anita Hill affair-but Andrew Thomas also brings out some information-some of it new-which reflects unfavorably on the Justice.

I would go so far as to say that Andrew Thomas’ book is the closest anyone has yet come to a truly impartial and comprehensive account of the life of Clarence Thomas. Unlike the *Weekly Standard* article alluded to above, Andrew Thomas’ biography grapples with all sides of Clarence Thomas’s complicated personality, including the bad parts. Reading this biography, you will see Andrew Thomas the conservative stalwart turn into Andrew Thomas, the dispassionate historian-to the extent that anything about Clarence Thomas can be discussed dispassionately.

From the author’s book, we learn that Thomas is neither the demon portrayed by his enemies nor the angel portrayed by his allies. Thomas is a lawyer/politician of the type who tends to rise to the top in American politics. Thomas’s career, including his judicial career, is a political career. I am not one of those folks who draws a line between politics and jurisprudence. The latter is part of the former, and I believe that most Americans are aware of this fact. The federal courts, including most definitely the U. S. Supreme Court, are political organs, although federal court opinions frequently pretend that the “political branches” of the federal government are Congress and the Presidency. Who are they fooling? Federal judges, whether “liberal,” “conservative,” or “moderate,” are politicians. They are politicians with life tenure. If you want non-political judges, then ask God to judge you.

The author doesn’t ask us to believe in the myth of nonpolitical judges. What he does is follow Thomas’s career as a lawyer/politician. First, there is the account of the Pin Point years.

Thomas was born in 1948, which, although the author doesn’t mention it, is the same year that a South Carolina politician named Strom Thurmond ran for President on an anti-civil-rights platform. Said Strom during his campaign in that year: “There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.” Strom would have been outraged if a fortune-teller had told him that, in this election year, a black child had been born who would marry a white woman and be appointed to the Supreme Court with the enthusiastic support of the senior Senator from South Carolina. If a fortune-teller had said this, Strom would have said, “I hope I live long enough to fight the scalawag Senator who supports such a nomination!”

Thomas was born into the Jim Crow system supported by Thurmond and by the whites who ran the South. Thomas’s mother left him in the care of his grandfather Myers Anderson, a man who had not made his peace with Jim Crow and who had gone into business for himself rather than take orders from white people. Anderson was one of those stern-but-loving guys who intimidate their kids (or grandkids) into shaping up and flying right. Anderson insisted that Thomas get up before the crack of dawn to help in the family business, to do backbreaking labor on the family farm, and so on. Thomas later came to see the value in Anderson’s tough-love child-rearing. It probably wasn't fun at the time, though.

Thomas was raised as a Catholic-which was rare in Georgia at the time. When Thomas decided to become a Catholic priest, Anderson supported him and financed his seminary education in Georgia and then in Missouri. There were Catholic seminaries in both places. The author was unable to confirm Thomas’s oft-repeated story about quitting the Missouri seminary after students expressed support for Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination. On the contrary, the author found people who had been at the seminary at the time and who denied that such a racist statement would have gone unreproved in the seminary’s progressive atmosphere. The author’s sources also said that Thomas had never mentioned the alleged racial incident at the time, even to friends. The Martin Luther King episode is probably an example of Thomas fudging the truth. The reality seems to be that Thomas had been having doubts about religion in general, and the priestly vocation in particular, and this is what led him to leave the seminary (and face his grandfather’s wrath, although the two later reconciled).

Despite his religious turmoil, Thomas had shown an ability to make friends, including white friends. It might seem strange to say that Thomas was an easy person to like, but such is the impression one gets from the people interviewed by the author. This is certainly not the impression I had received from the media, but who are you going to believe, the media or a well-researched biography?

Having given up on Catholicism, Thomas decided to train for a different sort of priesthood-the legal priesthood. This turned out to be a good career move, since Thomas would ultimately end up as one of the nine high priests of the law who comprise the U. S. Supreme Court.

After some undergraduate study, Thomas chose Yale Law School, and Yale chose him. At the time, Yale was having a seizure of political correctness, of which an affirmative-action policy was the mildest manifestation. Thomas’s opponents haven’t let him forget this. Thomas has been dogged by the assumption that he was an affirmative-action student, a stigma he resents. This may help explain his fight against affirmative action on the high court. Thomas has also been accused of hypocrisy for “benefiting” from affirmative action and later denouncing it. Of course, we don’t know if Thomas benefited from affirmative action. If Yale had had a race-neutral admissions policy of the sort Thomas later endorsed, we cannot say for certain that Thomas would have been turned down for admission, although of course it is only under this assumption that Thomas’s opponents can say that he benefited from affirmative action. What should Thomas have done? Refuse to apply to Yale even if he thought he was as qualified as any white student? Falsely list his race as white so that he would not risk being caught up in the affirmative-action net?

During his years in secular colleges, Thomas, according to the author’s sources, watched pornographic movies. It was the in thing for many students. We’re talking about the 1970s, when porn virtually went mainstream (with help from the Supreme Court). The major confidential source in the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation was named after a porno film. Thomas was in rebellion against his religious background, and he was a perfect milieu for expressing his background (he admitted to smoking dope, and inhaling, during this same period).

Although the author disbelieves Anita Hill, the pornography angle provides some corroboration for her story. If Hill made up her accusations against Thomas, then how was she able to weave the element of pornography into her invented story? Was she unaware of Thomas’ predilection for porn, but simply guessed that a man who was in college during the early 1970s would have watched the stuff? That would have been a reasonable assumption, but it would have been a risky assumption, if we assume that Hill was merely guessing that Thomas liked porn. Under this theory, Hill took a deliberate risk that Thomas might have produced witnesses claiming that the nominee was a strict puritan who never watched a movie after *The Sound of Music.* I suspect that, even if Hill is making her story up, she had in some way learned about Thomas’s porn fixation from some source or other. If Hill is a liar, that doesn’t mean that she didn’t weave some threads of truth into her tapestry of lies. The author’s position on the Hill/Thomas affair will be discussed later.

After Yale, Thomas got a job in the Attorney-General’s office in Missouri. There is no doubt that this was an affirmative-action appointment. Missouri Attorney-General John Danforth was looking for a black guy to work in his office, and Danforth found Thomas. Thomas handled a variety of legal issues, but seems to have stayed away from civil rights. He also made friends in the office, as he usually does wherever he goes. The author learned from these friends that they would talk to Thomas about the issues of the day.

Get your smelling-salts ready, because here I discuss one of the author’s shocking discoveries. Thomas discussed abortion while he worked in Missouri. Yes, he talked about abortion. He was against it. The author’s sources don’t specifically remember whether Thomas talked about the *Roe v. Wade* decision legalizing abortion, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that Thomas would have opposed the *Roe* decision, just as he would later do on the Supreme Court.

Of course, anyone with sense knows that Thomas discussed abortion. The author is the one who finally got witnesses to prove it. One of the questions in Thomas’s nomination hearing was whether the nominee had ever expressed an opinion on the *Roe* decision. Thomas obviously opposed the decision-so does anyone who cares about the rule of law-but as a nominee Thomas claimed to reserve judgment on the issue. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy asked what, if anything, Thomas had said about *Roe* in the past. Let’s pick up the questioning right after Thomas said that, as a married law student (married to wife #1), he (Thomas) didn’t have the time to have informal discussions as often as other students.

LEAHY: Well, Judge Thomas, I was a married law student who also worked, but I also found that at least between classes we did discuss some of the law, and I'm sure you're not suggesting that there wasn't any discussion at any time of Roe v. Wade?

THOMAS: I cannot--I--Senator, I cannot remember personally engaging in those discussions. The groups that I met with at that time during my years in law school were small study groups.

LEAHY: Have you ever had discussion of Roe v. Wade other than in this room [the Senate hearing room where the nominee was being questioned]? In the seventeen or eighteen years since it's been there?

THOMAS: Only, I guess, Senator, in the fact that, in the most general sense, that other individuals express concerns one way or the other and you listen and you try to be thoughtful. If you're asking me whether or not I've ever debated the contents of it, the answer to that is no, Senator.

LEAHY: So you don't ever recall stating whether you thought it was properly decided or not?

THOMAS: I can't recall saying one way or the other, Senator.

Thomas could have been telling the truth in the Clintonian sense. In other words, he was lying. He’d talked to colleagues about how horrible abortion was, and he obviously didn’t qualify his opposition the way most feminists do, by saying that abortions are bad but the decision is between the woman and her doctor, etc. Thomas said abortion was bad, period. He didn’t simply listen thoughtfully as others talked.

Maybe Thomas didn’t utter the words, “*Roe* is wrong,” but if he didn’t, it would only have been because the wrongfulness of *Roe* was simply assumed. Maybe Thomas didn’t “debate” *Roe* in the sense that he didn’t argue with someone who thought *Roe* was right. But he did talk against abortion in the course of conversing with people who thought *Roe* was wrong.

The author catches Thomas making many other inaccurate statements, which usually cannot be attributed to selective memory or honest error. The alleged King incident in the seminary is one example, but there are others. Thomas’ false statements were often made in contexts in which the false statement helps advance his career. The author makes no apologies for Thomas’ deceptive statements, despite the author’s obvious sympathy for Thomas’ jurisprudence.

This willingness to discuss Thomas’ deceptions enhances the author’s credibility, because the author obviously admires Thomas and wishes that Thomas had never done the bad things he did. But the author doesn’t cover up for Thomas or make excuses.

After leaving the Missouri Attorney-General’s office, Thomas went to work as a lawyer for a chemical company, which could have been the beginning of a profitable career in corporate law. However, Thomas had the political bug. He had been exposed to the black academic Thomas Sowell, who was extremely critical of the civil-rights establishment which purports to act in the interests of black people. Thomas read Sowell’s work and met him in person. Sowell has argued eloquently that white racism, although of course it exists, does not constitute the only, or even the primary obstacle impeding black progress. Sowell’s rejection of traditional civil-rights approaches to black problems has caused many blacks to shun him.

Thomas had developed a certain degree of toughness thanks to his grandfather and his other life experiences, and he needed this toughness as he started following in Sowell’s footsteps, into the community of people referred to as “black conservatives.” He also joined the Reagan administration and ultimately registered as a Republican. Thomas knew that he would be annoying a lot of black people, to whom the word “conservative” is a term of opprobrium. Many black people, even if they support school prayer, vouchers, restrictions on immigration, the criminalization of abortion, etc., would never dream of calling themselves conservatives, much less Republicans.

Conservatism and Republicanism have tainted themselves in the eyes of many in the black community. The Republican party is not a white racist party, but it wants the white backlash vote. The white backlash refers to white people who are either racists or who think the government has done too much in favor of blacks. Republicans would risk losing their edge among white backlash voters if the actively sought black support.

Therefore, the attitude of the Republican party toward blacks is like the attitude of most denominations of Judaism toward the goyim: We welcome converts, but we don’t evangelize. To use a phrase which Tip O’Neill attributed to one Mrs. O’Brien-“people like to be asked.” The Republicans don’t ask black people to vote Republican. The Democrats *do* ask. Guess who wins the black vote in elections? The Democrats court the white backlash vote, of course, but mainly to defend themselves against the Republicans. The Republicans are more sincere than the Democrats about appealing to white backlash. And the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, are willing to appeal to the *black* backlash-meaning blacks who are either racist against whites or who think that the government is doing too much for whites. This is why the Republicans are given credit if they manage to get 20% of the black vote.

Except for a brief period during his Supreme Court nomination, when blacks rallied behind him, Thomas has had outsider status, or in some cases pariah status, in the non-conservative black community. The author documents many instances of this. At the same time, Thomas started out as a comparative outsider in the conservative community. As the civil-rights chief in Reagan’s Department of Education, and later as the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas was often sidelined or else suspected of liberal tendencies. It was Clarence Pendleton, not Clarence Thomas, who was at first deemed the up-and-coming black conservative in the Reagan administration.

Thomas, on the other hand, seemed at first to marginalize himself as he fought what he saw as imprudent proposals by the administration’s hard-core conservatives to destroy the civil-rights agenda root and branch. Thomas was not the only one urging moderation, of course. To take one example, big business weighed in against proposals to abolish the federal affirmative-action program for government contractors. Big business prevailed in this dispute, and Thomas’ side won.

Thomas lost another internal political battle when the administration tried to restore tax-exempt status to private segregated schools. Thomas feared that this effort would be grossly misrepresented and would get sound-bited to death. Thomas was quite correct-it was a public-relations disaster. Which is a pity, because the Internal Revenue Service had revoked the federal tax exemption of segregated schools without any authority from Congress. The fact that the IRS had raised taxes without Congressional approval was the real scandal, but the Reagan administration lost in the Supreme Court and the court of public opinion.

The author argues that Thomas, during his tenure as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, actually turned the agency around. Thomas transformed the EEOC from an inefficient bureaucratic backwater into an agency with teeth, fulfilling its legal mandate by aggressively pursuing discrimination complaints against employers and making discriminators pay. This fact was overshadowed, in the media, by Thomas’ de-emphasis on the standard liberal tactic of suing corporations based on statistical “disparities” between the work force and the local labor force. The government often tends to presume discrimination if a “protected class” of people-blacks, hispanics, women, etc.-is “underrepresented” in a company, with underrepresentation being defined in terms of questionable statistics. With his reading of Sowell’s works (Sowell is an economist), Thomas probably realized the problems inherent in using raw statistics to “prove” racism or sexism at a company.

What is remarkable about Thomas’ tenure at the EEOC is not that the agency dropped the ball on some age-discrimination cases (which it did), but that it otherwise improved its performance and became a respected government department which was prepared to crack down on employment discrimination.

While working in the executive branch, Thomas gave speeches to private organizations, speeches in which he endorsed the conservative line on many issues, including legal issues. Thomas was presumably trying to improve his relations with the administration and show himself to be a true conservative. That doesn’t mean that he was insincere about his beliefs, although his ambiguous relationship with the truth might give rise to such suspicions. It doesn’t appear, however, that Thomas was any more insincere than any other ambitious lawyer/politician. I know that’s not exactly a high standard to meet, but it puts Thomas’ behavior in the proper context.

When the Reagan administration was succeeded by the regime of Bush the Elder, Thomas was appointed to an appeals court judgeship, in preparation for eventual elevation to the Supreme Court. Thomas had the chance to give some relatively interesting opinions, but a sudden vacancy in the Supreme Court opened up the avenues of promotion and Bush the elder nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court.

The justice whom Thomas would be replacing was Thurgood Marshall. Obviously, Bush the Elder nominated Thomas in large part so that a black person would be placed in Marshall’s seat. One can easily imagine the reaction if Bush had nominated a non-black person, especially a white person, for the Marshall seat. Bush the Elder’s declaration that race had nothing to do with the nomination is not to be taken seriously, and the author does not insult our intelligence by asking us to believe it, or even to pay much attention to it.

Thomas was, of course, compared unfavorably to Marshall. Thomas’ legal career had been solid, but it didn’t come near the greatness which Marshall showed as the NAACP’s lawyer. Before becoming a judge, Marshall had traveled the South, arguing for the lives of black clients in front of white judges and juries steeped in the mores of the Jim Crow system. A victory for Marshall in these cases generally meant that the jury imposed a life sentence instead of death, or that a federal court was persuaded to order a new trial. Marshall was also the general-in-chief in the NAACP’s legal assault on Jim Crow. As a lawyer, Marshall had to display, for comparatively little pay, a degree of physical and moral courage which is frankly unmatched in the legal careers of most attorneys, certainly unmatched in the legal careers of other attorneys who became federal judges.

There was no way that Thomas could hope to compare with Marshall, or even get in the same league as Marshall, *as an advocate.* Marshall was simply one of the greatest lawyers in history.

Marshall was also one of the most mediocre U. S. Supreme Court judges. On the Supreme Court, Marshall seems to have given up his previously workaholic habits. He let his clerks do much of his work. He dissented every time the Court upheld a death sentence, disregarding precedent. Then, with no apparent sense of irony, he wrote a dissent in a death penalty case in which he accused the majority of disregarding precedent. He cast a reliably left-activist vote in just about every case where activism was an option One of Marshall’s purported remarks may have been more revealing than he had intended. Marshall joked that he was so concerned about who might be appointed as his successor that he didn’t want the news to get out if he died. Just prop him up and keep him voting, was Marshall’s grisly joke. The joke implied that Marshall’s voting pattern would be the same whether he was dead or alive, and this can be considered a metaphor for the Justice’s disengaged style.

As a Justice, Thomas showed a better record than Marshall. Thomas seems to talk things over with his clerks and his colleagues, look into the issues, and take a stance which is (despite reports to the contrary) easily distinguishable from the stance of his colleague Scalia. The author shows cases where Thomas and Scalia parted ways, cases in which Thomas called for reconsideration of bad precedents, cases in which Thomas let his mind go to work on the problems at hand. I won’t go into the details of all of Thomas’s cases here; the book gives a good description.

Wait-I seem to have skipped something. Let’s see-joining the Reagan administration, Chairmanship of EEOC, appeals court judge, Supreme Court Justice-it seems that I’ve overlooked something in Thomas’s career. Wasn’t there some kind of minor controversy about the Supreme Court nomination? Some kind of allegation of wrongdoing? Durned if I can remember what it was, it scarcely received any coverage. It must not have been very important, but there was a spot of bother.

Oh, yes. The Anita Hill thing. I suppose I might as well discuss that, since the author *does* mention it.

Before I read Andrew Thomas’s book, I thought that Hill was telling the truth. I read David Brock’s *The Real Anita Hill,* but it didn’t convince me. I read *Strange Justice,* and although I didn’t like the authors’ get-Thomas attitude, their arguments seemed strong. I found the pro-Hill arguments much more convincing than the pro-Thomas arguments. I thought that Hill may have been downplaying the role which ambition played in her relationship with Thomas, but this did not affect my belief that Thomas was guilty of harassment. My beliefs were reinforced when I read a recent anti-Hill diatribe by P. J. O’Rourke in which O’Rourke adopted an agnostic attitude toward the validity of Hill’s story. If O’Rourke, who dislikes Hill, is unwilling to call her a liar, then maybe she isn’t. Perhaps, I thought, Thomas’ defenders had reflexively denied Hill’s story back in 1991, but now they are willing to concede the story’s accuracy. In the boys-will-be-boys atmosphere spawned by the Lewinsky affair, maybe the conservatives are shifting their position from “He’s innocent” to “so what if he did?” Also, I read Hill’s *Speaking Truth to Power,* and the apparent sincerity of the book moved me. Why would Hill make up this story out of whole cloth? The only question in my mind was whether Thomas was such a habitual harasser that he simply forgot the incidents with Hill, or whether he remembered the incidents but lied about them.

Andrew Thomas’s book has unsettled my previous beliefs. I used to believe Hill, but now I have my doubts. That’s how good a case the author lays out against Hill.

The author believes that Hill was an incompetent worker who made up her story of sexual harassment in order to make an excuse for why she did badly at the Department of Education and the EEOC. The author’s take on the Anita Hill affair cannot be dismissed out of hand as a hatchet job by a Thomas partisan. If the author wanted to cover up Thomas’ behavior, he would not have published his evidence concerning Thomas’ frequent lies. The author’s willingness to criticize Thomas in other contexts should be borne in mind when we look at the author’s defense of Thomas in the Hill case.

The author maintains that Hill wasn’t up to snuff at her work in the federal government. This is believable. Hill’s first job when she left government service was as a professor at the Oral Roberts law school. Oral Roberts, the founder of the university and law school where Hill worked, is the evangelist who asked his followers to give him money or else God would kill him. Why would an ambitious lawyer like Hill want a professorship at a dinky law school founded by a man who was a national laughing-stock? The most likely explanation is that Hill was really desperate. She says that she was desperate to get away from the lecherous Thomas, but she could have escaped to a better law school, if in fact she was qualified. The fact that Hill went to Oral Roberts’s law school to get a job says something about her abilities.

Here are, in brief, are the arguments the author makes against the truth of Hill’s story:

-Hill’s testimony at the time of the hearings conflicts in many respects with what she said later in her book *Speaking Truth to Power.*

-Hill’s testimony contradicts the testimony of other witnesses, including persons who gave public testimony and persons whom the author interviewed. For instance, other witnesses say that Thomas was hesitant to hit on women even once, for fear of rejection, and he was far too proud to repeatedly beg a woman for dates, as Thomas allegedly did with Hill. Other witnesses also say it was not Thomas’ habit to spend time in other people’s offices, although Hill said Thomas spent a lot of time talking to her in her office.

-Witnesses say that Hill was not up to the job, and that she was jealous about other people getting promoted ahead of her.

-Hill’s allegedly “contemporaneous confirmation” of her story is consistent with someone making up a tale of harassment instead of confessing that she was having trouble doing her job.

-Hill moved from the Education Department to EEOC, explaining this later by claiming that she feared that Thomas’ successor at EEOC would fire her. Hill claimed that Thomas told her she did not have civil-service tenure at Education, and that she believed this statement of her alleged harasser. In fact, Hill was protected against being arbitrarily fired from Education. Civil Service rules protected her. Federal civil servants-specifically including Hill-are aware of their rights under Civil Service regulations, and it is unlikely that a civil servant would be ignorant of such matters.

-Hill kept a contemporaneous record of her work, at a time when she was worried about being fired. She was probably creating a paper trail so that, if Thomas tried to fire her, she would be able to show records confirming her work habits. However, Hill did not keep a contemporaneous record of the alleged sexual harassment, although such a record would have been highly useful if Hill wanted documentation which could help her keep her job.

-The witness Angela Wright, who told a story of sexual harassment similar to Hill’s, is an unreliable source because, inter alia, she is a disgruntled former employee.

-Hill made numerous friendly calls to Thomas even after she had left the federal government.

-Hill did not come forward voluntarily at any of Thomas’ confirmation hearings. In the Supreme Court hearing in 1991, Hill was coaxed into giving her story, and even then under a pledge of confidentiality. The author thinks it was Senator Metzenbaum who arranged to leak the story to the press.

-Thomas reacted to the charges with extreme anguish, an anguish which cannot be attributed to frustrated ambition because the anguish continued (to Thomas’ own detriment) even after he had joined the Court. A guilty man, in contrast, would have rejoiced in his victory and in the fact that he had gotten away with something. So says the author. My own experience is that it hurts much more to be accused of something I *didn’t* do than to be accused of something I *did* do. One might expect, therefore, that if Thomas had managed to get away with harassment and perjury, he would have felt some gratification at beating the rap. Unless, as mentioned above, he committed the harassment and then forgot about it.

-During the hearings themselves, Hill made false statements which she later had to correct. Her claim not to know Myers, for example, was false. Her initial lapse of memory as to whether she had been told that Thomas might quietly resign may well be more than just a lapse of memory.

Seeing these arguments by the author, my confidence in Hill’s veracity is greatly shaken. Two points stand out: Why did Hill make contemporaneous notes of her work, to protect her civil service rights, while failing to make contemporaneous notes of her alleged harassment, notes which would also have protected her civil service rights? And speaking of the civil service, was Hill truly ignorant of the civil service regulations protecting her from the type of arbitrary firing she claimed to fear at the Department of Education?

In Hill’s favor, I must say that the author does not give as much attention as he should have to one important question. Why did Hill’s story have Thomas making references to the *oeuvre* of Long Dong Silver, and to other porno movies? Did Hill know about Thomas’ interest in porn? If not, why did she make her claims with such confidence-wouldn’t she have been worried that Thomas would be able to produce evidence that he was *not* interested in porn? Of course, Thomas *was* interested in porn, so Hill had no grounds to fear that kind of rebuttal. But how did she know she had no grounds to fear a rebuttal? Doesn’t that suggest that Hill was aware of Thomas’ interest in porn? And if Hill knew about Thomas’ proclivities, how did she come by the information? Did he tell her? If so, wouldn’t talking about Long Dong Silver to an employee constitute a serious breach of professionalism-wouldn’t it, in fact, go far to confirm Hill’s story? Or did someone who knew about Thomas’ tastes share that information with Hill? In other words, how did this information about Thomas’ personal life leach into the work environment? The author tells how Thomas would show his employees screenings of *The Fountainhead,* a bad movie based on a book by Ayn Rand. Did Thomas hold screenings of porno movies, too? Surely not! In sum, what did Hill know about the porn, and how did she know it?

The porn issue may be an irrelevant diversion, but it’s too bad the Judiciary Committee didn’t investigate. Supposedly, the Committee was worried about its dignity, but it was a bit too late to be concerned with such things by that point. A subpoena of Thomas’ video rental records might have been useful.

Be that as it may, Andrew Thomas’ book makes me skeptical of Hill’s accusations, where I was not skeptical before. The evidence seems to indicate that Thomas is more likely to be innocent than to be guilty in the Hill case. But we can only weigh probabilities on this subject-the truth often slips through our hands like quicksilver.

And what if Thomas *is* guilty of harassment? At least Thomas never refused a job to a woman on account of her sex, like William Brennan; or joined the Klan, like Hugo Black; or advocated the internal deportation of American citizens, like Earl Warren. Yet to liberal law professors and others of their ilk, Thomas will always be the ethically-challenged justice, while Brennan, Black and Warren will be granted absolution for their sins because they voted the right way.

As I mentioned, the author demonstrates how the harassment accusations haunted Thomas even after he got on the Court. Although supposedly the Hill ordeal inspired Thomas to revive his religious faith, his goodwill toward others is not as great as it could be. The author complains that Thomas is dragging out his self-pity to an unhealthy extent-another example of the author refusing to spare Thomas from criticism.

I think that this book is the first attempt by anyone to do a full-length, *impartial* biography of Clarence Thomas. Go and buy it today.