How High-Tech Lynching Got Him
Tenured Job on U.S. Supreme Court
By M.P. Prabhakaran
“What’s the difference between a low-tech lynching and a high-tech lynching?” asks Frank Rich in his October 7, 2007, column in The New York Times. He answers the question himself, in the next sentence: “A high-tech lynching brings a tenured job on the Supreme Court and a $1.5 million book deal. A low-tech lynching, not so much.”
The book Mr. Rich is referring to is the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s recently published autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir. Mr. Rich is right: Mr. Thomas owes his elevation to the Supreme Court to his colorful, if angry, characterization of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on his nomination as “a high-tech lynching.”
The racially-loaded characterization came during his rebuttal of the sexual harassment charges made against him by his one-time subordinate, Anita Hill. At the time of the 1991 Senate hearings, Ms. Hill was a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma and Mr. Thomas a federal appeals court judge in Washington, D.C.
In her testimony before the Senate committee, presented on October 11, 1991, Ms. Hill gave a graphic description of the nature of the sexual harassment she suffered at hands of Mr. Thomas, while working as his assistant in 1981-83. She worked with him first in the Department of Education and later at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, both in the Republican administration, under the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. She said that Mr. Thomas used to make her feel “extremely uncomfortable” by persistently asking her out, in spite of her saying no, and by talking to her about the size of his penis and on topics of that nature. “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess,” Ms. Hill told the committee, among other things.
Judge Thomas denied “unequivocally, uncategorically (sic) … each and every single allegation.” At one point in his lengthy, angry rebuttal, he did something which neither the senators who questioned him nor the public at large who watched the proceedings on TV had expected. He played the race card: “This is a circus,” he said. “It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
That did it. Until then, at least the Democratic members of the committee had been asking probing questions on Ms. Hill’s charges. Once Mr. Thomas compared what they were doing to the lynching the blacks in the country suffered, until not long ago, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, even they felt uncomfortable continuing their probe. Remember, it was an all-white Senate panel. Republican senators, on their part, accused Ms. Hill of “erotomania” and perjury. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah even accused her of making up her testimony from her reading of The Exorcist.
Those of us who watched the Senate hearings had thought that “high-tech lynching” was a phrase Mr. Thomas uttered extempore in an angry outburst. His autobiography has proved us wrong. It was deliberately incorporated in the rebuttal which he prepared at his mentor Senator John Danforth’s office, with the senator “watching over me like a guardian angel.” This is how he says it happened:
“Jack had been writing down possible points for me to make.… [T]he thoughts that had been running through my head for the past half-hour crystallized into a single phrase. ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘this is a high-tech lynching.’
“‘If that’s what you think,’ he replied, ‘then say it.’
“I took his pad and scrawled ‘HIGH-TECH LYNCHING’ under his list of talking points.
“Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have been thinking of To Kill a Mocking Bird, in which Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man on trial for the rape of a white woman.”
Mr. Thomas is erroneous in one important respect, though: In this case, both the accuser and the accused are black. One of them spoke the truth and the other one lied. No other human being had witnessed what happened. I hope Mr. Thomas, who invokes God and the Bible at the drop of a hat, won’t have problem accepting this: God witnessed it and, one day, the truth will out.
Roe v. Wade
However, we don’t have to wait until then to point out that he was not being truthful in answering some of the questions put to him at the hearings. For example, every time he was asked to give his opinion on a woman’s right to an abortion, under the Constitution, his stock reply was that he had not given sufficient thought to the subject and so had not formed any opinion on it. In response to Senator Patrick Leahy’s questions, he even went to the extent of saying that he had never discussed Roe v. Wade, the most important case on the subject ever taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court. When asked whether the fetus has constitutional status as a person, he paused for long, keeping the senators in suspense, and then came up with the answer: "I cannot think of any cases that have held that."
Millions of viewers around the country were quite surprised that a nominee to the Supreme Court was allowed to get away with the kind of answers he gave. When the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, on January 22, 1973, upholding a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy if she so chooses, millions of women in the country heaved a sigh of relief. However, the decision instantly became controversial and stirred heated discussions among academics, lawyers and in the media. Even high school students participated in those discussions. Mr. Thomas, who at the time was a student at Yale Law School, one of the prestigious law schools in the country, had not participated in any such discussions? Whom was he kidding?
Equally shocking was the answer he gave to the question whether the fetus has constitutional status as a person. The historic verdict in Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, had held that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment [to the Constitution], does not include the unborn.” If not anyone else, a federal appeals court judge was expected to know this pivotal point in the verdict.
The suspicion many viewers of the 1991 hearings had, that Mr. Thomas was not being completely honest in answering some of the questions, has now been confirmed. In the course of answering questions related to the Senate hearings, put to him during his interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program, on September 30, 2007, he said, “The issue was abortion. That's the issue today. That was the elephant in the room."
Toward the end of the program, Mr. Steve Kroft, who conducted the interview, pointed out what struck him as "One of the most surprising things” in Mr. Thomas’s autobiography: “‘Like most Americans,’” Mr. Kroft read from the book, “‘I had mixed emotions about abortion. I wasn't comfortable telling others what to do in that difficult circumstance.’”
Justice Thomas’s response: “There are tough decisions we have to make in life. And of course, we all feel about that. People think that because you might agree or disagree with them on certain things, that you don't have that concern about people who are left with tough choices. You do have that concern. But none of that had anything to do with what's in the Constitution. The point is simply this. The Constitution is what matters. Not my personal views, whatever they may be. And I don't go around expressing them on that issue.”
If that's the case, why didn’t he say so during the confirmation hearings? Why did he confuse and frustrate the senators who questioned him on the subject, and millions of those who watched the hearings, with his convoluted, evasive, and untruthful answers?
Narrow 52-48 Margin
Even after his “high-tech lynching” accusation intimidated some senators into switching sides and voting to confirm him – though by a narrow 52-48 margin – his joining the Court could not be guaranteed until he was administered the oath of office by the chief justice.
The White House hastily held an unofficial swearing-in ceremony on its South Lawn, on October 18, just three days after the Senate vote. The date for the official ceremony which it had decided earlier, with the consent of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was November 1, full 17 days after the Senate vote. Anything could happen in the interim. The media were still at work, trying to prove or disprove Hill’s charges and Thomas’s denial. Supporters of Hill were also busy collecting evidence to substantiate her charges. Because of all this, White House officials wanted to move the oath-taking ahead of the planned November 1 date. But they had a problem: Chief Justice Rehnquist was in mourning. His wife had died on October 17. The agonized over what to do for sometime. Finally, as legal analyst and TV commentator Jeffrey Toobin says in his recent best-seller, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, they “decided the stakes were high enough to risk offending Rehnquist, so they asked him to administer the oath to Thomas only days after Nan Rehnquist’s death. The chief agreed, and the swearing in took place on Oct. 23 in a conference room at the Court, the first such private ceremony in fifty years. The official explanation for the speeded-up procedure was to allow Thomas’s secretaries and clerks to get on the Supreme Court payroll.” Bah! What a convincing explanation! Equally convincing is what Mr. Thomas says in his book: that he “had wrongly supposed that the White House ceremony was sufficient.”
Mr. Thomas can thank the Holy Ghost, whose name has been invoked several times in his book, that the White House expedited the official oath-taking. To quote from Mr. Toobin’s book again, “That same day, according to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, three reporters for the Washington Post ‘burst into the newsroom almost simultaneously with information confirming that Thomas’ involvement with pornography far exceeded what the public had been led to believe.’ They had testimony from eyewitnesses and the manager of a video store where Thomas rented such fare. But since Thomas had been sworn in, the Post decided not to pursue the issue and dropped the story.”
It’s hard to tell what would have happened if those reporters had come up with the information a day earlier and if The Washington Post had published the story. What is important is that Clarence Thomas officially became an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, on October 23, 1991.
Considering what he went through during the confirmation process, even his critics had no problem granting him his legitimate right to declare victory and to savor it. But they had also expected him to be magnanimous in victory. They had expected the man, who never tired of tom-toming to the world how deep his faith in God was, to forgive his enemies and move on. But the muck-raking he has done in his book, and during his TV network tours to promote it, has let them down. They have realized to their utter disappointment that he still harbors hatred for those who opposed his nomination.
Anita Hill, the main target of his hatred, has already responded to the “litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee,” which Mr. Thomas has repeated in his book. “The Smear This Time,” the Op-Ed piece in The New York Times of October 2, 2007, in which she gave her response, also addresses the derisive remarks Mr. Thomas made about her religious conviction, during his interview on “60 Minutes”: that “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they [high-tech lynching mob?] portrayed.” She calls it “a particularly nasty blow” and goes on to prove how unfounded it is: “Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa [Oklahoma].” She taught there for three years. To survive as a teacher at an evangelical Christian university for three years, one has to be religious and conservative.
Conclusion
A democracy, it can be said, is a market of conflicting ideas – political, social and economic. But it has institutions that provide means for resolving conflicts. The most revered and authoritative of those institutions is the court of law. In America, the most powerful democracy in the world, we now have a justice sitting on the highest court of law, who portrays people with ideas opposed to his as part of a lynch mob. God save America!
[First published on October 16, 2007. It has since been slightly edited.]
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