Justice Thomas writes autobiography

Mark Sherman

WASHINGTON — Breaking his 16-year public silence on his bitter confirmation hearings, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says Anita Hill was a mediocre employee who was used by political opponents to make claims she had been sexually harassed.

Thomas writes about Hill, his former employee in two government agencies, and the allegations that nearly derailed his nomination to the high court in 1991 in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son,” which went on sale Monday. A copy of the book was obtained last Friday by The Associated Press.

He writes with indignation of the nationally televised hearings that he memorably called a “high-tech lynching.” A child of the segregated South, Thomas says he was being pursued “not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.”

Powerful interest groups were out to stop him at all costs and chose “the age-old blunt instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct,” he writes.

Hill, who is also black, had worked for Thomas at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). She first made her allegations after Thomas had been nominated to the high court, 10 years after she began working for him and only after she was contacted by congressional investigators.

In the book, Thomas describes Hill as touchy and apt to overreact, not someone who would wait a decade to level a charge of harassment. She had complained to Thomas only about his refusal to promote her, the justice says.

“Her work at EEOC had been mediocre,” he writes.

In 1991, Thomas adamantly denied Hill’s accusations that he made inappropriate sexual remarks, including references to pornographic movies. Thomas says he did talk about X-rated movies while at Yale Law School, adding that so did many other young people in the 1970s.

Thomas says now that he was “one of the least likely candidates imaginable” for a charge of harassment, having made clear his desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities and women as professionally as any other.

Thomas, 59, acknowledges that three other former EEOC employees backed Hill’s version of events, but he says they either had been fired or had left the agency on bad terms.

Hill, a professor at Brandeis University, took serious exception to Thomas’ characterizations of her in a strongly worded opinion piece published by the New York Times under the headline “The Smear This Time.”

“In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination,” Hill wrote, “Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a ‘combative left-winger’ who was ‘touchy’ and prone to overreacting to ‘slights.’ A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.”

Hill went further. “Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies,” she wrote. “He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had ‘given it’ to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.”

What incensed Hill the most was Thomas’ attack on her spirituality. “In a particularly nasty blow,” she wrote, “Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling ‘60 Minutes’ this weekend, ‘She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.’ 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. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.”

The 289-page book, for which Thomas has been paid more than $1 million by publisher HarperCollins, is an account of his up-from-poverty story from his first home in tiny Pinpoint, Ga., through his swearing-in as a justice at the age of 43.

He recounts the brief period in which he lived with his mother and brother in a one-room apartment in Savannah. The building had no indoor plumbing, and one of Thomas’ chores was emptying the chamber pot. He spent most of his childhood living with his grandparents and attending Catholic school.

Thomas is the second black justice in the nation’s history, having taken the seat of the first, Thurgood Marshall.

Thomas does not discuss his colleagues or his work on the court.

He does, however, trace his rightward political shift from a protesting college student at Holy Cross and a George McGovern supporter in 1972 to an appointee of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

In the roughly one-third of the book spent recounting his nomination to the court, Thomas says his opponents were obsessed with the issue of abortion and determined to stop him because they believed he would oppose abortion rights.

As a justice, Thomas has called for overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which would leave states free to deal with abortion as they wish.

But at the time of his nomination, Thomas told senators he had never discussed the case. In the book, he describes himself in the years before he joined the court as a lazy libertarian with mixed feelings about abortion, uncomfortable telling others what to do.

Within a few months of his confirmation, however, the court was faced with a case that offered the prospect of overruling Roe v. Wade. By then, he says in a footnote, he had ample time to study the issue and concluded that Roe was wrongly decided in 1973.

Associated Press writer Christine Simmons contributed to this report.

(Associated Press)