The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story.

The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story, by David Brock (Free Press, 438 pp., $24.95)

FOR David Brock, the issues in the face-off between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas are issues of stark fact, permitting little interpretive extenuation. Either Thomas said the filthy things Miss Hill says he did, or he did not. If he did, then unarguably, in Brock's view, Thomas is a sexual harasser and a despicable liar into the bargain for he denied everything, utterly, citing God as his witness. Such people should not sit on the Supreme Court, Brock stipulates. On the other hand, if Thomas did not say those very things to her, as Brock ardently argues, then Anita Hill and those who consciously abetted her detailed perjury are either villainous, or pathological, or both.

To paraphrase Senator Karl Mundt commenting on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers 45 years ago, one of these two is the biggest liar of the century. Brock himself sees similarities between the two cases but should have added that in the matter of Thomas and Miss Hill we are seeking to ,find the factual truth about alleged conversations that were completely private. Chambers produced secret documents to support his allegation that ten years earlier Hiss had given him secret documents; Miss Hill (who has to be Chambers in this analogy) produces only her highly detailed recollection of decade-old conversations. Seeking to conclusively resolve factual issues which he insists are of the essence, but which, by their very evidentiary nature, are almost impossible to resolve, Brock is pushed to make several startling and explicit accusations against Miss Hill.

The point needs to be stressed. Brock is not simply defending Thomas in the ordinary manner of defense attorneys for whom "not proven, therefore not guilty," is defense enough. If this were his important but limited objective, his book would be victorious. (And indeed in these terms, and others, it is, as I shall discuss below.) But Brock goes beyond that, trying to prove, conclusively, that throughout her professional life Miss Hill has lied over and over, in small ways and large, and therefore that she lied egregiously about the dirty talk, thereby activating an already latent conspiracy against Thomas, in order to keep him off the Supreme Court. It is with regard to these central assertions, which by the end of the book become as lurid as those made by Miss Hill against Thomas, that I must demur.

It is worth noting that these accusations against Anita Hill are Brock's, not Thomas's. Unlike Hiss, who confected a tale of homosexual fratricide to explain why Chambers, on brief acquaintance, would lie so egregiously about him, Thomas made no effort to explain why Miss Hill, a long-time friend and protegee, would take such pains to destroy him. Neither does Brock do much to explain Thomas's silence in this regard. Thomas didn't even reflect on a possible political motivation, which, if Brock is right about Miss Hill's open and long-standing opposition to his civil-rights conservatism and about her not-so-secret feminism, was there for the speculating. Hearing about her accusations more than a week before they became public knowledge, Thomas did not call his old friend to ask what in God's name she was talking about. He did not even seem angry at her, though she was the prime cause of his pain. (Neither did Hiss seem angry; he kept saying how much he pitied Chambers and Nixon.) Surprisingly, Thomas did not listen even one minute, he said, to her testimony or study the transcripts, a fact that gives pause since one would think that an innocent man, a lawyer, would have scoured the transcripts seeking insights into his accuser and ammunition for his defense. For all the fervor of his proclamations of innocence and his inapposite railings against a "high-tech lynching" (confusingly, but effectively, playing the race card), there seemed something suspiciously passive and fatalistic about Thomas's response to accusations which Brock contends were totally off the wall.

And while Brock is at great pains to discount the significance of this point, it must be noted that Thomas (like Hiss) refused to take a lie-detector test, while Miss Hill (like Chambers) agreed to submit to one and apparently passed. True, the test makes mistakes when pathological liars elude its physiological monitors or when it is conducted by an incompetent. True, innocent people sometimes appear guilty, and perhaps Thomas, who like many men seems to have had a taste for porn films in his youth, feared that guilty feelings about matters pornographic would distort his honest responses to questions about the alleged dirty talk. But Brock's suggestion that the test was rigged and the tester an incompetent, and that Miss Hill had nothing to lose in taking the test because a failed test would never be reported by her lawyers, seems a bit of a stretch to me. The point is in no way decisive, but Miss Hill's apparent willingness and Thomas's reluctance to take the test ought to count somewhat against him.

If Thomas were guilty, Brock asks, why didn't he withdraw his name from consideration for the High Court rather than risk the pummeling a guilty man had every reason to expect? He could have remained a federal judge, his family and himself saved from the savaging. An interesting, and perhaps salient argument, though again the Hiss analogy may be pertinent, for Hiss, guilty in my view, recklessly pressed his innocence when simple silence, the Fifth Amendment, could have saved him enormous trouble. Furthermore, it should be noted that, after all, if Thomas was gambling recklessly when he denied all, the gamble paid off. He sits on the Supreme Court.

Of course, the main controversy over the book has centered around Brock's refutation and extraordinary reinterpretation of what had seemed to be Miss Hill's strongest and, indeed, her only corroborative evidence, the testimony of four people who separately and independently contacted her after Thomas's nomination to the High Court, or after the public disclosure of Miss Hill's charges, to say that they recalled Miss Hill reporting the harassment and being distressed by it, either at the time or fairly soon after it allegedly occurred.

When Judge Susan Hoerchner heard, in July 1991, that Thomas had been nominated, she immediately called Miss Hill, an old friend whom she had not seen for many years, to ask her, as it were, whether she was going to turn the bastard in. Brock does not dispute that Judge Hoerchner had the strong impression that Thomas was the man whom Miss Hill had complained about, several times, ten years earlier. Nor does he dispute the two women's contention that when Anita Hill first told Susan Hoerchner about her distress over her boss's behavior, she had her friend take an oath of silence about the matter. According to Judge Hoerchner, in the summer of 1991, Miss Hill released her from that oath, and, in Brock's persuasive telling, it was Judge Hoerchner's private iteration of the charge that summer that came to the attention of anti-Thomas activists in Washington and led in part to the sordid events which followed in September and October.

According to Brock, Miss Hill could not have been complaining about Thomas when she reported harassment to Susan Hoerchner, ten years earlier, because at the time of the original conversations Miss Hill was not yet working for Thomas. Brock's evidence for this is from transcripts of Judge Hoerchner's first interviews with the Senate staff and the FBI in which she repeatedly places the time of her hour-long phone conversations with Miss Hill in the spring of 1981, eight months before Thomas's alleged harassment. Very important to Judge Hoerchner in reconstructing these dates was the fact that she had moved from Washington, D.C., to California in September 1981 (three months before the alleged harassment) and she dearly associated the calls with those she had frequently had with Miss Hill when the two were in Washington together. Brock concedes that in her later testimony Judge Hoerchner changed her story, firmly placing the calls after the alleged incident, which would make them calls to California. (It seems to me that the much-touted refutation of the book which appeared in The New Yorker misses the mark on this and several other scores. Brock's analysis of the record is scrupulous here.)

So here is what must have happened, according to Brock: Judge Hoerchner calls Miss Hill about Thomas not knowing that Miss Hill had actually complained about sexual harassment by someone else at the law firm where she worked before joining Thomas. (Brock is not sure whether the harassment was actual or a figment of Miss Hill's cunning imagination.) Miss Hill strokes the mistake and builds on it, releases Judge Hoerchner from her oath, permits her to circulate the news, and later elaborates on it. When Judge Hoerchner realizes the error, she makes up several lies to save Miss Hill's face, her own face, and the cause of Left-feminism which they both serve. Miss Hill's team of advisors also must know the score, for they help alter Judge Hoerchner's reports on the matter, consciously orchestrating what is now, according to Brock, a wider conspiracy of lies and character assassination.

What is most persuasive about Brock's argument on this crucial point is that Judge Hoerchner recalls not one but several conversations, ten years earlier, with Miss Hill on the matter: the initial complaint and subsequent conversations in which Miss Hoerchner asked her what she was doing about the harassment. Thus there would need to have been not one but several phone calls to California. Notwithstanding the fact that she has changed her story about the date of the original conversations, Judge Hoerchner did not say--as far as I know she has never said that she dearly remembers several lengthy cross-country calls. Indeed she admits that the two women pretty much ceased contact after she herself moved to California.

However, confusion about long-since chronologies is not uncommon (Hiss made much of Chambers's indubitable contradictions in recollections, about matters ten years old, concerning when Chambers broke with the Communist underground). Perhaps there were several hour-long cross-country calls, which Judge Hoerchner simply forgot about. She clearly recalls a conversation with Miss Hill that took place before she took the job with Thomas, in which she expressed her excitement at the prospect of working with him. That may be the Washington call Judge Hoerchner remembers so vividly and the others may indeed have been to California. If this seems a bit far-fetched, is it more so than the conspiratorial story Brock asks us to accept in its stead? The oath of silence, which Brock accepts, makes more sense if Thomas, Anita Hill's protector and sponsor and fellow black, was the alleged perpetrator, rather than some white cowboy at the law firm.

According to Brock, the same scenario, unlikely as it may seem, played itself out three other times: people calling Miss Hill to remind her about her complaints and distress about Thomas. Again in those cases, says Brock, Miss Hill was actually complaining about a different harasser-- indeed, he even names one possible harasser, unfairly in my view, on no evidence except the man's general reputation as a harasser.

As Brock tells the story, when Susan Hoerchner's mistaken gossip reached the anti-Thomas forces--staffers for liberal senators, feminist activists, liberal warriors--they, understandably, contacted her for more details. Pressured by them and by her friends, she slowly, and reluctantly, supplied same, and finally, after fiercely insisting on anonymity, went public when a possibly criminal leak of her confidential testimony (Brock convinces us that Senator Paul Simon of Illinois and staffer James Brudney separately and independently leaked the explosive material) smoked her into the open. The riveting details of the alleged harassment--Long Dong Silver, references to pubic hair on Coke cans, graphic pornographic and bestial descriptions, supposed boasts about his own prowess and equipment, and his alleged comment to her that she could ruin his career by telling the world about him--would thus be total inventions developed late in the day and drawn from sources entirely other than Clarence Thomas's conversations.

Why did Miss Hill slander her friend and frequent sponsor and protector? Brock offers multiple explanations, different explanations in different parts of the book. At times he stresses ideological and political factors, and here his argument is fresh and persuasive. More dubious are his efforts at psychoanalysis from a considerable distance. Miss Hill, we hear, is the kind of person who habitually uses charges of sexual harassment or, when her bosses are not African-American, racism, in order to hide from her own demonstrated inadequacies. A black affirmative-action child of our times, she suffered, to the point of malicious pathology, from the suspicion that she was not good enough for the challenging jobs she fraudulently obtained by virtue of her race and gender. Furious at a father figure and protector who abandoned her by betraying diminished confidence in her abilities, she set out, symbolically, to destroy him. (Brock discounts speculation that she was in love with Thomas and resented his marriage to a white woman.) Going further, in his final chapter, and citing a wide range of unattributed gossip, Brock more than suggests that the "real" Anita Hill has had a not-so-secret life as a foul-minded, foul-mouthed, porn-loving, sex-obsessed hag, a person not very different from the person she accused Thomas of being. According to Brock, she is an habitual seducer of students who may even have sprinkled snippets of her pubic hair in exam books (why, for goodness sake?). His evidence is the locker-room tales of students whose testimony is more likely to be about themselves than her. Allegedly, Miss Hill talks dirty to friends about men and their sexual equipment, and sees harassment in the most innocent contact between men and women. What Brock seems to be saying here is that Miss Hill is a moral monster, and moreover a representative feminist of our times, capable of precisely the betrayal he has attributed to her. At points he suggests that her pathologies are so consuming that she has come to believe her own villainous inventions. Small wonder that she took the lie-detector test so confidently, and passed it triumphantly. Coming from someone who eloquently protests against what he convinces us are unsubstantiated, and indeed unsubstantiatable accusations against Thomas, this psychoanalytic rampage is, frankly, disgusting.

Indeed, the material in this unfortunate chapter actually undermines Brock's central point, because the Anita Hill depicted here seems precisely the sort of person whom a porn-lover and dirty talker would choose to seduce without fear that his approach would be taken as harassment. Furthermore, on the basis of this sort of speculation, Brock does not need to refute testimony of those who say Anita Hill complained about Thomas's harassment long ago. For the Anita Hill who emerges from these final pages may have been lying about Thomas even then, and Judge Hoerchner and the others may indeed be remembering correctly that it was Clarence Thomas she complained about.

Notwithstanding all this, I think the book should be credited with some important victories and is an important contribution to the discourse about this entire episode. We are convinced by Brock that Anita Hill had strong and partisan objections to Thomas's nomination on ideological grounds which she disguised in her testimony; we are convinced, as we are in reviewing the Bork hearings, that a spirit of unconscionable zealotry and viciousness is corrupting the process by which Supreme Court nominees are considered and that there were forces that would stop at almost nothing to derail the Thomas nomination (although in this account they did stop several times before Anita Hill enticed them further). This reviewer is persuaded that Thomas is a more substantial thinker his apparent obtuseness at the hearing forced by the recent history of hearings--and his adequacy for the Court more defensible than I had thought, and that he is a man of formidable strength of character and moral integrity. Brock convinces us as well that Anita Hill is not the innocent rustic of recent legend; that she has frequently been an inadequate lawyer and teacher of law; and that she has not only failed to confess to her professional failures and personal inadequacies (that's not shocking) but fibbed about them (which also is not exactly unusual).

What David Brock has not done, in my view, is prove that Anita Hill was the sort of liar who would tell the extreme lies he attributes to her, or that she singularly carried off the daring and personally dangerous deception which he alleges, or that the others who became aware of it after the fact have agreed to collaborate in this considerable conspiracy.

But then I do not accept his stipulation that there are no alternatives to the extreme scenario he has developed in his book. With a little human imagination, one could construct several human arrangements--private, invisible, arrangements between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas--that would explain the behavior of both of them, then and now, and even encompass their possible lies. Indeed, I think one could even interpret Thomas's false denials (if they are false) of what the eavesdropper would call filthy talk in a way that does not damn him to the perdition Brock assigns to any such public mendacity. As Wittgenstein teaches, there are matters about which we simply are in no position to speak the final truth and in those cases we should not try to whistle the truth either. That doesn't keep us from saying much that is important, and there is much that is important in this work, but it does caution us against imitating the zealotry we deplore.

Mr. Cohen, chairman of the American Studies Department at Brandeis University, is writing a book entitled The Performance of Innocence, concerning Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, Bruno Hauptmann, the Rosenbergs, and John Demjanjuk.