Speaking Truth to Power (23 page)

The hearing had not started, but already five members of the Judiciary Committee had blasted my claim publicly. Despite the many errors in their statements, the press continued to pay great deference to the senators. Peter Jennings described them as “profoundly intelligent men.” No member of the committee expressed a belief in the veracity of my claim. Those who did not actively campaign against it preferred to remain neutral.

I realized that I would go to Washington for a hearing but had only the sense from the statements of Senators Simpson, DeConcini, and Specter of what reaction to expect. David Boren, the Democratic senator
from Oklahoma and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma School of Law, had not returned calls from Dean David Swank, who had begun calling him on Monday, October 7. Surely by now Senator Boren knew the reason for the call. But in an unmistakably political move Boren had already declared his support for Thomas, even before the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded its first hearing evaluating Thomas’ competency for the position. Yet, neither Boren nor anyone on his staff has ever discussed any matter related to the hearing with me. Interestingly, on my subsequent return to Oklahoma, Lyle Boren, the senator’s father and a former politician, made a concerted effort to contact me, calling the law school more than once until he reached me. The elder Mr. Boren, now deceased, apologized to me and told me of his embarrassment at his son’s position during the hearing.

David Swank had also contacted Senator Don Nickles, Republican from Oklahoma, who
did
return the call, though he supported the Thomas nomination as well. During our conversation on Tuesday, October 8, he seemed uninterested in my claim. He talked instead about the difficulty of traveling from Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C. He also invited me and my family to visit his office for a tour if we were “out sight-seeing during your trip to Washington for the hearing.” At the time, I declined his offer, and I rather doubt that I will be asked again. It was clear that despite the fact I was a voter in Oklahoma, I had no representation in Washington from either Boren or Nickles.

During the evening of October 8, I received a telephone call from Senator Joseph Biden, who formally informed me of the hearing. It was to be a public hearing that would convene “as early as Friday.” This left me less than seventy-two hours to prepare. “Harriet Grant will help you with the witnesses,” Biden said.

“How many witnesses will I be allowed to call?” I wanted more specifics than I had gotten from the committee before.

“Anita, I mean Professor, I assume that in addition to your testimony we will hear from Ms. Hoerchner,” he responded. “You both will be subpoenaed by the committee. I strongly recommend that you contact
someone who can talk about sexual harassment. I understand that Judge Thomas plans to call two coworkers as well as women who worked around him,” he added.

Thomas seemed much more organized than I. I asked how the hearing would be conducted.

“Well, at this point the only thing we can do is to conduct an open hearing,” he said, almost as if I were to blame. “I give you my word that I acted only to protect your confidentiality.” He began to outline the measures he had taken to ensure that the press would not get my statement. But by now the leak of my statement was of little consequence to me. I had to begin the business of preparing to present my testimony to a hostile panel of senators.

“The only mistake I made, in my view, is to not realize how much pressure you were under. I should have been more aware,” Senator Biden confessed over the telephone line. “…  Aw kiddo I feel for you. I wish I weren’t the chairman, I’d come to be your lawyer,” he added when I told him I had not secured legal counsel. I fought the urge to respond as I furiously took notes of our conversation, hoping for some useful information. Little concrete information was forthcoming. As he closed the conversation, I could almost see him flashing his instant smile to convince both of us that the experience would be agreeable.

Though Senator Biden had offered members of his staff to assist me, including Grant and Ron Klain, past experience suggested that the staff would not be very helpful. That meant that I had to contact Sue Hoerchner myself and prepare “character witnesses” for a hearing that might begin fifteen hundred miles away “as early as Friday.” Again, where process was concerned, I was at a complete disadvantage. And after making some telephone calls with very little result, I gave up. The whole thing was overwhelming. The only good news of the evening came when my brother Ray called to say that he would be in Norman the next day and would travel with me to Washington.

I
woke early on Wednesday, October 9. I had no particular plan for the day or for the next few to follow. Though I had been getting advice from Sue Ross and Charles Ogletree, I had not approached them to represent me at the hearing. As I was not a member of the Oklahoma bar, I had very few contacts among lawyers in Oklahoma. I had long ago left Washington, and though I kept my bar membership there, I knew few practicing lawyers there either. I had no idea whom to enlist in such a situation. Nor could I even think of an analogous situation. This was not a sexual harassment claim, which would be brought in court. But I was not just a witness giving testimony to a neutral Senate committee; the campaign against my testimony had already begun. And though I had not been formally indicted, effectively I had become the accused.

At dawn I was sitting in my kitchen with my head in my hands, trying to gather the energy to move. I did not even have reservations to travel to Washington. When the telephone in front of me rang about 6:00
A.M.
, I took only seconds to answer it. On the other end was Emma Coleman Jordan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, whom I knew from my work with the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Jordan, a black woman, was then president-elect of that group, and an outstanding scholar of commercial and banking law.

In her calm, take-charge fashion, Emma snapped me out of the near trance into which I had fallen. “Do you have legal counsel?” she asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said. Though my response must have shocked her, she remained calm. The hearing was to convene in forty-eight hours, and I had not even spoken to anyone about representing me. She told me that she had been in touch with several other law professors around the country and that they had proposed a list of people who would be good legal counsel in this situation. One of the people she spoke to was Professor Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California, whom I knew in passing from my days at Yale, where she had been on the law faculty. Judith Resnik had contacted John Frank, an Arizona lawyer whose firm would volunteer his time and the time of another lawyer to provide me representation. Frank, a constitutional scholar with expertise in the Supreme Court nomination process, had testified in the hearing on Judge Bork’s nomination but had not been involved in the Thomas confirmation hearing to date. He also had Yale connections, having taught constitutional law there.

I did not know any of the people on the list, but Jordan assured me that she would see to it that they were all contacted about their availability. Unlike me, Jordan, along with other women who were concerned that the Senate conduct the hearing fairly, had developed a plan. That telephone conversation—I refer to it as the telephone call that saved my life—gave me the energy to move into action. I took down the names and told her I would get back to her with any thoughts I had. I quickly got dressed and went to the law school to ask my colleagues if they knew any of the lawyers on the list.

Chaos doesn’t begin to describe the law school in the days immediately prior to the hearing. Reporters filled every open space; the telephones in the main office rang so often that the staff put them on mute; and emotions ran high, as everyone became consumed in the upheaval. My colleagues on the faculty pitched in to do what they could, taking telephone calls, fielding press inquiries, following up on leads, and trying to give direction to students whose concerns were quickly mounting. Some of the telephone calls and letters were from cranks; others, from people who wanted to offer information about Thomas’ handling of
sexual harassment claims within the EEOC, took too long to verify. We only had twenty-four hours before I would have to leave for Washington.

Two letters that proved invaluable emerged from the morass of information and paper. The first was from John Carr, a friend whom I met when I worked for Clarence Thomas. He’d been getting his law and business degree at the time and I kept in touch with him. He wrote to say that he recalled my telling him about the incidents with Thomas and was available to support my claim if he could. By midmorning Emma Jordan had pulled together several lawyers to help me, but we had no place to assemble. An overnight letter from Don Green, who had been a partner at the now defunct Wald, Harkrader firm and was now with Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz, offered the firm’s conference room as a meeting place for the legal team.

Ray arrived on schedule, and my nephew Eric picked him up at the airport. Poor Eric, then nineteen years old, seemed the one most baffled by the situation. He had always been very sensitive, and we had always been close, but I did not have time now to reassure him. The situation had us all baffled. Finally, it occurred to me that it might help if he could come along to Washington. He had to postpone a test to do so, but he got permission from his professor. Shirley Wiegand also asked if I wanted her to come along. At first I told her that I didn’t think it would be necessary, but then I caught on to what she must have already realized: if things were as chaotic in Washington as they had been in Norman, I would absolutely need her help. She became the fourth in the party to travel to the hearing from Norman.

Meanwhile I contacted my sister JoAnn in Tulsa and my sister Joyce in California. JoAnn arranged for herself and my parents to travel to the hearing. My mother would turn eighty in a few days; my father in a few months. It would all have been easier to bear if I had had time to explain to them what had happened. But there was no time. Moreover, I didn’t know much more than they did. No one had time for explanations; there was only time to organize ourselves. My brother Albert helped get my father to the barber and his suit to the cleaners. My brother Alfred picked
up the dry-cleaned clothes and delivered them to my sister. Such was the level of our preparation for the hearing.

My sister Elreatha, also in Tulsa, decided to come as well. In California, Doris, Carlene, Joyce, and her daughter, Anita LaShelle, made plans for the trip. They would all arrive on Thursday evening. All the travel arrangements worked smoothly until JoAnn and my parents arrived at the airport in Tulsa to find that the charge privileges on my credit cards had been suspended. Even though I had not reached the credit limits, the number and amounts of charges for all the travel arrangements from around the country were such that the card companies were requiring a verification for any additional charges. Since they could not reach me, my parents’ and sister’s travel was temporarily stalled until other arrangements could be made.

With the help of campus security, Shirley, Ray, Eric, and I avoided the press on our way to the airport, but we boarded a plane filled with reporters making their way to Washington, D.C. On one leg of the trip, we sat in the rear of the plane and noticed that a man in our row was in handcuffs. I felt sorry for the poor fellow as the cameras panned to catch me and undoubtedly caught him too, handcuffs and all. Yet in a way I felt that we were all being taken into custody along with him. During the layover in St. Louis, airline security pulled a maneuver aimed at diverting the press in Washington to Dulles Airport instead of Washington National, where my flight would actually land. Some press people were fooled and so my arrival in Washington was perhaps the least publicized thing I had done in the last few days.

When we got to Washington that evening, airport security met us at the gate. We were tired, but all still fairly upbeat. Sonia Jarvis, my former roommate in Washington and friend since law school, and her friend Ray McFarland devised an ingenious plan to get me to the Capitol Hill Hotel without being followed by the press. It was worthy of a spy movie, requiring three vehicles and two drivers. One car followed closely the vehicle McFarland drove, in which I was a passenger. As we were about to enter the highway connecting the airport to Washington, the second driver faked a breakdown of his car, blocking the entrance ramp. This
allowed McFarland and me to get a jump on the reporters and others who had been tailing the second driver. McFarland sped away, leaving his accomplice in a heated argument with the drivers behind him, and we had just enough time to switch to another car that was parked and waiting for us just inside the district. In a short time, we were at the door of the hotel. I checked in unobserved under the name J. C. West, conveniently borrowed from my friend Joy, who had made the hotel arrangements.

I awoke on Thursday morning feeling the hearing would begin in just over twenty-four hours with the public badly misinformed about sexual harassment. The steady campaign to discredit me was in full swing. Its obvious purpose was to persuade the public that my claim was baseless and that Thomas should be confirmed. The second purpose of the campaign was intimidation. The senators still hoped that the battle would not be fought in a hearing. Senator Biden had originally told me the subpoena would be delivered to me prior to my departure from Oklahoma. In fact, it was not served until Thursday, the day before my testimony, giving me ample time to retract my statement or otherwise capitulate—or perhaps to get into a fruitless and damaging war of words with the senators over the truth of the allegations before a public hearing could be held. With their press experience and contacts, the senators would undoubtedly have won such a battle.

I still do not know whether Senator Simpson’s comment about the terrible treatment I could expect was primarily intended to keep me from testifying or merely to intensify anxiety during my testimony. But I do know that intimidating tactics are common in harassment suits. Defense counsel often issues warnings that range from manipulative (“You will ruin him and his family”) to threatening (“You will be ruined”). In any case, when I did not withdraw prior to the hearing, the hostile senators attempted to establish as menacing a forum as possible, making good on Simpson’s warnings of “real harassment.” Behind the scenes, they maneuvered to make the hearing procedure as detrimental to my testimony as possible, well before my attorneys even arrived in Washington.