Exactly at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, the strike of a gavel echoes through the courtroom, and the nine black-robed justices of the Supreme Court emerge from behind a red velvet curtain. As those assembled in the ornate hall take their seats, the lead lawyer rises, and the arguments begin.
Soon, most of the justices are up on their elbows, hurling questions at the attorneys. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg take turns poking holes in the advocate’s argument. Justice Antonin Scalia, sympathetic to his case, leaps in to prop up his contention. “Aren’t you really arguing that . . . ,” Scalia offers helpfully.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Oct. 30, 1994 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday October 30, 1994 Home Edition Los Angeles Times Magazine Page 6 Times Magazine Desk 2 inches; 43 words Type of Material: Correction
Because of an editing error, Lani Guinier was incorrectly identified in “Lone Justice” (Oct. 9), about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as a Clinton nominee for attorney general. She had been nominated for assistant attorney general to head the civil-rights division of the Justice Department.
Anthony M. Kennedy, looking pensive, asks a philosophical question. Troubled by the answer, Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens want to know how far the advocate seeks to push his claim. All the while, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist leafs through the briefs, trying to find a disputed passage of the law in question.
But one justice looks out of place. At the far end of the bench, Justice Clarence Thomas rocks back in his leather chair and gazes at the ceiling. He rubs his eyes and stares off into the distance. Sometimes, Thomas has a brooding look, as if he is pondering deeply. More often, he just looks bored.
“I don’t understand it. He is engaged,” says a former Thomas clerk, who like most of those who have worked for him, expresses great admiration for the justice. “He likes to argue out the issues in chambers” and displays a special interest in bankruptcy law and state tax disputes, he says. But Thomas’ interest is not apparent in the courtroom. While Scalia and Ginsburg may ask five or six questions during a one-hour argument, Thomas asked not a single question during the last term of the court.
Lawyers in Washington and visitors to the courtroom never fail to comment on how removed he seems. “What’s wrong with Clarence Thomas?” one lawyer new to the high court commented. “He just sits there.”
That’s a marked contrast from his 18 months on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, says a judge who observed him then. “He’s like two different people,” says the judge. “He was talkative, gregarious on our court, a real participant. Now he seems to be in a shell.”
This eerie courtroom silence has marked Thomas’ career for all of the three years since he inadvertently became the best-known member of the Supreme Court. At first it seemed that he was simply trying to retreat, somehow, from the stinging visibility of the “he said, she said” confrontation with Prof. Anita Hill that made him the ostensible villain in a TV drama about sexual harassment. It was, perhaps, the worst imaginable fate for a fiercely proud and intensely dignified man.
For a time he was the most carefully watched, most reviled man in town. On the November day he took the oath of office at the court, his ceremonial walk down the marble steps was cut short when a small group of protesters began to boo and shout, “Down with the Male Supremacist Court.” Not surprisingly, rather than beam for assembled photographers, Thomas turned away and walked back into the basement of the court. A few months later, the new justice accepted an invitation to judge a moot court competition at Seton Hall University Law School but canceled when word came that a women’s student group was planning a candlelight vigil.
Wounded, Thomas retreated into the silence that protects a judge who is even more rigid and dogmatic than his opponents feared. As the hoopla over the man has died down, his judicial record has become clearer. He has compiled the most conservative voting record on a conservative court and lambasted his colleagues for refusing to go further in changing the law. He has voted to revoke the right to abortion and return some prayer to the public schools. He cast a key vote to cut off further hearings in a death penalty case, even when newly revealed evidence might have proven the defendant’s innocence. He cast the deciding votes to make it harder for minorities to prove they were victims of job discrimination, harder for victims of stock fraud to sue lawyers and harder for environmentalists to be heard in court.
“He has shown himself to be exactly what his opponents said he would be: a knee-jerk right-winger,” says University of Virginia law professor Pamela Karlan. “He was always going to be tainted somewhat for how he got to the court, but I think he is going to be more tainted by how he is acting now. He’s shown no capacity for growth.”
Georgetown University Law Center Associate Dean Mark Tushnet concurs. “So far, it’s been the least impressive performance of any justice since Whittaker,” he says, referring to justly forgotten Charles Whittaker, who resigned from the court in 1962 after having a nervous breakdown in his fifth year.
But friends and admirers say Thomas is unfairly treated because he is a conservative. “He is not the justice that the NAACP would like,” says Stephen McAllister, a former Thomas clerk who teaches law at the University of Kansas. “He brings his own perspective to the law, but he certainly knows what it was like to grow up poor and black.”
Fueling the debate are Thomas’ activities outside the court. The confirmation fight separated Thomas’ allies from his enemies, and it deepened an already strong commitment to conservative values. While other justices avoid any appearance of partisanship, he boasts of his friendship with conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, speaks mostly to gatherings of conservatives, brags about not reading the papers and indulges a “not politically correct” fondness for smoking cigars and driving a black Corvette.
Both his demeanor and his record have renewed questions about his qualifications for the high court. No one, not even Thomas himself, had rushed to defend President George Bush’s assessment that he was “the best man for the job.” After all, he had had no significant legal experience as a prosecutor, defense attorney, trial lawyer, law professor or judge and had spent only a year as Bush’s appointee to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. But at the very least, Thomas promised, he would be impartial. “My personal views have no place in adjudication,” he said. “I can assure you, I have no agenda.”
Many of those who believed him, such as Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican who cast a key vote for him, now admit they are dismayed by Thomas’ record. “Frankly, I have been very disappointed with his first three years,” Specter says. “I had thought his roots would show. But he came out of those hearings a changed man, an embittered man.”
*
Each day when the court is in session, Thomas and his wife, Virginia, leave their new home in suburban Virginia and drive into town before most Washingtonians have hit the road. “We travel everywhere together, like a pair of nuns,” Thomas tells friends. His wife, a senior policy coordinator for the House Republican Conference, was said by friends to have been deeply hurt by her husband’s confirmation ordeal. She said they survived by praying together. It “was not a normal political battle. It was spiritual warfare. Good versus evil,” she told a People magazine interviewer a few days after his confirmation.
Theirs is a strange sort of celebrity: They are instantly recognized but seldom seen outside carefully chosen venues. While none of the justices sits for TV interviews on Sunday morning, most make the rounds of bar groups, civic organizations and law schools, giving speeches and answering questions about the work of the court. As members of the nation’s highest court, they can count on a warm reception and instant respect.
Not so with the youngest justice. “It’s like he’s in the federal witness protection program,” says one prominent Washington lawyer.
Thomas has told friends he quit watching most television–for a time, he was a regular punch line on some sitcoms–and stopped reading most newspapers and magazines, with the exception of reliably conservative publications such the Washington Times. (He also refused requests to be interviewed for this story.) “They can say absolutely anything they want about me. I will never read them again to see it,” he told one friendly interviewer last year.
But the confirmation struggle sealed his loyalty to those who stood with him. Each morning as he lifts weights in the Supreme Court’s gym before his workday begins, he says he likes to listen to tapes of Rush Limbaugh poking fun at feminists, environmentalists and all manner of liberal crusaders.
The men are more than passing acquaintances. On May 27, when the rotund entertainer married for the third time in a ceremony at the home of Virginia and Clarence Thomas, the justice performed the official duties. After a sit-down dinner, the assembled guests gathered for “cigars and adult beverages on the deck,” according to Limbaugh’s office.
Among friends, Thomas hardly appears to be a bitter man hidden in his shell. “He is not brooding or angry at all,” says McAllister, his former clerk. “I found him to be warm, supportive and friendly. He has a positive outlook.” He has a big handshake and a hearty laugh, although his eyes have a wary look. As a speaker, he has an endearingly personal style. Far from being the polished high official whose comments drift above the audience, Thomas speaks slowly, emotionally, as if measuring each word to describe his joys and pain. Almost invariably he speaks of his childhood and recounts stories about his grandfather. Even if the tales are a bit familiar now, he comes across as warm, genuine and personal.
From the start, conservatives pointed to Thomas life story as his main qualification for the high office. Here was a man, the vaunted story went, who was born to a teen-age mother in a dirt-floor shanty near the marshes of Pinpoint, Ga., and grew up poor in the segregated South. When his mother could no longer care for him, young Thomas was rescued first by his grandparents and then by the Catholic schools, working his way through Holy Cross College and then Yale Law School, where he graduated a year behind Bill Clinton. “I was drunk with anger,” he told students at Holy Cross, describing himself in the late 1960s, “out of control with hostility toward what I saw as the oppression around me.”
But his up-from-poverty experience brought him to far different conclusions than did the middle-class upbringing of Thurgood Marshall, his black liberal predecessor on the court. Success depends on hard work and individual effort, says Thomas, espousing the lessons that conservatives champion, and government welfare checks or official “affirmative action” preferences serve only to hurt blacks by dampening their drive and cheapening their accomplishments.
Thomas was denouncing his sister back home in Pinpoint for being dependent on her monthly welfare check when he came to the attention of leaders of the incoming Ronald Reagan Administration at a 1980 conference of young conservatives in San Francisco. (The sister, Emma Mae Martin, was receiving welfare assistance while raising her children and caring for an aunt but soon after worked her way off welfare.)
Offers of government positions followed, and despite Thomas’ having announced that he would not work on “black issues,” he became assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department in 1981. A year later, he was named chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the laws against job discrimination, though he often seemed skeptical of its mandate. He had no patience with the civil rights activists who urged him to enforce the law more vigorously. All they do, he said, is “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and whine and whine.”
In a steady round of provocative speeches, he denounced the conventionally liberal positions on race and civil rights, criticized environmentalists, called for strengthening property rights and praised as “splendid” an article calling for the reversal of the Roe vs. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.
His star rose quickly in the Reagan Administration, and Bush’s Court of Appeals appointment signaled what came next: He’d be the designated Republican successor to the aging Justice Thurgood Marshall.
In five days of Senate testimony–largely obscured by Anita Hill’s later accusations–Thomas publicly backed away from many of his earlier statements. “A judge must be fair and impartial,” Thomas said in his opening statement to the committee. “A judge must not bring to his job, to the court, the baggage of preconceived notions, of ideology, and certainly not an agenda.”
When asked about his previous comments on affirmative action or the right to abortion, about his criticisms of liberal decisions and his long track record of deriding the civil rights establishment, Thomas reverted to the same theme. He denied he had any such strong views, and regardless, none of it would affect his judicial role. A justice has a nearly sacred duty “to strip down like a runner, to eliminate agendas, to eliminate ideologies,” he said. When interpreting the law, “it is the will of the legislature that counts,” he added reassuringly.
Thomas raised eyebrows when he testified that he had never discussed or debated Roe vs. Wade, even during his law school days when the case was decided. Asked about the separation of church and state and the so-called “Lemon test” often criticized by conservatives, Thomas replied that he had “no quarrel” with it. (The term refers to the court’s 1971 ruling in Lemon vs. Kurtzman that it will strike down any law or government program that has religious purpose, advances religion or creates “an entanglement” between church and state.) “I think the wall of separation is an appropriate metaphor,” Thomas commented, sounding more like a Jeffersonian liberal than a Reagan-era conservative.
He also praised the doctrine of stare decisis , Latin for letting the matter stay as decided. Many senators were skeptical, but the nominee sought to reassure them. “I understand your concern that people come here and they might tell you A and then do B,” he told one senator who had pressed him on the abortion issue. “But I can assure you . . . I have no agenda.”
This was not the Clarence Thomas whose provocatively conservative speeches, articles and statements the committee Democrats had reviewed for weeks prior to the hearing. And it was not the Clarence Thomas whose true views became clear soon after he took his seat.
*
Thomas’ first opportunity to weigh in on abortion came in January of 1992, two months into his tenure, when the court agreed to hear a case from Pennsylvania challenging that state’s new abortion regulations. The law didn’t prohibit abortion but required pregnant teen-agers to obtain parental consent, wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure and, if they were married, to inform their husbands in advance.
Though the case of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey did not require the court to decide the fate of Roe vs. Wade and the right to abortion, and Pennsylvania’s lawyers urged the court to uphold the regulations as consistent with Roe, it looked like a suitable vehicle for the court’s conservatives, who were determined to overturn the abortion right. Three years earlier, in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, four members of the court–Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Byron White–had indicated a willingness to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Clarence Thomas could provide the fifth vote.
But that majority didn’t coalesce in the Casey case. Kennedy, citing the importance of precedent and stare decisis , joined an opinion affirming women’s basic right to choose abortion, and Roe was upheld. As expected, however, Thomas took the other side, signing on to one dissent by Rehnquist that called for Roe to be overturned and to a second, more fiery one from Scalia that compared the abortion ruling to the Dred Scott decision, the pre-Civil War era ruling that sanctioned slavery. Pretty strong stuff for someone who had had no views on the matter just a few months earlier. Since neither side in the case had argued that Roe vs. Wade should be flatly overturned, Thomas could have filed an opinion upholding the Pennsylvania regulations, but deferring a ruling on the broader question of Roe vs. Wade. According to the scuttlebutt from the court’s clerks that year, however, no such half-step was even considered in Thomas’ chambers. The justice’s mind was made up.
“He clearly lied to them (his confirmation committee) about legal issues, “ says Karlan, the University of Virginia professor. “I think he perjured himself about Roe.”
That same term, the issue of prayer in the public schools returned to the docket. For a decade, lawyers for the Reagan and Bush administrations had pressed the court to permit more religion in the schools and to stop insisting on such a strict separation of church and state. They had made little progress, but pressed ahead in a case from Rhode Island that arose when a middle-school principal invited a cleric to deliver a prayer at a graduation ceremony. After a Jewish parent complained, a federal judge ruled that the graduation prayer was unconstitutional and could not be repeated.
The case of Lee vs. Weisman was appealed to the high court when again there was a surprising setback for the conservatives. Thomas did join them once again, but Kennedy switched to the liberal side, and a 5-4 majority upheld the judge’s ruling, saying that officially sponsored religious invocations have no place in the public schools. An angry Scalia slammed the decision as as “jurisprudential disaster” and demanded the scrapping of the Lemon test for judging religion cases. Thomas, who had said he had “no quarrel” with the standard a few months before, signed Scalia’s dissent.
In his first three years on the court, Justice Thomas has rarely had a chance to write a major opinion. Having staked out a position on the far right, he rarely affects the outcome in key cases, except to supply the fifth vote for a conservative majority. He seems less interested in being an influential coalition builder than in forcefully stating his position. So far, his voice has been heard more loudly in political circles than within the confines of the court. So repeatedly, the chief justice has assigned him to write mundane decisions involving federal jurisdiction or bankruptcy disputes. However, Thomas has strongly asserted himself in two areas of law: prisoners’ rights and voting rights. Parting company even from conservatives such as Chief Justice Rehnquist, Thomas has called for reversing precedents that have benefited inmates and Southern blacks.
Thomas had been on the bench just two weeks when the court heard a case involving Keith Hudson, an inmate in a Louisiana prison. Late one night, Hudson, locked in his cell, got into an argument with a nearby guard, Jack McMillian. Assisted by two other guards, McMillian handcuffed and shackled the prisoner and took him into a hallway. As the others held Hudson, McMillian punched him in the face and jaw and kicked him in the stomach. A supervisor on duty watched but merely told the guards “not to have too much fun.” Hudson emerged with a badly swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate.
Hudson sued the officers in federal court, alleging he had suffered cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A magistrate concluded that the beating was unrelated to any disciplinary purpose and awarded Hudson $800 in damages.
On a 7-2 vote, the court upheld the magistrate’s decision in Hudson vs. McMillian. Justice O’Connor said prison guards have broad authority to use all necessary force to enforce discipline or put down disturbances, but “the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain” violates the Eighth Amendment. Thomas, however, argued that the prisoner’s injuries were at most “minor” and accused his colleagues of creating “a National Code of Prison Regulation.”
His written dissent attracted attention, and not just for its strident conclusion. During his confirmation hearings, Thomas had displayed a minimal knowledge of constitutional law. He drew a blank, for example, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked him to name some of the most important high-court rulings of the past 20 years. But his dissent in the Hudson case delved into early English law and quoted a series of precedents from the 19th Century.
Around the court, that was seen as a sign that Thomas had turned over his writing duties to his young clerks. Most justices employ their clerks to do research or write preliminary drafts, but their final opinions tend to reflect their own personal styles. Not so with Thomas. “I don’t see any distinctive touches, what you might call ‘Thomasisms’ in his opinions,” says a veteran attorney who appears regularly before the high court.
The dissent in the prisoner’s case argued that in the 18th Century, “cruel and unusual punishments” referred to the punishment imposed by a judge. Therefore, the court should limit the Eighth Amendment only to officially imposed punishments and not to “a deprivation suffered in prison.” Of course, if Thomas’ view became the law, prison guards could use electric shocks, cattle prods and other means of torture without violating the ban on cruel and unusual punishments.
More than a few observers remembered how Thomas had, during his confirmation hearings, told the senators that he could identify with the plight of prisoners. From his courthouse window, he said, he saw “busload after busload” of young men going into the jailhouse. Leaning forward intently, he’d concluded, “I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God, there go I.”
Scalia, the court’s liveliest intellect, its most energetic questioner and its best writer, signed Thomas’ dissent, but he later confided to a friend that he did not fully agree with it. Rather, he wanted to protect his embattled new colleague from being “out there all alone.”
Twice since then, the court has revisited the issue of prisoners’ rights, and in both instances, Thomas has slammed the majority for adhering to the view that the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment in prison. “Judges or juries, but not jailers, impose punishment,” he wrote in a dissent issued in June. This time, however, Thomas spoke only for himself. Scalia had joined with the majority.
*
Thomas has stepped boldly into the mine field of voting-rights law, the controversial area that was the undoing of C. Lani Guinier in her bid to become Clinton’s attorney general. Unquestionably, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has had an enormous impact in the South. Under penalty of that law, Southern officials could no longer use techniques “subtle as well as obvious” to nullify the votes of blacks, and finally, a century after the Civil War, black citizens have gained a voice in government. The reach of the law, however, is uncertain, and Thomas has taken an active role in trying to define it. Some had expected him to show a special sensitivity because of his background, but instead he urged the court to overturn past rulings favoring blacks.
One case testing the act’s limits came before the court in his first month on the bench. In 1986, Lawrence Presley became the first black man in this century to be elected a county commissioner in Etowah County, Ala., after a judge ordered the county to select its commissioners by district, rather than county-wide. Presley won a seat in a new black-majority district, and the post was a powerful one, since each commissioner also controlled the budget for road maintenance in his section of the county. Soon after Presley was elected, however, the new county council voted to put all road decisions in the hands of the whole commission. With one stroke, the white majority had regained all power.
Presley sued, contending that this move to strip him of power violated the Voting Rights Act. But on a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court rejected the claim in Presley vs. Etowah County. “This is a case where a few pages of history are far more illuminating than volumes of logic,” John Paul Stevens wrote for the three dissenters. Congress wanted to end schemes used to deprive blacks of political power, so the court should enforce the will of Congress, not thwart it, he said.
But writing for a conservative majority, Justice Kennedy said the 1965 law applies only “with respect to voting,” not to “routine actions of state and local governments.” Thomas joined his opinion.
Alice Presley told Emerge magazine that her husband had, in the tumultuous days of Thomas’ confirmation, believed that because of his background, “we ought to give the guy a chance.” But after the 1992 ruling, Presley, who died in January, 1993, realized he had made a mistake. “That really hurt him more than the decision. He would walk around saying, ‘I can’t believe Thomas voted against me,’ ” Alice Presley said.
Last year, Thomas cast the deciding fifth vote to rule that drawing congressional boundaries solely to create black-majority districts violated the constitutional rights of whites. And this year, Thomas went even further and disputed the entire 25-year history of using the Voting Rights Act to help elect more blacks in the South.
The issue arose in an unusual case from rural Bleckley County, Ga., where all power is exercised by a single county commissioner who acts as both executive and legislature. Blacks, who make up 20% of the population, said they were excluded from power and filed a suit under the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals, relying on Congress’ 1982 amendments to the voting rights law, agreed with the black voters and ordered the county to switch to a five-member commission.
Those amendments underlined that any “standard, practice or procedure” used in the electoral process would violate the law if it denied racial and ethnic minorities the right “to elect representatives of their choice.” If a large black or Latino population is denied representation because of the way district boundaries are drawn, those lines are illegal, even if they were not intended to discriminate. Minorities are not guaranteed proportional representation, but the law tells judges they must examine “the extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the state or political subdivision.”
On the high court, the justices voted 5 to 4 to overturn the appeals court and uphold Bleckley County’s single commissioner system. Why? Three members of the majority–Kennedy, Rehnquist and O’Connor–said the courts can’t decide the size of a governing body because there is no “benchmark” for deciding what is fair. If Bleckley would need five commissioners to give blacks a voice, should the next county have 20 commissioners so it could serve a group with 5% of the population? they asked.
But Thomas, in a 59-page separate opinion, took the view that the Voting Rights Act does not cover the make-up of governing boards and the drawing of electoral boundaries, no matter what their effect on minorities. He said he would reject 25 years of court precedent on the issue and ignore what Congress has said on the subject.
His broad arguments, though familiar, have a certain power. The law as currently interpreted “encourages federal courts to segregate voters into racially designated districts . . . . In doing so, we have collaborated in what may aptly be termed the racial Balkanization of the nation,” he wrote.
Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot called his opinion, which Scalia joined, an “intellectual bombshell” and a “tour de force.” This is Thomas at his best, arguing that there is a price to pay for elevating race as the all-important factor in politics and the law.
But Thomas’ view of the law has one obvious drawback: Congress does not agree with him. As Justice Stevens pointed out in an opinion joined by Souter, Ginsburg and Blackmun, it is “crystal clear” that Congress wrote the law to apply to voting districts that denied minorities the right “to elect representatives of their choice.”
Sen. Specter, who had closely questioned Thomas to seek assurance that the nominee would abide by long-standing interpretations of federal civil rights law, heard Thomas give the desired assurances. “If there is a longstanding interpretation and Congress does not act . . . that certainly would be, at least from my way of looking at a statute, evidence that cannot be ignored in revisiting that particular statute,” he told Specter. But that was just the kind of longstanding interpretation of the voting-rights law that Thomas ignored in June.
*
While no one has proved whether Thomas told the truth when he “categorically denied” all of Anita Hill’s accusations, there is ample reason to believe that he did not honestly describe his legal views in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee.
That’s not a problem in the eyes of those who strongly supported Thomas from the beginning. “I think he is proving to be an excellent justice,” says Charles Cooper, the former Reagan Administration lawyer. C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel under George Bush, praises Thomas’ opinions on voting rights and the prisoners’ cases as “gutsy, not politically correct. I think he’s doing a great job. He’s been just what I had hoped for,” Gray says. Danforth says he has paid little attention to his performance on the court. “I stood by him as a friend,” he replies. “I’m not a critic.”
But disappointment and anger are strong in other circles. Ralph Neas, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, concludes that Thomas has been exactly what he feared. “We opposed him because we thought he would be a right-wing ideologue, and that’s what he’s been,” Neas says. Before, Scalia had been generally seen as the court’s most conservative justice, and Thomas has voted with him in 86% of the cases. It is the closest pairing of justices since the liberal tandem of William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall retired.
Harsh criticism has come from blacks. Last November, Emerge magazine, which appeals to black professionals, published a scathing attack on Thomas titled “Betrayed” in which several black Republicans who supported Thomas three years ago said they now regret having done so. Film director Spike Lee commented that “Malcolm X, if he were alive today, would call Thomas a handkerchief head, a chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.” The magazine’s cover featured a photo of Thomas with his head wrapped in a handkerchief.
Reactions to Thomas differ so sharply in part because his friends indeed see a different person. Consider these two stories:
Sen. Danforth calls Thomas “warm, pleasant, funny, inspiring, just a delightful person to be with.” To illustrate, he cites his summer interns, who expressed an interest in seeing the Supreme Court. “I called Clarence, and he had them come over the next day. He took time with every one of them. The personal warmth just comes through. That’s the real Clarence Thomas,” the senator says.
William L. Robinson, dean of the District of Columbia School of Law, also wanted to bring some young students by the Supreme Court. A black civil rights lawyer who knew Thomas from his EEOC days, Robinson considered the justice a friend, even if they disagreed on the law.
“It would really mean a lot to these kids if they could see someone like him (Thomas) who made it. I just hoped he would duck his head in the room and maybe say ‘hello’ while we were there,” Robinson says. He called Thomas’s chambers repeatedly, explained why he was calling and left messages. “He wouldn’t even call me back. And I guess I’m pissed about it now,” Robinson says. That’s the real Clarence Thomas, too.
A more confident Thomas was on display this spring as the justice showed a new willingness to get outside the court. He gave talks at his high school and college alma maters, discussed crime before the Federalist Society, spoke to judges in New York and Baltimore, dropped by uninvited to chat with the disc jockeys at a local “oldies” radio station and even donned a football jersey and visited the practice field of his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys. Why the Cowboys? Because the local Redskins are hugely popular in Washington and their arch-rival, the Cowboys, are generally hated, he explains. He also says he likes the Los Angeles Raiders “because everybody hates them.”
His Federalist Society speech on crime was powerful and provocative, sounding like the Thomas of old. He blamed the “rights revolution,” promoted by 1960s-era liberals, for much of the crime and mayhem that besets America’s cities today. It’s a view gaining increasing currency in Republican circles.
One thing seems certain. Justice Thomas and the controversy that follows him figure to be with us for many years to come. This fall, two new books on his confirmation fight are due to be published. Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson of the Wall Street Journal take a critical look in “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.” The authors are not promising a “smoking gun” about sexual harassment, but they do say that the Bush White House deliberately painted a misleading picture of Thomas.
Meanwhile, Danforth gives an insider’s account of the 10-day fight to save his friend’s nomination in a book entitled, “Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas.” Danforth, according to an account in Washingtonian magazine, describes how Thomas’ nomination was saved by a quick prayer session in the moments before Thomas presented his final defense. Thomas, his wife, Virginia, and Danforth, along with Danforth’s wife, Sally, met in the restroom of Danforth’s office, the story goes, praying and listening to a recording of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” “We reached out to each other and held hands as we listened: ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war.’ I looked at Clarence. His eyes were closed, his head bowed; his foot beat time to the music.”
“An effective criminal justice system–one that holds people accountable for harmful conduct–simply cannot be sustained under conditions where there are boundless excuses for violent behavior and no moral authority for the state to punish,” Thomas said. He ticked off the modern-day explanations for crime–”poverty, substandard education, faltering families, unemployment, systemic racism”–but none of them can excuse an individual’s wrongdoing, he said. While he offered no precise recommendations for what can be done, his message about crime and personal responsibility seems sure to win broad approval.
As for the 46-year-old Thomas, he tells almost every audience that he is “getting comfortable” being a justice and is settling in for a long stay. “It’s a joy to work at the court,” he told a meeting of federal judges in New York. “And in good health, I hope to be there for another four decades or more.”
