Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas raised the question of sexual harassment to national prominence, only to reduce it again to its toughest and most intractable kernel: her word against his. Neither Hill nor Thomas was able to bring decisive evidence before the committee last week to support their widely differing versions of their dealings in the past. Thus the evidence of character counts all the more heavily. But even that appeared to weigh equally on both sides. Based on their backgrounds, Hill and Thomas seemed to be the two least likely people in the world to be involved in an exchange of accusations about sexual misconduct or false charges. Both have devoted their lives to hard work and public service. He is said to be sensitive to women. She has a reputation for integrity. One of them is lying.
Some people have always found it hard to reconcile the fact that Clarence Thomas is both black and a conservative. It is harder still to match the image of Thomas offered by Anita Hill -- of a boss who pressured and humiliated her -- with the picture offered by friends and co-workers, who portray him as a model of courteous and respectful relations with women. The bedeviling paradox that emerged last week was this: How could Thomas have been one man to the world and another to Hill?
Even as her charges were electrifying the country, Thomas' defenders were rushing to his side. Dolores Rozzi, director of the office of federal operations at the EEOC, worked for Thomas for seven years. Through hundreds of meetings together, she says, she never saw him listen to anyone tell a dirty joke, let alone tell one himself. "People thought he was a little uptight and conservative," says Rozzi. "The word was, 'You have to go to Clarence with clean hands.' "
Former colleagues insist that if anything, Thomas had a special sensitivity toward women's concerns. Janet Brown, who met Thomas when both were on the staff of Missouri Senator John Danforth, recalled that when she was subjected to sexual harassment some years ago, Thomas was the most sympathetic of her friends. "Outside my immediate family, there was no one who exhibited more compassion, more outrage, more sensitivity, more caring than Clarence Thomas."
Friends from his undergraduate days at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., maintain that Thomas tried to set an example among the black students on the dormitory corridor where he lived. "He was always respectful of women and critical of those who were not," says classmate Leonard Cooper. In the early 1970s, when the campus was gripped by debate over whether to go coed, Thomas composed a poem, "Is You or Is You Ain't a Brother?" which he posted at the entrance to the dorm. "The point of the poem was, if you don't respect women, you're not a brother," recalls Edward Jenkins, a Boston attorney who was one of Thomas' fellow students.
In those years Thomas got the campus Black Student Union to adopt guidelines for the behavior of men in the dormitory who had women guests on the weekends. The code included rules for dress, language and how to deal with the dicey bathroom issue. "He was acutely aware of these things at 21," says Clifford Hardwick, a friend who is now an attorney in Savannah, "when many of us weren't even thinking about them."