Anita F Hill

Clarence Thomas had returned, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, not because he desperately wanted a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, but because he desperately wanted something else: the opportunity to restore his good name. "This whole affair has been anguish for me," he told the senators, his voice resounding with emotion. "I feel as though something has been lodged against me and painted on me, and it will leave an indelible mark." And, of course, he is right.

Anita Faye Hill said Friday that she is "shocked and angry" at the way she was assailed during the recent congressional hearings but that she has "no regrets" about publicly leveling sexual harassment charges against new Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "I'm glad I did it. I have no regrets," Hill said.

Jay Leno put it best. The government, he told his "Tonight Show" audience this week, missed a great opportunity to wipe out the national debt: "They should have put the (Clarence) Thomas hearings on pay-per-view." Perhaps not since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has a TV event seized the nation as emotionally as the Senate testimony of Thomas and Anita Hill, whose sexual harassment accusations marred his ascent to the Supreme Court.

Squabbling and recriminations have broken out among the media over the press' conduct in the Clarence Thomas confirmation battle. One reporter has quit her paper, another has been publicly revealed to be under investigation for sexual harassment, a third has been condemned as lacking in credibility because of plagiarism. And the press in general has been accused by one of its own of having "congealed into an undifferentiated blob" that is "out of the mainstream" of American thought.

President Bush lashed out Thursday at the civil rights and "women activist/feminist" groups that opposed the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas as the White House prepared for an unprecedented South Lawn gala today to demonstrate public backing for the newly confirmed Supreme Court justice-to-be.

Click! That buzzword of the modern feminist movement, introduced in 1972 by writer Jane O'Reilly in the premiere issue of Ms. magazine, described moments when individual women became radicalized: The housewife who realized she was defined only in terms of her husband. Click! The professional whose husband still expected her to do all the housework. Click! This week, to hear many women tell it, a collective click!

Sunday evening, as a second woman was preparing to testify that Judge Clarence Thomas also had made unpleasant sexual remarks to her, Senate Republicans and Democrats reached a private agreement that kept the woman off national television. The compromise meant that Angela Wright, who had been fired by Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, did not provide the testimony that Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill's supporters had deemed crucial to buttressing her credibility.

For two days on the witness stand last week, Judge Clarence Thomas raged at those he said had sought to "destroy" him. Senate Democrats, liberal interest groups and the press, he declared, were conspiring to "put me and my family through . . . this kind of living hell."

For Phyllis Schlafly, it was the best of times; for Kate Michelman, the worst. "The feminists and other liberals in this country have just gotten the backlash of public and Senate opinion that they deserve," Schlafly, president of a conservative women's group called Eagle Forum, declared Tuesday in hailing Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Feminist activists in Los Angeles on Tuesday vowed to turn their anger over the Senate's confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas into action they say will galvanize the women's movement across the country. "This has shown the need for more women in the Senate better than the entire feminist movement has been able to show in the last 25 years," said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the Fund for the Feminist Majority.