Anita Hill

Life imitates art on TV from time to time, but perhaps never so closely as it does on tonight's "Murphy Brown" episode, in which Candice Bergen's character faces a U.S. Senate committee that is investigating a leaked confidential Senate report. This morning, a real-life broadcast reporter--National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg--was scheduled to face a Senate special counsel who really is investigating a leaked confidential Senate report.

I would like to clarify two points in your Nov. 4 article: The decision by the American Bar Assn. to grant affiliate status to the National Lesbian and Gay Law Assn. did not "sidestep normal admissions requirements." The admission was approved by both the ABA Assembly and the House of Delegates. A relatively small number of lawyers have resigned from the ABA because of an award given to Antia Hill. The ABA gave its medal--the only association-wide award--to Thurgood Marshall.

Most people, if you are to believe the opinion polls, say Anita Hill was lying. They don't know this, of course, but this is what their guts tell them. This is what my mother told me the other day. People say that Anita Hill, intelligent, poised and articulate, hardly acts like a doormat, like someone who would follow her sexual harasser around, like somebody who would need 10 years to finally get all the horror off her chest. This just doesn't jibe, they say.

Here is the text of Judge Clarence Thomas' opening statement Friday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings: Mr. Chairman, Sen. Thurmond, members of the committee. As excruciatingly difficult as the last two weeks have been, I welcome the opportunity to clear my name today. No one other than my wife and Sen. Danforth, to whom I read this statement at 6:30 a.m., has seen or heard this statement. No handlers, no advisers. The first I learned of the allegations by Prof.

Call me guilty. If I had been a senator or staffer during the recent Thomas hearings I, too, would have leaked the Anita Hill info to the press . . . for moral reasons. True, I wasn't there. But I have been. I was once a bureaucrat in Washington, also once a reporter in Washington. And I would have leaked or sought the leak because, early on, the old men of the Judiciary Committee tried to sweep Anita Hill under the rug. But I would not--again, for moral reasons--have been a party to the official smear (Bush's word)

I have not read the book "Capitol Games" (June 14), which deals with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas, and I do not intend to read it. I am sick and tired of the glorification of Anita Hill by the white-owned media, predominantly white feminists, and white pretend-liberals who use her as a willing, often-grinning puppet. What Anita Hill basically did was trash a black man before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on national television. Many, many black Americans were embarrassed, angered and outraged by the spectacle of this black woman trashing a black man. A byproduct of her scandalous, partially vulgar performance is this: Regardless of how outstanding Justice Clarence Thomas may become as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, the unforgetting, unforgiving, white-owned media always will tie him to that silly, vindictive Oklahoma law "professor" who emerged from obscurity, her natural habitat, to serve her masters and mistresses, Judge Thomas' opponents, with her decade-old allegations of sexual harassment.

Wrong, Dianne! America was more scared over what it saw unfolding on the TV relative to the conduct of many of the senators on the Judiciary Committee than it was over Anita Hill's charges--which, by the way, all scientific and credible polls showed the American people, black and white, did not believe. ("Woman With Guts Puts a Scare Into America," Oct. 17, Dianne Klein column.) Regarding those charges: The sheer fact of the matter is that neither she nor her corroborators could substantiate them.