Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

Sex, Lies & Politics: Thomas V. Hill

Instant History "Flashback" by Bryce Zabel

Just this month, the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather's Son, was published and set off a new round of "He Said, She Said" in the media. In the book, Thomas gives his side of the nomination hearings of 1991 which, of course, led to a rebuttal by Anita Hill in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and on and on.

Discriminating readers and historians have ample evidence on both sides of the story to decide who they want to believe. In that respect, nothing at all has changed in the 16 years since October of 1991 when America had a normally not-so-compelling Supreme Court nomination hearing process hijacked into something that felt like it came out of the tabloids.

If you think the current nomination and confirmation process surrounding Supreme Court nominees was rough during the last few years, just remember that it's almost impossible for it to get as awful as the Clarence Thomas hearings. We will probably never see anything quite like this again.

Although it's more on the level of the O.J. Verdict and not JFK's murder or 9/11, for those who lived through it, the Thomas Hearings still have a "where were you?" quality to them. Where were you when Anita Hill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and publicly claimed that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had compared the length of his penis to an actor in a pornographic film by the name of Long Dong Silver? I was in a hotel room in Hawaii -- there to research an NBC pilot I was writing -- and even though I was surrounded by paradise I spent two days glued to a TV set.

Time devoted a great deal of space to this controversy in its October 21, 1991 issue, starting with an opening essay titled, "An Ugly Circus" and moving into the main article, "She Said, He Said."

It was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of differing sensibilities -- oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad taste on his. If Hill's description of Thomas' words and actions was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If Hill's account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional and a candidate for medical attention.

Notice on the cover that Time sub-titled the issue: "America's watershed debate on sexual harassment." That's my main nitpick on this issue. If both parties had agreed on what was said and done but disagreed on whether or not it was sexual harassment, well, then we could have had a watershed debate. This wasn't a debate on the issue of sexual harassment. It was a public spectacle where two incredibly bright, articulate and seemingly honest people told starkly different stories. One of them was a complete liar of epic proportion and the other wasn't. Today, 14 years later, we still do not definitively know the answer.

Cool and unflappable, Hill looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question without hesitation...No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were Thomas' anguished statements and adamant denials.

The hearings gave up lots of memorable moments. One of the "oddest episodes", according to Hill, involved an exchange in Thomas' office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" After Hill's testimony about this and numerous other incidents which included descriptions of Thomas discussing porno with women with large breasts engaged in a variety of sex acts with animals, Thomas came out swinging, calling the hearing "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The article concluded:

...everyone who had witnessed Hill's and Thomas' dramatic testimony knew for certain only what they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was shouldering the burden unfairly -- and it may never be known which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the strength of a very convincing lie.

So, who was telling the truth? Thomas had more to gain by lying -- a Supreme Court seat. But he also had excellent witnesses from his previous staffs who had worked with both of them saying that such behavior was never seen by them and would have been totally out of character. And it did appear that Hill initially thought her testimony to the FBI would be sufficient to derail his nomination without her having to speak to the committee. No one has definitively answered this question.

What do I think? First and foremost, I think that if Thomas did those things to Anita Hill then he's an asshole of extreme proportions (and I'm not talking about his Long Dong Silver either). And I also think that if it could be proved, even today, then he should be impeached and thrown off the court. But as I've pointed out earlier, this case isn't about sexual harassment, at least not until you can tell who's telling the truth.

I watched all the testimony on TV and whenever either Hill or Thomas was speaking, I believed them and knew the other was lying. It was maddening then, and it's maddening now. They were both brilliant witnesses. If I absolutely had to choose, I would take Thomas' denial to be the truth, but only by a very, very slim margin. Here's why. A tiny voice tells me that -- knowing know how high the stakes are over these nominations and how Democratic activists believe now (and believed then) that a woman's right to choose is literally at stake -- well, that voice tells me that it's possible Anita Hill was recruited to derail Clarence Thomas, things got out of hand, and she was basically told by a lawyer that she could either stick by her story or go to jail for perjury. But I wish I knew with more certainty...

State your own opinion in the comments. Who's the scummy liar and who's the victim? Tell it the way you feel it.

Imagine John Lennon at 67

Instant History "Flashback" by Bryce Zabel

John Lennon would have been 67 years old today (October 9) had he not been gunned down 27 years ago on December 8, 1980. Both Time and Newsweek gave over their covers to Lennon's passing. I've chosen Newsweek to focus on because it has that haunting portrait by Richard Avedon. Also, I had previewed the first Newsweek cover to feature the Beatles back in 1964 in an earlier post, and it's interesting to compare how the coverage changed in those intervening years.

Newsweek devoted twelve entire pages to the death of John Lennon in a special "pull-out" coverage. It contained a handful of separate articles entitled: "Death of a Beatle" which was the news coverage, "Lennon's Alter-Ego" about assassin Mark David Chapman, "Strawberry Fields Forever" about the influence of the Beatles, and "An Ex-Beatle 'Starting Over'" about Lennon's new emergence on the public scene after nearly five years of absence.

"Come together, he had once asked them in a song, and now they came, tens of thousands of them, to share their grief and shock at the news. John Lennon, once the cheeky wit and sardonic soul of the Beatles, whose music had touched a generation and enchanted the world, had been slain on his doorstep by a confused, suicidal young man who had apparently idolized him. Along New York's Central Park West and West 72nd Street, in front of the building where Lennon had lived and died, they stood for hours in tearful vigil, looking to each other and his music for comfort."

But, of course, there was no comfort because no matter how many times we sang "Imagine" that week, nothing would bring him back. I remember hearing the news myself -- at the time I was a CNN correspondent in Los Angeles (we had just gone on the air) and I was at home and saw it on the TV. I immediately called my brother and told him and he seemed to react like, "So why are you calling me?" About a half hour later he called back and said he didn't know what he was thinking -- he was devastated like the rest of us. Looking back, I think his delayed reaction came from the sheer out-of-left-field unthinkablility of the news. Nobody saw this coming.

The magazine called Lennon the "unofficial" leader of the Beatles, cited his "numinous influence" on pop culture and noted: "the killing stunned the nation -- and much of the world -- as nothing had since the political assassinations of the 1960s."

"Lennon, semiconscious and bleeding profusely, was placed in the back seat of Officer James Moran's patrol car. 'Do you know who you are?' Moran asked him. Lennon couldn't speak. 'He moaned and nodded his head as if to say yes,' Moran said... Though doctors pronounced Lennon dead on arrival at Roosevelt (Hospital), a team of seven surgeons labored desperately to revive him. But his wounds were too severe. There were three holes in his chest, two in his back and two in his left shoulder. 'It wasn't possible to resuscitate him by any  means,' said Dr. Stephen Lynn, the hospital's director of emergency services. 'He'd lost 3 to 4 quarts of blood from the gun wounds, about 80 percent of his blood volume." After working on Lennon for about half an hour, the surgeons gave up, and went to break the news to Yoko."

Newsweek gave Lennon and the Beatles a great deal more credit for their music than they had 16 years earlier. "These are great songs. If they are pop, then clearly pop is capable of greatness in expressing the pathos of mass society." Lest we give them too much credit, however, for "getting it", that same article concludes talking about the song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", never mentioning (or knowing) that the "gun" was not a firearm, but a hypodermic needle.

Lennon never gave up his passion for social justice. On the day he was shot, John and Yoko had decided on a trip to San Francisco for the following week to walk with Asian workers who were demonstrating for wage equality. Let's close with Yoko Ono's own words:

"Some people are saying this is the end of an era. But what we said before still stands -- the 80s will be a beautiful decade. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please tell people to pray the same for him. Please remember that he had deep faith and love for life and that, though he has now joined the greater force, he is still with us."

A couple of years ago, the Chicago Tribune did some excellent coverage on the murder and its impact and, because of this blog, I even found myself quoted in the piece by reporter Mark Caro.

So 25 years after his death, to many people, Lennon equals peace. Then again, to many kids, Lennon equals pajamas with cute little animals on them, thanks to Ono's licensing of her late husband's whimsical artwork. To some young adults, Lennon may equal the anthemic soundtrack to a sneaker ad. To others, he may simply be a name from the past.

None of these equations, of course, captures the man in all of his complexities and talents, but that's what time does. "It's like there's only so much room in the national cultural hard drive, so as you continue to add more stuff, you don't remember everything about everything anymore," said Bryce Zabel, a screenwriter ("The Poseidon Adventure") and former chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. "John Lennon as a solo artist has been reduced to `Imagine,' and as a cultural icon he's been somewhat reduced to the `Give Peace a Chance' guy." 

With Lennon not here to create new memories of someone who, if he'd lived, would have turned 65 this October, he has become everyone's property, to be interpreted and shaped in ways that say as much about the beholders as the beholden.

Check out the full article here.