Virginia Thomas

(CNN) — This week Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, called Anita Hill and left a message on her answering machine inviting her to apologize for testifying during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings.

It is hard to imagine why Virginia Thomas would make such a call. Surely she could not have expected an apology. And there was a very real chance that the press would hear about it and call attention back to the issue of Clarence Thomas’ conduct. Such public attention would bring with it the possibility that someone would come out of the woodwork to support Anita Hill’s claims, which is precisely what happened. Lillian McEwen, who dated Clarence Thomas years ago, paints of picture of someone whose behavior is exactly what Anita Hill claimed during the 1991 hearings.

Could it be that a very shrewd Virginia Thomas has just made the first move in a messy divorce?

As it happens I was in the hospital during that week in 1991. With nothing else to do I watched the hearings from gavel to gavel.

In the interests of full disclosure, when he was nominated I thought both by experience and scholarship Clarence Thomas was unqualified for the Supreme Court. His nomination was a cynical way for George Bush Sr. to replace Thurgood Marshall with someone from the very far right while preempting serious opposition. It worked, the black community decided that replacing one black justice with another black justice was good enough, even though Clarence Thomas opposes everything Thurgood Marshall stood for.

During the hearings several things were very clear.

• Anita Hill didn’t want to be there. She was a reluctant witness. She had nothing to gain in subjecting herself to attacks from the right. I found no reason to believe she wasn’t telling the truth.
• Clarence Thomas followed the right wing playbook to the letter. When they catch you in a lie, get very angry and very loud.

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

• No one in the senate was listening. After all was said and done not one vote was changed.
• Special kudos to one member of the senate panel, Edward Kennedy. On matters of sexual misbehavior he knew that his best course of action was to remain silent. The conduct of everyone else on the panel, from both sides of the aisle, was embarrassing to watch.