A Question of Character

By Richard Lacayo

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."

Those who know him shake their head at the idea that Thomas has any preoccupation with porn films. At Yale Law School in the early 1970s, Lovida Coleman, now an attorney in private practice in Washington, belonged to a group of students, which Thomas was also part of, who convened in the dining room at 7 a.m. She vividly recalls the morning when Thomas described the plot of a pornographic film that she believes was Behind the Green Door. "We were all laughing hysterically," says Coleman. "He was talking about how absurd it was." Moreover, says an old friend, his methods of flirtation before he remarried were hardly those of a Lothario. "Clarence's idea of a date was to call up a woman and ask if he can come over and have a beer and talk," says the friend. "He wants the woman to make the first move."

It is just one of the ironies of his situation that while heading the EEOC, Thomas strongly urged the Justice Department to back the commission's sexual- harassment guidelines in arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. But while he strongly denies it, Thomas has been accused of dragging his feet on the 1983 case of an EEOC attorney who was accused of making unwelcome sexual advances to several women in his office. After an internal investigation found the charges to have substance, Thomas urged that the attorney be fired, but the dismissal never took place and the accused man eventually retired.

Thomas' defenders insist that he could act decisively in dealing with cases of sexual harassment. Rozzi cites one case of a male field supervisor under her supervision who she felt had been unfairly charged with harassment. "I tried to convince Thomas that I didn't feel this gentleman was guilty, but he wouldn't listen," she says. "He downgraded the person two grades, which is a very severe punishment." If Thomas is the man his friends say he is, that penalty might have been pure justice. If he is the man Anita Hill says he is, it was pure hypocrisy.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston