A. As long as I’ve got.
Q. How far ahead do you have columns stockpiled?
A. Say what?
All of those are wiseass responses, and all of them happen to be true. Because while sometimes columns come out of some strange area of expertise or personal exposure, while sometimes they are crafted over days of thinking and rethinking a subject, while sometimes they are written and then left in computer storage until an opportunity presents itself, most of the time newspaper columnists work exactly the same way they did when they were reporters—on the news, on deadline.
Each of us has subjects that are evergreen, to which we can turn whenever the engine of public discourse seems to have ground to a halt. There are books to be read and commented upon, habitual sources to be called.
William Safire, the conservative columnist who uses the telephone the way Leonard Bernstein once wielded the baton, does some of his most interesting work, as far as I’m concerned, when he simply calls his old boss for a long chat. His old boss happens to be Richard M. Nixon, and no matter what you—and I—may think of Mr. Nixon, there’s no doubt that he is always good for some interesting thoughts on the state of geopolitics. Thus does Mr. Safire fill some of the arid spots magnificently.
But in my first two years of column-writing the dry spots were few, so few that I never once considered that perennial favorite among columnists, the column about the dearth of things to write columns about. The Gulf War was fodder for almost a year, from the time President Bush told Saddam Hussein that the United States could not stand quietly by while Iraq invaded Kuwait to the night when we went to war for the first time since I was still a student, to the aftermath in which many thought we had pulled out too soon, leaving Saddam still in power.
The 1992 presidential campaign was the same sort of cycle. It was not simply that these were obvious things to cover in a column. Sometimes they were the only thing. When the president actually authorized hostilities to begin in the Gulf, or when Gennifer Flowers told the world that Bill Clinton had been her paramour, it would have felt foolish to write about anything else, foolish to me, foolish to the readers.
Sitting in the faint glow of a computer screen, all alone in my narrow office, I flash from time to time on a coffee cup, a kitchen table, and a newspaper folded back to what I have written. The face of the reader is never really clear. Another ubiquitous question is whom I am writing for, and I often answer that given the size and scope of the Times circulation, and given the number of other papers that carry my column, if I tried to imagine the readership in my mind I’d go half mad. The truth is, the reader I write for is myself, which is the act of arrogance that powers the work of most columnists.
But whether I’m picturing myself hoisting that coffee cup, or seeing some faceless Everyreader instead, it is clear that there are days when there is only one story in the world, one thing that everyone is talking about, one topic that must be covered, about which readers, turning to the Op-Ed page, are saying, “Let’s see what they think about that.”
Perhaps no story in my first years as an Op-Ed columnist so clearly demanded that kind of attention as the one that emerged when Anita Hill, a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law School, temporarily derailed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court—and turned the national agenda on its axis—by saying the nominee had sexually harassed her when she worked as his assistant. It is the only subject about which I have written four columns in a row without ever thinking I might be boring the reader. Whether you believed Professor Hill’s story or not—and I did—and whether Clarence Thomas was confirmed or not—and, of course, he was—in the short but seemingly endless span of two weeks during which the story broke, the hearings were scheduled, the testimony from both sides was given, and the vote taken, there was simply no other story to be told.
When the details of Ms. Hill’s allegations first began to emerge, I was not in my office, with easy access to wire stories and files, but in Albany on a reporting trip, with a full schedule of appointments and a column idea all ready for Wednesday. But I went to a dinner, and everyone said, “What are you going to write about Anita Hill?” Not: Are you? Not: Will you? To them, it was a done deal, the only thing on their minds. And that meant it must be the thing on my mind, too. That’s how you know, whether you hear it from people at dinner, hear it discussed on the street, or hear it in your mind’s ear.
Sometimes we do write columns that keep, but inevitably events like these intrude. Or the column begins to feel a little canned. Sometimes there are columns that can be cosseted into shape over days. But events like these unfold quickly, and luckily deadline work is second nature to most of us, even when we are analyzing the news instead of covering it.
(I cling to the rigors of deadline work when I look up and see one of my columns on the Gulf War tacked to my bulletin board. It was written just as the conflict drew to its triumphant close, and predicts confidently that George Bush will be reelected in 1992. It hangs there to remind me of the sin of hubris.)
And columns that must be written quickly as events unfold are often the easiest to produce. The Anita Hill columns were so deeply felt that by the time I actually sat down at the computer they were half written in my head. When I am deeply aggrieved I can never type fast enough.
How do I come up with column ideas? The same way you do, really, except that it is my job to do something with them. When you notice more people sleeping in the subways, you may shake your head and get on the train; I may do the same and then write about the worsening economy, or a street sweep in the bus stations, or the American anomie about pain and suffering. When your children learn to read, you may write it down in a baby book or file it away in your memory bank; I may do the same and then write a paean to Maurice Sendak, or a memoir about growing up a bookworm.
When Anita Hill spoke, all of us listened. And then some of us wrote. It really is as simple as that. Twice a week, week after week. Thank God for the news. I’ve felt that way my whole life, ever since I threw in my lot with the newspaper business. But never with more gratitude than now.
JUSTICE FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
September 11, 1991
Picture a columnist appearing before an audience of readers. Someone asks a question about an issue—capital punishment, say, or abortion, or busing. And the columnist replies, “It would be improper for me to discuss that because I plan to write about it in the future.”
Now, there’s a considerable difference between columnists and justices of the Supreme Court, the greatest being that the latter are infinitely more important, despite what the former sometimes seem to believe.
The similarity is that the trade-secret response for either is insulting to the audience. Yesterday Senator Joseph Biden noted that Clarence Thomas would, if confirmed, serve on the Court well into the twenty-first century, and so it seems a good time to establish a twenty-first-century agenda for confirmation hearings. And that is what the American people should know and the Judiciary Committee should try to uncover: how a nominee thinks, how his mind works.
Clarence Thomas’s biography has become the linchpin of his appointment to the Court—his impoverished childhood, his rise from humble beginnings. We know the color of his skin; now it is time for the content of his character and the caliber of his mind. We need to know not necessarily his intellectual and judicial destinations but the roads he will travel to arrive at them.
More than his personal opinion on abortion, I want to know what he thinks of the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. I hope the committee will continue to ask about that decision, about what he sees as its shortcomings and its strengths. I would like to know his thinking on privacy rights and the right to reproductive freedom.
I hope there will be many questions about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation decision that Judge Thomas has criticized in the past. I hope there will be many questions about his philosophy regarding sex and age discrimination, about affirmative action
and the rights of the accused.
I hope he will be urged to speak publicly about the Constitution, about whether it should be interpreted narrowly or broadly, about how he would assess the work of Thurgood Marshall, about his judicial role models.
In a 1987 speech Judge Thomas cited “natural law” as the bedrock of the American political tradition, adding, “The thesis of natural law is that human nature provides the key to how men ought to live their lives.” Yesterday Senator Biden said that natural law was the single most important issue before the committee. I hope someone will try to discover how Judge Thomas squares his belief in natural law with its historical use as a tool of discrimination, about whether natural law is just another name for personal or religious beliefs and what role such beliefs should properly play in the decisions of the Supreme Court.
The next justice of that Court should be not just competent but gifted. Judge Thomas does not have the judicial track record to make that manifest, and so the Judiciary Committee must do so now. It will not be done by pretending that the life of his mind is classified information. That attitude was concocted to protect not the stature of the Court but the nominee, who in giving a definite answer might give one that committee members would dislike.
One refrain is that nominations to the High Court are not and should not be political. That is a preposterous notion in light of the president’s determination to nominate a conservative no matter how distinguished the liberal pool. But it also ignores the fact that politics is just another word for a way of looking at the world, and that a way of looking at our world is something we want to know about any high official whose decisions will change our lives.
The notion that nominees to the Court should not talk about matters of law assumes that what Justice Souter, at his own confirmation hearings, called “the promise of impartiality” is an absolute, and that judges come to us with a tabula rasa. The truth is that judges bring their past, their philosophy, and their political orientation to the bench. Sometimes they make decisions because of them, and sometimes in spite of them. That is their job.
The job of the Judiciary Committee, acting on our behalf, is to find out everything it can about those things, to labor mightily to reveal the mind within the man, for now and for the century ahead.
THE BLANK SLATE
September 14, 1991
Orrin Hatch seemed peevish. The Republican senator from Utah had determined that members of the Judiciary Committee had asked Clarence Thomas twice as many questions about abortion as they had asked David Souter a year ago. “You’d think from listening to what’s going on here that that’s the only issue the Supreme Court has to decide,” he said.
Right on both counts: Judge Thomas has been questioned more closely than Justice Souter on Roe v. Wade, and there are other important issues before the Court in the terms to come. It was the senator’s affect that was wrong, the way in which he seemed to suggest that the issue of abortion was a pesky fly buzzing around the room, an annoyance that should be either ignored or eliminated.
There are many issues the Supreme Court will take up come October, but none other has thrown an entire American city into turmoil this summer. None other has resulted in demonstrations and mass arrests in communities across the country. None other addresses the bodily integrity of half our citizenry. None other has become as controversial and as important as this one has. Whether Senator Hatch wants to slap it down or not, it is not going to fade away.
Watching the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas has been a sobering, sometimes saddening, occasionally illuminating exercise. A year ago Justice Souter was a cipher trying to take on intellectual flesh. Judge Thomas has been exactly the opposite—an opinionated individual with a rich and contradictory past and paper trail trying to present himself as a blank slate. “Stripped down like a runner,” in his own words.
The controversial writings and pronouncements on affirmative action, natural law, discrimination—most, he suggests now, were misinterpreted, oversimplified, taken out of context. In the weeks leading up to the hearings we heard often of the strong-minded black conservative who disdained quotas and criticized his own sister for dependence on a welfare check. That man has been conspicuously missing, although from time to time behind the oh-so-intense eyes I suspect the Clarence Thomas with flammable opinions is yearning to burst loose. Then I see him sharing a few laughs with Strom Thurmond and think I am imagining things.
Nowhere has the blank slate been more unsatisfactory and unconvincing than it has been on the issue of abortion, which is, for some of us, the issue of our lives. It was not only that Judge Thomas repeatedly said he could not discuss the matter and maintain his impartiality, although he was strangely able to discuss other issues that will likely come before the Court. When he was asked to recount discussions he might have had in law school on the subject, he replied, “I cannot remember personally engaging in those discussions,” and perhaps there were even people who believed him. He also thought for a long time when he was asked whether the fetus has constitutional status as a person. “I cannot think of any cases that have held that,” he finally replied.
Quite the contrary. The operative sentence is: “The word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.” The case is Roe v. Wade.
There is occasionally a man at that table who might be capable of addressing this issue with humanity. He is the man who has presented such a problem for liberals in recent weeks, a man who knows from experience what discrimination and disfranchisement are all about. He is the man who said on Thursday that from the window of his courthouse he could look out and see the buses transporting criminal defendants, adding, “I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God, there go I.”
I wish I had any confidence that he considered those of us who feel that way when we see a group of desperate women in a clinic waiting room. To watch as one of the most important issues of our times, an issue that intimately affects the lives of millions of women, is reduced to a political fandango in some cynical means-ends construct and a peevish annoyance for a senator who will never have to think twice about who holds jurisdiction over the territory beneath his skin is worse than dispiriting. It’s insulting. A man in robes who is capable of looking at men in handcuffs and seeing himself ought to recognize that.
LISTEN TO US
October 9, 1991
Listen to us.
You will notice there is no “please” in that sentence. It is difficult to be polite, watching the white men of the United States Senate and realizing that their first response when confronted with a serious allegation of sexual harassment against a man nominated to the High Court was to rush to judgment. It is difficult to be polite, knowing they were more concerned about how this looked for them, for their party, their procedures, and their political prospects than in discovering what really happened.
The gender divide has opened and swallowed politeness like a great hungry whale. Why? Why? Why? they asked. Why did Anita Hill, now a tenured law professor at the University of Oklahoma, not bring charges against Clarence Thomas when, she contends, he sexually harassed her a decade ago? Why did she stay on the job although, she says, he insisted on discussing with her the details of pornographic movies? Why was she hesitant about confiding in the Judiciary Committee?
The women I know have had no difficulty imagining possible answers. Perhaps she thought no one would believe her, he being powerful and she not. If she was indeed humiliated by her boss in the seamy way she describes, regaled with recountings of bestiality and rape when she was fresh out of law school and new to the world of work, perhaps she decided it was best buried in her memory. Perhaps she thought the world would never believe that the man charged with enforcing sexual harassment laws as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would do such a thing.
From time to time I am told of the oppression of the white male, of how the movements to free minorities from prejudice have resulted in
bias against the majority. Watching Judge Thomas’s confirmation hearings, I wondered how any sane person could give this credence. The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill. The need for more women in elective office was vivid every time the cameras panned that line of knotted ties.
“They just don’t get it,” we said, as we’ve said so many times before, about slurs, about condescension, about rape cases.
Judge Thomas has floated on the unassailable raft of his background—impoverished boyhood to Yale Law to public position, a rise that was impossible to diminish. Professor Hill had the same climb, with the added weight of gender. It seems obvious that she has been caught between the damage she feared these charges might do to her hard-won stature and the morality of watching in silence the elevation of a man she believes is capable of harassing women.
One of the most difficult things about bringing sexual harassment charges is that it is usually one woman against the corporate power structure, against not only the boss who says she’s imagining things but also a bulwark of male authority that surrounds him. Davids against the Goliaths. Anita Hill, poised and dignified, spoke up Monday and found herself aligned against the most powerful men in America, including the president. Who among us would have had the guts to pick up her slingshot?
Listen to us. If the Senate had trivialized the allegations of this woman by moving ahead without painstaking investigation, it would have sent a message: that no matter what we accomplish, we are still seen as oversensitive schoolgirls or duplicitous scorned women. Obviously it would have been better if Professor Hill had stepped forward earlier, content to be reviled and be suspect in the public eye.
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