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F E A T U R E

Reckless genius
By Galway Kinnell
A pulitzer prize-winning poet pays ribute to the belle of Amherst
(11/03/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Blues Up and Down
By Tom Piazza
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Blue: The Murder of Jazz
By Eric Nisenson
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The Art of the Comeback
By Donald Trump
Nonfiction
(10/30/97)

Memoirs of a Geisha
By Arthur Golden
Nonfiction
(10/29/97)

The Party
By Sally Quinn
Nonfiction
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The End of the Novel of Love
By Vivian Gornick
Nonfiction
(10/27/97)

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374 PAGES

BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | Toward the end of her memoir, "Speaking Truth to Power," Anita Hill writes of her reluctance to campaign for sympathetic politicians. "I am not a rousing speaker. I am slow, methodical, and lack charisma." It's an accurate description of her prose as well. While some of the personal material in "Speaking Truth to Power" is inherently compelling, the wonkish asides on sexual harassment law and congressional procedures are as dry and plodding as a public policy textbook.

Ironically, Hill's uptight style helps make her case -- it's easy to see how someone so reserved could be devastated by sexual comments that might not faze a more freewheeling type. During the hearings, Clarence Thomas' supporters tried to paint Hill as a sexually voracious, spurned woman, but such a woman could never have written this utterly sexless book. She describes the shame of relating Thomas' remark, "Who put a pubic hair on my Coke?" to the congressional committee: "At once, I was twenty-five years old again," she writes. "By that time I had had several jobs and worked with many different people, but never before had anyone ever uttered such an absurdly vulgar and juvenile comment to me. Disgusted and shocked, I could only shake my head and leave the office. I heard him laughing as he closed the door."

The book's greatest contribution is to help those of us who always instinctively believed Hill to understand why she waited 10 years to bring her charges against Thomas and why she called him a dozen times during those years. She's absolutely convincing, explaining that it didn't occur to her -- then a 25-year old neophyte -- to confront Thomas (who was, after all, in charge of the agency that dealt with sexual harassment). It is equally clear why, with her quiet passion for the law, she told congressional investigators about the harassment as soon as they asked. Eventually, Hill took a teaching job at Oral Roberts law school, which lacked both accreditation and prestige, just to get away from Thomas. But given the hostile climate she found herself in at that conservative university, it's no wonder she was unwilling to sever her few professional connections, even those to someone like Thomas. I imagine most women reading "Speaking Truth to Power" will remember similar instances -- a letter of recommendation from a lecherous teacher, a reference from a sexist ex-boss.

While at the start of the book Hill's primness is grating, her tone eventually lends poignancy to her desperate attempts to retain her dignity during the escalating sexual humiliations of the hearing and its aftermath: "I will not count the number of times, even before the hearing, that I have been threatened with sodomy, rape, assault and other forms of sexual and nonsexual violence." A student columnist called her "dirty, depraved, schizophrenic and grossly sexual, a sheer idiot or a sore liar," and her treatment at the hands of Congress was only a few degrees more civilized. Sen. Alan Simpson said in a veiled threat, "Anita Hill will be sucked right into the -- the very thing she wanted to avoid most. She will be injured and destroyed and belittled and hounded and harassed."

Of course, the reader already knows what's in store for Hill. The chapters when congressional investigators first contact her and her story begins to circulate have a horror-film dimension, as we see her step, naive and afraid, into a political, sexual and racial nightmare. These chapters are the most powerful because they relate the part of the story only Hill can tell. It's the story of a shy 35-year-old woman, sweating under the glare of flashbulbs, terrified by a barrage of death threats, humiliated from relentless questioning about her sex life and horrified to find herself the object of so many powerful men's unbridled hatred and contempt.
SALON | Nov. 3, 1997

Michelle Goldberg is an editorial assistant at Salon.