All Things Reconsidered
Nina Totenberg, ten years later.

By Andrew Peyton Thomas, attorney and author of Clarence Thomas: A Biography, a main selection of the Conservative Book Club.
November 10-11, 2001

ne of the added dividends of writing a biography of Clarence Thomas was the prospect of interviewing Nina Totenberg. Totenberg became famous in October 1991 for obtaining an illicit copy of Anita Hill's written statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee (compliments of Senator Howard Metzenbaum and his staff) in which she alleged sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas. After obtaining the document, she immediately pressured Hill into granting her first interview about these accusations. Many conservatives remember Totenberg also for providing a lesson in press bias during the confirmation hearings — namely, her profanity-laced tirade against Senator Alan Simpson outside the ABC studios following a contentious episode of Nightline. Her actions during the hearings were part of a shrewd career move that made Totenberg an important actor in a drama that became part of American history.

I began my quest to interview Totenberg with a telephone call. Surprisingly, the receptionist put me right through to her telephone line, which she answered. When I identified myself and told her I wished to interview her for my biography of Clarence Thomas, she was momentarily silent. A sense of urgency then overtook her voice, as she informed me she was "crashing on deadline" and could not talk. This seemed odd, as she was no longer a print journalist trying to assemble the next day's news, but I took her at her word. Before she could shoo me off the phone, I asked her when I should call back. "Any time after five," she replied.

At 5:30 p.m. EST, I called back and asked if this was a more convenient time to talk. "Not really," she said in a plaintive tone of voice. She then offered a second battery of excuses for demurring. "I don't normally do these kinds of interviews," she said. "I don't think reporters should be in the position of critiquing Supreme Court justices. They have a superior intellect to mine, frankly."

This explanation was disingenuous for a number of reasons. Was it not Totenberg's very job to critique Supreme Court justices for National Public Radio? Moreover, she had not been as reticent about critiquing justices in the past, including Thomas himself. In 1992, for example, she told an audience at Stanford that Thomas "may yet be ruined" by Hill's allegations. She added, "Justice Thomas will certainly be scrutinized in a very uncomfortable way." (This very statement was, of course, ipso facto proof of the point she was making.) Thomas's "superior intellect" obviously had not deterred such analysis in the past.

Totenberg then asked me to send her some information so that she could "check out my references." She asked about my professional background, what articles I had written, who my publisher was — an exercise that was obviously an ideological frisk. I volunteered to send her a bio and some articles I had written. I ultimately mailed her my Weekly Standard article on Justice Thomas, which led to the biography, and a piece that displayed my ideological credentials pretty clearly — a Wall Street Journal article defending former Green Bay Packer Reggie White's broadside against the gay-rights movement.

I received an e-mail from Totenberg about a week later stating she had received my correspondence. She said she was going to be traveling extensively over the next month, and asked if I could send her questions in writing. Stifling the urge to ask where in the world telephone technology had not reached, I sent her a list of twelve questions, which included the following:

How would you describe yourself in terms of your political views — i.e., liberal, conservative, or some other designation — at the time of the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings in 1991? Why?

What was your opinion at that time of Roe v. Wade? Affirmative action?

Based on your experience, please estimate what percentage of the journalists covering the Thomas confirmation hearings supported Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.

How did you obtain a copy of Ms. Hill's written statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee? Who provided this to you?

Please describe in detail your conversation(s) with Senator Alan Simpson on or about October 7, 1991, after your appearance on Nightline.

What is your response to allegations that you engaged in plagiarism while working for the National Observer? What were the circumstances of your departure from the National Observer? [Totenberg had left the National Observer amid allegations she had plagiarized from an article in the Washington Post.]

A testy letter from Totenberg was not slow in coming. She began by stating she was "frankly somewhat surprised at the tenor of your queries, since in our phone conversation you indicated that you wanted to interview me about Justice Thomas and his tenure on the Court. You seem in your letter to have an agenda that focuses instead on me . . . ."

Her account of our conversation was inaccurate. I had asked only if I could interview her for my biography of Justice Thomas. I had no need to interview her about Thomas's tenure on the Court, as I felt reasonably competent to read the case law myself.

She declined to answer most of my questions. The responses she did give were illuminating:

As you can see by going to the NPR web page, I have won many awards for my legal coverage, and I certainly hope that my private views are not reflected in my reports about Justice Thomas or any other subject. Other than to say that I am a registered Independent, who has voted for candidates from both parties, I make it a practice not to discuss my personal politics.

As for Anita Hill, Totenberg described her fulsomely as a "credible witness whose bona fides checked out upon examination; her previous employers all spoke highly of her; she had some corroborative evidence which she allowed me to investigate after I interviewed her; and the Senate Judiciary Committee had treated her in a rather odd manner."

Hill, of course, was anything but a "credible witness." A simple review of the transcripts from the hearings (Totenberg wrote a preface to a privately published reprint of the transcripts) reveals that Arlen Specter, during cross-examination, utterly demolished Hill — so thoroughly, in fact, that she would never again submit to such open-ended questioning. Hill's previous employers "all" did not speak highly of her — starting with her first law firm and including her most famous employer of all, Clarence Thomas. Her corroborative evidence was tenuous at best. The Judiciary Committee treated her far better than it did Thomas.

I wrote Totenberg a follow-up letter to correct the record about why I had requested an interview. She did not respond.

There are at least two morals to this story. First, that is much more fun to ask questions than to answer them. And second, that Anita Hill found the perfect partner for her historic defamation of Clarence Thomas in a disingenuous journalist at NPR who was just as devoted to situational ethics.