The Booking Of Anita

By Richard Lacayo

TITLE: THE REAL ANITA HILL

AUTHOR: DAVID BROCK

PUBLISHER: FREE PRESS; 438 PAGES; $24.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: At times sharply effective against Hill, there's still soft and treacherous footing here.

EVERY ERA HAS ITS ARCHETYPAL confrontation. A previous generation had the struggle between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss about whether Hiss was a Soviet spy. The baby boomers' version is the titanic struggle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. In both cases contesting claims became enmeshed in larger issues that haunted the country -- the cold war then, the war between the sexes now. And, as in the Chambers-Hiss case, the respective defenders of Hill and Thomas have never rested.

How else to explain the surprising success of The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story, which maintains that Hill's claims of sexual harassment were just an escalating series of brazen falsehoods? Published in April, the book gradually garnered positive reviews, is now into its sixth printing and is lodged in third place on the New York Times best-seller list. Brock, who works ; for the conservative magazine American Spectator, depicts Hill as a left-wing feminist, a woman of "radical views and inflamed sensitivities," who is also a working-world bumbler pushed by affirmative action into jobs she was unequipped to handle. Brock has a bad habit of raising a conjecture on one page only to restate it as a fact on the next. But his close examination of FBI records, the sworn testimony of Hill's witnesses and his interviews with people who knew (and mostly disliked) Hill, while they may be one-sided, turn up enough gaps and question marks to ensure that the other side will be busy for some time smoothing the seams in Hill's story.

Brock picks apart the testimony of Susan Hoerchner, a law-school friend of Hill's who remained in close touch when the two lived in Washington in the early 1980s. Hoerchner became one of Hill's corroborating witnesses when she told the fbi that in a phone call in the spring of 1981 Hill had complained to her of being harassed by her supervisor. Brock notes with pleasure that Hill did not start work with Thomas at the Department of Education until September 1981, so she could not have complained about Thomas in the spring.

Hoerchner maintains that she told FBI agents who had interviewed her earlier that her attempt to put a precise date on the conversation was a "wild guess" and that she offered it only when repeatedly pressed by them to be more specific. Brock makes much of the fact that in September, when Hill started work with Thomas, Hoerchner moved to California, where she is now a workers' compensation judge. By her own testimony she "lost touch" with Hill. "If you look at how she's remembering the date, I think it's as plain as day that the call came prior to September 1981," Brock told TIME. For her part, Hoerchner insists that she had not completed her move to California until nearly the end of 1981, and that she and Hill stayed in contact even beyond that date. "I did not lose touch with her until much, much later," Hoerchner told TIME, "after she left the EEOC."

In later chapters, Brock's portrait of Hill becomes increasingly diabolic. Relying frequently on anonymous sources, he describes her at Oklahoma State University as obsessed by racial and gender grievances. He repeats the claim by two of Hill's former students that she returned papers to them in which they found her pubic hair sprinkled among the pages. The story is useful for demonizing Hill and fun for Brock to tell in his main text. Perhaps too much fun. Only in a footnote buried in the back does he acknowledge that the whole tale may have been a racist joke about the only black woman on the faculty.