to see a draft. McGahn never insisted that he share it, choosing to trust him.
Ford may have been the one who insisted on unlimited time for opening statements, but it was Kavanaugh who took advantage of that opportunity, with a statement that stretched for nearly forty-five minutes. He knew that it would be his one opportunity to make his case directly to the American people, and he would take all the time he needed.
By late Wednesday evening he had a draft he could practice delivering. Perhaps counterintuitively, rehearsal can be more important for an emotional speech than for a dry one. The first few times he practiced, it was almost impossible to get through it without breaking down. But for all its emotion, his remarks were essentially a presentation of the evidence for and against the allegations. This was a lawyer’s speech. By eleven o’clock, he had it where he wanted it, and he went home to rest.
He spent the next morning making edits and practicing before going to Capitol Hill with Ashley shortly before noon. They waited for two hours in a holding room in Dirksen furnished with a table, a couch, a few chairs, and a TV tuned to the Golf Channel coverage of the Ryder Cup. They were not watching Ford’s testimony and had little to do while they waited, so Kavanaugh read his opening remarks to his wife. She told him they were good.
The one change they made that day was adding a story about their daughter Liza’s saying that they should pray for the accuser, which Ashley had told him that morning. He added a note with a black Sharpie permanent marker, his editing tool of choice. Having learned from practice that some parts of the speech would be hard to make it through, he had indicated with his Sharpie where to stop to breathe.
Kavanaugh had been deluged with advice until the end. His Bush friends, by and large, told him to not to show too much emotion. But he received calls from a few senators encouraging him to show his righteous indignation. They intimated that they found him too passive in the interview with MacCallum. There he had followed the advice of some friends to emphasize that he was a father and husband—as a “guilty politician would do,” one of his aides said dismissively.
The news Kavanaugh received was mostly filtered through McGahn, who kept him positive but realistic, and Ashley. He knew from them that Avenatti’s accusations were striking most people as ridiculous. Though the allegations angered him, they gave him confidence going into the hearing. He had felt the attacks were crazy since the first allegation, but now he knew that the public was starting to see it that way as well.
There were very few people who could understand what Kavanaugh was going through, and they were sitting on the Court. For some of the justices, watching the day’s proceedings, or even the first set of hearings, was too painful, even if their own confirmations had been easier.
The drama of this day reminded everyone of Clarence Thomas’s reopened hearings in 1991.2 His nomination had barely made it out of the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee on a tie vote. Before it could come to a vote on the floor, Anita Hill’s allegations, which had been turned over to the FBI and were supposed to be evaluated by the committee confidentially, were disclosed to the press, putting Thomas in the position of having to prove a negative. A man who had played by the rules was now sabotaged by people who were trafficking in lies, leaks, and rumors. Thomas meditated on the words of the apostle Paul—the same words, it turned out, that Kavanaugh had read at Mass the day before his nomination: “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”3
As Ashley Kavanaugh would do two and a half decades later, Thomas offered a prayer of surrender to the will of God: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”4 He focused on the second part of that prayer, knowing it was the most difficult.
As in Kavanaugh’s case, Thomas’s hearings were reopened because it had become clear that the votes were not there without a public airing of the accusation. He had spent years reviewing precisely the type of employment discrimination and harassment allegations that Hill was