making, and he knew that her unsubstantiated and contradicted charges would have been thrown out of court immediately. But the court of public opinion was another matter. “The mob was howling, and it wouldn’t be satisfied until it had tasted my blood,” Thomas would later reflect.5
Choosing to testify before Hill, Thomas delivered a statement—seen beforehand only by his wife and his longtime friend and ally Senator John Danforth—in which he denied Hill’s allegations and spoke about the pain that the ordeal of intentionally burdensome document production, intrusive reporters digging for dirt in his own garage, and rumor-mongering had caused him and his family. “This is not American; this is Kafkaesque. It has got to stop. It must stop for the benefit of future nominees and our country. Enough is enough.” He didn’t intend to testify further after this. “There is nothing this committee, this body, or this country can do to give me my good name back. Nothing. I will not provide the rope for my own lynching or for further humiliation.”6
The powerful statement appeared to have taken the room by surprise, and Thomas left to allow Hill to testify. After his wife, Virginia, relayed to him the specific charges Hill was making against him before the committee, Thomas felt relieved. He had been racking his brain for days to figure out what offhand comment she had misunderstood, but now he knew her charges were unrelated to anything he had actually done.
Although Thomas had not planned on returning to the committee to respond to Hill’s charges, Danforth and Senator Orrin Hatch convinced him that the media would have a field day with her story if it was left uncontested. In Danforth’s office he lay down to think, settling on one phrase he felt crystallized his thoughts about the process. He wrote “HIGH-TECH LYNCHING” on the legal pad on which Danforth had listed suggested talking points. Thomas reflected on the parallels between his situation and the storyline of To Kill a Mockingbird, which dealt with both racial prejudices and a mob bent on short-circuiting the due process of law. That was the same book Kavanaugh had cited in his first round of hearings as teaching him not to prejudge others.
Thomas returned to the hearing room and delivered a speech that would change the momentum of the confirmation process. He began by again “unequivocally” denying “each and every single allegation against me today.”7 Then he turned to the process, which he called a travesty. “This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee. It was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. . . . This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment.” He continued, “This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”8
Justice Thomas described the moment in his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son: “When I was done, my words seemed to hang in the air of the Caucus Room like the smoke from a bomb that had just exploded.”9 And their effect was truly explosive. By the end of his testimony, polls showed that more than twice as many Americans believed Thomas as believed Hill. And an overwhelming majority thought Thomas should be confirmed.10
Now it was Kavanaugh’s turn. The war room was set up in the vice president’s suite in the Dirksen Building as it had been in the first set of hearings, but there was nothing much for people to do. Clever tweets and talking points were not going to save this nomination. A smaller number of aides and officials watched Ford’s testimony in the offices of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina and relayed necessary information to Kavanaugh. When Ford had finished her testimony, a few aides came and offered advice to the judge, one suggesting that he meekly talk about Ford’s courage in telling