I picked up My Grandfather’s Son by Clarence Thomas at the local library the other day. It was a quick read, and a spiritual experience to spend two days revisiting the life of a great man.
From the chapter titled Approaching the Bench
“The fourteen members of the judiciary committee seated together in a long row at the front of the room, loomed larger than life, dwarfing the small table and single chair that had been set up for me. Jamal, my mother, and my sister were seated near the front of the room. Virginia joined them, and Senator Danforth and my other advisers took seats immediately behind me. My old friend Harry Singleton stood next to a pillar, looking like a sentry. (He would stand there throughout the hearings, as though he was guarding my back.) I greeted the senators and went to my chair, drawing momentary comfort from the sight of my wife, family, and friends. Then I turned my back on them and sat down to face the unknown.
The morning was taken up by the committee members’ lengthy opening statements, more than a few of which were so blatantly hostile as to border on the comical. I endured them as I had endured the slights and slurs I had heard all my life, but I found it offensive that this particular group of people was talking about my in such terms. What gave these rich white men the right to question my commitment to racial justice? Was there no limit to their shamelessness? Not until three in the afternoon was I allowed to speak.
Vernon Jordon had suggested that I express my appreciation of the civil rights pioneers who had done so much to change America for the better, but I needed no prodding from him to do so, just as nobody had to remind me to tell the senators where I came from and what I believed: “A judge must get the decision right because when all is said and done, the little guy, the average person, the people of Pinpoint, the real people of America will be affected not only by what we as judges do, but by the way we do our jobs.”
Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech that I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said: “I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would…strike down laws restricting property rights.” That caught me off guard, and I had no recollection of making so atypical a statement, which shook me up even more. “Now it would seem to me what you were talking about,” Senator Biden went on to say, “is you find attractive the fact that they are activists and they would like to strike down existing laws that impact on restricting the use of property rights, because you know, that is what they write about.”
Since I didn’t remember making the statement in the first place, I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say in reply was that “It has been quite some time since I have Professor Macedo…But I don’t believe that in my writings I have indicated that we should have an activist Supreme Court.” It was, I knew, a weak answer.
Fortunately, though, the young lawyers who had helped prepare me for the hearings had loaded all of my speeches into a computer, and at the first break in the proceedings they looked this one up. The senator, they found, had wrenched my words out of context. I looked at the text of my speech and saw that the passage he’d read out loud had been immediately followed by two other sentences: “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.” The point I’d been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.
Throughout my life I’ve often found truth embedded in the lyrics of my favorite records. At Yale, for example, I’d listened often to “smiling faces sometimes,” a song by the Undisputed Truth that warns of the dangers of trusting the hypocrites who “pretend to be your friend” while secretly planning to do you wrong. Now I knew I’d met one of them: Senator Biden’s smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk. Instead of relaxing I’d have to keep my guard up.
Democratic senators spent the next few days pummeling me with loaded questions. Many were halfhearted retreads from my last confirmation hearing, but no sooner was the subject of abortion broached than the room heated up considerably. Patrick Leahy quizzed me aggressively about whether I’d discussed Roe with anyone. “Have you ever had discussion of Roe V. Wade other than in this room?” he asked sarcastically. “In the seventeen or eighteen years it’s been there?”
I explained that while I might have mentioned it in passing, it wasn’t a case about which I’d thought deeply or whose merits I’d had occasion to consider. It was obvious that the senator didn’t believe me. Apparently few people in Washington thought it was possible to live and breathe without debating Roe and forming a considered opinion on it. But that was what I’d done, so I didn’t give in to Senator Leahy’s bullying. All I could do was keep on telling the truth, just as I had told it to my questioners at the murder boards.
Each day I left the Caucus Room tired, tormented, and anxious, and each day Virginia and I bathed ourselves in God’s unwavering love. I knew that my team was doing all they could for me, but the long months of preparation had worn me down to a shadow of myself, and I knew that no human hand could sustain me in my time of trial. After years of rejecting God, I’d slowly eased into a state of quiet ambivalence toward Him, but that wasn’t good enough anymore: I had to go the whole way. I recalled one of Daddy’s sayings, “Hard times make monkey eat cayenne pepper,” Now, with Virginia at my side, I ate the pepper of faith—and found it sweet.
Psalm 57 showed me the way:
I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings
Until the disaster has passed…
I am in the midst of lions;
I lie among ravenous beasts—
Men whose teeth are spears and arrows,
Whose tongues are sharp swords,
They spread a net for my feet—
I was bowed down in distress.
They dug a pit in my path—
But they have fallen into it themselves.
Between sessions Mike Luttig and I went over various subjects that were proving problematic. My opponents were armed with longs lists of trick questions prepared by law professors and activists. I, on the other hand, had spent most of the preceding decade running a federal agency instead of studying two centuries worth of Supreme Court decisions, and Roe V. Wade wasn’t the only area of constitutional law about which I’d yet to think deeply.
Trying to review so many cases in the space of three months was like trying to cram for a final exam while being shoved around by an angry mob. It wasn’t that I doubted my ability to master the material. I already understood the key cases and the legal concepts behind them perfectly well.
But it’s one thing to know a precedent and another one to think it through methodically, then apply it to specific cases. Until he’s gone through that deliberative process on a case-by-case basis, an open minded judge can’t predict how he will rule in any given situation. As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn’t have one—and didn’t want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day-to-day engagement with the law isn’t worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I’d spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as It’s lived.
On the other hand, I now saw that there was no reason for me to worry about my ability to discuss such broad-brush questions with the easy fluency of a Robert Bork. Most of my opponents on the Judiciary Committee cared about only one thing: how would I rule on abortion rights?
I knew it was irresponsible for them to expect me to prejudge a complex area of law without having decided a single case on the subject, but I also knew that it had never occurred to any of them that my personal view about the morality of abortion would have nothing to do with my view of Roe v. Wade. I wasn’t that kind of judge—or that kind of person.
I had sworn to administer justice “faithfully and impartially.” To do otherwise would be to violate my oath. That meant I had no business imposing my personal views on the country. Nor did I have the slightest intention of doing so. From the start of my tenure on the court of appeals, I’d taken Larry Silberman’s advice to heart: in every case that came before me, I considered what my role was as a judge. But my enemies weren’t looking for open minded justices. All they cared about was keeping anyone off the Supreme Court who might possibley vote to reverse Roe or water it down. As far as they were concerned, my open mindedness was a disadvantage, not a qualificiation.” P. 234 – 239
Here is the Sixty Minutes Interview with Clarence Thomas (Part one)

Here is the web site that was published to round up the various reviews of the book. My favorite features were the various video stories that were published, especially Armstrong Williams party which was covered by C-Span.
Jenny Hatch
Ellis Washington also wrote about Clarence Thomas in his weekly column. Go Here to read it!

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