SENATE ASSASSINS TARGET A FINE MAN; WHERE IS OUR PRESIDENT?

Do you need perspective on what's going on in the Senate with the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court? On Tuesday afternoon, the distinguished senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts rose to his feet solemnly and with a straight face. He spoke these words:

"If members of the Senate ignore Professor Hill's serious charges, if the Senate votes on this nomination without making a serious attempt to resolve this issue, the Senate will bring dishonor on this great body. ... If Professor Hill's allegations are true, Judge Thomas denied Professor Thomas her right to work free from sexual harassment."

This, then is what we've come to. The United States Senate is now a place where the last surviving Kennedy brother gets to hold forth, unchallenged, on The Need to Respect The Rights of All Women, Everywhere, to Decent Treatment.

Four years ago, Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz opened his newspaper column with the observation that, "There's a war going on in this country, and only one side is fighting." He referred, of course, to a then-unprecedented assault raging on Capitol Hill against the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. At approximately the same time I weighed in with an observation thought by many, no doubt, to be too strong at the time. My words, back in the fall of 1987, were these:

"The Goebbels-like campaign against Judge Bork is without equal in American history. It features intentional distortions, shrill personal attacks, blatant intellectual dishonesty, witness intimidation, demagoguery, and lies. All this is well-received in the United States Senate, once known as the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, and now peppered with and egged on by men of the demonstrated character of Senators Biden, Kennedy and Metzenbaum."

But even a conservative who watched the Bork lynching with white-knuckle fury could not have forecast this week's carefully planned, hurry-up, eleventh-hour assassination of Clarence Thomas. (Full-page advertisements have been taken out in alternative newspapers in some cities, saying, in effect: Call or come see us if you have any dirt on Clarence Thomas).

What follows is a list of telephone messages for Judge Clarence Thomas that he says record calls to him at his office made by Anita Hill. They are culled from telephone logs Thomas says his secretary kept when he headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Missouri Senator John Danforth released the phone logs Tuesday afternoon.

Jan. 31, 1984, 11:50 a.m.: "Just called to say hello. Sorry she didn't get to see you this week."

May 9, 1984, 11:40 a.m.: "Pls. call."

August 29, 1984, 3:59 p.m.: "Needs your advice on getting research grants."

August 30, 1984, 11:55 a.m.: "Returned your call (between 1 & 4)."

Jan. 3, 1985, 3:40 p.m.: "Pls. call tonight." On this message Hill leaves the phone number for the Embassy Row Hotel in Washington and a room number.

Feb. 26, 1985, 5:50 p.m.: "Pls. call."

March 4, 1985, 11:15 p.m.: "Pls. call re: research project."

July 5, 1985, 1:30 p.m.: "Pls. call."

October 8, 1986, 12:25 p.m.: "Pls. call."

August 4, 1987, 4 p.m.: "In town 'til 8/15 ... wanted to congratulate on marriage."

November 1, 1990, 11:40 p.m.: "Re speaking engagement at University of Oklahoma School of Law."

Anita Hill now says these telephone logs are "garbage." Perhaps. But here we have checkable, ascertainable circumstances, which are either facts or not, and which could take this matter beyond the fruitless exercise of his-word-against-hers, yes-you-did-no-I-didn't. Credit card records and the registry of the Embassy Row Hotel can be checked to determine whether Miss Hill was, indeed, staying there during the first week of January, 1985. If so, how could Thomas have made this up?

Attesting to Thomas's character have been many distinguished people, ranging from Sen. Danforth, to Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell, to St. Louis attorney and former NAACP president Margaret Bush Wilson, to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the flagship civil rights organization founded by the late Rev. Martin Luther King, to name just a few.

And attesting to Thomas's dis honor is one aggrieved and previously anonymous ex-employee, who followed him from agency to agency after the alleged "harassment"; who admits she has no witnesses; who makes no allegation that Thomas even touched her; and who specifically disavowed the term "sexual harassment" in her Monday press conference. The Washington Times was left wondering yesterday what sort of "sexual harassment beams" Judge Thomas must have emitted.

We know that after sitting silently during two previous Senate confirmation hearings in the years since she worked for Judge Thomas, Miss Hill was literally recruited by James Brudney. Brudney is Hill's former law school classmate, who now works as a Labor Committee staffer for the implacably anti-Thomas Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.

Everyone who regards this as a fair procedure, and who'd feel comfortable submitting yourself for public service to the toxic waste dump that the modern United States Senate has become please stand up. Offer yourself for public service, and watch the slime ooze out from your enemies, solicited, leaked and promoted by people who will literally stop at nothing to keep a distinguished and principled black conservative from breaking free of the Liberal Plantation.

The Senators have sunk to a new low, unimagined even for them. And a gentleman of impeccable pedigree, name of George Herbert Walker Bush, had better stop with the pieties about how he's "satisfied with the (Senate) process" (his statement Wednesday afternoon). Our gentlemanly President had better wake up, smell the coffee, and start fighting back when his nominees come under sustained assault. These attacks after all, are really attacks on him, his people, and on everything he's trying to accomplish.