Clarence Thomas: The Justice Nobody Knows

Supreme Court Justice Gives First Television Interview To 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft

(CBS)  Thomas has denied the allegations, saying, "It didn’t happen."

"If someone makes a broad allegation against you what would you do?" he asks.

"Ask them to prove it I guess," Kroft replies.

"Yeah," Thomas agrees.

Asked if the Anita Hill that testified was the same Anita Hill he knew at the EEOC, Thomas says, "She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That's not the person I knew. "

"Who’s the person you knew?" Kroft asks.

"Well, I think she could defend herself. Let's just put it that way. And she did not take slights very kindly. And anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly," Thomas says.

"Didn't take ten years?" Kroft asks.

"It didn't take ten minutes," Thomas says.

In the book, he remembers her as an average employee whose behavior could sometimes be irritating, rude, and unprofessional, which he attributed to her youth. He was asked to write a number of recommendations for her and helped advance her career, and speculates that she was swept up in events and succumbed to a combination of ego, ambition and immaturity.

When it came time for him to publicly respond to Hill's allegations, Thomas turned the tables on his interrogators, and for all intents and purposes ended the debate.

"This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace," he said during the hearing. "It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

"Why did you use that language? Why a high tech lynching?" Kroft asks.

"If someone just wantonly tries to destroy you, if somebody comes in and drags you out of your house and beats the hell out of you. What is it?" the justice replies.

"What do you want people to think about these allegations? What is important…," Kroft asks.

"I think most well-meaning people understand it for what it was. It was a weapon to destroy me, clear and simple," Thomas says.

Thomas says the hearings brought him back to his Catholic faith and he couldn’t have gotten through them without the support of his wife Virginia.

Virginia Thomas says the process was "the hardest thing I've ever gone through."

Asked if she ever doubted him, Virginia Thomas tells Kroft, "No. We talked honestly about what was happening in his life back then. But I didn't doubt him, no."

"Were you angry?" Kroft asks.

"Oh, yeah. I'd say I was angry. I was angry. I mean, you feel all the emotions when you're falsely accused," she replies.

Thomas was eventually confirmed, but he took no personal joy in the outcome. "The process harmed her. It harmed me, and we see sort of the precedence of this kinda thing begin to even harm people like President Clinton. Things are out of control," he explains.

"After this whole horrible experience, you won," Kroft says.

"Won what?" Thomas asks. "What was the game? There was no game, Steve. This wasn't about winning anything, this wasn't a football game. This was about our country. This was about a process. This was about our courts. This was about our Constitution. Who won?"

"Well, I mean, you know it's about a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States," Kroft says.

"So what?" Thomas asks.

"They don’t come open, they come open that…," Kroft says.

"That’s not a holy grail for me Steve," Thomas says.

Was it worth it in the end?

"I think it was always worth it to stand on principle. No matter what the ultimate goal is. Wrong is wrong even if it was over a penny," Thomas says.

Thomas believes the real issue being fought over during his confirmation was all but unspoken. "The issue was abortion. That's the issue today," Thomas says. "That was the elephant in the room."

"In what sense?" Kroft asks.

"That was it. That's the issue. That is the issue that people apparently are so upset about. That you determine the composition of your Supreme Court and your entire federal judiciary, it seems now," Thomas says.

"Your opponents were afraid that you might at some point rule against or help overturn Roe V. Wade?" Kroft asks.

"I have no idea what they thought. But they knew one thing. They weren't in charge of me. So, I wasn't gonna do their bidding," Thomas says.

Thomas believes the issue of abortion is not addressed in the Constitution and should be left to the states to decide. If that were to become the majority opinion on the court, abortion could be outlawed in 40 percent of the country.

"One of the most surprising things in the book, in it, you say, 'Like most Americans, I had mixed emotions about abortion. I wasn't comfortable telling others what to do in that difficult circumstance,'" Kroft remarks.

"There are tough decisions we have to make in life. And of course, we all feel about that. People think that because you might agree or disagree with them on certain things, that you don't have that concern about people who are left with tough choices. You do have that concern. But none of that had anything to do with what's in the Constitution. The point is simply this. The Constitution is what matters. Not my personal views, whatever they may be. And I don't go around expressing them on that issue," Thomas says.