Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s character and integrity have come under incessant attack in the last few months, from endless articles in the press to the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the supposed need for Supreme Court ethics reform.
The Left’s attacks on Thomas aren’t new. But this most recent wave is particularly troubling. Let’s look at how it started, where I have some personal experience. It all began with an April 6 piece in ProPublica , which asserted that Thomas was a hypocrite and a grifter for claiming to be a man of simple tastes while taking luxurious trips and vacations with billionaire Harlan Crow. The hypocritical claim quoted by ProPublica was an out-of-context clip from my film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words :
You know, I don't have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. I prefer going across the rural areas. I prefer the RV parks, and I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that. I prefer being around that.
I am certainly not an expert on judicial ethics, but I know something about that clip.
Our film presents Thomas’s life from his point of view. The film is based on more than 25 hours of interviews with Thomas, during which he looked directly at the camera and told viewers his life story in his own words. Even so, we fact-checked the documentary. This claim was easily fact-checked. I have personally spoken to many who traveled on Thomas’s RV, and I’ve seen pictures from those travels to more than 40 states. Whatever else he may do during some of his vacations, he spent the bulk of most summers traveling America in his RV, usually with only his wife, Ginni Thomas, and two dogs for company.
We put this clip toward the end of our film because it sums up Clarence Thomas’s character. All the justices, and most other powerful Washington figures, go on fancy vacations occasionally. No one else that I know of spends most of their summers traveling in an RV, going all over the country, and staying in RV camps.
ProPublica, on the other hand, featured it early in the piece, where it seems weird, perverse even. Yet in the film, viewers at this point will have heard Clarence Thomas describe growing up in Pin Point, Georgia, with Gullah as his first language; experiencing dire poverty and hunger with his mother and brother in segregated Savannah, Georgia; learning discipline and hard work from his grandfather, who raised him, and the nuns at his school; rejecting his grandfather’s values for radical black power ideology; returning to his Catholic roots and his grandfather’s principles; being attacked as an Uncle Tom during the Reagan administration; fighting against allegations of sexual harassment during his bruising confirmation battle; and writing more than 700 opinions, more than any sitting justice, during his many years on the court. Unlike like many who merely pretend, Clarence Thomas really grew up among the poor — and in the Jim Crow South. He relates to them.
Whatever ProPublica and many other journalists are now saying, this is who Clarence Thomas authentically is, as is apparent to all who know him. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in a speech last year on June 16:
Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name. Every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories. He’s the first one who will go up to someone, when you’re walking with him, and say, “Is your son OK? How’s your daughter doing in college?” He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida. He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution, about the people who work there, about people.
I do not know Clarence Thomas as well as Sotomayor does, but this aspect of his character is so strong that it manifested itself to me even during our filming. I interviewed Clarence Thomas in four-hour sessions, from 8 a.m. to noon, weeks apart. I promised his staff that I would end promptly at noon, even though producers such as me are famous for asking five or six “last questions.” My son, Alexander, who was working as a production assistant, the lowest person on the totem pole, always invited Clarence Thomas to lunch with the crew. The justice would stay a full hour, sitting with Alexander and the other production assistants, encouraging one, a Mexican American young woman, to go to law school in spite of her doubts. Even weeks later, he would remember what the production assistants told him last time and follow up with new questions and advice. This is who he is, fundamentally, essentially, and unmistakably. There is no hypocrisy here.
Our film does not end with that clip. After the justice talks about connecting with ordinary people, Ginni Thomas says that for her husband, his grandfather, who was uneducated and illiterate, was one of those “ordinary people,” yet Clarence Thomas considered him the “greatest man in his life.” Clarence Thomas says he would want to be able to say to his grandfather that “he lived up to his oath” and defended the Constitution, “the very thing that protects our liberty,” which was so important to his grandfather and to people like him.
Character is what sets a man or woman apart. And anyone who watches our film in its entirety can’t help but see that this is Clarence Thomas’s true character, whatever you may think of his individual decisions. Even the three authors of the ProPublica piece, were they to watch the full film with an open mind, could not escape this conclusion, so far is it from hypocrisy.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICAMichael Pack is a documentary filmmaker, the president of Palladium Pictures, and the former CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He has produced over 15 documentaries for public television, most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.