The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill story has crashed back into public consciousness, thanks to Thomas’s wife’s bizarre suggestion that Anita Hill apologize. And that prompted an old flame of Clarence Thomas, who has kept quiet for 19 years, to emerge from the woodwork.

Like many people, I was transfixed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991. Anita Hill was so believable..and yet, so was Thomas. Who to believe? What was the truth?

Liberals blindly sided with Anita Hill’s lurid accusations against Clarence Thomas. Meanwhile, conservatives claimed that Anita Hill was making it all up, a mere pawn of liberals.

Today, I am neither Republican nor Democrat. But back then, I was mostly Republican. And yet, after listening to endless hours of testimony, in my gut I felt Anita Hill was telling the truth. I had no way of knowing if my gut reaction was correct or not. That’s just how I felt. I WANTED to believe Clarence Thomas, I really did. And I was glad to see him confirmed. But I always felt Anita Hill was, at the least, telling MOSTLY the truth of what she experienced.

It was a truly puzzling story. Could there be a middle ground somewhere?

Now, some evidence is coming out to confirm my gut reaction. The Washington Post tells that story.

Lillian McEwen (right) was dating Clarence Thomas prior to the hearings, and she kept quiet. But now she’s speaking, and what she has to say confirms what Anita Hill accused Thomas of doing–his fascination with porn, his treatment of women, etc.

A lawyer and prosecutor, McEwen is retired now and living comfortably, with nothing to lose. She’s talking about the things she observed and heard from Thomas during their dating years. The Post article also collects what other women who worked with Thomas said, testimonials that didn’t get much airplay during the hearings but which align with what Hill and McEwen allege.

McEwen, as much as anything, is irritated that Thomas continues playing the indignant victim, making himself out to be someone she insists he most definitely was not. She’s had enough.

Anita Hill will never be exonerated, and Thomas will never be unconfirmed. But it’s always good for truth to come out.

But is this the truth yet? My gut is a bit more satisfied, but I remain open to surprises.

I recently read three lengthy political profiles which I want to recommend. Normally, the best political profiles appear in The New Yorker. But here are three in other publications.

Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican was written by John H. Richardson for the September 2010 edition of Esquire. The profile focuses a lot on Gingrich’s 3 marriages. Central to the profile is a lengthy interview with Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne (right), to whom he was married for 18 years before he took up with a new woman and eventually divorced Marianne.

All things considered, Marianne is surprisingly reasonable and non-bitter, though nonetheless quite frank. Richardson writes, “You might be inclined to think of what she says as the lament of an abandoned wife, but that would be a mistake. There is shockingly little bitterness in her, and she often speaks with great kindness of her former husband.”

Gingrich proposed to his second and third wives before he had asked for a divorce from his current wife. So Marianne experienced both sides. She says, “He asked me to marry him way too early. And he wasn’t divorced yet. I should have known there was a problem.” She says his proposal came within weeks of them meeting. “It’s not so much a compliment to me. It tells you a little bit about him.”

While his marriages are the continuing thread, the profile ranges way beyond that. We learn about Gingrich’s childhood, and about the insecurities which someone very close–like a wife–would see when Newt is out of the spotlight. We also come to understand, to an extent, why a man of Newt’s brilliance has been saying some really outrageous things (for which Joe Scarborough, on Politico, really took Gingrich to task). In several ways, we’re told that Newt doesn’t feel that his rhetoric must line up with his lifestyle, a fact supported by his attitude toward personal morality.

It’s quite an interesting profile, though Newt did not appreciate it.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury appeared in the October 2010 issue of Vanity Fair (which came out in September). Reporter Michael Gross, a self-proclaimed Christian, says he launched into the article with positive feelings toward Palin. But as he followed the story, talking to person after person who knew Palin, a different article emerged.

If you’re a Sarah Palin fan, you won’t like this article. You won’t want to accept what people say about the Sarah Palin they have seen, and the stories they tell behind-the-scenes. Unless you’re willing to accept that we peons constantly get hoodwinked by our political heroes. I’m one of those cynics who has believed in people’s public persona way too many times, and been severely disappointed. So I have no trouble accepting that at least some, maybe most, of this may be true.

However, I’m troubled by the over-use of anonymous sources in the article, people who would talk about Palin only if their names weren’t used. Gross acknowledges that this is a problem, that it damages the credibility of his article. Yet in the end, that’s what he had to go with. Sarah Palin, as he (and unnamed sources) continually point out, can be very vindictive and has a record of destroying people who oppose her. That’s why people preferred to stay off the record.

Gross spent months working on the article, and followed Palin through four states. He talked to lots of people in Alaska who know her (and who say she’s not the outdoorsman she pretends to be). He talked to people in the McCain presidential campaign, who had very few kind words about her and revealed some things I hadn’t heard before (like a Palin daughter who once told her, “You’re so fake. Why are you pretending to be something you’re not?”). Gross also delves deeply into all kinds of financial issues surrounding Palin. We learn about her explosive temper (which stays hidden from public view), her increasing isoloation in Wasilla, and the Bill-and-Hillary nature of her marriage.

Take the article with a grain of salt, or several grains. I did. I don’t like anonymous sources, and the portrait that emerges of Sarah Palin doesn’t always align with my gut reaction. But Gross is a responsible reporter, and I’ve taken the article under advisement. Plenty of negative stuff is said and written about Palin by detractors who have agendas (politicians and the MSNBC prime-time idiots), and I have no reason to trust what they say. But a good reporter like Michael Gross–I can’t write off everything he says. And there is a LOT in this lengthy, in-depth profile to chew on.

Glenn Beck

Being Glenn Beck, by Mark Leibovich, appeared in the September 29 edition of the New York Times. It’s mostly a positive, and somewhat light-hearted, profile of Beck. I found it enlightening, and have had to soften some of my disdain for this man, whose divisiveness I consider very bad for America. The article helped me understand some of his motivations, and that he shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

The article also sheds light on Beck’s sometimes rocky relationship with FoxNews and its other headliners. We learn that his show has an especially high female demographic, that he’s lost a lot of viewers, and that nearly 300 advertisers won’t promote their products on his show. It’s all interesting stuff and, as I said, presented in what I would consider a positive package.

Christine O’Donnell has seen China’s “carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over America.”

That statement, according to James Fallows of the Atlantic, came in 2006 during a Senate primary debate. She was criticizing one of her opponents–a man of Chinese ancestry, Jan Ting, a law school prof–of appeasement for suggesting that China and the US were economically dependent and should work together.

Yes, she looked across the platform, saw a Chinese-American, and assumed he must be in bed with Mainland China. Just like all those Japanese-Americans during WW2 were actually beholden to Emperor Hirohito.

Said O’Donnell: “We have to look at our history and realize that if they pretend to be our friend, it’s because they’ve got something up their sleeve.”

She said she was privy to classified information which, when pressed, she said came from nonprofit groups that send missionaries to China. So the Chinese are not too protective of their masterplan to conquer the US.

O’Donnell was pulling the same stunt Dick Cheney regularly pulled in justifying torture by saying that torture had uncovered big terrorist plots. But when questioned, he would claim access to classified information which he couldn’t divulge. “If you could see what I’ve seen, you would agree with me.” So how can you disprove it?

Anyway, Sarah and the Tea Party picked an excellent candidate. Anyone who can uncover an enemy’s masterplan for conquest–I want that person on our side. Besides, I can’t wait to hear all the interesting things she’ll say as a sitting Senator.