My Grandfather’s Son, the memoir published Monday by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is the fulfillment of a promise. As Justice Thomas explained in an interview with National Review Online on Monday afternoon, “I made a promise to myself.” Citing the Golden Rule, Thomas recalls when he was “young and vulnerable,” and promised himself that when he was in the position to help others, “I wouldn’t ignore them the way I was ignored.”
Clarence Thomas famously doesn’t give interviews. But right about now, you might say he’s giving a lifetime’s worth of interviews. The occasion for all of his talking—starting with a positive
60 Minutes feature Sunday night—is not the opening of another Supreme Court term, although the new Court term does coincide with the sudden outburst of Thomas talk, but the release of his memoir. And maybe, just maybe, you can’t help but figure he’s thinking,
I can live in interview-free peace after this. As he told me on Monday, “I prefer not to talk at all.”
But you could be easily fooled listening to the garrulous Thomas. When I ask him if he agrees with the early
Washington Post buzz that he’s got an “angry” book out, Justice Thomas just laughs a hearty laugh. It’s the kind of full-bodied laugh that sounds like it comes from a man who lives life fully and well. But that’s no surprise if you’ve read his new memoir,
My Grandfather’s Son, for that’s it exactly. The book is
about living life fully and well.
And the answer is “no,” he doesn’t view it as an angry book. “That is ridiculous,” Thomas says. “What happens is that people think that is what they would be [in similar situations], and so they transpose and impose.”
Talking to Thomas, it is easy to forget you are talking to a Supreme Court justice. His straight-talking honesty is the stuff of raw father-and-son (or grandfather-and-grandson, in this case) this-is-the-way-the-world-is heart-to-hearts. Clarence Thomas may sit on the highest court in the land, but he’s an “ordinary man” and his book is “the story of the journey of an ordinary person,” he tells me
Thomas explains that he wrote
My Grandfather’s Son for people who work hard and pay their bills: “I wrote it for people who are still trying . . . for people trying to sort out the problems in their lives.” It was with this audience in mind that Clarence Thomas went through the painful process of recounting past struggles, injustices, and mistakes — the history that is at the heart of the book. In
My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas goes through his childhood, abandoned by his father; he goes through the racism that drove him from what he thought was his vocation to the Catholic priesthood; he goes through his struggle to know how honest to be in public life, as his peer group tried to discourage the honesty he knew his grandfather taught him; he goes through the “guilt” of his divorce. And, of course, he writes about the world-famous confirmation hearings. But don’t pick up the book for lurid details, just the all-too-human story.
(At one point in the book, Thomas tells of a woman approaching his wife, Virginia, years after the hearings. The woman was crying. She had worked for one of the groups that had opposed Thomas’s nomination. “‘We didn’t think of your husband as human, I’m sorry. . . . We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk.”)
Speaking from his Supreme Court chambers by phone on Monday, Justice Thomas explains that young people take you seriously once they know that you know what they’re going through. “Once they see that you understand them you’ve made a connection.” That’s why he wrote about his radical youth and his youthful anger at his grandfather — who, with his grandmother, raised Thomas and his brother. A young person with similar obstacles reading this book will understand that Thomas has “been there.”
“I was nine years old when I met my father,” Thomas begins
My Grandfather’s Son. “When [young people] realize they can ask, ‘How did you get over being upset at your father?,” all of a sudden you have made a connection. And you can say to them, ‘There is a way out.’”
And how do you get over losing your religious faith? That’s part of Thomas’s story, too. When I ask him what it was that ultimately brought him back to the Catholic faith of his youth, Thomas tells me, “my grandfather used to say something. He used to say you
just live long enough. He was right.” Life, Thomas says, “is so full of uncertainties and challenges.” He says that his “faith came back slowly . . . and then flooded in.” He recalls, “I really completed my journey home when I returned to my Catholic faith.”
And it’s that faith that keeps him in Washington. No fan of the Beltway, Thomas writes in the book that “in Washington, what matters is not what you do but what people can be made to think you’ve done.” But living there — even in such a public position—has been worthwhile regardless, “because it is our country. . . . Do you think those kids who are over in Iraq want to be there?” Did the soldiers in Normandy, or in Gettysburg? he asks. They are probably not standing on the battlefield because there is nowhere they would rather be, but they know “the job is worth doing.” What the jobs have in common are that they are “about something bigger than yourself.”
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