Chapter Four

An Unsettling Time: AIDS, Sexual Harassment, and the Senate

I really didn’t expect a gargantuan issue that would impact the world would fall on my shoulders when I was sworn into the House in 1983. When AIDS first came into my consciousness, I didn’t know what it was, how you got it, not even what it was called.

Early one morning in 1982 I was walking a path with my friend Carolynn alongside a restored marshland, my first successful effort as an environmental organizer. She grew uncharacteristically sad. When I asked her what was wrong, Carolynn, a professor of music at San Francisco State, told me her writing partner was suffering from what he was first told was pneumonia in a San Francisco hospital.

When I offered my cheery assessment that pneumonia shouldn’t be such a big problem for a young, healthy man, she told me that she thought that too, but somehow this was different. He wasn’t responding to medication, just getting weaker.

“He’s kind of wasting away, Barbara,” she told me. “And they don’t know why.”

That was the first time I heard the phrase “wasting away,” but by the time I was sworn into the House in 1983, I had learned that this “wasting away” was caused by a virus now called HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which led to a disease called AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS was becoming a huge and devastating epidemic that seemed to be cutting down people all around me, and at that point it seemed that the victims were all gay men.

My colleague Congressman Phil Burton, a true powerhouse in the House when I got there, was one of the first members to acknowledge and understand the dire need for AIDS research and he pushed hard for AIDS research funds. When he died unexpectedly from an aneurysm just months after I was sworn into the House, I was forced to step up and shout from the rooftops to get help. So I railed about the lack of attention AIDS was getting from the Reagan administration. Sometimes I was not polite.

“Anyone who knows how to stop the transmission of AIDS and refuses to talk about it,” I said, “is guilty of murder!”

In retrospect, that was not an overstatement, but at the time I got more dirty looks than I care to remember. I also took a gamble and sent out very graphic mailings to the vulnerable parts of my district. The explicit nature of the information raised eyebrows, but I was desperate. I really was.

When Phil’s wife, Sala Burton, was elected to his seat after his death, she had the most intense AIDS burden: not only because she had to help build coalitions in Congress to obtain the needed funding for research and treatment, but also because she kept losing friends, supporters, and staff to the disease. Then, after Sala’s death from colon cancer in 1987, a new congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, brought her considerable energy to the fight. Phil, Sala, and Nancy represented most of San Francisco. I represented about a quarter of it, as most of my district was in Marin County.

In 1982, President Reagan had appointed Dr. C. Everett Koop as Surgeon General of the United States. Many people in the Reagan administration—like Gary Bauer, a key advisor and future leader in the Family Research Council, whom many called a gay basher—were opposed to spending any money on the “gay disease.” But even though he came from a conservative religious background, Koop approached the disease as a doctor, not a reactionary politician. To him AIDS was a tragic disease that had to be prevented and controlled. By this time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reported ten thousand confirmed cases. It was becoming a true disaster. And I believe if Dr. Koop hadn’t been so frequently stifled until 1986 by his bosses in the Reagan administration, many fewer Americans would have died.

In 1988, Koop created a controversy when he mailed AIDS information pamphlets to every American family. Religious activists were upset, calling for Koop to be fired. The battle got more intense when Koop suggested sex education in the early grades.

Nevertheless AIDS continued to spread like wildfire. What could we do? We needed answers. When we learned from the CDC that AIDS was sexually transmitted and a condom could stop that transmission, I wanted that simple, easy-to-understand and enormously useful information distributed far and wide in my district. Dr. Koop’s mailing was great, but I knew a barrage of communication would be necessary in my home district to break through the wall of fear and denial.

I had to get over my innate embarrassment in order to talk about risky sexual behaviors and how to stop AIDS. Of course, Reagan was still refusing to even say the word “AIDS.” His conservative backers claimed that the “gay disease” was caused by immorality and in their narrow minds it was a “choice to be gay”—an incredible inaccurate lie that now, thank God, is beginning to be a dark shadow of past history.

Back then, however, we were still under the shadow, so I believed it was incumbent upon every member of Congress who had a threatened constituency to be strong and assertive. Reagan had the biggest bully pulpit in the world, but he wouldn’t talk about anything that had to do with AIDS, and still never used the word himself.

Nevertheless, I had to talk about condoms. After all, we had information that could save lives. If I didn’t get that information out there, that, in my mind, would be immoral—I would be guilty of a crime. I couldn’t shy away from what I knew. I was also grieving the loss of many gay activists I knew personally, many of whom had helped me in my campaign for Congress.

In 1985, I was appointed to the House Budget Committee, a six-year assignment I had coveted because I wanted to have a say in AIDS funding. Without that type of position, I would have been consigned to begging.

Not that I hadn’t been begging already. Early on I had gone to William Natcher, a longtime Member of Congress from Kentucky. He was then chairman of the Health Subcommittee of Appropriations. I visited his office, explaining this “mysterious disease” that had hit San Francisco and other cities that had large gay populations. People were getting skin diseases, had breathing problems, and were wasting away. We didn’t know exactly how it worked yet and we needed research funds. I was distraught and worried that Congressman Natcher, who was seventy-six at the time, had probably never met a self-identified gay person in his life.

“Mr. Natcher,” I said, “I know you don’t have a large gay population in your district, but among the voters I represent, AIDS is killing people every day.”

To my immense relief, this southern gentleman couldn’t have been more wonderful to me. I was a novice, and he certainly wasn’t used to women members of Congress.

“I see you are upset, and that you care a great deal. If people are sick then we must help,” he said in a soft southern drawl.

That was the second year of specific AIDS funding, and it increased by 50 percent from the year before to twelve million dollars, all because of Bill Natcher. The last presidential budget request I saw for AIDS was thirty billion dollars for domestic and global AIDS funding. Who knew then what twelve million would become? But that twelve million dollars gave us all hope.

I still wanted to assert more leadership so I asked Budget Chairman William Gray if we could set up an AIDS Task Force on the committee and I asked to chair it. Bill said yes and I was most grateful to him.

I remember when Elizabeth Taylor came to testify before the full Budget Committee. She was eloquent and compassionate, and she used her celebrity in the fight against AIDS as much as she could. Some other notable celebrities I’ve worked with include Ted Danson, Carole King, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ed Begley, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Pierce Brosnan on the environment; Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Angelina Jolie, Ben Affleck, and Joanne Woodward on foreign policy and the arms race; Jimmy Smits and Geena Davis on fairness in films; Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Fran Drescher, and Christine Lahti on health issues; Barry Manilow on music education, and Paul Newman on children. Over the years, Oscar-winning lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman have been by my side on a range of progressive issues as have Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lilly Tomlin, A&M Records legend Jerry Moss and his wife, Ann, as well as music entrepreneur Clarence Avant and his wife, Jackie, and actor Paul Reiser and his wife, Paula. They all leveraged their influence to help bring attention to issues and they helped me every time I ran.

When Rock Hudson, a longtime friend of Ronald Reagan’s, died of AIDS in 1985, it must have changed Reagan’s attitude, because in 1986 he ordered Dr. Koop to write a new AIDS report and things began to change. How sad that since its inception in 1983, Dr. Koop had been directly excluded from the Executive Task Force on AIDS, which did next to nothing except back a small number of research grants.

After 1986, however, the new Koop report treated AIDS not as a moral issue but as a health issue. Dr. Koop and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health led the charge to treat AIDS as a chronic condition, not a death sentence. Finally, a blood test was developed to detect HIV.

I admired Dr. Koop when he was ripped apart by social conservatives and responded:

“My entire career has been dedicated to prolonging lives, especially lives of people who were weak and powerless… who need an advocate.”

Fauci continued his stellar career in public health and is also a hero of mine.

When scientists determined that HIV could be transmitted from mother to child and that risk had to be addressed, I was depressed by the tragic news. We already had our hands full dealing with adults, but this required immediate attention. When I met a remarkable human being name Elizabeth Glaser, my spirits lifted.

Elizabeth was a mother fighting with every fiber of her body for the life of her son, Jake, after she and her husband, Paul, lost their daughter, Ariel, to AIDS.

Ariel was born in 1981 and died in 1988, only seven years old. Here’s why.

Elizabeth had received what was thought to be a routine transfusion during childbirth. Four years later, she learned that the blood was tainted with the HIV virus. Ariel had been infected with the disease through breastfeeding. Their son Jake was born in 1984, and the virus was passed on to him as well, in utero—from the tainted blood. Until then, nobody thought Elizabeth was anything but healthy.

When I met Elizabeth, she had one mission only: a pediatric AIDS initiative in America. She teamed up with two friends, Susie Zeegen and Susan DeLaurentis, and there was nothing, and I mean nothing, stopping these three women. I have met numerous activists on many issues over the years but never, ever, had I seen a team like this. They never stopped. They were out to save lives and prevent illness and there wasn’t a second to waste. Their determination was contagious. I saw firsthand the magic they performed on Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

Elizabeth’s husband, Paul Michael Glaser, is a well-known actor and director. He and Elizabeth had many friends, who had many friends, who had many more friends. Famous friends, rich friends, not-so-rich friends. That’s how the Pediatric AIDS Foundation started and has continued ever since. It is now called The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Soon after the foundation started, Elizabeth and Paul testified, upon my request, at the House Budget Committee. The hearings, held in March 1990, were extremely emotional. We heard Elizabeth’s story and saw her courage. She explained to us that children with AIDS can’t be treated clinically in the same way as adults. She fought for testing protocols for kids. She suggested that there must be a way to stop the transmission from mother to child, which was the biggest problem raging in Africa. She and Paul woke us up and changed minds. One thing Elizabeth made sure of: she would never, ever, pit children’s needs against the gay AIDS community. Never. She taught us that we must all stand with each other and help each other. She was an angel—truly.

She was now fighting not just for Jake but for all the children in America and the world who were infected with the disease or who were HIV-positive. When you spoke to her, you knew there was going to be a time when scientists would learn how to stop the transmission of the virus from mother to child and how to treat AIDS in a way to prolong life. She was absolutely right.

The foundation kept fund-raising and the funds went directly to research.

She and her amazing group asked sports figures like Sandy Koufax to attend these fund-raisers and it paid off. Millions were raised. Elizabeth’s theory was that scientists needed to collaborate more, so the foundation made sure they were constantly networking, sharing information, no longer working in isolation.

Elizabeth died in 1994. All the advances came too late to save her. Miraculously, Jake exhibits no symptoms of AIDS. He’s healthy today, and has the same amazing power of his parents to persuade and keep the focus on a cure and a vaccine. He’s contributing to American AIDS leadership in the world that has been carried out by every president of both parties, for which we all should be very grateful. It is one of the few issues that has united us across party lines.

The Pediatric AIDS Foundation is one of the reasons for this bipartisan approach to AIDS. Another is the work of the singer Bono, who has been unrelenting and who won over none other than that bulwark of conservatism, Senator Jesse Helms. In the early 2000s Helms expressed regret that he didn’t do more to combat AIDS early on. “I’m so ashamed that I’ve done so little,” he said after being persuaded by Bono, proving that miracles do happen.

But I still can’t forget the argument I had with Helms during the Senate debate over President Bill Clinton’s nominee to become Assistant Secretary of Housing, Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly lesbian nominee ever to be confirmed by the United States Senate. We really went at it. Dianne Feinstein and I were new senators, but since Roberta was a San Francisco supervisor, and we were proud she was from our state, we were moving her nomination forward. Helms called Roberta “that damn lesbian” and a “militantly activist lesbian.” I said, “This confirmation was as ugly as it gets on the floor of the United States Senate.”

Helms slowed the confirmation process down, insulted Roberta on the Senate floor over and over again, and tried to rally a majority against her. After Roberta won her vote 58 to 31, I spoke to the National Women’s Political Caucus and reminded them that Helms had said, wagging his finger: “This vote will be remembered.” I told the group it will be remembered because we stood up and we won.

Elizabeth Glaser had a profound effect on me. We had a special connection. I remember a phone conversation as she was resting in a Washington hotel room after a vigorous day speaking to a broad array of senators and House members. I called to tell her I had just read her book, In the Absence of Angels, and learned that we were born on the same day. Perhaps it explained our instant ability to get to the heart of what we both knew we had to do together. I helped introduce her to the political world and she won them over. She taught me so much about toughness, about how to focus, focus, focus, even when the task was daunting.

The second issue that drove my run for the Senate was Anita Hill’s testimony and subsequent vilification at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.

I was still in the House of Representatives on July 1, 1991, when President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had announced his retirement. Such a nomination had to go through the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Joe Biden was the chairman.

The nomination hearings were intensely contentious from the outset. Even before they began, many women’s and civil rights groups opposed replacing Thurgood Marshall, a liberal icon, with Thomas, a man who had previously expressed his strict opposition to abortion. These groups worried that he would want to reverse Roe v. Wade. Thomas was also against affirmative action, even though he himself was an African American who had benefited greatly from such policies.

I watched the hearings on TV with increasing disbelief and dismay. I was appalled when, after the customary evaluation by a committee of the American Bar Association, twelve ABA members voted that Thomas was not “well qualified” but only “qualified,” two voted that he was “not qualified,” and one abstained, for an overall vote that was one of the lowest ratings in history for a Supreme Court nominee and an embarrassment to the Bush administration.

Then things became even more dramatic. After the hearing was officially concluded, National Public Radio Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg received a leaked confidential Judiciary Committee/FBI report. The report stated that Anita Hill, a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law School, had been interviewed and had stated that Thomas made inappropriate sexual comments when they worked together at the Department of Education and again later when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This leak created a frenzy in print and broadcast media. The coverage brought pressure to reopen the hearings on Thomas, but the committee stalled. The hearings were not reopening. So Congresswoman Pat Schroeder suggested that a few of us march over to the Senate, where we knew that Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was having lunch with all the Democratic senators. We wanted to present the case to our Democratic colleagues that Anita Hill’s charges were serious and hearings on the Thomas nomination, still being stalled by the committee, should be reopened.

I rounded up Congresswomen Eleanor Holmes-Norton, Louise Slaughter, and Jolene Unsoeld. Pat got Nita Lowey and Patsy Mink, and the seven of us marched over to the Senate and up the stairs at the Senate side of the Capitol. We had no idea that there would be so many cameras facing us as we moved up the Senate steps: still photographers, TV cameras, tape recorders, hand mikes, boom mikes, and flashbulbs.

“Where are you going?” someone shouted at us.

“To speak to the senators.”

“What do you want them to do?”

“Slow down and look at the charges.”

“Is Thomas guilty?”

“We don’t know. We just think the charges are serious and deserve to be discussed.”

That now famous walk was captured in a photo that catapulted the issue of women’s rights into the American consciousness. In my case it was a run. If you examine that photo (see the photo insert), you’ll see yours truly in the lead. Not because this was my idea—it was Congresswoman Pat Schroeder’s—but because I was from California and running was part of my workout. I hung that photo in two different places of honor in my Senate office as a constant reminder of the fight for equality for all who view it.

Once we got the media behind us and went through the doors, there was a small but stern group of staff people lined up in front of a set of large closed mahogany doors. We asked them to stand aside and we knocked on the doors. One opened a crack.

“You can’t come in,” we heard a female voice, a senior staffer, say.

“Why not?”

Then we heard a very odd phrase flung at us from the same woman—Senator Mitchell’s gatekeeper.

“We don’t allow strangers in the Senate,” she said.

“Strangers?” we shouted right back. “Are you kidding? We’re your Democratic colleagues from the House!”

She explained that any non-senator was technically called “a stranger” and we shouldn’t take it personally.

Weird to be called a stranger. It looked hopeless. Then I made one more try.

“Listen, there are about a hundred cameras out there and they all took our picture coming up the steps. They know why we came here and they’ll want to know what happened, so if we don’t at least meet with the majority leader…” My voice trailed off with what I hoped was an ominous tone.

That’s when she got it.

“One moment,” she said. “Wait here.”

We waited. She came back in a moment.

“Okay,” she said. “The majority leader will see you in the side room now.”

During the meeting we argued that Professor Anita Hill was credible and believable and to ignore her was wrong. New hearings were scheduled.

Now that I know my way around the Senate, I would bet that Mitchell told my pal Joe Biden to open the hearings and let Anita Hill be heard. That would quiet us. Then, he told Joe, shut the hearings down and vote. Let me be clear, I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I think happened. We women of the House were a giant nuisance to the senators. We had to be mollified and then it would be back to business as usual.

We thought Hill’s testimony would change the course of the confirmation. It didn’t turn out that way, for sexist, unfair reasons that were kept secret and far beyond our control.

That’s what I believe. She was heard, the hearings were shut down, and the vote was fast, just four days after her extraordinary testimony.

Nevertheless, what those hearings achieved was monumental in terms of changing the makeup of the Senate forever. At the time there were only two women in the Senate and absolutely none on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The people of the country were shocked on both counts. After this “obligatory” hearing, the good old Senate “Boys’ Club” inevitably did what they should not have done, namely, they confirmed Thomas on October 15, 1991. But the election of 1992 shook everything up, tripling the number of women in the Senate, leading to the passage of the Violence against Women Act, and finally getting a woman, none other than California’s Senator Dianne Feinstein, on that committee. (For that, I do credit Joe Biden. He literally recruited her.)

Anita Hill was a very attractive, calm, and dignified woman. Obviously an expert on legal matters, she made it clear from the outset that she was testifying as to Thomas’s character and fitness, not about the legality of his actions. Professor Hill was treated with disdain and disrespect by the committee, but she pressed on fearlessly with her testimony:

“He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films, involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes… On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.”

She went on to describe one occasion when “Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?’”

This Coke can story became notorious. Oddly, however, the men on the Judiciary Committee didn’t seem to take it seriously. Some scoffed, others claimed she had to be lying. Thomas cleverly played the race card and accused Professor Hill and the media of committing a “high-tech lynching.”

Oh, my God, I thought. What a slick twist.

And it didn’t end there. When you read the transcripts of the Thomas hearing, you see him presenting himself as the victim. The women in the country didn’t buy it, but the senators did. Senators asked questions of Anita Hill like: “Are you a scorned woman? Do you have a martyr complex?”

Women in America couldn’t believe it. But then again they could. They were living through these things in the workplace. Professor Hill’s testimony pushed women’s buttons. It was familiar. It had happened in one way or another to many of them. They all could have been Anita Hill, and many of them had even worse stories to tell.

It had happened even to me, in the most unexpected situation and by the most unexpected perpetrator: my beloved economics professor at Brooklyn College.

Except for one semester during which my grades fell because of my romantic troubles with Stew, I always got good grades. So when I got a C-minus in my senior year from this professor, I called the economics department and spoke to him. He told me the problem was my final exam; that startled me, because I thought I had aced it. He said he couldn’t change the grade unless we went over the final together and I should meet him at the office the next day. I said fine.

By then I was married and living around the corner from campus. Stew walked me over and waited for me outside the building. Determined and still perplexed, I knocked on the professor’s door. Classes had ended—it was almost graduation day—and the halls were empty.

“Come on in!” the professor said, and he motioned to the long conference table. I sat across from him and noticed he had no papers in his hand, and the table was completely clear.

“Where’s my test?” I asked. “I thought we were going over it together.”

“No, we just need to talk,” he said, looking intently at me.

My spirits were lifted. Maybe he had had second thoughts about my test and would give me the good news.

“Look, Barbara, I have so enjoyed you in my class. You were so perky and you participate so well.”

“So why did I get this terrible grade? It pulled down my average.”

“Because I like you so much, I had to bend over backwards the other way.”

This made no sense. I got up to leave, exasperated, and he jumped up, blocking the door with his body.

“I need to go!” I said.

“Just give me a good-bye kiss.”

He leaned over and put his wet lips somewhere on my face. It was disgusting.

“I need to go somewhere right now. My husband is waiting for me.” That must have scared him, because he stepped away from the closed door.

Thank God for Stew! I ran out of there shaking.

I was stunned and outraged, but reported nothing. I was twenty-one years old and ready to graduate. The C-minus he gave me really bothered me, because in economics, my major, I had never gotten less than a B-plus. In retrospect, of course, that was his plan… to get me into his office alone. Sure, he had a great reputation as a loving father of several children and that gave him a trustworthy aura. I don’t know if he had other victims, but it was hard to believe I was the only one.

I remember this incident as if it were yesterday. Stewart was there for me and helped me work through it. We wanted to report him at the time, but Stew and I knew he could hold up my graduation and I already had a job waiting for me on Wall Street that I desperately needed, since Stew was starting law school full-time. So Stew was the only one in the world who knew about it, as was the case with so many women in those days, until Anita Hill told her story, and I told mine.

I blame myself for not focusing more on what was happening behind the scenes after we had marched up the steps of the Senate. I might have learned in real time what I learned later—that the committee had refused to allow the testimony of two women, Angela Wright and Rose Jourdain, both of whom were prepared to say that Thomas had made unsolicited sexual advances.

Wright, who’d worked for Thomas at the EEOC until he fired her, said he had pressured her for dates, asked about the size of her breasts, and made similar comments about other women. Jourdain also said Thomas was always commenting on her body, and Sukari Hardnett, another former Thomas assistant, told the Judiciary staff that “if you were young, black, female, reasonably attractive and worked directly for Clarence Thomas, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female.”

In May of 1993, moreover, an article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson stated that Joe Biden had abdicated control of the Thomas confirmation hearings and didn’t call four women who’d traveled to Washington to corroborate Anita Hill’s claims, including Wright and Jourdain.

They also claimed that Thomas had lied under oath, since they had seen video rental records showing Thomas’s interest in and use of pornography to a far greater extent than the public had been led to believe. Mayer and Abramson wrote a book, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was also made into a movie for TV.

Looking back, I failed to do the follow-through. I failed big time. Not that it would have been easy. We women of the House were seen as the enemy. We really were… enemies of the status quo, of the way things were, of the gentlemanly way things were. I believe that even my buddy Joe Biden had to succumb to the vast majority of his committee members on both sides.

It’s a long, sad story and there’s even more. In 2010 Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, left a voice mail message on Anita Hill’s office phone at Brandeis University over a weekend, demanding that the professor say she was sorry for accusing her husband of sexually harassing her.

“I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” the voice mail said in part, according to NBC News. “So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did.”

Incredible, isn’t it?

Professor Hill called the message “inappropriate,” and reported it to her employer’s security department, who in turn reported it to the FBI. Further, Professor Hill said she has no reason to atone.

“I have no intention of apologizing because I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony,” she said in a statement to NBC News.

Anita Hill’s story touched the hearts of women and caring men across the nation.

I definitely rode that wave. It was a rough wave and very high, but I hope you can understand now why the Anita Hill case translated into victories for women. Anita Hill is an icon who went through hell for coming forward, and I hope she knows what a difference she made, even though Clarence Thomas got confirmed.

Major federal laws were passed to address sexual harassment and violence against women, and the long march to get more women elected to Congress was kicked into high gear. All because of her courage, her ability to be tough under extraordinary pressure.

I was one of those women who benefited from her particular art of tough.

The pull of this issue of respect for women was tugging at me. It was one more reason to try to get into the Senate, in which women made up a dismal 2 percent of that “august” body.