Narrowly Defined Image Belies Jurist's Quiet Clout

What's clear is that Thomas's judicial profile has become sharper with each passing year. He has grown more defiant, less compromising -- content to reside outside the court's power center. His tenure on the court has been marked by strongly worded dissents and concurrences that prod and provoke, but that leave him on the margins of influence. And yet inside his chambers, and across the nation, he has become an effective spokesman for his ideas, displaying through personal interactions the kind of empathy not often evident in his court writings.

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At 56, Thomas is the youngest justice by nine years, and he could well end up being the last survivor of the Rehnquist Court, imprinting his ideas on the legal landscape for decades. As the court begins its new term, there is growing curiosity about the justice who seems more known than understood.

This two-part series explores Thomas's place on the court -- the style of the man and the substance of his work. It is based on a review of his written opinions and public speeches, and on interviews by The Post with 40 former law clerks and other court employees, plus legal scholars and dozens of Thomas friends and acquaintances. In addition, reporters examined the papers of the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun, whose files provide the first contemporaneous, behind-the-scenes look at the court during Thomas's tenure. Thomas himself declined repeated requests to be interviewed by The Post.

Supreme Court justices, for all their power and prominence, are not especially well-known. A recent Post survey of 1,007 respondents showed that Thomas remained largely unknown to about half of those polled.

But he exercises influence that goes beyond his work on the bench. Take the example of U.S. District Judge Victoria A. Roberts of Michigan. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton in June 1997 but didn't get a Senate hearing until a year later. After a mutual friend arranged a Roberts-Thomas meeting in his chambers, it was a smooth ride for her. After her hearing, a Republican counsel to the Judiciary Committee approached Roberts, as she recalls, and said: "We've heard from Justice Thomas, and you won't have any more trouble."

Thomas also aided Eric Clay, a Yale Law School classmate whose nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was held up by the Senate's Republican majority for more than a year before he was confirmed in fall 1997. And in a 1998 conversation in his chambers, Thomas told Memphis Judge D'Army Bailey that he would have been willing to fight for Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie L. White if only he had been asked. White's nomination for a federal judgeship ultimately was killed by Republicans, led by then-Sen. John D. Ashcroft (Mo.), a longtime Thomas friend.

Thomas is hardly a stranger in the Senate. He can be spotted in the Dirksen Senate Office Building cafeteria, eating the hot buffet lunch with his clerks. He is chummy with the women who cook and waitress. He has breakfasted among senators in their private dining room, just a whisper away from some of the lawmakers who virulently opposed his nomination. Who would have imagined that the U.S. Senate, the stage for Thomas's "high-tech lynching," as he angrily charged during his 1991 confirmation hearings, is where he enjoys meals?

A Man of Many Dualities

The contours of Thomas's biography are fairly well known. He was born in Pin Point, Ga., a tiny rural settlement that has an 80 percent poverty rate. A fire destroyed the Thomas home and he wound up in Savannah with his grandfather, who offered him a stern hand and a Catholic school education during the Jim Crow era. Thomas graduated from Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and in no time found himself on an express train punching the tickets of government service. In 12 years, he went from a junior staffer for then-Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) to Supreme Court justice.

A close inspection of Thomas's life sooner or later leads to a conundrum. Why does a man who repeatedly cites racism as the reason he left the seminary return to that same seminary 30 years later and speak warmly of "a connection that I've always thought I had with the institution"? Why does a man who complained of being treated as a token by Reagan administration officials stay in that administration long enough to become the longest-serving EEOC chairman in history? Why does a man who implores people not to become victims -- "We've got to stop whining and get up and go do it" -- so often cast himself as a victim?

"It is hard to be disliked," he said at a 1998 conference of black conservatives in Washington. "It is hard to walk into a room and know you're going to always be beaten up."

For Thomas, it is possible to live on both sides of the same coin. On one side, he relishes his privacy -- if only he could take a helicopter to work, he told one court visitor, he would live even farther out than his secluded Fairfax Station home, some 24 miles from Capitol Hill. Flip the coin and he becomes remarkably revealing to anyone invited to listen.

Thomas is perhaps the court's most accessible justice -- except to journalists seeking on-the-record interviews and to people he perceives as closed to his views. He is known to spot a group of schoolchildren visiting the court and invite the students to his chambers. Students from his alma mater, family members of former clerks, people he encounters on his drives across the country in his 40-foot Prevost motor coach -- all are welcome.