THE VINDICATION OF CHRISTINA JEFFREY

Standing in a crowded hallway outside his office with Jeffrey by his side, Gingrich told assembled reporters that he took “full responsibility” for not supporting Jeffrey in the throes of a media “feeding frenzy” and acknowledged that her “personal name and her professional career had been smeared.” He pledged to find future employment for Jeffrey as a consultant to the House of Representatives.

Democratic Rep. John Lewis, a one-time Jeffrey critic, met with her the following day to make amends and pledged his support in further efforts to clear her name. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who had praised Gingrich for acting so quickly to rid himself of Jeffrey in January, also proclaimed remorse at the press conference: “There was an atmosphere of ‘Gotcha,'” he said. Jeffrey should not be “criticized for the rest of her life” for poorly chosen remarks made years ago.

But even as Gingrich and others were trying to make amends to Jeffrey, others in Washington, notably some of the most partisan Jewish Democrats, refused to back down on their earlier comments, presumably because attacking Jeffrey is still politically expedient in some quarters. “Congressman [Charles] Schumer stands by his earlier statements,” said his press secretary, Josh Isay. “The views that [Jeffrey] expressed were an insult to Holocaust survivors.” Barney Frank, who had previously called Jeffrey’s views “wacko,” also reiterated his January outrage: “I thought and continue to think that her views on the Holocaust were weird. I thought her denigration of the teaching of the Holocaust was a terrible mistake.”

And what exactly were the Kennesaw State College political scientist’s ” insulting” and “weird” views that caused all the controversy? Laffaire Jeffrey traces its origin to 1986, when the Reagan administration’s Department of Education aked Jeffrey, then an associate professor at Troy College in Alabama, to review a $ 70,000 grant application tbr a controversial middleschool ethics program called Facing History and Ourselves.

The 15 lay evaluators of the program were given an eight-page confidential questionnaire to facilitate their review of the program, with instructions to focus on the extent to which “excellence, balance, and imagination” were demonstrated in the program’s proposed activities. Jeffrey’s most quoted offense was her answer to the second question: whether the program’s activities would be likely to accomplish the project’s objectives. “The project itself lacks balance,” wrote Jeffrey. “Will former Nazis, etc., be asked to speak?”

She also wrote, in response to a question about the program’s “impact on the students,” that its methods were “intrusive” and, again, “unbalanced.” She continued: “It is a paradoxical and strange aspect of this program [that] the method. used to change the thinking of students is the same that Hitler and Goebbels used to propagandize the German people. This reeducation method was perfected by Chairman Mao and now is being foisted on American children under the guise of ‘understanding’ history.”

In her “overall assessment” of the program, Jeffrey reiterated and expanded upon her previous remarks: “First of all, the entire program strikes me as mass reality avoidance. We can’t deal with today’s problems, so let’s solve yesterday’s. We had rather focus on the shortcomings of Hitler and the Germans, than on our own. . . . I have grave reservations about this type of program for junior high students.”

In conclusion, Jeffrey pointed out that “the program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity. The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view, and it is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan. The selection of only two problem areas, Germany and Armenia, leaves out many others, many of which are more recent. I am thinking of the U. S. S. R., Afghanistan, Cambodia and Ethiopia, among others. No explanation of this selectivity is given. My impression is that this program . . . may be appropriate for a limited religious audience, but not for widespread distribution to the schools of the nation.”

Jeffrey now says her review was written in a tone of sarcasm. She maintains that her query about asking former Nazis to speak was intended as a parody of the moral relativism she saw as an inherent flaw in the Facing History program itself. As for her stress on the program’s lack of “balance,” she now recognizes that her use of the word painted her as a moral relativist — exactly what she was criticizing the program for. “I used the word because I was specifically instructed to analyze the program in terms of balance. It was very unfortunate. I never meant that the Nazi point of view was legitimate — just that you cannot understand what happened during the Holocaust without understanding the origins of the Nazi ideology.”

In the funding proposal — not the offcial Facing History Resource Book for teachers as it appeared in 1986, or as it: appears now — that she was reading, lacking were any references to the German philosophical origins of National Socialism, the history of the Weimar Republic, or the history of European Jewry prior to the Holocaust. Such background was, in fact, included at length in the Facing History Resource Book, and it has been expanded since then.

Moreover, her dissatisfaction with the program was based more on its liberal agenda and morally neutral “values clarification” approach than its Holocaust content. Specifically, she objected to the program’s use of historical comparisons, such as the lynching of southern blacks by the Ku Klux Klan, the My Lai massacre, and nuclear war as similar examples of genocide. “It demeans and exploits the Holocaust,” asserts Jeffrey. “Let’s teach the Holocaust to these kids as history. That Nazism, genocide and the Holocaust are evil is indisputable — how do you ‘values clarify’ genocide? This kind of approach is dangerous.”

By referring to Mao and Goebbels she was, she says, giving sarcastic voice to conservative outrage at the way liberal indoctrination had seeped into a program allegedly about the evil of the Holocaust. Still, despite her considerable misgivings, Jeffrey awarded Facing History a passing grade of 61, the highest score given by any of the 15 evaluators. With such lackluster support, Facing History was denied department funding that year and in two succeeding years.

The issue lay dormant until 1988, when the late Democratic Rep. Ted Weiss convened a House subcommittee hearing to investigate “The Department of Education’s Refusal to Fund Holocaust Curriculum.” Trumpeting his status as a son of Holocaust refugees, Weiss charged that a bey of conservative reviewers, interest groups, and Holocaust deniers had hijacked the Facing History funding. In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, the Department released the list of grant reviewers, but not the confidential reviews. Even so, within days a copy of Jeffrey’s evaluation was leaked to the press by someone within the Education department. It soon became a focal point of the subcommittee hearings and was entered into the offcial record.

Jeffrey, who only learn ed of the hearing after seeing her name bandied aboul in press reports, sought to enter a written defense into the offcial congressional record. Her request was denied. The hearing concluded that Facing History had been unfairly denied funding. Shirley Currey, the Education department official responsible for selecting reviewers of the Facing History grant proposal, was fired. Jeffrey did, however, receive an offcial letter of apologfor the leak of her review from assistant secretary of Education Patricia Hines: “To the extent that any Department of Education official has characterized [Jeffrey] herself as racist or anti- Semitic, we do indeed apologize.”

With this, the issue faded into history and Jeffrey went back to teaching without any apparent ill conse quences from her first 15 minutes of fame. She was offered a professorship in political science, and eventually tenure, at Kennesaw State College near Atlanta. “Everyone knew about Christina’s experience in Washington; the issue was raised when she first came to Kennesaw,” remembers Craig Aronoff, professor of private enterprise at Kennesaw’s business school. “But we were satisfied by the way she explained her comments and put them in context. She’s not an anti-Semite or a Holocaust revisionist. Anybody who knows her knows she’s not.”

Shortly after her move to Georgia in 1987, Jeffrey made the acquaintance of her new congressman and academic colleague, Newt Gingrich, who was teaching his college course, “Renewing American Civilization,” at Kennesaw. Already a vocal conservative, a former member of Phyllis Schlafiy’s Eagle Forum, Jeffrey established an immediate rapport with Gingrich. She recommended her students for internships in his district offce and defended the congressman when her colleagues at Kennesaw objected to his teaching a “partisan” course at the pullic college.

Given their relationship, some Gingrich-watchers expected her to be named to his expanded personal staff when he became speaker. Instead, when Gingrich fired long-standing House historian Raymond Smock in mid-December, he quickly called Jeffrey to offer her the job.

In retrospect, Jeffrey’s biggest mistake, at least by Beltway standards, may be that she didn’t remind Gingrich of her controversial past and its public record. Surely, as a political scientist who had already lived through one such episode in Washington, she must have realized that she could become a lightning rod for Gingrich, who was up to his ears in controversy over his lucrative book deal.

In her defense, Jeffrey says she assumed that anyone who served in Congress in 1988, or had a staff worth its weight, would have known about the Weiss hearings and the Facing History imbroglio. Jeffrey also asserts that she did raise the issue, at least tangentially, to Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s press secretary, by referring to herself as a junior Ollie North.” Perhaps this was a little too subtle. Blankley has repeatedly denied that either he or his boss was aware of Jeffrey’s past statements. In fact, at the height of the media blitz, Blankley declared, in a letter to the Washington Post, that had he known about her prior remarks, he would have “leaped out of my chair and blocked any such person from being appointed to anything.” Not to worry; there were Democrats aplenty willing to do just that when news of the eight-year-old comments broke again in the press and reverberated throughout Capitol Hill.

On Jan. 9, White House aide George Stephanopoulos alerted reporters to the existence of the 1988 hearings and the Washington Post’s coverage of them. Reps. Frank, Schumer, and Nita Lowey, among others, quickly went on the offensive, seizing an opportunity to score hometown points while assaulting Gingrich. By 10 p.m., Jeffrey learned through an Associated Press reporter that she had been fired. At midnight, she received a call from Gingrich informing her that she would have to resign. She never tendered a letter of resignation and to this day asserts that she was fired.’ For six weeks, Gingrich refused to return her phone calls.

Jeffrey was called a “Nazi sympathizer” on the floor of the House, and members of the media quickly turned what were originally described as “weird,” “offensive,” and “extreme” views into a brutally personal, ad hominem attack. “Anyone who thinks that way is an unreconstructed anti-Semite,” wrote Raymond Sokolov in the Jan. 13 Wall Street Journal, in an article that branded Jeffrey a “Yahoo” — a hairy, uncouth lout portrayed in Gulliver’s Travels. “It is one thing to hate Jews. Any moral dwarf can do that. But it takes an especially ignorant and fact resistant sort of historian to believe that there is a viable Nazi point of view on the subject.” Richard Cohen, writing in his Jan. 12 Washington Post cc4umn, simply called Jeffrey a ” jerk.” “The Holocaust is over, but hate ertdures,” he said.

And officially sealing Jeffrey’s transformation from insensitive reviewer to anti-Semitic Yahoo was Tony Blankley’s own statement in the Washington Post. When asked on Jan. 12 if he accepted Jeffrey’s protestations that she was not anti-Semitic, Blankley responded that the voluble speaker had “no comment.” Throughout Washington, Gingrich was commended Christina Jeffrey fcr the swiftness of his dismissal (the comparison with Clinton’s bungled nominations was lost on no one) even as he was criticized for cronyism and poor judgment in hiring Jeffrey to begin with.

On Jan. 28, less than month after arriving in Washington and moving into their new home, the Jeffreys repacked their U-Haul, bundled up two kids and cars, and returned to Georgia, where both eventually resumed their academic carriers. Not only had Christina’s reputation been savaged, but they were now $ 30,000 in debt from their two moves, lost income, and rent.

“No one was interested in either taking a close look at what she really said, or putting it in context,” says Kennesaw’s Craig Aronoff. “They preferred instead to use an inference to do what they could to get Newt Gingrich. That’s the whole story. There is no more to it. It has nothing to do with Christina and what she is or what she’s not.”

Jeffrey, it bears reiterating, was not alone in her misgivings about the Facing History program, although her choice of words was the most memorable. Two prominent Holocaust historians independently voiced many of the same reservations about the “values clarification” program. Writing in Commentary in 1990, the late Lucy Dawidowicz criticized Facing History as a “vehicle for instructing thirteen-year-olds in civil disobedience and indoctrinating them with propaganda for nuclear disarmament,” all in the guise of teaching the Holocaust. In the program, obedience to authority and conformity to legal mandates are associated with injustice and totalitarianism; resistance, protest, and following the dictates of conscience are encouraged. Dawidowicz, the most distinguished American historian of the Holocaust, excoriated the program’s transparent “activist agenda” in its offer to make available to teachers and students a list of groups dealing with “issues of the nuclear world of today.” Dawidowicz’s chastisement may have been responsible for the removal of the nuclear disarmament chapter from the current, revised edition of Facing History.

More recently, Emory University religion professor Deborah Lipstadt agreed with a number of Jeffrey’s basic criticisms of the Facing History program, even as she denounced Jeffrey’s terminology. “My discomfort has less to do with the way the Holocaust is approached and more with the context into which it is placed,” Lipstadt wrote in the March 6 New Republic. At the end of each chapter of the Facing History Resource Book for teachers is a section called “Connections,” which includes references to present-day racism and violence in an effort to make the Holocaust experience for American students more directly relevant. “The problem with this approach is that it elides the differences between the Holocaust and all manner of inhumanities and injustices,” Lipstadt wrote. “No teacher using this material can help but draw the historically fallacious parallel between Weimar Germany and contemporary America.”

The edition that Jeffrey reviewed linked the Holocaust with Hiroshima, and mass murders in Armenia (the list has since been expanded to include Rwanda, Tibet, Laos, and Cambodia). As Lipstadt points out, these examples are all horrific tragedies, but are markedly different from the Nazi efforts to wipe out an entire people: “There are important distinctions to be made, and Facing History and Ourselves, in its ambitious attempt to engage in moral education by teaching about the Holocaust, at times obscures more than it reveals.”

To its credit, the Facing History and Ourselves Foundation has removed some of these controversial comparisons and allusions from its revised edition — a 564-page tome replete with exhaustive documentary evidence, background rnaterial, and historical context that has earned praise from Holocaust experts like Michael Berenbaum of the U. S. Holocaust Museum Research Institute and Lawrence Langer of Simmons College. Nonetheless, the relativistic and values-centered approach the prcgram employs continues to inspire debate throughont the field of Holocaust studies.

“I think that any Holocaust survivor, or relative of a Holocaust survivor, as I am, would look at the way they were trying to make an analogy between genocide in Nazi Germany and civil rights violations in the United States, and be nc t only astounded but offended,” says Barry Friedman, an associate professor of political science at North Georgia State College and a staunch ally of Jeffrey’s throughout her ordeal. “Christina was responding to that. No one who’s ever worked with her has ever seen or perceived any possibility of a taint of anti-Semitism or racism. All it would have taken was a little investigation on Congressman Schumer’s part, a little research before everyone jumped to smear her. That he hasn’t retracted his statements, now, 10 months later is shameful.”

In the end, Jeffrey will probably be remembered in Washington, if at all, as the House historian who either was or was not a bigot, but who was run out of town before anyone had time to find out. Christina Jeffrey’s choice of words in a federal academic review may well have disqualified her as a sensible candidate for public service; after all, public service requires discretion and sensitivity, (lualities that her misplaced sarcasm and penchant for overstatement suggest Jeffrey might be lacking.

That notwithstanding, the Jeffrey affair is not so much about Christina Jeffrey’s questionable choice of words, the Holocaust, or the Facing History and Ourselves program. It is merely another example of the viciousness of inside-the-Beltway politics as usual. The difference is that this time, the victim’s determined efforts — an all-out letter-writing and lobbying campaign — over the past ten months to clear her name have paid off. Jeffrey, ulike most others who have come to Washington only to be pushed off the gang- plank for the sake of political expediency, has been offered a public apology. ,

Elena Neuman is free-lance writer living in Washington. Her piece, “Harvard’s Sins of Admission,” appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.