WASHINGTON — The former historian of the House of Representatives is pressing a $10 million lawsuit against Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich for her abrupt dismissal in 1995 over her misunderstood criticism of a Department of Education values clarification ethics program for teachers.
Dr. Christina Jeffrey, an associate professor of history at Kennesaw State College in Marietta, GA, was fired by Gingrich as House historian after three days on the job when partisan political critics attacked her as a “Nazi sympathizer,” “anti-Semite” and “wacko.”
The attacks were inspired by Dr. Jeffrey’s 1986 critical review of a Department of Education grant proposal on the Holocaust entitled, “Facing History and Ourselves.”
“The review was supposedly confidential, and I served as a citizen-layman for no compensation,” Jeffrey says. “The proposal on the Holocaust was not a history curriculum. Rather it was a teacher education project for a values clarification ethics program. That is, it proposed to use the Holocaust, along with KKK lynchings in the South and American atrocities in Vietnam, as examples of genocide to clarify moral lessons.”
Jeffrey found the project politically biased, methodologically flawed and exploitive of the Holocaust. But her criticisms were portrayed as anti-Semitic.
“I was scarcely the only one to have thought this program amiss,” she says. “All, or nearly all, the Republicans in DOE opposed it in the ’80s, including Secretary (William) Bennett’s Chief of Staff Bill Kristol. He did not do so because he was against Holocaust education and neither did I. Eminent Holocaust scholars outside the Department of Education also agreed, including Deborah Lipstadt and Lucy Dawidowicz.”
The attacks on Jeffrey, notably from Rep. Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, came even before her appointment as House historian had been officially announced by Gingrich. The speaker, rather than risk political capital defending Jeffrey, chose to let her go.
“Mr. Gingrich had his lawyer remove me retroactively from the payroll, denied me severance and moving expenses and sent me packing back to Georgia with these comforting words: ‘Bob Bork is fine, Clarence Thomas is fine, and you will be fine.’ Not only was my reputation ruined, but we were financially ruined. This happened the very day the Shays Act was signed into law — an act designed to make Congress follow and be accountable to the laws of this nation just as any common citizen. Its treatment of me shows graphically that Congress has no intention of submitting itself to the spirit of the law or to the rules of common decency. The ethos of Washington is still one of superiority and arrogance. Washington still doesn’t get it.”
Long after the political furor had subsided, some of her harshest critics apologized for the misunderstanding they helped create. Eight months after praising Gingrich for firing Jeffrey, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement saying she had been “stigmatized unfairly” and mislabeled anti-Semitic.
“I want to assure you that, after examining the facts and circumstances of the controversy involving the ‘Facing History and Ourselves’ Holocaust curriculum, ADL is satisfied that any characterization of you as anti-Semitic or sympathetic to Nazism is entirely unfounded and unfair,” wrote Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director.
Jeffrey has also founded an organization called Operation Integrity which seeks to educate federal officials to honor and respect individual citizens. It also seeks to educate citizens that they no longer need tolerate federal officials who use the power of their positions to abuse the public trust for political gain.
The slander and defamation suit also names Schumer, Frank and others.
Jeffrey’s one concern about ultimate vindication is that she will not have sufficient financial resources to take on Gingrich, so a fund has been established to carry on the suit. The Jeffrey Vindication Fund, supervised by treasurer James Drane, can be contacted at 2360 Trenton Avenue, Clanton, GA 30115.
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