A Historian Becomes History : Christina Jeffrey flap: This appointment was the best Gingrich could do?

Christina Jeffrey will soon be shipping her cartons back to Georgia unopened. The Kennesaw State College political science professor lasted but days as historian of the House before Speaker Newt Gingrich, the man who hired her last week, abruptly fired her.

That happened after statements Jeffrey wrote in 1986, faulting an educational program on the Holocaust for not presenting what she called the “Nazi point of view,” came to light. Jeffrey claimed her remarks were misinterpreted, then and now.

This flap may be quickly forgotten amid the Republicans’ enthusiasm to enact their congressional agenda. Some of Gingrich’s admirers already are pointing to this incident as nothing more than proof of his decisiveness and his ability to cut his losses when he has erred.

However, the Jeffrey affair should hold other lessons. As a historian, Jeffrey should have been fully aware that some ideological debates are indeed settled. There is no room for instruction that legitimizes the vanquished Nazi ideology of Aryan superiority, a twisted notion that led directly to the World War II atrocities against Jews and others. To even suggest there is room for such instruction is akin to arguing that the notions of the Flat Earth Research Society should be part of geography instruction.

Moreover, the swift rise and fall of Jeffrey is a troubling indication of the Speaker’s inattention to the responsibilities of the high office he long sought and now has attained. Gingrich claims he didn’t know of Jeffrey’s comments when he hired her. Yet the two had taught together before Gingrich was elected to Congress, and Jeffrey’s aide said Tuesday that Gingrich did know her views. If the Speaker did not, he certainly should have. Jeffrey’s writings on the issues in which she claimed expertise were absolutely central to the duties she would have assumed as House historian. The nature of some of those writings speak to her disqualification for a federal post.

Gingrich, a former history professor himself, should have known better and spared himself and the nation this sorry episode.