MISSOURI COMMENTARY: NEWT SENDS JEFFREY TO KENNESAW STATE

President Bill Clinton had Dr. Joycelyn Elders. House Speaker Newt Gingrich had Christina Jeffrey. Elders wanted masturbation taught in schools. Jeffrey wanted proper attention given to the Nazi and Ku Klux Klan point of view on exterminating Jews.

Clinton took two years to dump Elders; Gingrich fired Jeffrey within hours when he learned of her outrageous sense of "educational balance" in the classroom.

Both the House and the Senate have professional historians who supervise the retention and preservation of official documents and who are the official "memories" of those institutions. In the current frenzy to cut payroll, both jobs could probably be eliminated and all the documents and papers could be gathered up by a janitor and stuffed into some beer boxes.

Speaker Gingrich, himself a historian, decided not to go to that extreme. He would retain the position of historian and give it to an acolyte, Christina Jeffrey, an associate professor of history at Kennesaw State College in Marietta, Ga. Fear not that no one in the academic world has ever heard of Associate Professor Jeffrey or of Kennesaw State College or, for that matter, of Marietta, Ga.

Gingrich viewed her as a saleslady of the new House of Representatives, someone who could go out and sell history according to Newt and Christina and Kennesaw State College. Jeffrey was a true believer, but a believer in what?

There is a small, bizarre cult that holds that the Holocaust may never had occurred or, if it did, it wasn't all that big a deal or, if it did, it isn't necessary to teach about it to Gentile audiences because, after all, it's a Jewish sort of thing.

Jeffrey felt you had to give academic fair play to the Nazis and the Klan. After all, Adolph Hitler and David Duke have thoughts too. None of this politically correct stuff of limiting discussion to just one side. In rejecting educational materials about the Holocaust, Jeffrey wrote, "The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view and is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan."

To listen to Jeffrey, all she was trying to do was to give Hitler his day in the court of history. Her views were once the subject of dark satire in a faux musical entitled "Springtime for Hitler." But Professor Jeffrey was serious about wanting to provide "fair play for Adolph."

Jeffrey simply couldn't accept an academic program relating to the Holocaust in which students were taught about the frenzy that swept up a whole nation into the ultimate act of horror and genocide. She felt that there was lots of other history around -- so why bother with all of that hand wringing about the Holocaust.

In fact, she believed that if you were to teach such a course, you were behaving like Hitler and Goebbels. "It is a paradoxical and strange aspect of this program that the methods used to change the thinking of students is the same that Hitler and Goebbels used to propagandize the German people. This re-education method was perfected by Chairman Mao and now is being foisted on American children under the guise of 'understanding history.'"

The Jeffrey case is important for two reasons. First, although Gingrich himself may not have specifically known about Jeffrey's bizarre ideas of equal time in the classroom, he did know enough about her overall qualifications and reputation to realize that her credentials fell short of the requirements to be the historian of the House of Representatives. Gingrich must have known that Jeffrey was dancing around the loony fringe.

Second, Gingrich knows when to cut his political losses. When school prayer didn't energize anyone as a first order of business, he dropped the subject. When his $4.5 million book deal failed the smell test, he dumped it with a smile and a shrug. When Jeffrey passed the loony test, he threw her overboard, sent her back to Georgia with his "tremendous admiration." Say hello to the kooks for me.

Clinton did not do the same with Elders. He patiently tried to wait out each of her stinging homilies -- until she became one of the most salient issues in the 1994 congressional campaign. It's kinder and gentler to be patient, but in politics it's much more costly.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.