Anti-Semitism: The Repository of Secrets at Akin Gump

In Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroeder, and the Building of the German Empire, the Columbia historian Fritz Stern discusses the close and confidential relationship between the 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the Jewish banker Gerson Bleichroeder. Stern specifically discusses how Bleichroeder's role as a trusted confident -- a person in possesion of sensitive state secrets -- meshed with the traditional anti-Semitic view of Jews as possessors of secrets.

Stern writes: "Bleichroeder was gradually groping for new roles and a new identity. There was the public scramble for acceptance, but there may also have been the less conscious striving for a new identity to replace the old identity as Jew. He wanted to be a major figure in Bismarck's Christian world, and his ostentatious role as repository of secrets was one way of asserting his new identity. By the same token, Bleichroeder's insistence on a new identity might have enraged those of his Christian enemies who had projected onto him 'entities from [their] psychic world,' and by projecting them to the outside could better protect themselves from these inner threats. In that way, the Christian had a stake in Bleichroeder's Jewish identity and suffered a psychic threat as Bleichroeder sought to minimize the differences between himself and his Christian milieu."

Stern explains by way of footnote: "I owe this paragraph to the striking observation made by David J. Levita, The Concept of Identity, where he discusses the role of 'secrets' and the projective character of anti-Semitism." The anti-Semite who unconsciously projects entities from his psychic world onto the Jew proceeds to view the Jew as a repository of (the anti-Semite's own) secrets.

It's interesting that one of the incidents of harassment that the D.C. Office of Corporation placed in controversy in Freedman v. D.C. Dept. of Human Rights, D.C.C.A. 96-CV-91 (Sept. 1, 1998) brought to my mind the action of my supervisor (and her presumed cohorts) in making me the repository of secrets (in the form of a confidential business document) with the possible intent that I betray those secrets to an employee at another law firm: an act on my part that would constitute gross misconduct and grounds for disciplinary action.

I note, incidentally, that homosexuality can be viewed as an act of betrayal: a betrayal of one's gender role.

I continue to believe that certain legal assistants made invidious references to my friendship with a male employee (Craig W. Dye) with whom I had previously worked at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson. At an Akin Gump dinner held in May 1989, another legal assistant (Jesse Raben, Esq.) acknowledged to me that he had heard a rumor that I was homosexual. See Brief of Appellee District of Columbia at 8.

Dye's supervisor at Hogan & Hartson during the period October 1986 to March 1987 was an individual named Sheryl Ferguson, a computer specialist. Ferguson left Hogan in the spring of 1987, and in about mid-year 1989 Dye assumed Ferguson's former supervisory position in that firm's Computer Applications Department.

In 1988 Akin Gump hired Ferguson, who by that time worked at ATLIS, a litigation support company, to perform, as a consultant, a study of Akin Gump's litigation support operation. Ferguson completed the consulting task in early 1989, and submitted a lengthy written report in February 1989. The report acknowledged the cooperation of Christine Robertson, Akin Gump's litigation support administrator, as well as several Akin Gump attorneys including John ("Jack") Gallagher and David Callet, senior partners who represented Eastern Airlines (the major client to which I was assigned), as well as an associate named David Tobin, who subsequently left the firm.

Ferguson had been my direct supervisor at Hogan & Hartson during the period September 1985 to March 1987. My Akin Gump supervisor Constance Brown, on her initiative, supplied me with a copy of Ferguson's written technical report, despite the fact that the report was stamped confidential and despite the fact that, according to Akin Gump, I was, as of February 1989, a dispensable temporary employee who had been hired to perform a specific time-limited clerical task for the client Eastern Airlines.

I continue to believe that Brown supplied me with a copy of the report knowing that the report was confidential, knowing that Ferguson had been my supervisor at another law firm, and anticipating that I would supply a copy of the report to persons I had worked with at Hogan & Hartson, which would have been an act of gross misconduct on my part. Eastern Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection a few weeks later, on March 9, 1989.

Perhaps as of February 1989 my employment at Akin Gump was perceived as vulnerable by certain employees who believed that a serious act of misconduct by me would result in my summary termination. But that's paranoid speculation. I like to think I was always one step ahead of the people who were trying to get me in trouble.

In effect, my supervisor, Constance Brown, made me a repository of firm secrets -- for no practical reason -- by providing me a copy of a confidential business document.