On Tuesday, The Boston Globe revealed that the Justice Department lawyer pushing Donald Trump’s war against Harvard University for alleged complicity in campus antisemitism once wrote a college paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.
When Michael Velchik was a senior at Harvard in 2011, studying Classics, he was assigned to write a brief paper in Latin “from the perspective of a controversial historical or literary figure justifying your actions and defending yourself against potential accusations.” Students could choose a “classical figure such as Nero or Cleopatra; a mythological figure such as Medea or Theseus; or anyone from the post-classical world, whether a Shakespearean villain or a twentieth-century tycoon.”
Velchik chose Hitler, according to three sources of the Globe—two of whom had read the paper and considered it disturbing. “At Harvard in 2011, no one would say that Hitler was a controversial figure,” an unnamed source said.
The instructor, dismayed, reportedly had Velchik redo the assignment.
Fast-forward 18 months—when Velchik was getting ready to matriculate at Harvard Law School—and, per the Globe, he told a peer that Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was his favorite book he’d read that year. “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” he wrote in a June 2013 email.
After starting at Harvard Law, Velchik offered additional thoughts on Hitler’s book in another email to a peer. Sharing quick reviews of 76 books he’d recently read, he called Mein Kampf “fascinating,” and wrote of its author, “He certainly excelled as an orator, and his writing reflects oratory.… Understands the importance of propaganda. Thought that the timing of a speech was important: better late at night!”
Velchik omitted to mention Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust.
And he wasn’t as impressed with other books as he’d been with Mein Kampf. Velchik was critical of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which he said “reminded” him why he didn’t “usually read books written by women.”
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