Christopher Hitchens (
1949-) is one of a peculiar breed of
American journalist, the snide
Brit who we shower praise and money on for pointing out how much we suck. He has a degree from
Oxford, of course, graduating in
1970.
To his credit, Hitchens is no political ideologue and is willing to savage either one side or the other. He spent the
Clinton years making a career attacking the
president, and there's no doubt he'll spend the next four attacking his successor – in a memorable column from late last year ("Why Can't
Dubya Read?" in October's
The Nation) he speculated that W's blatant gaffes were evidence that he is
dyslexic.
On the other hand, he's a total
asshole. He's the type of person who styles himself a provocateur, and probably delights in infuriating masses of people. Case in point:
The Missionary Position, his vicious
1995 attack on, of all people,
Mother Theresa. Now that's style. But it's all part of an image, because not only is he unafraid to piss people off, he's unafraid to blatantly pander to them either, jumping on the anti-Clinton bandwagon with
No One Left To Lie To (
2000) and helping produce a glossy celebrity
coffee table book slash
blow job called
Vanity Fair's Hollywood (
2000).
In
1998, Hitchens crossed the line between journalist and participant. He was lunching at the
Occidental Grill with his friend
Sidney Blumenthal, a top
White House aide, when Blumenthal referred to
Monica Lewinsky as "a
stalker". Hitchens promptly snitched to
Republican prosecutors and provided them with an
affidavit, who just as promptly hit Blumenthal with a
perjury charge. Blumenthal had testified that he was not leaking slanderous charges about Lewinsky to the press. Despite the charge, the affidavit did not contradict Blumenthal's account, because the anti-Clinton Hitchens would obviously not have served as a conduit for anti-Lewinsky spin.
The Hitchens-Blumenthal friendship was now over, of course, and Hitchens was denounced as a
Judas by some
liberals. What Hitchens' motives exactly were remain unknown. Some cynically suggest that he was attempting to promote his anti-Clinton book. Hitchens probably sees himself as a martyr sacrificing himself for the cause of slandering a man he viciously hated. But an aide calling someone a "stalker" is hardly the equivalent of the
Pentagon Papers, and Hitchens accomplished essentially nothing, other than adding a couple weeks worth of news accounts to the Republican
character assassination arsenal. Why he saw that as worthy of sacrificing a friendship and his ethics many people will never understand.
In the end, Hitchens is a man of contrasts and paradoxes: the provoking panderer, the liberal who hated Clinton, the celebrity
socialist, the wealthy champion of the
working class, the
Nation columnist who works for the glossy glamour magazine
Vanity Fair. Life is nothing if not strange.