Hitchens explains

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Mon Feb 8 18:08:07 PST 1999


N.B. below re: Hitchens. I'll forego emphasis of what I take to be most crucial to the discussion here and leave that to the curious.

I come away sickened by Hitchens. E.M. Forster, a novelist I like, once said if it came down to a choice of betraying his country or betraying his friends, he hoped he would have the courage to do the former. Hitchens didn't have to commit treason; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut.

Hitchens says he would go to jail before testifying against Sid. But the Post says a sworn affadavit is equivalent to testimony for prosecutorial purposes, so Hitchens' stipulation is at least part bull-shit. If Hitchens actually does any time for refusing to testify, I'll issue a qualified self-criticism and send him a beef and kidney pie in jail.

My distaste for Clinton's policies should be pretty clear. The right hates Blumenthal so much because he is only too happy to give them back exactly what they expect liberals to roll over for. For me that's enough reason to have some regard for Mr. B. (I only met him once at a lunch with a dozen others and I'm sure he wouldn't remember me, so he's no special buddy of mine.)

As for the waif Monica, here in D.C., though I haven't followed the events as closely as someone who spent a lot of time watching C-span, I don't get this picture at all. Dumb, yes. Innocent, no. Stalker, oh yeah. How else interpret her continual hectoring of Clinton. She wanted to get paid. She thought she should get a job in "corporate strategy," though in her words she didn't think she ought to do any work to attain such a position. From where I sit, she's Princess Bimbo. It's not as if she hadn't sufficient advantages in life to forego announcing that she was going to be an intern in the White House and was bringing her knee pads. With Willey there is less unambiguous evidence to go on; maybe she was wronged, maybe not. Indicatations are she was not wronged. A reputable investigative journalist friend of mine says Paula J. was a trailer park whore who jacked Clinton up; she wanted to get paid too.

President Willy is a predator who helps himself into these spots, to the detriment of his family, friends, and constituents. But the macro context of the Starr campaign outweighs that in my view, as does the micro context of a friendship betrayed.

m(ad)bs

------------------

FINAL ARGUMENTS: A Parting of Ways:

Chris Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal

By Lloyd Grove

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 8, 1999; Page C01

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship -- or so the two men believed.

Christopher Hitchens recalls meeting Sidney Blumenthal in the mid-1980s,

when both were visiting journalists at the Lehrman Institute, a now-defunct

conservative think tank in Manhattan. Hitchens, a British expatriate, was a

Washington-based columnist for the paleoliberal magazine the Nation.

Blumenthal had been living in Boston and writing for the neoliberal New

Republic. They took to each other instantly.

Once Blumenthal moved to Washington with his wife, Jackie, and their two

young sons, he and Hitchens were in continual contact. They shared meals

at each other's houses, attended one another's important family occasions

and regularly traded opinions and information.

As the relationship deepened, the Blumenthals gave their children's toys to

Hitchens's older son, Alexander. In the early '90s, when the Protestant,

Oxford-educated Hitchens discovered Jewish roots in his ancestry,

including a blood-tie to an English family of Blumenthals, the American

Blumenthals invited him to their Passover seder in Takoma Park, and

affectionately called him "cousin."

The two remained chummy even after Blumenthal became a top assistant

to President Clinton and Hitchens's columns for the Nation and Vanity Fair

magazine turned increasingly anti-Clinton. Last Wednesday, as Blumenthal

was being deposed by House managers for Clinton's Senate impeachment

trial, Hitchens's wife, Carol Blue, left a warm message on the Blumenthals'

answering machine, saying she was worried and thinking about them.

But yesterday the friendship abruptly ended -- apparently another casualty

of Clinton's scandal-ridden presidency -- with news accounts that Hitchens

had signed an affidavit challenging Blumenthal's sworn denials to the Senate

that he spread defamatory stories about Monica Lewinsky.

The document, obtained from Hitchens by House Republican staffers,

potentially puts Blumenthal in serious legal jeopardy. But Hitchens's

surprising act is also a cause celebre for an elite subset of Washington

society -- the crowd of journalists, intellectuals, authors and policymakers,

mostly in their thirties and forties, who regularly dine in together and dine

out on each other. They are at once riveted and repelled, like

rubberneckers passing the scene of an accident.

"This was, for our generation, a Chambers-versus-Hiss moment," said

author Christopher Buckley, a friend of both Hitchens and Blumenthal. "I

think it is going to be a tectonic event for 'our crowd.' You'll have people

leaping from one plate to the other as they separate. It is the kind of event

in which one inevitably must take sides."

Hitchens, reached at home yesterday after a nervous appearance on

NBC's "Meet the Press," predicted: "I daresay I'll be cut and shunned."

And Blumenthal, through his lawyer, issued a written statement taking

exception to Hitchens's account of a lunch last March with Hitchens and

Blue at Washington's Occidental Restaurant, at which Blumenthal called

Lewinsky a "stalker," among other things, according to Hitchens's affidavit.

"I was never a source for any story about Monica Lewinsky's personal

life," Blumenthal stated yesterday. "I don't remember the luncheon with my

then-15-year friend Christopher and his wife that he describes. . . . My

wife and I are saddened that Christopher chose to end our long friendship

in this meaningless way."

Hitchens responded: "I feel terrible about this. But the only thing that could

have stopped this is for Sidney not to have told me what he told me."

Hitchens, who is publishing an anti-Clinton book in April, said he spent

much of last week trying to gather documents on the impeachment

proceeding for a Nation column, and repeated to several people his

account of the lunch with Blumenthal (which he now believes occurred on

March 17, not the 19th as he claimed in his affidavit). Apparently, a

Republican to whom he confided the lunch anecdote tipped off Susan

Bogart, investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.

According to Hitchens, Bogart phoned him around 4 p.m. Friday and

asked pointed, obviously informed, questions about Blumenthal's alleged

comments. Convinced that she knew anyway, Hitchens reprised his

account of the lunch. Bogart asked him if he would make a sworn

statement. Hitchens agreed. But when two House staffers arrived around 8

p.m. to obtain his signature, Hitchens stressed, as he did yesterday on

"Meet the Press," that he would never testify against Blumenthal in a

prospective perjury trial -- a formulation that struck many as bizarre, given

that an affidavit is evidence by itself.

"I can't imagine why Hitch would do this, unless he's trying to promote his

book," said Joan Bingham, executive editor and vice president of

Grove/Atlantic Press. "Maybe he doesn't realize the extent of the problems

he's gotten Sidney into. Because of what Hitch has done, Sidney is facing

hundreds of thousands of dollars more in legal expenses. When Hitch said

this morning on television that of course he won't testify against Sidney if it

came to trial, what was he thinking? Does he understand the American

legal system? There are people around town who think that Hitch has gone

loony."

Bingham added that she had dinner with the Blumenthals Saturday night, a

few hours after Hitchens's affidavit became public. "They were in total,

total shock."

Buckley said, "I am struck by Hitchens's apparent sincerity in this, as

painful as that may be. Hitchens is a gutsy guy. Many of his views are

surprising and some of his views are contemptible. . . . But I do not doubt

the substance of what he had to say about the March lunch, as stunned as I

am by the revelation of it."

Columnist Joe Conason, a Clinton sympathizer at the weekly New York

Observer, cast doubt on Hitchens's account. "I can't say it didn't happen,"

he said, "but I was talking to Sidney a lot during that time and he never told

me he talked to the president, and he refused to talk to me in any way

about Monica Lewinsky. It was somewhat frustrating."

Conason added that when he searched press accounts of the scandal

before March 19 -- the alleged date of the lunch -- he found 430 stories

containing the words "stalker" and "Lewinsky," giving credibility to

Blumenthal's contention that he sometimes talked to friends and family

about matters already in the public domain.

"I think Sidney is a person who puts the highest value on loyalty," said

author James Chace. "It's extremely bizarre that someone who has long

been a close friend of Sidney's should make such a statement, which may

very well cause Sidney a great deal of personal harm."

"I'm just amazed," said another friend, an author and magazine journalist

who asked not to be named. "I never would have believed that

Christopher would do a thing like this. I guess this says something about

the true nature of Christopher's friendships."

"I think it is such a pity that I'll never be able to speak with Christopher

again or have him in my house," said the author's wife, an investigative

journalist.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company



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