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