Here's Hitchens describing a neo-conservative conference in 1990:
The old gruel was still being served up, lukewarm, by the panellists. 'Americans have *always* loved Soviet leaders.' 'Americans have *never* liked being a world power.' (These from [Midge] Decter.) 'The Soviets are not giving up on their expansionist policy.' (This from Eugene V. Rostow, the man his father named for Debs, with a brother named for Walt Whitman.) My personal favorite came from a Thatcherite British delegate, who intoned, with heavy menace, 'Remember how nearly we had Henry Wallace as President of the United States.' Truly, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Somehow, though, the fizz had gone out of things. The house style of world-weary, superior sarcasm was still natural to most of the speakers, especially the ex-leftists among them. And there was always knowing applause for any jibe at the expense of the decade known as the sixties or the persons (noticeable by their scarcity, not to mention absence) one associates with affirmative action. But the lucubrations of *Commentary*, the *fatwahs* of the Ayatollah Solzhenitsyn, and the fervid search for the enemy within seemed as passe as - well, the Evil Empire itself. At the end of the opening session, which had featured Rostow and Dector, young John Podhoretz of the *Washinton Times* ('Paper Moon', as I like to call it - and him) rose in astonishment to ask: Were none of the panellists going to *mention* the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe? A good question, none the worse for being asked in a tone of chubby filial bewilderment.