The Smartest Man in the Room
Christopher Hitchens is not dead. Not entirely. His sound and vision can be conjured up any time of the day or night online, in an endless assortment of videos and clips on YouTube and beyond. Search C-SPAN’s archive for “Hitchens” and you will find his 75+ appearances on the channel dating from 1985 until 2011, the year of his material death. What sets the Anglo-American journalist apart in these appearances from any of his predecessors, contemporaries, or descendants is how he synthesizes his decades of covering politics and culture with a learned and wiseass attitude, one that confirms a compliment regularly paid to him that he is, oftentimes, the smartest man in the room.
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Hitchens was born in Britain in 1949 and received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College at Oxford. He moved from London to Washington, DC, in the late 1970s, and began his stateside career as an editor and columnist for The Nation, a post he held until 2002. From the early 1990s–onward he also served as a contributing editor and columnist for Vanity Fair. A self-described democratic socialist and champion of working-class causes, Hitchens’s column for The Nation was aptly titled “Minority Report” and his direct, colorful style both in print and in person made him a sought-after guest on television news programs and panels. Hitchens appeared often on C-SPAN’s daytime shows throughout the 1980s and 1990s as well as network political comedy programs like Politically Incorrect and The Daily Show as his celebrity grew. His unique take on domestic politics (“from the left outside the Left,” as he described it) can be found on topics ranging from Bill Clinton to Henry Kissinger, and he sounded alarm bells warning of human rights abuses in South Africa, Bosnia, and Iraq months or years before they became headline topics.
Although he rarely wrote about his private life (excepting his memoir, Hitch-22), Hitchens’s personality is embedded in every line he wrote and in every television appearance. Having cut his teeth in the unforgiving newsrooms of London’s tabloid-flavored Fleet Street, he conveys his authoritative knowledge of a subject with humor and simplicity without being reductive. His upper-class British accent immediately sets him apart in any debate or roundtable discussion; he belies the presumed snobbery of his tone with attitudes founded on the belief that “we are members of only one race, the human race,” an aversion to monarchy or deference toward any station in life ordained by birth, and a deep skepticism for all forms of religious and secular establishment. He delivers his concise opinions headline style, which may entice or enrage but always leaves one wanting to know more. (His withering slices at public figures have become so legendary they now have their own phrase, hashtag, and series of YouTube videos: the #hitchslap.)
On JFK: “A high-risk narcissist.” On Vladimir Putin: “A KGB weasel not to be trusted.” On George W. Bush: “Impeachably incompetent.” On Bill Clinton’s legacy: “Nothingness punctuated by nastiness.” On Donald Trump (in 2000): “Well, he’s managed to cover 90% of his head with 30% of his hair.” On hearing a (what turned out to be false) rumor of Bob Hope’s death: “The last time I saw him, he certainly seemed dead enough.”
Christopher Hitchens on prime time in the late 1990s. Left on Dennis Miller Live, right on Politically Incorrect.
There were several high-profile figures that Hitchens was unable to write off with a dismissive phrase; about those people, he wrote books. An appearance from 1998 on Dennis Miller Live shows the journalist at his best. He strides onto the comedian’s half-hour political talk show with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Miller, a comedian not known for his modesty, is uncharacteristically deferential to his guest: “You’re the smartest guy I’ve even seen on TV.” Hitchens thanks his host, praises Miller’s “Charles Manson giggle,” then launches into the subject of his recent book The Missionary Position:
Mother Teresa was a bat from hell. She believed that contraception was the moral equivalent of abortion, and that abortion was the moral equivalent of murder. Mother Teresa took heaps of money from the Duvalier family in Haiti—who probably gave the poor as hard a time as the poor have ever got, the poorest of the poor—and justified their regime. She took a heap of money from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan in California—whose bad debts you’re still paying for—and a private jet in return for saying that he was a great guy, and a friend of Jesus Christ. . . . The other people you see getting on and off these jets advertise the fact that they’re scumbags and grinders of the faces of the poor. She does it by saying, “I’m doing this to do the poor a favor,” and then she says, “Poverty is a gift from God. Suffering is a gift from God. Leprosy is a gift from God. The death of your child is because God loves the child,” and expects people to sit still for it. Well not this reviewer!
After the deafening roar of shouting, misinformation, and filler words that now dominate network and cable news twenty years in to the twenty-first century, watching Hitchens’s opine about Mother Teresa is a needed elixir of criticism based on research, interviews, and firsthand observations. He became such a well-known skeptic of the nun’s activities that when she was proposed for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church Hitchens was invited to the Vatican to act unofficially as a “Devil’s Advocate,” the role of one who argues against someone’s beatification during the canonization process and a position that Pope John Paul II had formally abolished in 1983. “And thus,” Hitchens muses later, “I became the first person to ever represent the Devil pro bono.”
What is humbling when digging through the online trove of Hitchens is the civility with which political discourse was conducted on long-form talk programs like C-SPAN’s News Review the the late 1980s and early 1990s. The show featured a left-leaning journalist and one from the right, with a moderator asking questions about the news of the day and then taking calls from the public. One watches with disbelief in seeing Hitchens politely sit still while Pat Buchanan or columnist Mona Charen sound off in opposition to gay marriage or refer sneeringly to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but even more unbelievable is that these same panelists politely keep their mouths shut while Hitchens expresses his support for national health care and criticism of Reagan’s economic policies. The callers are not always so poised. When one angry caller dismisses his interest in Jesse Jackson’s campaign for the 1988 Democratic party nomination for president with a sneering “I can see exactly what a liberal he is . . . if he doesn’t like the United States, then why is he over here, trying to ruin it?” To this, Hitchens does take umbrage: “You’re more insulting than you intend to be madam, by calling me a liberal. I said earlier I was a socialist—you can’t have been listening. We regard liberals as dangerous compromisers.”
In the News Review studio
In addition to contrasting opinions, Hitchens’s look and tone couldn’t be more opposed to his conservative counterparts. Over the years his appearance changed innumerable times, with hair vacillating from short to curly to bordering-on-mullet, his weight jumping up and down and eventually maintaining a robust upswing; one consistent factor was his haggard, out-too-late and up-too-early countenance, with clothes that appeared to be thrown on literally while running out the door. This posits his Republican nemeses in stark relief as a series of perfectly coiffed villains overly buttoned-up in both mind and body, and seems to suggest an attitude on the part of Hitchens’s that says, “I rolled out of bed and clipped this mic on, and I’m still more erudite than you.”
Top left: Pat Buchanan on C-SPAN in August 1993; Top right: Hitchens keeps it casual on the show in June 1990; Bottom left: columnist Mona Charen’s appearance in November 1994; Bottom right: A windswept Hitchens in the studio, April 1993.
The journalist balanced his acerbic output of political commentary with a concurrent series of enthusiams on classic and contemporary literature. Although he most often appeared on C-SPAN’s Booknotes program when promoting his own titles, Hitchens was also invited on to discuss topics ranging from The Odyssey to Saul Bellow. In print, his opinions of twentieth-century authors are incisive and thoughtful: on Rebecca West, “Writing on this level must be esteemed and shown to later generations, no matter what the subject”; on Joan Didion, “We may intuit that the author is nervous, edgy, alive to the nuances of menace even in the most banal situation”; on Graham Greene, “Thank God that on so many occasions Greene has shown that he can write like an atheist.” He can be most often found online discussing the lasting impact of his favorite author, George Orwell, on whom he released the critical study Why Orwell Matters in 2005.
The context for Hitchens’s views about the politicians of his day have sometimes developed greater and unintended meaning in the subsequent years. In a conversation with Charlie Rose in 1999 about his book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, the journalist elaborates on his “bottomless contempt” for the former president: “He’s an abnormally ghastly individual in every respect. He uses his daughter as a prop, he uses the help as comfort women, and he uses public money to defame them and blackmail them.” In discussing the most recent sexual assault allegation lodged at Clinton at the time, Rose meekly suggests that Clinton’s lawyer had denied the claims. Hitchens fumes: “A lawyer? C’mon, you’d want to do better than that if you’d be accused of rape. I’m sorry . . . If I said to you that a plausible, respectable woman with no motive of malice has laid a charge of sexual assault against you, what do you say? Would you be content to say, ‘Well I know a lawyer who will say it’s not true’? I think self-respect would make you want to do a little better than that.” After this comment, Rose quickly stutters out a few half-rejoinders, plugs Hitchens’s book, and signs off. Beginning in 2017, thirty-five women to date have accused Charlie Rose of sexual misconduct and describe a decades-long work environment of regular verbal and physical harassment. In an unsuccessful attempt to paint Hitchens as a man obsessed, asking the author, “Could [Clinton] just be a guy who is consumed by ambition, who genuinely wants to make a difference?” we can now see how transparently Rose was trying to enhance the appearance of those he felt in sympathy with.
Hitchens in conversation with Charlie Rose in 2007 promoting his book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Hitchens was enamored with the United States since his arrival and became a naturalized citizen in 2007. From his first appearances to his last he is ardent about his love for the country and the unique freedoms it possesses. He cites the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the First Amendment not as stale fundaments of history but as living creatures who must be continually studied, referenced, and protected. Deeper than his sense of disgust at Clinton came a creeping resignation and sadness that Hitchens began to feel toward his own camps, those in journalism and those on the left, whom he felt deliberately pulled their punches during the former president’s tenure in order to maintain Democratic control of the White House. Dating back to TV appearances during the 1992 Democratic primaries until the turn of the century, Hitchens points out time and again at the former president’s “eerie and unattractive ability to get liberals to keep their mouths shut tight.” Blurring out the specifics of week-to-week issues that filled his columns and televised appearances, what Hitchens fought for most ardently his whole career was for the individual’s right to be free of ideological coercion, as he illustrates in an essay from 1989: “The real test . . . is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close allies and friends.”
Hitchens and Suzanne Somers on Politically Incorrect in 1999.
On the heels of this growing disillusionment came 9/11. Hitchens became a surprising proponent of the invasion of Iraq, explaining whenever he was given enough time to do so that he saw September 11, 2001, as a continuation of February 14, 1989, the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill friend and novelist Salman Rushdie. He saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a severe threat to democracy, secular culture, and independence of thought. Although he was strongly against Bush Sr.’s Gulf War he saw Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror against his own people—something the journalist had spoken out about since the late 1980s when details about the Anfal genocide against the Iraqi Kurdish population became known—as something that had to be vanquished as soon as possible. This position, which he argued was in keeping with his lifelong “anti-totaltarian” stance, put him in the crosshairs of many of his colleagues and allies; over the next few years he can be seen defending this support in debates with intellectual luminaries like Michael Parenti and his own brother, Peter Hitchens, a well-known journalist and author in England. (Peter is as amusing and eloquent as his brother but also every bit the pretentious-sounding conservative establishment type that Christopher was often accused of being, but who, in contrary to his predicted opinion, was against the Iraq War.)
Hitchens is never more magnetic and delightful than when he’s laying into a sacred religious figure or demolishing a conservative despot with a withering remark, but it’s when he’s hitting closer to home and jabbing at our own ideas of what is right and just that he’s most doing his job. Watching his arguments and hearing his accounts of numerous visits to Iraq and the surrounding regions reignites our memories from the ’00s and forces us to revisit the foundation upon which we built our opinions about the war. Hitchens encourages a skepticism within his readers and viewers, to not only disagree with his opinions but to audit our own. His total engagement in contemporary politics and society is one that he expects of others—in panels and debates he becomes agitated not when he’s in discussion with someone who disagrees with him, but only when that person cannot defend why they believe what they do.
During this time Hitchens’s appearances are no less colorful, but they can be more humorless. As the format of political talk shows began to evolve into more yelling and crosstalk and less conversation, the journalist usually only has a minute or two to make his point and there’s little time for levity with the matters at hand. Now rather appearing as a seated panelist in a studio with a solid-color backdrop, his visage is chopped and screwed into one of many talking head boxes, where he’s forced to shout elevator-pitch missives over other boxes in the few seconds before the next commercial. Now that he was superficially seen as one holding a conservative viewpoint, Hitchens was invited to be a guest on several Fox News–ish programs in which the hosts were invariably disappointed when the journalist tempered his support of the war with an indictment of the Bush administration as “ideological fanatics who are not competent to defend us.” Hitchens’s love of alcohol was no secret—one of his most well-known column articles was titled “Booze and Fags”—and during this time, in many appearances recorded after lunchtime the journalist seems somewhat pickled (and on the evening panel shows he simply brought his whiskey out with him). Part of the fascination of these videos is watching Hitchens glassy-eyed and flush while listening to another speaker, as if he’s drifted off in thought or about to slur his words, only to see the journalist open his mouth and deliver his customary concise, thoughtful opinion in his customary rich, deep tone, free from any trace of inebriation.
Left: Hitchens put up with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough for just so long in 2007; Right: Suffering through Morning Joe in 2009.
It is telling that even his old friend Rushdie became alarmed by the path Hitchens was on, and reflects in a posthumous tribute, “Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally, and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American conservatism for long.” Undoubtably, the journalist’s final target was his most formidable, but in some ways the easiest for him to unravel. In his book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (the little g is his), Hitchens formulates an argument against faith that had been brewing throughout his forty-year career of examining the evil that men do and the foundation upon which they justify their actions. The journalist argues that the real axis of evil are the three religions ruling the hemispheres: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In his promotion for the book, he posits the notion of religion from a unique stance:
Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who you must endlessly praise and who can convict you of thought-crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to a total surveillance around the clock every moment of your life. I say of your life, but also before you’re born and, even worse—and this is where the real fun begins—after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? At least in North Korea you can leave in one of two ways: you can escape, or you can die.
In additional to the usual televised appearances and bookshop readings Hitchens traveled throughout United States debating religious theologians about the fundaments behind their beliefs and appearing in a prominent debate in Toronto with former UK prime minister Tony Blair in November 2010. god Is Not Great became a bestseller, and Hitchens followed it up with a memoir, Hitch-22, of which he jokingly acknowledged: “When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps ‘too soon.’ Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken ‘too late.’” Shortly after the book’s release Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and forced to cancel his promotional engagements in order to undergo treatment. Rather than shying away from the public during this time, Hitchens openly detailed, as he put it, his “resistance” to cancer, recording his experiences in his Vanity Fair column and meeting with interviewers and journalists in his home. These videos can be hard to watch but they’re heartening and harrowing—he is neither angry about his diagnosis nor arrogant about his legacy (“that’s for others to decide”); he’s matter of fact about the gravity of his situation but understands that one can maintain optimism without stooping to faith to cope.
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Christopher Hitchens is dying. His head is bald, save the patchy wisps left after chemotherapy treatments. His usual stout figure is pale and gaunt. His normally velvet voice is raspy. It’s January 2011 and he’s sitting in his apartment across from Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN and a longtime professional ally. Lamb asks him the same few questions every interviewer asks during this time: has he changed his mind about God at all and has he regretted “going after anyone,” namely Mother Teresa. Hitchens’s answer is a sincere and somewhat surprised “No” to both, with an attitude of “Why on earth would I?” Lamb ask Hitchens that in light of his terminal diagnosis, does he have any regrets about the way he’s lived his life—the smoking, the drinking, the arguing. Hitchens answers seriously, thoughtfully, wistfully: “It would be hypocritical of me to say yes. I almost don’t regret it, though I should. I decided all of life is a wager, and I decided to gamble mine on the one I led. I can’t make it come out any other way.”
Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, at the age of sixty-two. A writer would prefer their legacy to be built upon the texts they’ve left behind, but the staggering weight of Hitchens’s recorded output is a rewarding way to be introduced to the man and further refine one’s opinion about him. His singular voice is, literally and figuratively, a needed tonic for any today we may find ourselves in.
There are many links to choose from in this piece, but if one would like a recommendation as to a good place to start, for a short clip I recommend the segment from Dennis Miller Live mentioned earlier, and for a full hour of discussion try this episode of Booknotes from September 1993, with Hitchens in conversation with Brian Lamb discussing his essay collection For the Sake of Argument.