The Defector

Christopher Hitchens’ memoir details a lifetime in combat journalism

In 1990, Commentary magazine warned its readers that Christopher Hitchens, then a bomb-throwing columnist at The Nation, was “a highly visible piece of leftist bric-a-brac in East Coast literary salons.” The targets of Hitchens’ wrath, said the conservative monthly, were typically “anyone in the democratic West,” with the exception of the left-wing lion Gore Vidal, the writer who once anointed Hitchens as his dauphin.

Twenty years later, writing in Vanity Fair, Hitchens dismissed his former comrade Vidal as a “crackpot” whose recent political writings were inseparable from the bilge found on loony conspiracy websites. This lefty bric-a-brac, it appeared, had transmogrified into a dues-paying member of the neocon establishment.

While he had always smuggled heterodox views into the pages of The Nation on issues ranging from abortion to the Falklands War, Hitchens’ real apostasy (and it is always referred to in quasi-religious terms) was precipitated by the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the weeks and months following the mass murder in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Hitchens unloaded on his Nation stablemates, including Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Alexander Cockburn, for not recognizing what he diagnosed as the West’s decades-long war with Islamic fascism.

The responses to Hitchens’ noisy break with the left were routinely ad hominem and, in the case of his ex-allies, often intensely personal. Cockburn, editor of the radical newsletter and website Counterpunch, seethed that his former friend was a “truly disgusting sack of shit.” Another Counterpunch writer, Jack McCarthy, sputtered that Hitchens was a “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian.” Norman Finkelstein, who had previously praised Hitchens’ writings on the Israel-Palestine conflict, suggested that he might do the world a favor by committing suicide.

Sifting through the detritus of post-9/11 opinion journalism, you’ll see newly minted detractors accusing Hitchens of being, variously, an alcoholic, snitch, racist, cad, Holocaust denier, and predatory homosexual. Small wonder that The New Yorker would ask, in 2006, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?”