One was ‘Oh, that’s useful because Christopher has always been very pro- Palestinian, and much more forthrightly pro-Palestinian than any other non-Palestinian in the US.’ And he had edited that collection with Edward Said. And I thought, ‘This will make it harder to accuse him of being an anti-Semite.’
I must say I never thought of him as being an anti-Semite, he always struck me as being very scrupulous in his politics. On the other hand, I knew he was friends with a lot of the New Republic people. And I thought, ‘Well, this is convenient, because it will help him with the New Republic people, because a certain amount of eccentricity is tolerated among Jews. That will help him with people like Michael Kinsley and Leon Wieseltier.’ And I think to a certain extent that happened. I don’t think it happened just because he discovered he was Jewish, but he was taken up by the New Republic for a time. Christopher wrote for the New Republic and went to their parties.32
In a sense, then, the Brit abroad had just acquired a new dimension to his identity, one that may have slightly taken the edge off his anti- Zionism. And it may have made his provocations over the Holocaust slightly less toxic for his audience. One of Hitchens’s brief passions in the late 1990s was the defence of the pro-Nazi historian David Irving and, increasingly, Hitchens’s sympathy with Irving’s view that the numbers of those murdered in the Holocaust have been grossly inflated. Hitchens told anyone who would listen that it would be wrong to dismiss Irving’s work, for there was a real issue at stake. To Tariq Ali and quite a few others, Hitchens divulged an interest in making a film about the subject.
He came to me and said, ‘Tariq, do you think six million Jews were killed in the Judeocide?’ I said to him, ‘What difference does it make?’ And he said, ‘You’re wrong to poo-poo this – the figures don’t add up. If it was 4.3 million Jews who were killed, we should use that figure.’33
It was not only the figures that Hitchens found dubious but, following Irving, the details of what the Nazis are alleged to have done. Dennis Perrin says Hitchens dismissed ‘the concept of lamp shades [made of human skin] and human soap in the Nazi camps as Stalinist propaganda’.34
All three issues have a margin of legitimate historical controversy. At the very least, there is disagreement about precisely how many Jews the Nazis murdered and certainly doubt about the extent of human soap-making. But what is suggestive is that Hitchens seems to have believed that he could not engage with the questions from within mainstream historical scholarship and thus needed to hear them from a scholar with a weak spot for Hitlerism. This was, to be fair to Hitchens, before the conclusion of the trial in which Irving was taken to pieces over his fabrications – a libel case he had brought against the historian Deborah Lipstadt because of her characterisation of him as a ‘Holocaust denier’. It was also therefore before the publication of the historian Richard J. Evans’s Telling Lies for Hitler, a crushing demolition of Irving’s propaganda.35
But even this concession to ‘fairness’ is an insult to Hitchens, since it implies that he was taken in by Irving. Hitchens had justly criticised H. L. Mencken for his sanguinity in the face of fascism – a ‘literary failure’ and not just political decrepitude. In the figure of Hitler was a target, a quack, a charlatan, ‘a crank to end all quacks’, Hitchens declared. ‘Such a target! And from the pen that had flayed and punctured the “booboisie”, there came little or nothing.’36 It would be nonsensical to compare to Hitler a petty, duplicitous fraud like Irving, to say nothing of comparing Hitchens to Mencken. But at least we can say that Hitchens knew what a flunk it was to be remiss on the issue of fascist quackery. To make himself an ally of Irving just when the latter’s worth as an historian was being mercilessly divested surely immolated Hitchens’s probity at the shrine of opportunism. As was often the case with Hitchens, however, rather than recant or express contrition, he rationalised and revised, such that he painted himself mainly as a defender of free speech rather than someone hoping to stir controversy about the Holocaust.37
But what to make of this episode, given Hitchens’s own statement that ‘a Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer’?38 It might be true, if finger-wagging, to suggest that the author of the ‘Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs’ was trivial about his recently acquired Jewishness, that it meant as much to him as it can mean to someone who is capable of making a week’s reputation out of the paradoxical assertion that a Holocaust affirmer is actually on to something. More prosaically, it suggests that Hitchens was capable of rationalising any absurdity without its affecting his amour propre, provided there were indeed the requisite reputation miles to be earned in the process.
There would be far worse, far more wholesale quackery on Hitchens’s part, in the years to come. As I mentioned, quite often in those years he would find himself standing up for the ‘Jewish people’, whether their foe was real or imaginary. On these occasions Hitchens would freely dispense the trivialising innuendo, implying anti-Semitism on the part of his opponents, an accusation to which he had himself once been subject, and from which the discovery of his Jewishness only partially screened him. Hitchens’s Jewish descent thus formed first a protective carapace, then a weapon, but it also arguably formed part of a compound Anglo-American-Jewish identity that distinguished him among his peers.
HATING CLINTON, LOVING BUSH
Hitchens could be unforgiving of slights. When his friend Guttenplan tried to get Hitchens to work at Vanity Fair, he was rebuffed by the editor. Guttenplan dealt with this by treating Hitchens to an expensive lunch on the expense account each time he was in town. Hitchens, before eating, routinely checked: ‘This is on Fuckface, right?’39 Similarly, his long-standing hatred for the Clintons may have owed at least in part to a rebuff by Hillary Clinton. Soon after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Hitchens approached his friend Tariq Ali with some news. ‘I need to discuss something with you,’ Hitchens said.
I’ve got Jessica Mitford and her husband coming round to dinner in a few weeks’ time. You know that Hillary Clinton worked in his law practice as an intern and then as a young lawyer? Well, I’ve invited Hillary along to my dinner, and this will be a big test for her, whether she comes or not.
How might it have been had the Clintons decided to entertain Hitchens and taken him into their confidence? Ali’s answer: ‘He would have been completely playing ball with them.’40
If that had happened, Hitchens would not have been the only one to be charmed by the Clintons. ‘Clinton did have this capacity to seduce journalists who had until then seemed like outsiders and happy with it,’ Guttenplan recalled.
There was a way in which Clinton seemed, I think mistakenly, to be ‘one of us’ … I remember people thinking that because this guy worked for McGovern, he demonstrated against the war, so when he gets to be president, he’ll be great. I remember thinking, ‘This guy comes from Arkansas and he’s not a racist, that’s such a big thing and it’s worth voting for.’41
However, it is not obvious that Hitchens was ready to be seduced even before Hillary’s rebuff. As soon as the governor of Arkansas appeared as a serious presidential candidate, Hitchens set out to prove to liberals that Clinton was not their man and did so at first primarily by demonstrating that Clinton was, if not a racist himself, quite happy to play to Southern racist traditions.
Exhibit A in this charge was the execution of Rickey Ray Rector. Here was a man against whom punishment was futile, and not merely cruel, as he had already destroyed his frontal lobe with a self-administered gunshot. Hitchens went about showing that not only was death by lethal injection an uncivilised horror, and not only racist in its application, but even by the usual standards of America’s barbaric criminal justice system a gross affront to normal standards of clemency. As such the person who authorised this execution – William Jefferson Clinton – could be shown to have ‘opted to maintain the foulest traditions and for the meanest purposes’, even where no poll-driven
