-Caveat Lector-
>From LA Times
Tuesday, February 9, 1999
Shredding the Ties That Bind Journalists
<Picture>Friendship: Writers dine out on facts. What they must not do is
burn each other.
By TODD GITLIN
<Picture: J>ournalists, especially in Washington and especially on the
left, are reeling from the weekend news about the morals of their
"community." What caused shudders was the affidavit sworn out last week by
the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, alleging that his (now ex-)
friend Sidney Blumenthal had lied when he maintained, under oath, in a Feb.
3 deposition for the Senate trial of President Clinton that he had not
spread derogatory rumors about Monica Lewinsky to reporters.
Curiously referring to his wife as his "associate," perhaps to
establish that the lunch with Blumenthal last March was all business,
Hitchens alleged that "Mr. Blumenthal stated that Monica Lewinsky had been
a 'stalker' and that the president was 'the victim' of a predatory and
unstable sexually demanding young woman. . . . I have personal knowledge
that Mr. Blumenthal recounted to other people in the journalistic community
the same story about Monica Lewinsky." Blumenthal, himself a well-known
former journalist turned White House aide, has responded that "the notion
that I was trying to plant a story with this rabidly anti-Clinton friend is
absurd."
So, to the delectation of the Republican right, has Blumenthal been
betrayed by a man who affects revolutionary virtue, marooned in the '90s.
Some of what is in play, no doubt, is left-wing fundamentalism: the
conviction of purists that what stands in the way of their hearts' desire
is the treacherous class enemy, the Social Democrats (aka "social
fascists," in Stalinist parlance) who mislead the otherwise vigorous
proletariat. Blumenthal's Clintonian "third way" centrism is, from this
point of view, itself the sheerest betrayal. Therefore, no holds are to be
barred. Belle-lettristic denunciation will not suffice. Call in the law.
But some of what seems to be in play in Hitchens' betrayal is the
question of what constitutes friendship in the first place. For if
Hitchens' affidavit is false, that is one sort of betrayal; if it is true,
that is another sort. In either case, betrayal of friendship is the
irreducible core of the matter--as is the case in two recent books about
friendship and betrayal, Norman Podhoretz's "Ex-Friends" and Paul Theroux's
"Sir Vidia's Shadow." In a superb review of both books in the current issue
of Dissent, writer George Packer asks what kind of friendships these were
that were so lustfully, so irreconcilably broken. They were not what one
normally thinks of as friendships. They were little mutual-use societies.
These shredded friendships were, in effect, business deals gone bad. The
two books, Packer writes, "call into question the very notion that literary
friendship itself is possible."
In the case of Blumenthal and Hitchens, accomplished writers both, the
deals were largely political, not literary, but Packer's point stands in
their case as well. Journalists tend to befriend journalists and organize
convivial associations of their kind. Even rivals are warmed by the fires
of the same fraternity (or sorority). As in every professional circle, they
cement their bonds with gossip, among other things. They dine out on
facts--meaning in part, each other's facts--and they also confide. What
they must not do is burn each other.
If this principle sounds cozy, it is also, in journalism as in
politics, a prerequisite for social decency. In the early years of the Cold
War, friendships also shattered when ex-Communists named the names not of
spies but of run-of-the-mill Communist Party members. What was so deeply
corrosive was not simply that the ex-Communist witnesses disagreed about
Stalin or the Cold War--that was long overdue. They could have written
articles, even film scripts, denouncing each others' views. That would have
been the politics of the pen--what one expects from writers, after all.
No, what was corrosive was that friends went before congressional
committees and courts to inform. They hadn't been friends at all, connected
person to person. They had been "comrades," a bond they had thought more
exalted--fused in a total enterprise they had imagined to surpass such
bourgeois notions as trustworthiness. They were badly, grievously wrong.
Their opportunistic bond proved paper-thin.
From Linda Tripp to Kenneth Starr to Christopher Hitchens. . . .
poisons are circulating. Tripp's illegal tape recordings led to
impeachment, hot pursuit of a president led Starr to circulate his
illegally got gains all over the world, and now Hitchens joins them in
disgrace. Wiretaps, subpoenas, affidavits, the whole criminalizing
apparatus of betrayal--all this destroys trust. Abuse the trust of friends
and you shred honor. Shred honor and you plunge civilization into the war
of all against all. Talk about moral lessons for the young.
- - -
Todd Gitlin Is the Author of "The Sixties," "The Twilight of Common
Dreams," and the Forthcoming "Sacrifice." (Metropolitan/henry Holt)
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From CounterPunch.CoM
Hitch the Snitch
"'Okay,' I said, giving him a chance to rationalize his snitching, which
all informants have to do when they start out."
J. Wambaugh, Blue Night
Many people go through life rehearsing a role they feel that the fates have
in store for them, and we've long thought that Christopher Hitchens has
been asking himself for years how it would feel to plant the Judas kiss.
Indeed an attempted physical embrace has often been part of the rehearsal.
Many's the time male friends have had to push Hitchens' mouth, fragrant
with martinis away, as, amid the welcomes and good-byes, he seeks their
cheek or lips.
And now, as a Judas and a snitch, Hitchens has made the big time. On
February 5, amid the embers of the impeachment trial, he trotted along to
Congress and swore out an affidavit that he and his wife, Carol Blue, had
lunch with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal last March 19 and that
Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. Since Blumenthal had
just claimed in his deposition to the House impeachment managers that he
had no idea how this linking of the White House stalker stories had
started, Hitchens' affidavit was about as flat a statement as anyone could
want that Blumenthal has perjured himself, thus exposing himself to a
sentence of up to five years in prison. At the very least, Hitchens has
probably cost Blumenthal about $100,000 in fresh legal expenses on top of
the $200,000 tab he's already facing. Some friend.
And we are indeed talking about friendship here. They've been pals for
years and Hitchens has not been shy about trumpeting the fact. Last spring,
when it looked as though Blumenthal was going to be subpoenaed by
prosecutor Starr for his journalistic contacts, Hitchens blared his
readiness to stand shoulder to shoulder with his comrade: "...together we
have soldiered against the neoconservative ratbags," Hitchens wrote in The
Nation last spring. "Our life a deux has been, and remains an open book. Do
your worst. Nothing will prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table
or, I trust, him from gnawing in return." This was in an edition of The
Nation dated March 30, 1998, a fact which means -- given The Nation's
scheduling practices-- that Hitchens just writing these loyal lines
immediately before the lunch -- Hitchens now says he thinks it was on March
17, at the Occidental Restaurant near the White House -- whose
conversational menu Hitchens would be sharing with these same
neo-conservative, right-wing ratbags ten months later.
The surest way to get a secret into mass circulation is to tell it to
Hitchens, swearing him to silence as one does so. His friends have known
this for years. As a compulsive tattler and gossip Hitchens gets a frisson
we'd guess to be quasi-sexual in psychological orientation out of the act
of tattling or betrayal.
This brings us to Hitchens' snitch psychology, and the years of psychic
preparation that launched him into the affidavit against his friend
Blumenthal. Like those who question themselves about the imagined future
role -- "would I really leap through fire to save my friend", "would I stay
silent if threatened with torture" -- Hitchens has, we feel certain,
brooded constantly about the conditions under which he might snitch, or
inform. A good many years ago we were discussing the German Baader-Meinhof
gang, some of whose members were on the run at the time. Hitchens, as is
his wont, stirred himself into a grand little typhoon of moral outrage
against the gang, whose reckless ultra-leftism was, he said, only doing
good to the right. "If one of them came to my front door seeking shelter,"
Hitchens cried, "I would call the police in an instant and turn him in!"
Would you just, we remember thinking at the time. We've often thought about
that outburst since, and whether in fact Christopher was at some level
already in the snitch business.
Over the past couple of years the matter of George Orwell's snitching has
been a public issue. Orwell, in the dawn days of the cold war and not long
before his own death, compiled a snitch list of Commies and fellow
travelers and turned them over to Cynthia Kirwan, a woman for whom he'd had
the hots and who worked for the British secret police. Now, Orwell is
Hitchens' idol, and he lost no time in defending Orwell's snitch list in
Vanity Fair and The Nation. Finally, CounterPunch co-editor Alexander
Cockburn wrote a Nation column giving the anti-Orwell point of view, taking
the line that the list was mostly idle gossip, patently racist and
anti-Semitic, part and parcel of McCarthyism. Bottom line snitching to the
secret police wouldn't do. Hitchens seemed genuinely surprised by our basic
position that snitching is a dirty business, to be shunned by all decent
people.
Then, in the middle of last week, he snitched on Sidney. Why did he do it?
We didn't see him with Tim Russert on Meet The Press, but apparently he
looked ratty, his physical demeanor not enhanced by a new beard. We have
read the transcript where, as we anticipated, Hitchens says he simply
couldn't let the Clinton White House get away with denials that they had
been in the business of slandering women dangerous to them, like Monica, or
Kathleen Willey.
There were couple of moments of echt Hitchens. Unlike Blumenthal, Hitchens
said, "I don't have a lawyer." Only Hitchens could charge someone with
perjury and then sneer that the object of his accusations was contemptible
for having a legal representative. And only Hitchens could publicly declare
Blumenthal to have lied to Congress and then with his next breath affirm in
a voice quivering with all the gallantry of loyal friendship that "I would
rather be held in contempt of court" than to testify in any separate court
action brought against Blumenthal.
Did Hitchens really think things through when he told the House impeachment
people towards the end of last week he was willing to swear out an
affidavit on the matter of the famous March lunch? Does he think that with
this affidavit he "reverse the whole impeachment tide, bring Clinton down?
Or is he, as Joan Bingham told Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post, merely
trying to promote a forthcoming book? A woman who knows Hitchens well and
who is inclined to forgive, has suggested that the booze has finally got to
him and that his behavior exhibits all the symptoms of chronic alcoholism:
an impulsive act, dramatically embarked upon and, in the aftermath, only
vaguely apprehended by the perp.
It's true, Hitchens does drink a staggering amount with, as all
acquaintances will agree, a truly amazing capacity to pull himself together
and declaim in a coherent manner while pint of alcohol and gallons of wine
are coursing through his bloodstream. But he does indeed seem only vaguely
to understand what he has done to Sidney. On Sunday February 7, he was
telling one journalist that he still thought his friendship with Sidney
could be saved. By Tuesday, he was filing a Nation column, once again
reiterating his friendship for Blumenthal, intimating he'd done him a big
favor, blaming Clinton for everything he, Hitchens, was doing to Blumenthal
and concluding with a truly revolting whine of self-pity that the whole
affair would probably end with he, Hitchens, being cited for contempt of
court.
Perhaps more zealously than most, Hitchens has always liked to have it both
ways, identifying himself as a man of the left while, in fact being, as was
his hero Orwell particularly towards the end of his life, a man of the
right. "I dare say I'll be cut and shunned," he told the Washington Post
and we had the sense of a halo being tried for size, with Hitchens
measuring himself for martyrdom as the only leftist who can truly think
through the moral consequences of Clintonism and take appropriate action.
But the problem is that even though Chris Buckley, also quoted by Lloyd
Grove in the Washington Post, tried to dress up the affair with the
historical dignity of return of the duel between Alger Hiss and Whitaker
Chambers, this is a footnote to history, costly though the footnote will be
costly to Blumenthal at least in lawyers' fees. The worst price Hitchens
will have to pay will be in terms of Georgetown party invitations. In
Georgetown, as Buckley also told Grove in The Washington Post, it is "a
tectonic event for our crowd."
There is the final question: is Hitchens making it all up, about the March
17 lunch? Blumenthal says he has no recollection, and adds, as all agree,
that there had already been hundreds of references in the press to Monica
being a stalker, and he may just have repeated to Hitchens and Blue what
he'd read in the papers. It was a month, remember, when the White House was
being very careful in what it was saying about Monica because they were
uncertain which way she would jump and didn't want to piss her off. Joe
Conason of The New York Observer, certainly an eager recipient of White
House slants at the time, says he spoke to Blumenthal in that period and
Blumenthal refused to talk about Lewinsky at all. It's true, Hitchens can
be a terrific fibber, but, short of willful misrepresentation, maybe,
amidst his insensate hatred for Clinton he's remembered the conversation
the way he deems it to have taken place rather than the way it actually
happened. In his own affidavit Hitchens did not say that Blumenthal had
directly cited Clinton as describing Lewinsky as a stalker and on CNN he
tagged only Blumenthal as describing Monica thus. Yet, in her affidavit,
filed after her husband's from the west coast where she has been staying,
Carol Blue said that Blumenthal had indeed cited Clinton has describing
Lewinsky as a stalker and also as crazy. It seems extraordinary that
Hitchens and Blue couldn't get their affidavits straight, and it seems that
Blue's affidavit was filed purely with the intention of further damaging
Blumenthal--which indeed it has.
We think Hitchens has done something utterly despicable. It wasn't so long
ago that he was confiding to a Nation colleague, in solemn tones, that for
him the most disgusting aspect of the White House's overall disgusting
behavior was "what they have done to my friend Sidney". He's probably still
saying it. Hitchens always could cobble up a moral posture out of the most
unpromising material. CP
~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From SalonMagazine.CoM
-----Et tu, Chris?
<Picture: media circus>
THE JUDAS KISS -- OR AN ACT OF PRINCIPLE? STEVEN BRILL, BARBARA EHRENREICH,
GRAYDON CARTER, KATHA POLLITT AND OTHER MEDIA POOBAHS WEIGH IN ON THE
HITCHENS-BLUMENTHAL DEBACLE.
BY SUSAN LEHMAN
Journalists, perhaps having associated with politicians for too long, have
begun to eat their own. Among the pundits and scribes this week, one
subject ruled supreme, displacing such minor affairs as the impeachment
trial: the ugly little dust-up between Christopher Hitchens (a sometime
Salon contributor) and Sidney Blumenthal. Haven't had enough? Media Circus
sought comment from well-known media figures.
Barbara Ehrenreich (author of "Blood Rites"): My first response was a small
cheer. I always thought the most despicable thing the White House did in
all of this was to attempt to discredit Monica Lewinsky -- from Clinton's
calling her "that women" to the effort to float the stalker theory. It just
disgusted me. That's why my first response was a little cheer. I'm sort of
glad Hitchens exposed Blumenthal.
Katha Pollitt (columnist, the Nation): I think someone who calls himself a
socialist and a man of the left should not be helping the repressive powers
of the state. He could have just left this whole thing alone. There was no
need for him to help Trent Lott, Bob Barr and Henry Hyde. He could have
said, "I don't have a dog in this fight." I think that would have been a
defensible left-wing position.
Joe Conason (columnist, Salon and the New York Observer): In the long run,
it is a sideshow created by the House managers and abetted by Christopher
Hitchens in order to prolong their own failure. And they failed even in
this.
Janet Malcolm (author, "The Crime of Sheila McGough"): Frank Rich [New York
Times columnist] kind of had the last word in his column today about it. I
have nothing to add. [Rich scoffed at Christopher Buckley's claim that the
incident was a "Chambers-vs.-Hiss moment ... the kind of event in which one
inevitably must take sides," writing, "Where are the huge principles to
rally around? ...What is on the line is the guest list of certain
Washington dinner parties, a lot of lawyers' fees, and Mr. Hitchens'
continued ability to command a spotlight on All Monica talk shows. This cat
fight isn't Chambers vs. Hiss but Beaver-vs.-Eddie Haskell."]
Marc Cooper (author, "Roll Over Che Guevara"): We just spent a year being
told that it's none of our business what the president's sex life is; if
that's true, it's even less of our business to know details about the
friendship between Christopher Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal. It's between
them. I don't think Christopher Hitchens betrayed any journalistic
confidence here; he did disrupt a friendship, but he didn't violate any
journalistic standard. My interest is in what this whole thing has done to
what we call the left, and in the degree to which the left has consistently
folded itself into Bill Clinton's camp over the last year. When someone for
once in this whole mess rises above crass self-interest and political
expediency and acts on what appears to be principle, the whole world goes
crazy, and we see such foolishness as was visible in the L.A. Times wherein
Todd Gitlin argued that the survival of morally decent society depends on
these two guys and their old boy's network keeping each other's secrets --
regardless of what Blumenthal did or didn't do.
For those who want to wring hands over the moral and ethical questions
here, the larger question is about other so-called journalists, who are all
aghast and shocked about what journalist Hitchens has done. What about
journalist Blumenthal, who resigned his job in order to put his Rolodex and
professional authority into the service of a lying and scheming president,
and who used his contacts not to defend national security or social reform,
but to be a hit man, in an effort to handle, not a political opponent, but
a young woman who had become inconvenient for the president? Blumenthal has
become Clinton's Tom Hagen, the consigliere to Godfather Clinton, and I'm
supposed to feel badly because someone ratted out Blumenthal for cutting
the horse's head off?
N E X T_ P A G E | Cockburn: Hitchens is a Judas
ET TU, CHRISTOPHER? | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
Stanley Crouch (author, "The All-American Skin Game"): British people who
come to America and set themselves up as pundits are indefensible ... The
whole matter is rather startling to me, because I don't know what Hitchens
considers himself to be doing. Perhaps he assumes he's above the fray, so
far above the fray he can say what he wants to say. I think it may have a
disastrous impact on his career. Who would trust him after this?
Eric Alterman (author of "Who Speaks for America?: Why Democracy Matters in
Foreign Policy" and Nation columnist): I profoundly disagree with my friend
Christopher's decision to do this, as I disagree with virtually everything
he has said and done since the Lewinsky matter began. I don't believe in
attacking my friends through the media. That's all I have to say.
Ben Sonnenberg (former editor, Grand Street): How sad I am for a mental
breakdown of Christopher's. I don't understand what he's doing; I don't
think he understands it. It just makes me very unhappy, for personal
reasons and for public ones -- here Christopher is a man of the left,
allegedly, who would never betray a friend to the authorities, and now he
is doing just that and doing it in a particularly ineffectual way. I
endorse every word of Alexander Cockburn's column in the New York Free
Press.
Alexander Cockburn (writer, columnist): Hitchens has done something utterly
despicable. I wrote about this so that I wouldn't have to comment further.
All my thoughts on this are in the column I wrote yesterday. [A sample line
gives the flavor of Cockburn's piece: "And now, as a Judas and a snitch,
Hitchens has made the big time."]
Steven Brill (editor, Brill's Content): I don't think Blumenthal did it,
and I'm in sort of a unique spot in that at the time this conversation
supposedly took place, I was doing my reporting on the Pressgate article
and I tried in conversation with Blumenthal to get him to say stuff [about
Monica Lewinsky's alleged "stalking"] and he wouldn't. He sent me lots of
clips and [stalking] wasn't mentioned in any of those. The whole thing is
blown way out of whack -- if you look at Blumenthal's testimony and at what
Hitchens is saying, there isn't any disagreement about the facts. Hitchens
is right about that.
Ann Louise Bardach (contributing writer, Vanity Fair): Hitchens is a dear
friend and will remain one, but the whole episode is troubling to me.
Graydon Carter (editor, Vanity Fair): In a get-along go-along town like
Washington, where everybody cares way too much what everyone else thinks,
Christopher goes his own way intellectually, politically and certainly
sartorially.
Victor Navasky (editor, the Nation): I think there are two separate issues.
First, this is a distraction, an irrelevance and a sideshow in terms of the
impeachment of the president. It is a comment on the media and the pitiful
case for impeachment that Henry Hyde has to grab onto this and has tried to
use this against the president ... Second, the journalistic principle is:
It is inappropriate and improper for a reporter to use a private
conversation with a friend for public purposes without first getting
clearance ... To cooperate with opportunistic prosecutors or prosecutorial
operations raises real questions, as it did in the '50s when people who
cooperated legitimized these operations.
Lewis Lapham (editor, Harper's): Maybe if I were Sally Quinn, I'd know
whether to discuss this subject after the soup, with the asparagus or
before the sorbet.
James Chase (editor, World Policy Journal): I am a good friend of Sidney
Blumenthal's and a longtime acquaintance of Christopher Hitchens'. I think
Sidney is a person of great integrity, so I found it astounding that
someone who purported to be his friend would impugn his integrity.
How Hitchens could do this I don't understand. The day before the
affidavit, I hear, Hitchens told friends at a party that he would stand by
Sidney though the two disagreed about the president. And, earlier that
week, as I understand it, Carol Blue (Hitchens' wife) called Sidney
Blumenthal, before his deposition testimony, and wished him well. I find it
more bewildering that they would have submitted an affidavit to Republican
prosecutors. Why did they do this? I am totally bewildered as to why and
would not care to speculate.
SALON | Feb. 11, 1999
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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