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 I’d guess to be quasi-sexual in psychological orientation out of the act of tattling or betrayal.
This brings us to Hitchens’s 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, I 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!” Wouldn’t you just, I remember thinking at the time. I’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 had the hots and who worked for the British secret police. Now, Orwell is Hitchens’s idol, and he lost no time in defending Orwell’s snitch list in Vanity Fair and the Nation. Finally, I 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 my 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? I 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. I have read the transcript where, as I 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 pure Hitchens. 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 testify in any separate court action brought against Blumenthal.
Did Hitchens really think things through when he told the House impeachment people toward 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 will “reverse the whole impeachment tide” and 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 pints 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 whine of self-pity that the whole affair would probably end with him, 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 toward the end of his life, a man of the right.
There is the final question: is Hitchens making it all up, about the March 19 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 anger her.
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, amid this insensate hatred for Clinton he remembered the conversation the way he deemed 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 as 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.
Hitchens has done something 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.
March 4
“As far as chemical and biological weapons are concerned, Saddam Hussein is a repeat offender. He has used them against his neighbors and on his own people.”—Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State.
By Albright’s criteria, Saddam has a way to go to catch up with the United States. In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400 prisoners in Chicago with malaria in experiments designed to get “a profile of the disease and develop a treatment for it.” Most of the inmates were black, none were informed of the risks of the experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago malaria experiments as part of their defense.
In 1947, the US Army put on its payroll Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the Imperial Army of Japan’s bio-warfare unit. During World War II, Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied troops. He also operated a large research center in Manchuria, where he conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded germ bombs over dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings” to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons center in Frederick, Maryland.
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large quantities of Serratia marcescens, a bacteriological agent, over San Francisco, promoting an outbreak of pneumonia-like illnesses and causing the death of at least one man, Ed Nevins.
A yea
r later, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai charged that the US military and the CIA had used bio-agents against North Korea and China. Zhou produced statements from twenty-five US prisoners of war backing his claims that the US had dropped anthrax-contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying yellow fever and propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over Manchuria and North Korea. Secretary of State Dean Acheson dismissed Zhou’s accusations as being based on the “coerced confessions of brainwashed POWs.” Acheson blamed the outbreaks of disease in northern China and Korea on the “Communists’ inability to care for the health of the people under their control.” But in the fall of 1952 an International Commission looking into the matter produced a 700-page report supporting Zhou’s claims. The report noted that the insects found in the vicinity of the US “leaflet drops” were not native to the region. The Commission noted a “striking similarity” with the techniques perfected by Dr. Ishii during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.
From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released chemical clouds over six US and Canadian cities. The experiments were designed to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records noted that the compounds were used over Winnipeg, Canada, where there were numerous reports of respiratory illnesses, involving cadmium, a highly toxic chemical.
In 1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because blacks were believed to be more susceptible than whites. A similar experiment was undertaken later that year at Washington, DC’s National Airport. The bacteria was later linked to food and blood poisoning and respiratory problems.
Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, were the targets of repeated Army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill, suffering from fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers disguised themselves as public health workers in order photograph and test the victims. Several deaths were reported.
In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including eighty-eight children. In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted “bringing some germs” into Cuba in 1980.
Four years later an epidemic of dengue fever struck Managua, Nicaragua. Nearly 50,000 people came down with the fever and dozens died. This was the first outbreak of the disease in Nicaragua. It occurred at the height of the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government and followed a series of low-level “reconnaissance” flights over the capital city.
This is not to mention atmospheric nuclear testing.
May 20
Ron Ridenhour died on Sunday, May 10, at the age of fifty-two. He’d been playing handball, having told friends he’d probably had a few too many margaritas the night before. Then he sat down against a wall, turned blue and died. It reminds me too sharply of another journalist, my friend Larry Stern, whom Ron also knew, who went jogging at about the same age and keeled over. Journalists should take an arm’s-length attitude toward immoderate physical exercise.
I met Ron in New Orleans back in 1988. We talked about My Lai and how he’d heard about it, investigated it, and finally brought the massacre into the light of day. Ron’s point was always that My Lai was an operation, “an act of policy, not an aberration. Above My Lai that day were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force, from 7.30 a.m. to 11.30 a.m. It takes a long time to kill over 600 people.”
Then on the thirtieth anniversary of My Lai, this last March, I talked to him again, about Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta getting Soldier’s Medals for their action in saving some civilians that day. I asked him how he’d feel if someone offered him the medal. “I didn’t save any lives,” he said dryly. Ron was far too well-mannered to say it, but I knew he must have felt that there was something altogether too symmetrical and phony about the sudden discovery of Thompson as My Lai’s Lone American Hero, matching the prosecution of Rusty Calley as My Lai’s Lone American Villain.
May 27
I called my publisher, Verso Books, the other day and found its executive director, Colin Robinson, agog over the success of Verso’s 150th anniversary edition of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. He’d already sent me the sleek little book with its introduction by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. I told Colin waspishly it looked like an espresso, or maybe latte table book, with its somber, stylish cover design of a red flag by the Russian émigré artists Komar and Melamid flapping over a black background: Marxism without hope.
Robinson wasn’t irked at all. He said Verso had printed 25,000 copies and they were selling like hot cakes. The publicity had been gratifying. He’d nearly persuaded Barney’s to do a window display of fashionable models, all with copies of the Manifesto poking from their handbags or pockets. On his desk, he boasted, were great piles of excited articles that had run in the US press, all touting the new Marx craze.
I don’t like Verso’s edition. It looks like a memento rather than a manifesto. The old Moscow publishing house booklet which I read back in the late 1950s looked like it meant business. It was aimed at people who wanted to overthrow capitalism, and said so right away.
Hobsbawm says the proletariat is a failure and maintains that these days the prime countervailing force is environmentalism. Not the environmental movement, please note. The movement, which springs in part from utopian socialism, implies action and struggle. Hobsbawm seems to see environmentalism as prudently managed capitalism on a global scale, with social engineers nicely equipped with the appropriate degrees in charge.
Back in 1958 the American sociologist Lewis Feuer introduced his edition of the Manifesto, writing that the revolutionary intellectual of the ’30s has been replaced by the managerial intellectual of the ’50s, and with this change in social temper the philosophy of Karl Marx would be consigned by many persons to the museum of their youthful indiscretions. In 1998 these same managerial intellectuals want to manage the entire planet, and Hobsbawm, who had a few youthful indiscretions of his own, sees barbarism as the only alternative to such planetary supervision by credentialed, scientific professionals (presumably financed by George Soros and the Nature Conservancy). So Verso’s is a manifesto without class struggle, without revolution.
How different an attitude to history than Marx’s. In his last edition of the Manifesto, in 1882, he excitedly used news of the class struggle in Russia and America to adjust his revolutionary gunsights. His aim remained true, as did his commitment.
But to divorce the Manifesto from revolution, as does Hobsbawm, is indeed to produce a Marxism without hope. Marx merely becomes a preface to the great German sociologist Max Weber who once described capitalism as mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.
Many reviewers of Verso’s Manifesto have tended to see it as a celebration—admittedly acerbic—of global capitalism, sweeping away all hindrances to the basic task of accumulation. Both the neoliberal New Yorker and conservative Times Literary Supplement have praised Marx for his perspicacity and overall up-to-dateness in seeing which way capitalism was headed, while saying that where he truly messed up was in his revolutionary politics. Marx gets whacked with words like promethean or utopian, to show how he sent Communism off down a blind alley.
September 16
The more minutely we are able to examine the private side of vastly powerful public persons, the more pity we should feel for their condition. For many years the Emperor Franz Joseph, leader of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, used to try to get an extra kettle of hot water brought along miles of corridors in his palace to warm his bath. His orders were given a respectful hearing, then ignored.
Bill Clinton, leader of the free world, couldn’t engage in a furtive embrace of a woman not his wife in the Oval Office becaus
e he thought the gardener would peer in the windows. For the pitifully few moments of semi-gratification he and Monica Lewinsky were able to indulge each other, the two had to seclude themselves in a windowless corridor, a love site without even the close excitement of a broom closet.
The Starr report, released on September 11, on the intimacies of the President and the White House intern, must surely rank as one of the most bizarre documents about the sex life of a public person ever given to the world. A thousand years from now, cultural anthropologists will marvel at the insensate detail of its portrait of what happened when a president in his late forties was seduced by a rich girl from Beverly Hills. The Starr report is Clinton’s legacy, as striking a symbol of our time as was the scaffold of Louis XVI to the late eighteenth century.
This is not to undercut the demented nature of the Starr report, which has as eerie a feel to it as a proceeding from the Spanish Inquisition or one of those court sessions from the Middle Ages when animals were placed on trial for heresy. To us, in the late twentieth century, it is unfathomable that serious people should have considered putting a pig or a goose through the rigors of the judicial process. A century from now our descendants will surely marvel at an age—ours—when millions and millions of dollars were spent to determine that the President and Ms Lewinsky enjoyed ten bouts of oral sex in two years, attended by two orgasms per partner across that entire time.
A Colossal Wreck Page 13
