Hitch-22

In his memoir, Hitch-22 (2010), English-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens chronicles both the personal and political arcs of his life as he grows into his stature as a public intellectual and avowed atheist, while negotiating his positions in respect to the American left. The book received critical acclaim and earned a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Born in Portsmouth, England in 1949, Hitchens belonged to a family of Royal Navy veterans. Despite his family’s modest income, his mother insisted on cobbling together the money needed to send her son to boarding school: "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it." It was in boarding school that Hitchens discovered a valuable life lesson: "words could function as weapons." A relatively small boy, classmates regularly bullied the adolescent Hitchens. In fear of becoming "a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag," Hitchens confronted his chief tormenter and stood up for himself, telling the boy, "You are a liar, a bully, a coward, and a thief." Hitchens's rhetoric at that age was sufficiently forceful to cause the bully to retreat.

Hitchens's first active engagement with political thinking came in his thirteenth year during the Cuban Missile Crisis: "If politics could force its way into my life in such a vicious and chilling manner, I felt, then I had better find out a bit more about it." By the time he matriculated at Oxford, however, his interests still lay primarily in the field of literature. He consumed books at a startling pace and particularly enjoyed Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Over time, his fearsome debating skills made him a natural fit at leftwing political rallies, and Hitchens became, in the words of his friend the poet James Fenton, "the second most famous person at Oxford" after the playwright Mike Rosen. His pet political issues at the time were opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, nuclear weapons, and "the unaccountable corporation." While at Oxford, Hitchens attended the infamous gathering at which future President Bill Clinton "did not inhale" marijuana smoke. Hitchens substantiates this claim, but only because Clinton was allergic to smoke. Instead, Clinton consumed marijuana via "cookies and brownies."



Inspired by the British journalist James Cameron, Hitchens entered the field of journalism after his graduation from Oxford. His first steady job was as a correspondent for International Socialism magazine, published by the forerunners of Britain's Socialist Workers Party. For most of the 1970s, Hitchens worked as a war correspondent for the London-based magazine The New Statesman, reporting from conflict zones in Libya, Iraq, and Northern Ireland. His later controversial support of the Iraq War stems largely from his experiences in Iraq in the late 1970s, during which he witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's crimes against humanity. He describes Hussein's 1979 coup during which a group of men was shuffled into a room where one half of them were ordered to kill the other half to prove their loyalty to their new leader.

In 1981, Hitchens moved to the United States as part of an exchange program with the U.S.-based magazine The Nation. A fiery critic of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Hitchens began to stray from the American left in the wake of what he felt was its tepid response to the fatwa called against his friend Salman Rushdie. He felt that politicians and intellectuals on the left should have been more forceful in their criticism of Islamic extremists calling for Rushdie's death in the wake of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. His fraught relationship with the American left continued during the Bill Clinton presidency when he and his wife, Carol Blue, submitted an affidavit to the Republican party alleging that their friend Sidney Blumenthal, one of Clinton's aides, called Monica Lewinsky a "stalker."

Hitchens's split with the American left was complete in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: “When you have seen the Pentagon still smoldering across the river, from the roof of your own apartment building, you are liable to undergo an abrupt shift of perspective that qualifies any nostalgia for Norman Mailer’s ‘Armies of the Night’ or Allen Ginsberg’s quixotic attempt to levitate the building." He quit his position at The Nation, stating that he couldn't work for an outlet with the position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." This schism deepened even further when he became a strong advocate for President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Despite accusations of being a neoconservative, Hitchens maintains that he is still a Marxist, a member of what his friend Ian McEwan calls "the anti-totalitarian left."



According to The New York Times, Hitch-22 is "Electric and electrifying... He has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments with a flick of the wrist."