Christopher Hitchens

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been born on the 13th of April 1949. He would be dead before the year was out, at the age of 62.

  He left behind 18 books, a long run of magazine columns, and a reputation that no one could file neatly. Admirers called him fearless. Critics called him a contrarian and a provocateur. He was fond of saying that he wanted neither label.

  How does a young Trotskyist end up arguing for wars that most of his old comrades opposed? Why would a writer choose a nun, a president and a diplomat as the subjects of whole books? And what did a man who spoke for a living want people to remember once the speaking stopped?

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• 2. The Commander's Son

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  Portsmouth, in Hampshire, is where Hitchens was born, the elder of two boys. His parents were Commander Eric Ernest Hitchens and Yvonne Jean Hitchens, born Hickman. They had met in Scotland while both served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. She had been a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service. Christopher usually referred to his father simply as "the Commander".

  On the 26th of December 1943, Eric Hitchens was aboard HMS Jamaica when it helped sink the German battleship Scharnhorst at the Battle of the North Cape. His son later paid tribute: "Sending a Nazi convoy-raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done." Eric's naval postings dragged the family from base to base across Britain and its colonies. In the Maltese town of Sliema, in 1951, Christopher's brother Peter was born. After the Navy, Eric kept the books for boatbuilders, for speed boat manufacturers and for a prep school.

  At the age of 38, Hitchens found out that his mother was of Jewish origin, and from then on he identified as a Jew. His Jewish ancestors, he learned, had been immigrants from Eastern Europe, Poland among them. He had been raised nominally Christian in Christian boarding schools. Even so, from an early age he refused to join in communal prayers.

  Mount House School in Tavistock, Devon, took him from the age of eight, and the Leys School in Cambridge came after. In 1967 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read philosophy, politics and economics. His tutors included Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. He graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree, and in 1968 he had appeared on the television quiz show University Challenge.

  His teenage reading left marks. He was "bowled over" by How Green Was My Valley, by Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, by Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and by R. H. Tawney on religion and capitalism. The works of George Orwell hit him just as hard. A piece by the journalist James Cameron convinced him to become a journalist himself.

  He joined the Labour Party in 1965. In 1967, most of the party's student organisation was expelled, Hitchens with them. He blamed "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of the Soviet dissident Victor Serge, steered him toward Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism.

  Soon afterward he joined a group he called "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect", the International Socialists. Its slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism", and it would not defend communist states as "workers' states". Hitchens stayed away from the recreational drugs of his generation. "In my cohort we were slightly anti-hedonistic," he said, since planted drugs made police provocation easy.

  One person he recruited to the International Socialists was the poet James Fenton. Fenton would turn up again soon, as a colleague on a London magazine.

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• 3. Fleet Street and Athens

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  In 1971, after a year travelling the United States on a scholarship, Hitchens took a post as social science correspondent at the Times Higher Education Supplement. He was fired after six months. Next he worked as a researcher for ITV's Weekend World. He also wrote for International Socialism, the magazine of his own group, which was the forerunner of today's Socialist Workers Party.

  The New Statesman hired him in 1973, and the office was crowded with writers. Martin Amis, whom he had briefly met at Oxford, worked there, along with Julian Barnes and Fenton, who had once shared a house with him. Amis remembered him then as "handsome, festive and gauntly left-wing". On Fridays came long lunches. Guests included Clive James, Ian McEwan, Kingsley Amis, Terence Kilmartin, Robert Conquest, Al Alvarez, Peter Porter, Russell Davies and Mark Boxer.

  As a war correspondent, Hitchens built his name as a left-winger from conflict zones such as Northern Ireland, Libya and Iraq. In November 1973 he was in Greece, reporting on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. That report became his first leading article for the magazine.

  That same month, his mother died in Athens. She and her lover, a defrocked clergyman named Timothy Bryan, had made a pact. They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan also slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew to Athens alone to recover her body. At first he believed that she had been murdered.

  In December 1977 he interviewed the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a conversation he later called "horrifying". By then he was unhappy at the New Statesman, and in 1977 he moved to the Daily Express as a foreign correspondent. He returned to the New Statesman in 1978, first as assistant editor and then as foreign editor. An exchange programme would soon send him across the Atlantic.

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• 4. A New World

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  The Nation, an American magazine, received Hitchens in 1981 under an editor exchange with the New Statesman. There he wrote loud attacks on Ronald Reagan, on George H. W. Bush and on American foreign policy in South and Central America. That year he also married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot he had met while working as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. They had two children, Alexander and Sophia. Alexander, born in 1984, later worked as a policy researcher in London.

  Los Angeles, in 1989, is where Hitchens met the American screenwriter Carol Blue. He called it love at first sight. They married in 1991 at the apartment of Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation. Their daughter Antonia grew up to be a writer and journalist on the staff of The New Yorker. In 1991 he also received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and he kept filing essay-style reports from places such as Chad, Uganda and Darfur.

  In 1987, his father died of cancer of the oesophagus, the same disease that would later kill Hitchens. That year Tom Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities, and some speculated that its character Peter Fallow was based on Hitchens. Others, Hitchens among them, thought the model was Anthony Haden-Guest, the "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" of Spy Magazine.

  In 1992 he became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, writing ten columns a year. Over the years he also wrote Fighting Words, a news-and-politics column at Slate. He became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008.

  In April 2007, after twenty-five years in the United States, Hitchens became an American citizen. He kept his British citizenship and later described himself as Anglo-American.

  Gore Vidal once called Hitchens his "dauphin", his heir. The affection did not survive Hitchens's political shift. In 2010 Vanity Fair ran his piece "Vidal Loco", which called Vidal a "crackpot" for embracing 9/11 conspiracy theories. On the back of Hitchens's memoir Hitch-22, Vidal's endorsement of him as successor appears crossed out in red and annotated "NO, C.H."

  His 2007 columns at Vanity Fair won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. In 2008 he was a finalist in the same category for his Slate columns but lost to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. Hitch-22 was short-listed for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

  The year 2007 also brought one of his most controversial articles, "Why Women Aren't Funny". He argued that society presses women less to practise humour and that "women who do it play by men's rules". He offered no empirical evidence. Vanity Fair printed letters of objection and a rebuttal by Alessandra Stanley, and Hitchens answered in a video and in writing.

  In December 2011, shortly before his death, astronomers named Asteroid 57901 Hitchens after him.

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• 5. Breaking With the Left

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  The Satanic Verses controversy opened the first crack. Hitchens, who had long called himself a socialist and a Marxist, was dismayed by what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left. Then came the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and then the anti-war movement's opposition in the 1990s to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, became one of Hitchens's chief targets. After the Bosnian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, he called Milošević a "fascist" and a "Nazi". He greeted Milošević's death with a positive reaction. He denounced Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman for criticising the NATO intervention. He also criticised the Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, whose government he accused of reviving "Ustashe formations".

  Supporting intervention in Bosnia, he said, was where he first found himself "on the same side as the neocons". He felt that the left's opposition was turning into support for Milošević's reactionarism.

  The September 11 attacks "exhilarated" him. They brought into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate", and they hardened his support for intervention against "fascism with an Islamic face". He left The Nation in 2002, over his deep disagreement with other contributors on the Iraq War. He said the magazine had reached a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden".

  In his memoir, Hitchens recalled an invitation from Bernard-Henri Lévy to write for the magazine La Règle du jeu. He gave his essay the partly ironic title "Can One Be a Neoconservative?" A copy editor, impatient, put it on the cover as "How I Became a Neoconservative." Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind". His friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. In a 2010 BBC interview, Hitchens said he still thought "like a Marxist" and was "a leftist".

  Still, he argued for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and endorsed George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. He viewed Islamism as the principal threat to the Western world. His advocacy won him a wider readership. In September 2005, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines placed him fifth on their list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals", with Chomsky first. The magazines noted that supporters' publicity had inflated some rankings.

  Waterboarding gave him doubts. Hitchens underwent the procedure voluntarily and then called it torture. In January 2006 he joined four other individuals and four organisations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in ACLU v. NSA, a challenge to Bush's warrantless surveillance.

  Other positions refused to line up. He supported gun rights and same-sex marriage, and he opposed the war on drugs. On abortion he was ethically opposed in most cases and believed that a foetus was entitled to personhood. On its legality his views were ambiguous and changing. In a 1988 interview with Crisis Magazine he said of the issue, "It's everybody's business." He doubted that self-described pro-life politicians sincerely wanted to prohibit it.

  European unity pleased him. On C-SPAN in 1993, he said that after 1992 he had held out for a Euro passport, and "So I travel as a European." At the London launch of his brother Peter's book The Abolition of Britain, at Conway Hall, he called the Eurosceptic movement "the British version of fascism". He added, "Scepticism is a title of honour. These people are not sceptical. They're fanatical. They're dogmatic."

  On Israel, he declared himself anti-Zionist. "If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine," he said, "then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine." In 1988 he and Edward Said published Blaming the Victims. Of Ayn Rand's objectivism he quipped that it was "quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough."

  In 2009, Forbes listed Hitchens among the 25 "most influential liberals" in American media. The magazine added that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list".

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• 6. Portraits and Prosecutions

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  Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and George Orwell each got a book-length biographical essay from Hitchens: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, and Why Orwell Matters. In the last, he defended Orwell against modern critics as both relevant today and progressive in his own time. A monthly essay for The Atlantic produced further literary reviews, collected in Unacknowledged Legislation.

  During a three-hour interview on Book TV's In Depth, he named the writers who shaped his views. They were Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien. Of the adage that everyone has a book inside them, he said that is "exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain". He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pittsburgh and The New School of Social Research.

  His attacks on living figures fill three full-length books. The Missionary Position took aim at Mother Teresa, No One Left to Lie To at Bill Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger at the American diplomat.

  Time magazine, in 2007, reported Hitchens's remarks on the evangelist Billy Graham while promoting God Is Not Great. According to the writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, he called Graham "a self-conscious fraud" and "a disgustingly evil man". They challenged his suggestion that Graham entered the ministry for money, noting that Graham had turned down million-dollar television and Hollywood offers. They granted that he was "on more solid ground" when criticising Graham's "vile" remarks about Jews in a 1972 Oval Office meeting with Richard Nixon.

  In 1999 Hitchens profiled Donald Trump for The Sunday Herald, when Trump was musing about running in 2000 for the Reform Party. The best guess, Hitchens wrote, was "a man who hates to be alone, who needs approval and reinforcement, who talks a better game than he plays, who is crude, hyperactive, emotional, and optimistic". He had earlier observed that "nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much".

  The same year, 1999, brought a personal wound. Hitchens and Carol Blue, both harsh critics of Clinton, gave an affidavit to the Republican trial managers in Clinton's impeachment. They swore that their friend Sidney Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. That contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition. After Blumenthal published The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces accusing him of manipulating the facts.

  The friendship ended, and Hitchens suffered a personal crisis. Friends sharply criticised the affidavit as cynical and, in the end, politically futile. One more letter from Blumenthal would still reach Hitchens years later.

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• 7. Against God

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  "Antitheist" was a word Hitchens hoped to bring into circulation. An atheist, he said, could still wish that belief in God were correct. An antitheist is someone who is relieved that there is no evidence for such an assertion. Readers of The Independent once asked him to name an "axis of evil", and he answered with Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the three leading monotheisms.

  In debates he put forward what became known as Hitchens's Challenge. Name one moral action that a person without faith could not perform. Then name one immoral action that only a believer has committed. His epistemological razor, that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence, is used in philosophy and law.

  God Is Not Great, published in 2007, stretched his case to every religion, including those Western secularists rarely attack, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and neo-paganism. Organised religion, he wrote, is "the main source of hatred in the world". He argued that humanity needs a renewed Enlightenment. The New York Times praised his "logical flourishes and conundrums", while the Financial Times charged him with "intellectual and moral shabbiness". The book was nominated for a National Book Award on the 10th of October 2007.

  The Rationalist International and the National Secular Society made him an honorary associate shortly after the book's release. The Freedom From Religion Foundation later named him to its honorary board of distinguished achievers. He also joined the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America.

  On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett came to Hitchens's residence. The four held a private, unmoderated discussion lasting two hours, videotaped and titled "The Four Horsemen". There Hitchens called the Maccabean Revolt the most unfortunate event in human history. In his view it meant a reversion from Hellenistic thought and philosophy to messianism and fundamentalism.

  Written debates came next. That year he began a series of exchanges with the pastor Douglas Wilson in Christianity Today on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" They became a 2008 book. The producer Darren Doane's crew followed their tour, and Doane's film Collision was released on the 27th of October 2009.

  On the 4th of April 2009, Hitchens debated William Lane Craig on God's existence at Biola University. On the 19th of October 2009, Intelligence Squared asked whether the Catholic Church is a force for good. John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe said yes. Hitchens and Stephen Fry said no, and an audience poll gave them the win.

  On the 5th of October 2010, Hitchens debated Tariq Ramadan at 92NY on whether Islam is a religion of peace. He called "Islamophobia" a "fake term" that "insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be 'phobic'". Then on the 26th of November 2010, at the Munk Debates in Toronto, he faced Tony Blair, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Blair argued that religion is a force for good, and Hitchens argued the opposite.

  Observers noted the "wit and eloquence" of his speeches, as well as their "verbal barbs and linguistic dexterity". Supporters coined the term "hitch-slap" for a carefully crafted remark meant to humiliate an opponent. The Humanist cited as an example his line on the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib: "one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot".

  His sharpest opponent sat closer to home. Peter Hitchens, two years younger, had joined the International Socialists in 1968, at 17, after Christopher introduced him. In 2005 Christopher said the main difference between them was belief in God. They fell out after a 2001 article in The Spectator that allegedly portrayed Christopher as a Stalinist. The birth of Peter's third child reconciled them. Peter's review of God Is Not Great sparked a public disagreement, but no new estrangement. They sat as panellists on BBC TV's Question Time in 2007, debated Iraq and God in the US in 2008, and argued about God in civilisation at the Pew Forum in 2010.

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• 8. Mortality and Memory

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  On the 8th of June 2010, Hitchens was in New York promoting Hitch-22 when he was rushed to emergency care with a severe pericardial effusion. He soon announced that he was postponing his tour to be treated for oesophageal cancer. In a 2010 Vanity Fair piece called "Topic of Cancer", he wrote that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". He admitted that heavy smoking and drinking since his teens had probably contributed.

  Francis Collins oversaw his care. Hitchens became the subject of Collins's new cancer treatment, which maps the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA. His writing about the illness earned him the 2011 National Magazine Award for Columns about Cancer.

  He died of pneumonia at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. According to Andrew Sullivan, his last words were "Capitalism. Downfall." As he wished, his body went to medical research. According to Christopher Buckley, Sidney Blumenthal had written to him before the end, in words of "tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness". Mortality, seven Vanity Fair essays about the illness, appeared in September 2012.

  Tony Blair called him "a complete one-off" who was "fearless in the pursuit of truth". Richard Dawkins called him "probably the best orator I've ever heard". The physicist Lawrence Krauss said he had "the courage to accept the world for just what it is and not what he wanted it to be". Bill Maher called him "one of the great talk show guests of all time". Salman Rushdie and Stephen Fry spoke at the 2012 Vanity Fair memorial. At the memorial service in New York, Peter Hitchens read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians.

  Three weeks before the death, George Eaton of the New Statesman wrote that Hitchens was determined not to be remembered merely as a "lefty who turned right". His targets, Eaton argued, had each offended the Enlightenment values of reason, secularism and pluralism. The Chronicle of Higher Education asked whether Hitchens was the last public intellectual.

  Larry Taunton's book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens claimed that Hitchens flirted with spirituality late in life. Dawkins called it "a disgraceful book". David Frum wrote in The Atlantic that Hitchens had repeatedly warned that such claims would come. In Mortality, Hitchens had written, "If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does."

  In 2015, the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation created the Hitchens Prize, worth $50,000. It goes to an author or journalist committed to free expression and inquiry. The 2024 winner was the filmmaker Errol Morris.

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