With what I can only assume is a motive of refined cruelty, the London Review of Books is featuring Christopher Hitchens' February 1998 review of Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot as an item from its archives today. At least, there's a cruel pleasure in the irony that, from the perspective of Bush's second inaugural, overtakes the opening of the review:

In Arthur Schlesinger's court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a 'White Paper' justifying Washington's destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire. This task he readily performed.

Not to mention Hitchens' later aphorism, a propos of the allegations that the Kennedys used Mob connections to swing a couple of key states in the 1960 election, that "an unscrupulous campaign doesn't have to undergo much in the way of metamorphosis to evolve into an unscrupulous administration." But for my money, since the subject has been much on my mind the last few days (despite, or because of, my current inability to write anything coherent about it), this is the seven-years-ago passage that most resonates now—particularly as it comes following some caustic remarks about the "junk thinking," the kind of "auto da fe among the intellectualoids," that promoted "unwholesome adoration" of the smarmily so-called Camelot:

One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more.

Hitch, of course, has honored his resolution to "drop everything" and think about American innocence only in the breach—assuming, that is, that the thinking he intended to do in 1998 was critical. (If there's a hell, I expect Hitchens' lot in it will be to listen as devils endless recite his pre-9/11, or maybe pre-Monica, writing. At each especially a propos passage, his head will explode anew.)

Come to think of it, the devils would do best to restrict themselves to the pre-Monica work. What's extraordinary about the LRB piece is that it makes it possible, not just to diagnose but to date, almost to the day, the moment that Hitch started coming unglued. Here's the envoi, which follows some remarks on the FBI's covert taping of Martin Luther King:

I had almost finished writing this on the Martin Luther King holiday, the day after which Bill Clinton's own vulgar and exploiting and finally trivial past almost caught up with him. It's in reading Branch's biography of King that one may still lay hold of a worthwhile strand in the narrative. While a succession of insecure and dishonest statesmen committed high crimes and misdemeanours at home and abroad, always justifying themselves by a fear of being thought weak, or by a terror of being undercut by a rival, or by simple fear of the contents of J. Edgar Hoover's private dossiers, Martin Luther King rescued the language from their clotted and conspiratorial style and made three ringing points. America had a bill coming due, to the descendants of its slaves, which it was morally obliged to redeem. There was unlikely to be domestic tranquillity, or the timely redemption of that bill, if a grossly expensive war of aggression was being prosecuted with a campaign of lies. ... What, then, is the 'linkage' between the private life of politicians and their public examples? There was certainly more on the King tapes than verbal obscenity. There is a great deal of foul-mouth talk on the Watergate tapes, much of it scabrously anti-semitic, but no sex. The Clinton tapes are of interest for serious purposes not because of the lipstick stains, but because of the possible use of lipstick subsidy (that of the Revlon Company, on whose board sits Vernon Jordan) to procure hush-money and soft jobs for friendly witnesses past and present. To take the two polar opposites, then, there is no discernible connection between King's lecherous indiscretions and his public persona, whereas there is at least a suggestive crossover between Kennedy's Mobbed-up sex-life and his thuggish foreign policy. Recall that Ian Fleming was one of his favourite authors. Bill Clinton has shown himself promiscuous about things like campaign finance and also about things like women met in a hurry along the trail. The two things may bear only an allegorical relationship. A baffled New York Times reporter noted from the heartland in the last days of January: 'Time and again, people invoked the widespread reports of former President John F. Kennedy's infidelities as evidence that sexual conduct had little to do with leadership capabilities.' This, as authors as different as Hersh and Wills have shown apparently in vain, is to get the personal and the political as confused as it is possible for them to be.

[I can't help highlighting the places in this where Hitchens' head will have to explode in the life to come.] There's almost a dimension of tragedy in this, of willful self-occlusion: Hitchens praises King's radical public honesty, in the face of a compromised private life, in the same breath as he insists (using the Kennedy precedent to mediate) on the most naive, the flattest possible reading of Bill Clinton's "promiscuity." The passage gets more schoolmarmish, more old-maidish, as it goes on. "The two things [private and public behavior] may bear only an allegorical relationship," Hitchens admits, which at least opens the possibility of falsification: but has he ever reckoned with himself over the undeniable fact that the Clinton prosecution never established any such "serious purpose" as he alleges for it, prospectively, here? On the contrary: as if to foreclose any future revisiting of the case, any confrontation of allegory with evidence, by the last sentence Hitchens has contorted himself into forgetting even the possibility of a distinction between personal and political. (Even his rhetorical command deserts him: one doesn't ordinarily use the word "confused" as a synonym for "disassociated.") As if, having once committed himself to a purely symbolic politics, to allegorizing private presidential sin as world-historical guilt, Hitchens can only forge on by commencing to set fire to his intellectual bridges. A strange, sad performance.

posted by michael  4:21:47 PM  
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