SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher, and Michael Rust. “Clinton's Lies Stopped at Hitchens' Door.” Insight on the News (28 June 1999): 21.

[In the following interview, Hitchens discusses the war in Bosnia, his socialist perspective, and his opinions on President Bill Clinton,]

This self-proclaimed limn of the left, who studied at Oxford while Bill Clinton was there, saw the handwriting on the wall concerning the future chief executive as early as 1992.

Earlier this year, journalist and author Christopher Hitchens got caught up in the final throes of the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton when he signed an affidavit attesting that Sidney Blumenthal, his longtime friend and Clinton acolyte, had spread the lie on behalf of the president that former intern Monica Lewinsky was a “stalker.”

When approached by House of Representatives investigators, Hitchens did not follow the lead of the occupant of the Oval Office. Instead of dissembling or overtly lying, Hitchens told the investigators that he and his wife, Carol Blue, had lunched with Blumenthal at an expensive restaurant a couple of blocks from the Executive Mansion where the White House aide told them the man whom Lewinsky jovially referred to as “the Big Creep” actually was the “victim of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman.”

According to Hitchens, they weren't the only journalists so briefed by Blumenthal; indeed, other reporters confirmed that the White House in the early days of the scandal enthusiastically had traduced the character of Lewinsky. This, however, meant little to the president die-hard defenders, who furiously denounced Hitchens as a turncoat, informer and over-enthusiastic imbiber of alcohol. (More viciously, some whispered falsely that he was a Holocaust denier.) An unsigned editorial in The Nation, where he serves as a columnist, attacked him as giving aid and comfort to the right-wing enemy.

A meeting with the staff of The Nation seemed to quiet overt collegial attacks on him in that journal; breathless Washington Post coverage of the rupture between Hitchens and certain left-wing glitterati also seemed to peter out. And while the president remains in office, Hitchens does have the last word of sorts. His recently published political essay, No One Left to Lie To, is an impassioned and witty attack on Clinton and the political culture that produced him. Hitchens argues convincingly, using sources with wide experience in the intelligence community, that the three cruise-missile raids ordered by the president last year were real-life exercises of the Wag the Dog scenario in which an American president orders a military operation to deflect attention from unpleasantness in the White House.

But then Hitchens' career has been top-heavy with elegantly expressed iconoclasm in both Europe and the United States. A columnist for Vanity Fair as well as The Nation, and a contributor to numerous publications here and in Britain, Hitchens' literary and political journalism is marked by an unrepentant leftism tempered by a disdain for political correctness, along with immense erudition and caustic wit.

The new book's title is taken from a speech by David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee. And Hitchens explains his actions earlier this year by saying he “would not protect Clinton's lies or help pass them along. I wasn't going to be the last one left to lie to.”

[Rust:] You were skeptical of Bill Clinton as early as the New Hampshire primary in 1992.

[Hitchens:] I felt there was something politically monstrous about him. There were moments when he seemed like a reptile breakfasting in a mammal's nest.

Did you know Clinton at Oxford?

No, although I am told that I was in the same room with him. I knew the house he lived in well. It was the center of draft resistance among Americans at Oxford. Draft resistance, I should point out; Clinton was a draft dodger. There were two or three women I know who kept company with him at Oxford. They tell me he was gentlemanly, so I think it was as he acquired power that he developed his taste for underlings. As far as politics goes, he seems to have been pretty moderate by the standards of the left at the time.

Have the insights Americans have about the president's character been reinforced by the current trouble in the Balkans?

Of course. Clinton skipped over meetings to prepare for war over Kosovo because he was engaged in his own private squalor. As they say in Ireland, you don't get anything from a pig except a grunt, and it's wrong to expect it. I would have tried to take Milosevic out a long time before. I was one of those on the left who was in favor of stopping him in Bosnia. He should have been removed or indicted for war crimes.

What's going to happen in Kosovo?

I think it's going to be a very interesting tussle between [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair and Clinton, and I think Blair is going to have a rude awakening about his pal. Because Blair, who I know slightly and I'm not sold on, and Robin Cook, who I know slightly and I think is a very good man—these two look upon this fight as a matter of principle, which is the opposite of what Clinton does.

If I aspired to be a World War II president, I would not tell my antagonist in advance he would not have to face ground troops. These Milosevic death squads in Kosovo, faced with a squad of well-trained farm boys from Iowa, would run away and that would be that. These are people trained only to fight civilians.

I think such a confrontation would be a great day and very durable, as they say. I think it is in the national interest because it's part of the national idea that a multinational republic not be destroyed by fascism.

Kosovo has made even more apparent the fissures and splits on both left and right. Is there going to be a realignment, or are we just going to continue muddling through?

What I've always wanted is more of a fusion between the left and the libertarian viewpoint. I always thought there was potential in that. It was very imperfectly expressed by a very odd person in the Jerry Brown campaign, but I thought it had a point of interest to fuse what is thought of as the left position with an opposition to big government without becoming an isolationist or Darwinist. Politics to me at the moment is working on that synthesis.

Do you still regard yourself as a socialist, or is it too complicated to explain in America?

Yes and yes. Brian Lamb, whenever I go on his show, always begins by asking me, “Are you still a socialist?” One reason I say I am is because I know that he's certain one day I'll say no; something in me wants to deny him that satisfaction. I don't like to see myself described as a liberal because that seems to me too easy a position. It's a way of making clear I wouldn't be satisfied with that. It's really a matter of stubbornness. In the future the struggle against globalization might have socialist connotations, but at the moment, I must say, it's baggage.

Conservative attacks on Clinton's character seemed to have little effect.

There was Bill Bennett's book, and (very much worse) a man called Marvin Olasky wrote a book—it may be the stupidest book I ever read—on presidential character. I thought midway through that it must be a put-on: George Washington won because he forbade drinking and swearing in the ranks, whereas the British side was riddled with buggery and booze and impiety. I thought, “How does he think, since godly leadership brought victory, that this band of drunken faggots managed to hold on to Canada and India and Australia and most of Africa? Also, why does he think George Washington had Thomas Paine's pamphlets read aloud to the troops?”

He says if Clinton had stayed in the choir in Little Rock, where he used to sing on the Sundays it was televised, he would probably have had a chance. By the same token, the people who think if only they could find out what happened to Vince Foster they could get Clinton are, and always have been, wasting their time and mine. The whole point about Clinton is that we don't need to know any more about him than we already know. The case against him doesn't rest on the unveiling of any horrible secret from the swamps of Arkansas. The reasons why he's unfit for office are all on the public record. That's all we need to know.

Everything that was wrong with him was conveniently enough staring one in the face—and still is. Look at the China business, for example. There's no new stuff really to be discovered on that. There will be some more confirming and damning revelations, I suppose, but there it all is. Obviously, I wish for all their sakes they had found the bullet for poor old Vince. They must wish that, too. But whatever the outcome of the search, it doesn't make any difference to me. Those who believe he was killed by Clinton have, I think, a paranoid view, but not as stupid as the view of those who think he was killed by the Wall Street Journal.

And that last is not considered a paranoid view at all. It's almost orthodoxy among Washington liberals.