[In the following essay, Phillips objects to Hitchens's misrepresentation of Trotskyist New York intellectuals in Hitchens's book review of Critical Crossings by Neil Jumonville.]

Christopher Hitchens is not only a slick journalist but also a slick thinker. He should be a valuable contributor to the popular magazines, but, unfortunately, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books utilize his talents. He is also a regular columnist for The Nation, where he lends a spark to the old-fashioned radicalism that persists after it has been pronounced dead.

Fortunately for Hitchens, he has a fund of doctrines that he can draw on from the politically correct arena. One of his recent efforts appears in The London Review of Books, where he ostensibly reviews yet another in the long line of books about the New York intellectuals—this one titled Critical Crossings by Neil Jumonville (University of California Press). This latest account is not as ideological as most of its predecessors. But it assigns different roles to the main actors, inflating some, diminishing others, thus creating a somewhat skewed picture of the period and its spokesmen.

But Hitchens uses the book to push his own peculiar line. He designates Trotsky as the central symbolic figure, and makes it appear as if most of the New York intellectuals were defined by their relation to the “old man,” the revolutionary leader and then the leading critic of Stalin and his regime. Thus the curve of Trotsky's life is made out to be the paradigm for the lives and careers of the New York intellectuals.

This picture, however, is not only misleading, but it follows the pattern of the Stalinist diatribes against the anti-Stalinists by labeling them Trotskyists. Of course, in the Stalinist arsenal, Trotskyist meant reactionary and imperialist. In Hitchens's arsenal, the invented Trotskyists turn out to be mostly Jews. Maybe this is not intentional, but it is strangely suggestive.

Among his other ideological innuendos, Hitchens pictures Lionel Trilling as a Trotskyist who later masqueraded as a “gentleman-liberal.” He also curiously defines the problem of the intellectual in politics as one of elites. “Should the masses or the intellectuals,” asks Hitchens, “be the proper target of enlightenment?” Apparently, the whole complex history of intellectual responsibility and engagement boils down to this.

In addition, Hitchens distorts the Ledeen episode, making it appear as though Partisan Review sold out the entire liberal heritage of the West by considering a piece by Michael Ledeen. Hitchens falsely describes the piece, in which Michael Ledeen discussed the process of arriving at foreign policies, as an attack on democracy. And he further tells a politically accusatory story about the magazine, fed him, he says, by Norman Birnbaum. According to this version, we postponed our fiftieth anniversary in order to conceal our past—a past, by the way, I've written about several times and went into fully in my memoir, A Partisan View (1983).

Finally, the piece is spiced with politically correct observations: such as the characterization of the “Judenrat” as being “at the service of the empire”; a bow in the direction of the Palestinians; a few cracks against those who supported the Gulf War, as well as a hint of Israeli interests in the war; and an often-repeated remark about the “scale of Iraqi civilian … casualties.”

The rest of the piece is harmless but pointless.