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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
This, I thought, would be the end of it. Then I got a call from my lawyer Bill McDaniel. "There's an affidavit from a British journalist claiming you committed perjury," he told me. That seemed incomprehensible. What lunatic twist was this? I couldn't imagine who or what he was talking about. "Who is this person?" I asked. "It's signed by someone named Christopher Hitchens and he cites his associate Carol Blue." "That's his wife," I said. "Christopher Hitchens is my friend. That can't possibly be true." "Well, it is," said McDaniel.
McDaniel read me the affidavit Hitchens had filed with the House Managers:
"I am self-employed and contribute articles to Vanity Fair and The Nation. Sidney Blumenthal and I are social friends and journalistic acquaintances.
"On March 17, 1998, Sidney Blumenthal, Carol Blue, and I met for lunch at the Occidental restaurant in Washington, D.C. [Hitchens handwrote the date.]
"If called to testify, I would testify on personal knowledge to the following facts.
"During lunch on March 17, 1998, in the presence of myself and Carol Blue, Mr. Blumenthal stated that, Monica Lewinsky had been a 'stalker' and that the president was 'the victim' of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman. Referring to Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Blumenthal used the word 'stalker' several times. Mr. Blumenthal advised us that this version of the facts was not generally understood.
"Also during that lunch, Mr. Blumenthal stated that Kathleen Willey's poll numbers were high but would fall and would not look so good in a few days.
"I have knowledge that Mr. Blumenthal recounted to other people in the journalistic community the same story about Monica Lewinsky that he told to me and Carol Blue."
I was amazed and bewildered. The document was absurd. By the time Hitchens claimed we had had this lunch, hundreds of articles about Lewinsky as a stalker had been published. I had testified that like everyone else I had talked every day about the Lewinsky stories with my friends. If the point of the affidavit was to prove I had obstructed justice by prodding Hitchens, by then a vehement Clinton-hater, to write a "stalker" story, that was ludicrous. If the point was to charge me with perjury, that, too, was nonsensical, because Hitchens's affidavit didn't contradict my sworn testimony.
Even more perplexing, Hitchens's affidavit was utterly irrelevant to the articles of impeachment and could have no effect on the outcome of the president's trial. While McDaniel was reading it to me on the phone, reporters broke into the television broadcasts of the trial with the startling news that a surprise affidavit had been filed charging me with perjury. As soon as I hung up, my phone started to ring, of course. Some of the reporters who telephoned said Hitchens had instigated their queries.
The day after the House Managers released Hitchens' affidavit, they made public a second affidavit, signed by his wife, Carol Blue. Suddenly, the plot became clearer -- and more threatening. Blue's affidavit included "facts in addition to those set forth" by Hitchens. Now it was apparent that the goal was to accuse the president of obstructing justice through me -- Graham's original obsession -- and that I was covering it up with perjury. Hitchens' affidavit hadn't been sufficient, so the one now submitted by his wife added this charge:
"During that lunch, in the presence of myself and Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Blumenthal stated that the president told him that he [the president] was the 'victim' of Monica Lewinsky's sexual advances and that she was a 'stalker,' and was 'crazy.' Mr. Blumenthal used the word 'stalker' several times to describe Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Blumenthal conveyed his conviction that the president's version of the events were [sic] true."
I chose not to reply to these charges. There were only days to the Senate vote. If I fanned the flames of an absurd side issue, even though it involved my reputation, I might give the House Managers a way to prolong the trial. The multiple untruths would have been impossible to disentangle; the details would be lost in the din. It was better, I decided, to weather the allegations than engage with the person that Hitchens had become. The virulence of his attack would have to be its own answer. When Hitchens' affidavit was revealed, I couldn't remember the lunch or that it had ever happened. I searched my calendar and found nothing except that on March 17 -- the day Hitchens cited -- I had been in Puerto Rico on official business. Then on February 8, a third affidavit was released by the House Managers. This one had been submitted by Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter and, as it happened, the father of a classmate of my older son. It read:
"On or about March 18, 1998, I was on a panel discussion at the National Press Club with Christopher Hitchens among others concerning national security reporting. Following that panel discussion, I met with Christopher Hitchens and Carol Blue at which time they recounted to me a conversation they had had with Sidney Blumenthal in which Mr. Blumenthal had related to them among other things that Monica Lewinsky was a 'stalker.'"
While I was watching reports of Armstrong's affidavit on television in my White House office, he suddenly telephoned me. "I got a call from Carol Blue over the weekend, on Saturday," he said. "She gave me a long story. Did I remember being with them at the Press Club and that they mentioned a conversation with you. If I were called, would I verify their account? Then I got a call from a staff Republican investigator on the House Judiciary Committee, Susan Bogart. She asked if I recalled the conversation. I checked my time manager. On March 18, after a panel, we had a brief discussion. I got another call from Bogart. Would I sign an affidavit? Before I read it, I got a call from ABC News. I was going to be the second person to say that you said Lewinsky was a stalker. Is this Hitchens or the Judiciary Committee who leaked it?" Armstrong seemed equal parts upset and muddled.
I asked if he had spoken with a lawyer. He hadn't. I asked if he wanted to speak to my lawyer. He said he had already signed the affidavit and faxed it back. "I'm not completely sure about my memory," he said.
"Well, Scott, we'll just see what happens. Thanks for calling."
A few hours later, Armstrong started telephoning reporters to protest his own affidavit. "This is ludicrous," Armstrong told the Washington Post. "I don't want to become part of any political witch hunt." "They were using me to set up Blumenthal," he said to Newsday. "I said I didn't have any information to relate, except for the date. But Susan Bogart insisted." Before he had signed, his affidavit was leaked. "So I called up Susan Bogart and said: 'If you're going to leak stuff about me, at least leak something that's true.' "
With Armstrong's and Blue's affidavits, it seemed to me that Hitchens either was panicked or was being prodded by the House Republicans, or likely both. I tried to recall such a lunch. He and I had had many over the years. Then my lawyer received a fax from the manager of the Occidental Grill, who, on his own, had located a receipt signed by Hitchens for lunch on March 19. (The bar bill before I arrived was $18.84.) Now I remembered that lunch. It wasn't March 17, and it was impossible for Armstrong to have heard Hitchens' story on March 18. But I refrained from giving my account, not wanting to feed the frenzy.
To understand what had really happened at our lunch, or even why I had broken bread with such a fervent Clinton-hater, it's necessary to understand the history of our friendship. I first met Christopher Hitchens at a think-tank seminar, but didn't really get to know him until Jackie and I moved to Washington in 1985. At the very first dinner party we attended, a week after coming from Boston, at the home of Peter Pringle, a British journalist, and his wife, Eleanor Randolph, then my colleague at the Washington Post, we encountered Hitchens. He rose at the table to toast our hosts, reciting several bawdy English limericks, and then launching into a gleeful and scurrilous story about a high Reagan administration official, "Reagan's whip master," who he claimed was a secret lesbian. It was impressive how anyone could be so lubricated and articulate.
Early on, Jackie and I gave Hitchens' son boxes of toys that our boys had outgrown. We invited him to celebrate American holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving with us. Sometime in the late 1980s, he announced dramatically that we were related. He claimed to have learned from his dying grandmother that he was Jewish and that his family name was really "Blumenthal." He took to calling me "cousin" as a greeting. I took his self-dramatizations with a grain of salt, but when he decided that he was part of our family, we invited him to our Passover seder. His separation from his eight-months-pregnant wife, Eleni, whom we all adored, did not lead to any break or censure. We were supportive of Eleni, but we remained friends with Christopher, tolerant of his "bad boy" persona. We understood that other people's marriages were mysterious. We befriended his new girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, Carol Blue. And I made friends with Hitchens' friends, the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
After I left Vanity Fair to join the New Yorker and Hitchens was hired by Vanity Fair, his perpetual money problems seemed to be alleviated. At last, he had his own Condi Nast expense account. Jackie gave him the idea of holding a Vanity Fair party after the White House Correspondents Dinner, the first of these now annual events being held in his apartment. He was delighted when I helped him compile guest lists, especially of Clinton administration figures he didn't know.
In the early Democratic campaign in 1992, Hitchens had favored Jerry Brown's quixotic effort, seeing in him some leftist crusader. He muttered after Clinton's election about how it was bad for the left; he'd rather have Bush: the worse, the better. None of this eccentricity bothered us. Who would take Christopher Hitchens seriously on American politics? He knew little about America's history, traditions, or Constitution. I told him fairly frequently when he was holding forth that he should go cover an extended political campaign in the Midwest. That never quieted him; he continued to cite Noam Chomsky on the perfidy of U.S. imperialism.
Though he paid scant attention to actual American politics, he caught the drift of things and applied his sensibility with the intent to shock, bedazzle, and entertain. He did not concern himself with domestic policy issues, not health care, education, or the economy. That would have been too prosaic for him, requiring precise knowledge about institutions with which he couldn't be bothered. While freed from commitment to practical political outcomes, he could purport to be more committed than any American precisely because of his roots in a European radical tradition. London was a good place to be from.
As a political writer, Christopher was a literary critic. As a literary critic, his specialty was not irony so much as mockery -- that very English form of implicit superiority and disdain, difficult for Americans to master. As a political reporter, he was, in a word, unreliable. "Why would you ever be fair?" Hitchens once said about his own method of debating. I never took him seriously as a reporter of fact, and I didn't know anyone in Washington who did.
By the mid-1990s, I began to wonder if he was morphing into someone I didn't quite recognize. When our mutual friend Martin Walker of the Guardian, an English paper, was leaving Washington for a new assignment, Hitchens (who had been best man at his wedding) hosted the going-away party, but just as it began he rushed off to appear on television shows on the deaths of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, two public figures he had already vilified in print, in order to besmirch their legacies. If nothing else, this abandonment was no way to treat his friend Walker. Soon he was spending months on end in California, living at his in-laws'. When he came back to town, he would call ahead to set up a lunch, where he would press me for news on what he'd missed in Washington.
By the time I was working in the White House, Hitchens and I had been having conversations and lunches and dinners and drinks and bar mitzvahs and book parties and holidays together for a dozen years, and he had become vociferous in his invective against President Clinton. This had no effect on our relationship. I paid no attention. Hitchens continued to make a great show of being a devoted friend to his "cousin," greeting me with an embrace and even a kiss. No matter what the political difference, a friend was a friend. He made professions of friendship at every turn. He might leave a wife, but not a friend. He had friends for life.
When Starr issued his subpoena to me, Hitchens proclaimed about us in the Nation: "Together we have soldiered against the neoconservative ratbags. Our life ` deux has been, and remains, an open book. Do your worst. Nothing will prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table or, I trust, him from gnawing in return."
For the entire period from January to mid-March 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was raging, Hitchens was in California. Upon his return, he called, as usual, and asked me to meet him at the Occidental Grill, a restaurant near the White House. Hitchens and Carol were at the bar when I arrived, and he was drinking a Johnnie Walker Black Label. "Cousin," he said. His embrace and kiss followed. Carol kissed me, too. We ordered our food -- and California cabernet -- and they demanded that I tell everything. They could barely contain themselves. They had been cooped up in faraway California. What had really happened? What was it like now in Washington?
I gave what I thought was an entertaining retelling of the story to date: how the scandal had broken, the media frenzy, the old boyfriend of Monica's holding a news conference right before the State of the Union address, how he had called her a stalker, the whole antic cast of characters -- Lucianne Goldberg (who had been sued by Kitty Kelley, did they know that?), Linda Tripp, Ken Starr -- and the complete story of my appearance at the grand jury, what it was like inside the room, the ridiculous questioning.
As we ate and drank, they laughed and laughed. Tell us more, what happened then? Each incident seemed more absurd to them than the next. Hitchens roared, Carol giggled. Along the way, they asked if I believed Clinton. Hitchens made some mocking derogatory comments. I said I did; they said they didn't. When the espressos were served, I handed Christopher a large envelope with copies of articles. The packet was one I was giving to a number of journalists -- I still have the original file -- and it consisted of articles on what I now told Hitchens about: the Arkansas Project, Richard Mellon Scaife, how Whitewater was bogus -- they had heard the Whitewater part from me before. Nothing about Lewinsky. Hitchens wasn't very interested, but I said he should read the articles. When Christopher paid the bill on his Vanity Fair expense account, I rose to go back to work. They asked if I could stay longer, but I did have to go. Hugs and kisses again. See you soon.
In late May, Christopher and Carol invited Jackie and me to dinner at their Washington apartment, where he regaled his guests with stories of Monica Lewinsky. She had posed for a photo spread for Vanity Fair and he had written the short text to accompany it. He described the unreleased pictures for us. She had posed on the beach with pink fans. The retouching, he said, was extensive. "She's a rhino! A tank!" He roared and Carol giggled. On and on he went with ridicule of Lewinsky.
By the fall, Hitchens was contending in print that the U.S. attempt to kill Osama bin Laden with a missile attack on his training camp in Afghanistan and the bombing of a suspected al-Qaeda factory in Sudan were "cynical" political ploys to distract from the scandal. To him, these events were a real-life version of the movie "Wag the Dog," in which a president and a public-relations man fabricate a war to sustain the politician's popularity. A staff member on the National Security Council, who had worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations, was enraged. He wrote a memo carefully refuting Hitchens's polemics and circulated it to others at the NSC and to me. Didn't Hitchens know that the joint chiefs approved of these actions? That the CIA had signed off on them? One question after another demonstrated ignorance and irresponsibility. But, I explained, "It's just Christopher Hitchens." "Ignore him," said another NSC staff member. The author of the memo conceded grudgingly that it was best to let the issue fade. But he worried whether leaving the falsity of the article unchallenged was the right thing to do: Wouldn't some people take the story at face value?
On October 9, Hitchens invited us to a book party for Gore Vidal and to dinner at a restaurant afterward. Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, came with us. Hitchens spoke to Vidal with slightly mocking deference as "mantre," or "master," while Vidal, over dinner, whipped into a jeremiad against the right wing and Ken Starr. Whenever Hitchens piped up with an effort to trounce Clinton, "mantre" rebuffed him, declaring Starr "a traitor." He was clearly upset that Vidal had sided against him.
A month later, at my 50th birthday party, Christopher and Carol mingled with the other guests, wandering often out to the porch, enclosed and heated for the occasion, where the bar was stationed and smoking was permitted. After the toasts, Hitchens seemed glum, and he explained to my friend Christina Ritch that he had been promised he could deliver one. Her impression was that he had a toast prepared and was let down because he hadn't been called on. Jackie remembered later that he had asked her if there would be toasts and that she had said there would be; he must have assumed he would be asked to give one.
Just before Thanksgiving, Jackie and I attended a black-tie dinner at the Swedish Embassy in honor of the American Nobel Prize winners, and Christopher and Carol were at our table. Hitchens started up with a stream of his usual denunciations of Clinton. By now, with impeachment at full throttle, he was calling the president "a rapist and war criminal." One of our tablemates, a human-rights advocate from Stockholm, Monica Nagler-Wittgenstein (the niece, by the way, of Ludwig Wittgenstein), was shocked. "He is a friend of yours?" she asked me. I explained that though we disagreed we remained friends. "That's right," said Hitchens. "We still love each other."
On February 3, I found a phone message from Carol Blue upon my return home after testifying in the impeachment trial. She was in California, expressed support and "love," and said that when she and Christopher were back in town we'd all have dinner.
The next day, after work, I went to a book party for a friend, David Fromkin, whose "The Way of the World" had just been published. That morning the New York Times had printed its article with Rogan's comment about my being "a gentleman," and people congratulated me for having survived the ordeal unscathed. To my surprise, Hitchens was there, looking the worse for wear, sporting a beard. I approached him, but he was strangely cold. I mentioned that Carol had called. He murmured something inaudible. I observed that his beard had a white stripe in it. "Skunk," he said. The next day he signed his affidavit.
That very evening Jackie and I had dinner with journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who were among Christopher's closest friends. None of us yet knew about his affidavit. But the conversation naturally turned to him, and the Cockburns were worried. Andrew remarked on how Hitchens's Clinton-hating seemed part of a general rightward drift. They had been with him on election night, when Hitchens had muttered imprecations at the reports of Republicans suffering defeats. "He's turned into Paul Johnson," said Andrew, referring to the former left-wing editor of the New Statesman who transmuted into a conservative, a figure whose sex life Hitchens had taken special pleasure in ridiculing in print. "He's more like Peter Hitchens," I replied. "That's it," said Andrew.
Peter, Christopher's younger brother, was in many respects his perfect mirror opposite. Or was he? A former student Trotskyist like his brother, he was now a thorough reactionary who believed that the Tories had sold out to modernity and that Tony Blair was destroying Britain root and branch. (His book on Blair was entitled "The Abolition of Britain.") Like Christopher, he was a columnist who expressed extreme opinions with vehement invective. The next day, February 6, the House Republicans released Christopher's affidavit.
On February 7, the day after the videotaped testimonies of Lewinsky, Jordan, and me had been broadcast, Hitchens was the first guest on NBC's "Meet the Press." He was unkempt, grizzled, and bleary-eyed. Tim Russert, the host, played a tape of my testimony. "As far as I saw from your tape," said Hitchens, "Sidney has not lied to Congress. I mean, what he said was he had no idea how that got into print. That's notionally possibly true." Having already filed a legal document, he now claimed he wouldn't testify. "I won't testify if it's just against him." McDaniel faxed a statement from me to Meet the Press, which Russert read on the air: "I was never a source for any story about Monica Lewinsky's personal life. I did not reveal what the president told me to any reporter. As I testified to the Senate, I talked every day about the stories appearing in the news about Monica Lewinsky to my friends and family, as everyone else was doing. Though I do not recall the luncheon with my 'then' friend of 15 years, the notion that I was trying to plant a story with this rabid anti-Clinton friend is absurd."
Hitchens replied to this fax with a self-contradicting remark: "Well, the last bit is true. If he thought -- I can't believe he would have ever thought I would pass it on." So what I had said was now "notionally possibly true" and "true."
"With us now," intoned Russert, "House Republican Managers Ed Bryant and Asa Hutchinson. Mr. Hutchinson, let me turn to you first. You've just heard Mr. Hitchens; you've read his affidavit. What fate awaits Sidney Blumenthal?"
"Well," said Hutchinson, "I think it's a very serious matter. The Senate should deal with this, should investigate it, determine whether there was any perjury committed before the United States Senate. It also points up how difficult it is to get to the truth in this case and how much of an obstacle it is for the House Managers to make the case, to get to the bottom of it."
By now, the controversy was a heated subject at the top of the news. The Washington Post reported, "The House impeachment managers are in full cry over Blumenthal and the Washington media-political complex... is obsessed with the affair." Both the Post and the New York Times published several articles apiece about it.
The Drudge Report screamed, "Hitchens turns in Blumenthal, says White House aide did smear Lewinsky." Soon Alexander Cockburn, a Nation colleague of Hitchens, called him "Hitch the Snitch." Michael Kelly, in a column in the Post, weighed in on Hitchens' side: "There you had it, a presidential aide caught out, a major Republican claim proved." In another Washington Post column, Robert Novak wrote, "Beyond legalistic accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice, Blumenthal has unwittingly exposed institutional White House corruption that most closely resembles the conduct of Richard M. Nixon." The National Review featured an illustration of me with a manacle around my neck, wearing prison stripes, being led away on a chain.
Hitchens now began a series of performances on TV shows and in newspapers and magazines. Immediately after the House Managers released his wife's affidavit, he was asked on CNN if he could confirm her more detailed and damning version. "Would I swear he said this is what the president wants you to know? No, I would swear he did not say that."
Hitchens' accounts -- of what had happened between us, of what he had heard and what his wife had heard, of how he had come to the attention of the House Republicans and how they had learned of his story, and of his own motives -- changed almost daily and gained gaudier embellishment over time. His stories expanded, contracted, and contradicted each other. The effect was Rashomon-like in its altered perspectives.
At first Hitchens claimed he had been called out of the blue by the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and had no idea why. "So when... I was asked a question by someone who already knew the answer, I wondered for a while who had preempted me," he wrote in a column in a London newspaper. And he told the New York Times that he was working in ignorance of my testimony when he was sought out by House Republican investigators.
"In retrospect, Christopher Hitchens said yesterday, the only thing he really regrets about signing an affidavit that could land his longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal in criminal trouble is that he did not break the news himself to Mr. Blumenthal, the presidential adviser... "I kept thinking, 'Can I phone them? If I get the answering machine, I can't leave it on an answering machine message. If I faxed them...' " At the time of the call from House members, Mr. Hitchens said, he did not know Mr. Blumenthal had just testified to the Senate that he was not the source of negative stories to reporters about Ms. Lewinsky."
(He did not tell the Times reporter that the night before he filed his affidavit he had strangely told me he was a "skunk.")
Then he offered another version. In this one, Hitchens was searching for my Starr grand-jury testimony in order to write his own exposi of me. (The testimony was in fact readily available on numerous Web sites, including those of major newspapers and television networks.) "In the course of getting hold of the transcripts and so forth, I had a number of conversations with staffers at various House committees. One of them evidently called the House Judiciary Committee, which contacted me on Friday, February 5, while this column was being written."
Soon he added new elements, including the portentous anecdote that "he [Blumenthal] left me two folders of pro-Clinton clips and documents, which I wish I'd kept, and went off back to the White House." And Hitchens also offered new information as to why he had been contacted: "When Susan Bogart, senior investigative counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, contacted me in the closing days of the trial, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer. I had put a version of the lunch with Sidney in print, in the London Independent of September 13, 1998." (In that article, he had written obliquely, "I've forgiven a good friend of mine, who sincerely lied for Clinton before a grand jury, for looking me in the eye last March and telling me that Monica was a 'stalker.' ") Hitchens also justified his affidavit as a brave effort to right the scales of justice and to override the established procedures of the Senate trial: "I thought it was a disgrace to have a mock trial, invisibly sponsored by the stock market and opinion polls, at which the defendant didn't appear and at which all efforts to mention Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick were quashed."
Yet Hitchens claimed he was still my friend. He insisted publicly he meant no harm to me -- only to the president. "I made it plain to the House counsel and lawyers that I regarded myself as witnessing only for their Senate trial, and only against the president... I would not testify in any separate or subsequent case against Blumenthal," he wrote in the Washington Post. Hitchens had a picture in his mind of how the drama would play out. I was "another Clinton human sacrifice," he continued, and he would be the hero, acknowledged in the end as the true friend:
"The Senate lets Bill Clinton walk. Judge Starr decides to proceed against Sidney, who by his excess of loyalty has become one of Clinton's victims. And I withdraw my affidavit (as I then would) and am cited for contempt.
"The U.S. Senate then finds out, having "put everything behind us and moved on," that everything we could even suspect in the Kathleen Willey case turns out to be true. A perfect victory for justice.
"So, for the moment, I am putting myself under the protection of America's love of the ironic. And, when this is over (and if it matters) I look forward to seeing Sidney again, and to having no differences with him except about politics."
Hitchens' plot thickened when his anti-Clinton polemic, entitled "No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family," appeared. In it he deepened his suspicions and added unnamed coconspirators: "I believe that clippings [about Lewinsky as 'stalker'] were in a folder of material that he brought along to give me, and which I no longer possess. I also believe that at least two other senior White House aides were involved in spreading the smear against a defenseless and vulnerable young woman." These he did not name.
Three years later, Hitchens was no longer presenting himself as my rescuer or friend. He told an English reporter:
"He looked as if he'd suddenly gone to work for John Gotti. He was shifty, he was looking around the room, he was uninterruptible and paranoid and he said, 'We're going to take care of these bitches' [Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey]. He was talking out of the side of his mouth -- like a real thug -- and it was very horrible and ugly and scary. Carol and I didn't know where to look, and she was obviously very upset and horrified. So I said, 'Look, Sidney, are you sure this is the kind of work you want to be doing? Is this what you signed up with the White House to be doing? I mean, hunting down these women?' No, I don't remember what he replied to that."
He had only been seeking to find a way to confront me, he explained to the Times of London. "But my regret is that I didn't have a crisis with him before I did." "A case in point," continued the Times chronicle, "was the night of Blumenthal's birthday party, the November before Clinton's impeachment crisis, when [Hitchens] and [his wife] Carol umm-ed and ah-ed about whether it was hypocritical to attend. In the event they did, and Hitchens spent a miserable evening on the deck in the freezing cold, refusing to go inside. 'A pathetic compromise,' as he says. The house was full of Clinton people who were clearly surprised to see one of the president's most persistent critics among their number. 'And I thought, 'Oh well, the unspoken question I can see in your eyes is a very fair one, and I've only just begun to really face it myself.'"
But the "freezing cold" deck was nicely heated; the bartender hadn't needed to wear a jacket.
In the days right after Hitchens emerged with his affidavit, two other witnesses stepped forward to cast some perspective on the issue of calling Monica Lewinsky a stalker. One was Michael Isikoff, appearing on National Public Radio. On the air, Monica Lewinsky's tape of her conversation with Linda Tripp on December 22, 1997, was played for him, in which she said, "I think people call me that stalker. I think that's what they say. Oh, my God. That gets me so mad. I hate that."
Isikoff commented, "Well, actually, it goes back a little further than that. It goes back to the time in April of 1996 when Monica Lewinsky is evicted from her position in the White House... It is true that people called her the stalker... At the time that the president was meeting with Blumenthal, which was the evening of January 21st, we were publishing in Newsweek our first story about this diary of a scandal, which included reporting for the first time about the so-called Talking Points that Lewinsky had handed Tripp. And those Talking Points did include a sentence in which Monica Lewinsky is referred to as a stalker."
Of course Lewinsky, as she testified, was the author of the Talking Points.
The other witness was Linda Tripp, on NBC's "Today Show." "Monica," she said, "was named a stalker far before Sidney Blumenthal saw fit to share it with his peers. This is not news. Monica was called a stalker when she was forced to leave the White House."
