The popular British expat journalist Christopher Hitchens died last Thursday at 62 of pneumonia brought on by esophageal cancer. One might say "passed away" but Hitchens's writerly ghost won't stand for it. In life, Hitchens was not sentimental about death, anyone else's or his own impending anticipated oblivion. When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Hitchens called the former president a "phony and a loon" and judged him "as dumb as a stump" in an obituary for Slate.
The Hitchens of 1994 would have stopped there but his more mature self needed to go further. "However," he wrote, "there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington" and the world changed forever. Hitchens had huddled at the Marriott Hotel "from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real."
Many of those friends were very smart Democrats who had "all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be… the president instead of Reagan." Their cars would soon sport Dukakis-Bentsen bumper stickers. "No doubt," he wrote, "they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait."
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