Correction:
The Dec. 17 obituary of writer Christopher Hitchens attributed disparaging remarks about Mr. Hitchens to his former colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn. The comments first appeared in 2002 on a Web site co-edited by Cockburn. According to Cockburn, the comments were taken from an essay and headline by other writers. This version has been updated.
In his 2002 book “Why Orwell Matters,” Mr. Hitchens sought to rescue Orwell from “sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise” and noted that the most important thing to be learned from Orwell was that “it matters not what you think, but how you think.”
Mr. Hitchens was often quite funny in print, but his humor was usually at the service of his rhetoric and larger ideas. He seemed to delight most in the things he disliked.
But unlike many armchair polemicists, Mr. Hitchens had the courage to take his convictions to the streets. He was shot at in Sarajevo, jailed in Czechoslovakia and, as recently as 2008, beaten bloody in Beirut.
He was among the first to criticize Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for issuing a 1988 fatwa, calling for the death of Hitchens’s friend “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie.
At 59, Mr. Hitchens voluntarily underwent a session of waterboarding, the practice of simulated drowning that had been approved by the George W. Bush administration for the questioning of prisoners. Although Mr. Hitchens supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his view of waterboarding was without equivocation.
“If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” he wrote in Vanity Fair, “then there is no such thing as torture.”
To Mr. Hitchens, literally nothing was sacred. He assailed the reputations of many religious figures, including Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. He had little but contempt for Clinton, whom he knew at the University of Oxford in the 1960s, and titled his 1999 book about Clinton “No One Left to Lie To.”
In a series of articles in Harper’s magazine and in a 2001 book, Mr. Hitchens attacked Kissinger, saying the former secretary of state should be charged with war crimes for supporting Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile and for encouraging what Mr. Hitchens viewed as genocidal policies around the globe.
At times, Mr. Hitchens sacrificed friendship on the altar of principle. During the Clinton impeachment spectacle of 1998, he submitted an affidavit to congressional Republicans saying that Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal — a longtime friend — had called Monica Lewinsky “a stalker” who was harassing the president. Many considered Mr. Hitchens’s statement an unpardonable breach of trust.
Mr. Hitchens seemed more comfortable on the international political stage and had long ties to Iraq, which he first visited in 1976.
“I should have registered the way that people almost automatically flinched at the mention of the name Saddam Hussein,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Hitch-22.”
Nevertheless, he opposed Desert Storm, the early 1990s war with Iraq during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Over time, Mr. Hitchens’s anger toward Hussein’s regime festered, and he came to believe that the West had a moral duty to stand up against what he saw as assaults on freethinking, tolerance and an open society.
His wholehearted endorsement of the 2003 U.S.-led intervention in Iraq marked an irrevocable point of no return for many of his old friends on the left. He was seen as deserting his long-held beliefs and crossing over, once and for all, to take up arms with the neoconservatives then in power. In 2011, after many conservatives had come to think of Mr. Hitchens as one of their own, he coined a scathing phrase to describe the tea party movement: All politics is yokel.
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