Christopher Hitchens is dead, but his annoying friends survive him. Since his death on December 15, I have read countless tributes from these friends.
Sally Quinn, the wife of retired Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, also contributes articles to the newspaper. Her piece, “Sleep in heavenly piece, dearest Christopher,” nauseated me the most. Indeed, the title alone would have induced the late Hitchens to vomit himself.
“Christopher was one of the most beguiling people I have ever known,” Quinn wrote. “I thought so from the first moment I met him at a party about 30 years ago in my home.” Rather than honoring his memory, she seemed more interested in advertising her social connection to him, as well as her Washington Post blog, “On Faith.” As she reminded her readers, “He wrote for ‘On Faith’ from the start and sat for two video interviews, one after he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.”
“He was one of the most learned religion scholars I knew, which is why he was such a formidable debater,” Quinn continued. “He really knew the Bible. He really knew the Koran. He really had read all the theologians, thinkers and philosophers.” In the first place, any Hitch hen who misspells the Qur’an has probably read nothing about Islam besides God is Not Great. More importantly, respected theologians have little respect for Hitchens.
Beyond a superficial grasp of religion, Quinn shares Hitchens’s commitment to sloppy reporting, which characterized the final stage of his career. In the December 19, 1979 issue of The Washington Post, Quinn profiled Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. She concluded her article this way:
“A reporter for a national magazine recently went to the White House to interview Brzezinski. The interview was very jolly. A great success. Not surprisingly Brzezinski was pleased with himself, exuberant. So exuberant, that as the reporter was leaving he began to joke around and flirt with her. Suddenly he unzipped his fly. The photographer who was with them took a picture of this unusual expression of playfulness. Shortly afterward the reporter received a photograph of the private moment they had shared, captured for eternity. It was inscribed, by Zbigniew Brzezinski.”
On December 20, 1979, The Washington Post published the following correction:
“In yesterday’s story about Zbigniew Brzezinski, it was stated that at the end of an interview with a reporter from a national magazine – as a joke – Brzezinski committed an offensive act, and that a photographer took a picture ‘of this unusual expression of playfulness.’ Brzezinski did not commit such an act, and there is no picture of him doing so. A photograph of Brzezinski and the reporter was made, and Brzezinski autographed it at the reporter’s request. The poses, shadows and background of this picture create an accidental ‘double entendre,’ which Brzezinski refers to in his caption. The magazine reporter states that nothing in the interview or the autographed picture offended her. The Washington Post sincerely regrets the error.”
Careful interviewing of the magazine reporter and the photographer would have prevented such an egregious error.
In addition to her journalism, Quinn is also an ambitious Washington hostess. Her 1998 book, The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining, almost surpassed Hitchens’s memoir Hitch 22 in its namedropping. Does it really benefit her readers to know that General Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a guest in her home?
“Aside from the people you invite, the most important aspect of entertaining with confidence is never to entertain beyond your means,” Quinn counseled her readers with apparent helpfulness, but her supporting example revealed her true purpose:
“Tom and Meredith Brokaw have an apartment in New York where they entertain elegantly. They also have a ranch in Montana with a couple of tiny log cabins and two modest cottages. When they entertain there, everyone wears jeans and it’s strictly homestyle, with simple, delicious food, buffalo steaks, bowls of vegetables, and potatoes passed around the table.”
A husband and wife who own an apartment in New York and a ranch in Montana are not economizing; they are luxuriating in their own wealth. Furthermore, I would recommend that social drinkers skip her chapter on cocktail parties:
“Speaking of the cocktail hour, it should be forty-five minutes long…No matter how scintillating your guests are, the very nature of the cocktail hour precludes any really serious conversation, and you can’t sustain polite, superficial chitchat for much longer than an hour…I’ve actually been to a private dinner in Washington where the President was over an hour late, and the cocktail party was interminable. Everyone was hungry, tired, bored, cross, and slightly boozed by the time he got there, and it was not a great start to the evening.”
You may agree that the cocktail hour should only last forty-five minutes, but I doubt that you will ever require the following advice:
“What if it’s the President and he’s late [for the cocktail hour]? The Secret Service will be there and will advise the host or hostess how much longer it will be. If the guests have been there since eight and it’s nearing ten, my advice would be to say to the Secret Service, ‘I’m sure the President would like us to go ahead and sit down.’”
Given her attacks on President Bill Clinton at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it is unlikely that Quinn served many cocktails to him.
For the November 2, 1998 issue of The Washington Post, Quinn interviewed well-connected members of the Washington establishment. “He came in here and he trashed the place,” said David Broder, her colleague at the newspaper, “and it’s not his place.”
David Gergen, the political advisor and commentator, went further:
“We have our own set of village rules. Sex did not violate those rules. The deep and searing violation took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them. That is one on which people choke. We all live together, we have a sense of community, there’s a small town quality here. We all understand we do certain things, we make certain compromises. But when you have gone over the line, you won’t bring others into it. That is a cardinal rule of the village. You don’t foul the nest.”
Appearing on C-Span several days later, Quinn made it clear to a caller that she considered herself a member of this elite club:
“Well, I mean, certainly I live here and I’m part of the community. So, you’re right in that respect that I couldn’t have known that these people felt that way unless I were their friends and I saw them professionally and socially….I think that there’s a sense in Washington that something that people here cared about has been damaged or has been diminished in some way and that people take it personally and seriously because this is their community.” (43:00)
Quinn did not include the black residents of Southeast Washington in her envisioned community, but they must have differed with her on the issue. In fact, Quinn went so far as to support Hitchens in his betrayal of his friend, Sidney Blumenthal. Hitchens signed an affidavit claiming that the Clinton advisor had described Lewinsky as a stalker. “I like Christopher, I think he’s brilliant,” Quinn stated at the time. “Christopher did what he had to do, and I don’t have a problem with that.”
It is widely assumed that a social snub motivated Quinn’s animosity. According to Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, 'The Clintons did not make her their guide.'
Quinn, of course, denied this to a C-Span viewer: “Being rebuffed by Mrs. Clinton just never happened. We’ve actually had quite a cordial relationship, and I’ve never been rebuffed by the Clintons, or Mrs. Clinton, so I think you have some false information there.” (37:00)
Relying only on my intuition, I cannot believe that Quinn would have turned against the Clintons had they regularly visited her home.
Like most of Hitchens’s self-promoting friends, Quinn is oblivious to the realities faced by ordinary people. When another caller, fearful of Clinton’s interventions abroad, contended that his son would have to fight in the event of war, but not hers, she explained that medical reasons would preclude her child from doing so. At the same time, however, she also exposed her own political and historical ignorance: “I don’t think that wealth keeps children out of the military.” (23:00)
Fortunately, subscribers to The Washington Post will no longer see her byline in print. Last year, Quinn used her social column, fittingly entitled “The Party”, to publicize her estrangement from her stepson’s family. In her response to complaints about her unprofessional behavior, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli terminated her column. Her blog, “On Faith”, can only be read in the on-line edition of the newspaper.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
”
