I met Christopher Hitchens only one time, and that was at a perfectly dismal event called the Democratic National Midterm Convention in Philadelphia in 1982. (It was at this event that I first noticed that the Democratic party, still shellshocked from the Reagan landslide two years earlier, was beginning to look around for a way a Democratic politician could become a corporate 'ho. The nascent Democratic Leadership Council was running things.) I was working for an alternative newspaper in Boston at the time, and I was hanging out with Alexander Cockburn, then of the Village Voice. We escaped to the lounge of the hotel, possibly because running screaming into the streets out of pure revulsion would have been undignified, and Hitchens was there. Cockburn introduced me, and Hitchens gave me that low-running smile. "Greetings, comrade," he said. He talked for the next three hours. It was damned impressive.

I never saw him again. But I followed his work. His support of Salman Rushdie when the Iranian mullahs put out a hit on the author was both brave and lonely. (Go back and see how many important writers hid under the bed on that one. It was appalling.) My favorite moment came on Crossfire, IIRC, when Pat Buchanan sided with a Muslim cleric who was standing up for the mullahs, and Hitchens told Buchanan that he'd wished that they'd invited Meir Kahane, so he could argue with the "detritus of all three major monotheisms." He stood up for the Bosnians long before NATO did, and he stood up for the Kurds every time an American president sold them out.

He also was one of the hundreds of very smart people whom Bill Clinton drove totally crazy. His support of the bloody bungling in Iraq, and his intemperate dismissal of people who knew better than he what a bungle it had to become, made me very angry. But I could never, ever stop reading the man. Hell, he was an atheist who knew the King James Bible better than half the preachers I've ever met. He became an American by choice, and that is to be admired, too.

He died last night. This craft is very much the poorer for his loss. I got that one evil grin and three hours conversation. I was a comrade for the afternoon. I was very, very lucky.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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