A Letter to Christopher Hitchens

In the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic Christopher Hitchens writes a fairly standard Hitchens review of Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. At points ascerbic and smart, the review nonetheless veers off into territory where Hitch is either uninformed or simply obtuse. I wrote a letter in response, but it has been three months and obviously has been discarded into the bin, but I wanted to share that letter, because someone needed to address a couple of shortcomings in the review:

To the Editors:

Christopher Hitchens makes at least two significant errors of interpretation or fact in his review of Peter Beinart’s new book The Good Fight. (“Blood for No Oil!” May 2006).

First, he writes, “Beinart gives due credit to the unjustly forgotten Bayard Rustin, who was perhaps the true genius of the civil-rights and democratic socialist movements . . .” One might quibble with the very idea of there being one “true genius” in a movement that was both vast and for the most part locally driven by many folks, geniuses or otherwise. And it is well and true that Rustin deserves a great deal more credit than the general public has granted him in the past. But since he is addressing a reading audience that is arguably more engaged than average, one has to ask about his peculiarly constructed passive voice assertion: Overlooked by whom? Hitchens implies that Beinart rescues Rustin from obscurity. Perhaps someone ought to tell Mr. Hitchens about recent Rustin biographies that have antedated Beinart’s (and by extension Hitchens’?) supposed discovery: John D’Emilio’s 2003 Lost Prophet (from the less-than obscure University of Chicago Press) or Daniel Levine’s 2000 Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (Rutgers). Going back only slightly farther, in 1997 Harper Collins published Jervis Anderson’s biography of Rustin. (That same year James Haskins even published a children’s book about Rustin.) If the public has forgotten Rustin, it seems clear that those who have made the greatest effort to bring his memory back to the fore deserve recognition.

The second, and to my mind more problematic assertion comes when Hitchens writes: “The other great argument of the time – over the imposition of sanctions on South Africa – gave the Left the moral high ground for a year or two, but was eventually co-opted by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as well.” This assertion is flabbergasting in its fundamental erroneousness. “The Left”,” whatever that is, had been calling for sanctions not for “a year or two,” but rather for decades. The American Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) extended back to the end of the Second World War, with the first serious calls for sanctions emerging in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960. Leaders of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), including Martin Luther King, Jr., very clearly called for sanctions in April 1960 and on many occasions thereafter. These calls only accelerated in the decades ("year or two”!) that followed. As for whether President Reagan “co-opted” the calls for sanctions? On September 25, 1986 Reagan vetoed the Dellums Bill (the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986) in keeping with his administration’s policy of Constructive Engagement, the architect of which was Undersecretary of State Chester Crocker, who to this day defends his policies. When the Senate (majority Republican, but the anti-Apartheid legislation was Democratic at the core) overrode Reagan’s veto on October 2 it not only marked Reagan’s most serious foreign policy defeat, it also marked the first time Congress had overridden one of his vetoes. Admittedly, In 1985 the Reagan administration had tried to appease his South Africa critics by passing an Executive Order restricting some computer sales to South Africa, an action that met with derision, and rightfully so. Co-opted indeed.

If forced to be honest with ourselves, most of us enjoy a good eviscerating book review more than the run of the mill assessment full of praise and encomia. But the burden on the acidic reviewer is higher – he needs to have his facts right and his interpretations screwed on straight. Hitchens’ snarky review fails these tests because Hitchens oversteps his bounds. He writes about what he does not know, presents misinformation as facts, and then uses this disinformation to smear Beinart for transgressions real and imagined.

I was sort of hoping for Hitchens to come back with one of his patented retorts. I suppose there is little chance that he reads dcat.