No One Left to Lie to: The Values of the Worst Family

Let’s be clear right off the bat: Christopher Hitchens was duty-bound to slay Washington, D.C., scoundrels. Somewhere around the time that the Warren Commission said there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the Johnson administration insisted there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, Hitchens made a pact with himself to be a principled avatar of subjective journalism. If a major politician dared to insult the intelligentsia’s sense of enlightened reason, he or she would have to contend with the crocodile-snapping wrath of Hitchens. So when five-term Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became U.S. president in 1993, full of “I didn’t inhale” denials, he was destined to encounter the bite. What Clinton couldn’t have expected was that Hitchens—in this clever and devastating polemic—would gnaw off a big chunk of his ass for the ages. For unlike most Clinton-era diatribes that reeked of partisan sniping of-the-moment, Hitchens managed to write a classic takedown of our forty-second president—on par with Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers (pathetic LBJ) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (poor Nixon)—with the prose durability of history. Or, more simply put, its bottle vintage holds up well.

What No One Left to Lie To shares with the Mailer and Thompson titles is a wicked sense of humor, razorblade indictments, idiopathic anger, high élan, and a wheelbarrow full of indisputable facts. Hitchens proves to be a dangerous foe to Clinton precisely because he avoids the protest modus operandi of the antiwar 1960s. Instead of being unwashed and plastered in DayGlo, he embodies the refined English gentleman, swirling a scotch-and-Perrier (“the perfect delivery system”) in a leather armchair, utilizing the polished grammar of an Oxford don in dissent, passing judgment from history’s throne. In these chapters, the hubristic Hitchens dismantles the Clinton propaganda machine of the 1990s, like a veteran safecracker going click-back click-click-back click until he gets the goods. Detractors of Hitchens over the years have misguidedly tattooed him with the anarchistic “bomb-thrower” label. It’s overwrought. While it’s true that Hitchens unleashes his disdain for Clinton right out of the gate here, deriding him on Page One as a bird-dogging “crooked president,” the beauty of this deft polemic is that our avenging hero proceeds to prove the relative merits of this harsh prosecution.

Hemingway famously wrote that real writers have a built-in bullshit detector—no one has ever accused Hitchens of not reading faces. What goaded him the most was that Clinton, the so-called New Democrat, with the help of his Machiavellian-Svengali consultant Dick Morris, decided the way to hold political power was by making promises to the Left while delivering to the Right. This rotten strategy was called Triangulation. All Clinton gave a damn about, Hitchens maintains, was holding on to power. As a man of the Left, an English-American columnist and critic for The Nation and Vanity Fair, Hitchens wanted to be sympathetic to Clinton. His well-honed sense of ethics, however, made that impossible. He refused to be a Beltway liberal muted by the “moral and political blackmail” of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “eight years of reptilian rule.”

Clinton is for Hitchens emblematic of an official Washington overrun with lobbyists, Tammany-bribers, and bagmen of a thousand stripes. But Hitchens doesn’t merely knock Clinton down like most polemicists. Instead, he drives over him with an 18-wheel Peterbilt, shifts gears to reverse, and then flattens the reputation of the Arkansas “boy wonder” again and again. Anyone who gets misty-eyed when Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” the Clinton theme song, comes on the radio shouldn’t read this exposé.

Hitchens’s eternal scorn, which, since his death from esophageal cancer in 2011, is resounding louder than ever with a thunderously appreciative reading public. In the post–Cold War era, Hitchens was the polemicist who mattered most. He understood better than anyone that today’s news is tomorrow’s history.

Everyone knows the wit and wisdom of Dorothy Parker and Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Like these esteemed literary predecessors, Hitchens will be anthologized and read for years to come. Three versions of Clinton’s impeachment drama (maybe more to come) will remain essential: Clinton’s own My Life, Kenneth Starr’s Official Report of the Independent Counsel’s Investigation of the President, and Hitchens’s No One Left to Lie To. Hopefully Hitchens’s book will continue to be read in journalism and history classes, not for its nitty-gritty anti-Clinton invective and switchblade putdowns, but to remind politicians that there are still reporters out there who will expose your most sordid shenanigans with a shit-rain of honest ridicule. Hitchens salutes a few of them—Jamin Raskin, Marc Cooper, and Graydon Carter among them—in these pages...