Shredding the Ties That Bind Journalists

Journalists, especially in Washington and especially on the left, are reeling from the weekend news about the morals of their “community.” What caused shudders was the affidavit sworn out last week by the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, alleging that his (now ex-) friend Sidney Blumenthal had lied when he maintained, under oath, in a Feb. 3 deposition for the Senate trial of President Clinton that he had not spread derogatory rumors about Monica Lewinsky to reporters.

Curiously referring to his wife as his “associate,” perhaps to establish that the lunch with Blumenthal last March was all business, Hitchens alleged that “Mr. Blumenthal stated that Monica Lewinsky had been a ‘stalker’ and that the president was ‘the victim’ of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman. . . . I have personal knowledge that Mr. Blumenthal recounted to other people in the journalistic community the same story about Monica Lewinsky.” Blumenthal, himself a well-known former journalist turned White House aide, has responded that “the notion that I was trying to plant a story with this rabidly anti-Clinton friend is absurd.”

So, to the delectation of the Republican right, has Blumenthal been betrayed by a man who affects revolutionary virtue, marooned in the ‘90s. Some of what is in play, no doubt, is left-wing fundamentalism: the conviction of purists that what stands in the way of their hearts’ desire is the treacherous class enemy, the Social Democrats (aka “social fascists,” in Stalinist parlance) who mislead the otherwise vigorous proletariat. Blumenthal’s Clintonian “third way” centrism is, from this point of view, itself the sheerest betrayal. Therefore, no holds are to be barred. Belle-lettristic denunciation will not suffice. Call in the law.

But some of what seems to be in play in Hitchens’ betrayal is the question of what constitutes friendship in the first place. For if Hitchens’ affidavit is false, that is one sort of betrayal; if it is true, that is another sort. In either case, betrayal of friendship is the irreducible core of the matter--as is the case in two recent books about friendship and betrayal, Norman Podhoretz’s “Ex-Friends” and Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow.” In a superb review of both books in the current issue of Dissent, writer George Packer asks what kind of friendships these were that were so lustfully, so irreconcilably broken. They were not what one normally thinks of as friendships. They were little mutual-use societies. These shredded friendships were, in effect, business deals gone bad. The two books, Packer writes, “call into question the very notion that literary friendship itself is possible.”

In the case of Blumenthal and Hitchens, accomplished writers both, the deals were largely political, not literary, but Packer’s point stands in their case as well. Journalists tend to befriend journalists and organize convivial associations of their kind. Even rivals are warmed by the fires of the same fraternity (or sorority). As in every professional circle, they cement their bonds with gossip, among other things. They dine out on facts--meaning in part, each other’s facts--and they also confide. What they must not do is burn each other.

If this principle sounds cozy, it is also, in journalism as in politics, a prerequisite for social decency. In the early years of the Cold War, friendships also shattered when ex-Communists named the names not of spies but of run-of-the-mill Communist Party members. What was so deeply corrosive was not simply that the ex-Communist witnesses disagreed about Stalin or the Cold War--that was long overdue. They could have written articles, even film scripts, denouncing each others’ views. That would have been the politics of the pen--what one expects from writers, after all.

No, what was corrosive was that friends went before congressional committees and courts to inform. They hadn’t been friends at all, connected person to person. They had been “comrades,” a bond they had thought more exalted--fused in a total enterprise they had imagined to surpass such bourgeois notions as trustworthiness. They were badly, grievously wrong. Their opportunistic bond proved paper-thin.

From Linda Tripp to Kenneth Starr to Christopher Hitchens. . . . poisons are circulating. Tripp’s illegal tape recordings led to impeachment, hot pursuit of a president led Starr to circulate his illegally got gains all over the world, and now Hitchens joins them in disgrace. Wiretaps, subpoenas, affidavits, the whole criminalizing apparatus of betrayal--all this destroys trust. Abuse the trust of friends and you shred honor. Shred honor and you plunge civilization into the war of all against all. Talk about moral lessons for the young.