To measure his loss, and ours, look at Prepared for the Worst, a collection of his early work published in 1988, or his superb, and sadly still pertinent, book on Cyprus from 1984. Or read his Nation column from May 2001 on Bob Kerrey’s lasting culpability for a massacre in Vietnam. Hitchens was teaching at the New School at the time, making Kerrey, he wrote, “my president”; yet the piece, incandescent with moral outrage, is never callous or crude. “If you look back on the essays that made his name,” Hitchens writes about Noam Chomsky, “you will find a polemical talent well worth mourning, and a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.” I wish Hitchens a speedy recovery, a long life and as much celebrity as he wants. But it’s the Christopher with a feeling for justice I mourn. I miss him very much.
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