NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS BOOKS Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles Why Orwell Matters No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton Letters to a Young Contrarian The Trial of Henry Kissinger Thomas Jefferson: Author of America Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything The Portable Atheist Hitch-22: A Memoir Arguably: Essays PAMPHLETS Karl Marx and the Paris Commune The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq ESSAYS Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports For the Sake of Argument Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays COLLABORATIONS James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner) Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said) When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kash) International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos) Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend) NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO THE TRIANGULATIONS OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON Christopher Hitchens This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012 Published in the United States by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, by arrangement with Verso, an imprint of New Left Books Copyright © Christopher Hitchens 1999, 2000 Foreword to this edition copyright © Douglas Brinkley 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74331 193 6 Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Laura Antonia and Sophia Mando, my daughters Contents Foreword to the New Edition Acknowledgments Preface ONETriangulation TWOChameleon in Black and White THREEThe Policy Coup FOURA Question of Character FIVEClinton’s War Crimes SIXIs There a Rapist in the Oval Office? SEVENThe Shadow of the Con Man Afterword Foreword 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