Christopher Hitchens on Alexander Cockburn and Barbara Epstein

From Christopher Hitchens' Web

A recent issue of Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch carried a viciously unpleasant account of my supposed conduct at the memorial meeting for the late Barbara Epstein. The item alleged that I had sought an invitation to an event to which I was not invited, had then behaved boorishly, and had claimed to be the man who, with Paul Wolfowitz, had induced President Bush to invade Iraq.

I do not mind the normally cheerful and freehand satires that Cockburn produces about me, but the attempt to make Barbara Epstein's memorial into a theater for his abuse seems to me to cross a line of decency. As it happens, I was notified of her death, and of the arrangements, by an a series of emails from the New York Review of Books. I was also honored by an invitation from her son and daughter. I have since received a kind letter from Jacob Epstein, unsolicited, which I am not at liberty to quote in full. However, he does not object to my citing him as saying: "There is no question you were invited to Barbara's memorial, as Helen and I asked you. The Counterpunch thing about this was incorrect."

That's all that needs to be said about the only hurtful defamation. As to the rest of it, I wouldnt have been able to act the part of a drunken hack even if I had wanted to, since a fellow-guest and close friend of the family was overcome by the heat while I was talking to him downstairs, and I had to spend most of the time in the lobby and on the sidewalk, waiting for the Emergency Services and keeping him company. I do recall being briefly snubbed by Jean Stein as she passed through the lobby, but I found I could bear that.

When people ask me about "my war" in Iraq, I do tend to say that it was indeed I who started it. Cockburn and his mean-minded second-hand and third-rate informants have even got my heavy sarcasm wrong, and don't mind making Barbara Epstein's memorial seem like a vulgar brawl, instead of the dignified and touching occasion that it was, if it will serve their purpose.