Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is an Anglo-American author, journalist, commentator, critic, contrarian and provocateur. He is considered one of the most influential writers of politics, literature, and popular culture wherever the English language is spoken or read. He is also ranked among its leading essayists and conversationalists and considered one of the world's leading public intellectuals.

But don't let the word intellectual scare you off: you may be infuriated with some of his opinions, but it's not likely you'll be bored. He is an engaging, boozy, bare-knuckled writer who is now waging his biggest fight against stage IV cancer, and as he likes to point out, there is no stage V. But he is still writing for an audience that spans generations and national boundaries.

Segment: Christopher Hitchens
Extra: Hedonism at Oxford
Extra: Defending war in Iraq and Afghanistan
Extra: Hitchens on dying
Extra: Writers reflect on Hitchens
Extra: Hitchens on alcoholism

That broad appeal was never more apparent than one night early last summer when Hitchens was interviewed by his friend Salman Rushdie before a highbrow New York audience, and then later appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" - both appearances to promote his new memoir, Hitch 22.

When Stewart asked how Hitchens was doing, the writer said, "It's a bit early to say."

The audience may have assumed that Hitchens was making a joke about his well-known penchant for staying out late and drinking. In fact, unbeknownst to anyone, he had checked himself out of a hospital earlier that day after having been told that he most likely was suffering from metastasized esophageal cancer.

"I'm a member of a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers," Hitchens told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft.

Asked if people have survived it, Hitchens said, "Oh, yeah. It can be survived. But the statistics are five percent, in other words, which are not the odds I would have picked."

When we began our conversations with him a few months after he had been diagnosed, he had already cancelled his book tour and begun an intensive protocol of chemotherapy, which had robbed him of much of his energy and all but a few strands of his hair. Now, most of his research and rumination were focused on his own mortality.

"What is your life like right now? I mean in terms of what you're able to do and how you feel physically?" Kroft asked.

"I was very afraid it would stop me writing. And I was really petrified with fear about that because I thought that would, among other things, diminish my will to live because being a writer's what I am rather than what I do," Hitchens said.

It would be impossible here to adequately summarize his output, since it includes 25 books and countless articles, reviews and commentaries pounded out over four decades through a haze of cigarette smoke and filtered through kettles of Johnny Walker Black.

Suffice it to say, he writes with confidence, conviction, certainty, and an air of self satisfaction - using his wits and words as weapons to eviscerate egos and slaughter sacred cows. He has labeled Henry Kissinger a "war criminal," Bill Clinton a "rapist" and a "conman," and the British royal family "a blight upon the reputation of England."

"I mean, you do go over the top occasionally," Kroft pointed out.

"I'm in no position to deny it, but I'm wondering if you had...I'd do better if you said where you thought that was," Hitchens said.

In one instance, he called Mother Teresa a "fanatical, Albanian dwarf."

"Lying, thieving Albanian dwarf," Hitchens told Kroft. "That was, I admit, an exercise in seeing how far I could go."

"But why did you want to do it?" Kroft asked.

"It was about celebrity culture," Hitchens said. "Now, Mother Teresa started with a reputation of being a saint, and so therefore, everything she did had to be reported as saintly. Thus, the fact that she took money from the Duvalier family dictatorship in Haiti, who must've oppressed the poor more than any other dynasty in history, somehow wasn't a fact. 'Cause it couldn't be true, because a saint wouldn't do that."

"What about Princess Diana?" Kroft asked. "I'm trying to remember what you said about Princess Diana. ...You compared her to a landmine."

"Well, there's a horrible joke about a landmine, yes," Hitchens acknowledged. "She was in Angola on her landmine campaign, and there was a hushed, reverent BBC commentator. And he said, 'The thing about mine fields is that they're very easy to lay, but they're very difficult and dangerous, and even expensive to get rid of' - the perfect description of Prince Charles's first wife."

Hitchens wrote it and told Kroft it was printed.

Hitchens was born 61 years ago into what he calls the gray middle class austerity of postwar England. His father was a naval officer, and his mother was the first real splash of color in an otherwise drab existence. She told him the only unforgivable sin was to be boring, and he has rarely committed it. She aspired for him to go to Oxford and become a proper English gentleman - and one of those wishes came true.

Produced by L. Franklin DevineAt Oxford, Hitchens says he kept two sets of books: by day he was an international socialist pamphleteer, and his nights were spent sipping whiskey and fine wine with the Oxford elite.

"Any exercise of hedonism on my part was actually a rebellion against conservatism. It might not have been for everybody, but it was for me," Hitchens told Kroft.

"You were somewhat famous or infamous at Oxford, I take it?" Kroft asked.

"Notorious would do. Yes, I was," Hitchens said.

Asked if people at Oxford knew who he was, Hitchens told Kroft, "I've always been able to give a speech in public. And '68 was a good year if you could just get up on a truck or an upturned barrel and make a speech through a megaphone or without or, in the more parliamentary style, which I had been trained for by debating society, speak at the Oxford Union against members of the government. I mean, cabinet ministers would come on the train. It was only an hour from London. And you could meet them when you were 18 and debate with them on level terms."

Within a few years of graduation, he was one of the most famous journalists in Britain, covering wars abroad and creating mischief at home. Margaret Thatcher once spanked him on the rump and called him a naughty boy. But he soon found England small and confining.

"Dr. Samuel Johnson used to say - famously said - 'If a man is tired of London he's tired of life.' And I was tired of London by the time I was 30 and I decided England was too small. I wanted to leave. I never get bored here," Hitchens said.

"Here" is Washington, D.C., where Hitchens has lived for the last 20 years with his wife, Carol Blue, and the youngest of his three children.

They have not gotten around to actually hanging pictures in their apartment, but Hitchens seems to know the exact location of every book in his vast library from Byron and Spinoza to Gray's Anatomy. He has read them all over to cover, and can still quote lengthy passages.

Hitchens pointed out a shelf full of religious books to Kroft, quipping, "And here's a collection of holy books, if ever I want to look for loopholes."

For years he hosted a famous party for Vanity Fair at his home, rubbing shoulders with Supreme Court justices, senators, Hollywood royalty and network news anchors, providing ammunition to rivals who call him a shameless namedropper and social climber. The apartment is currently being expanded with the proceeds of his recent best seller, God is not Great.

"You've elevated your career by picking on bigger and bigger targets. It's kind of gone from being, Hitchens against Kissinger, Hitchens against Clinton, Hitchens against Mother Teresa, Hitchens against God," Kroft pointed out.

"Ah, well. In a way, of course, it has to end with the belief in the divine, yes, because that is the origin of all dictatorship," Hitchens replied.

To some, Hitchens may be most familiar as the country's best-known atheist. He has taken on organized religion in his book, in dozens of articles and on the debate platform all over the country.

Religion, he contends, is the source of all tyranny, and that much of the trouble in the world can be traced to fanaticism - whether it is practiced by Islamic terrorists or settlers on the West Bank.

"It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority, who can convict you of thought-crime while you are asleep. A celestial North Korea," Hitchens said.

Wherever he appears, his readers fill auditoriums and wait in long lines for him to sign their books - even in the Bible Belt.

At one event in Birmingham, Ala., one of his fans even smuggled in a bottle of Hitchens' favorite beverage, which he refers to as "Mr. Walker's Amber Restorative."

Hitchens has a legion of close friends that includes writer Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and the critic, James Fenton, all of whom attest to his superior intellect, social skills, and a legendary constitution that allows him to consume staggering amounts of alcohol.

Author Christopher Buckley recalled a restaurant lunch that began at 1 p.m. and ended near midnight.

"At the end of this ten-and-a-half hour epic lunch, I would have happily checked into the nearest hospital to have oxygen, blood, and extensive liver work. I think he went home and wrote an essay on George Orwell," Buckley remembered.

"Christopher never does anything by halves, you know, so his attack is always a 250 percent attack," Salman Rushdie added.

Rushdie occasionally hid out in Hitchens' apartment after the Ayatollah Khomeini authorized Rushdie's murder for blasphemy.

And Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, is a longtime Hitchens employer, having assigned him to write about everything from what it's like to get a complete spa makeover to what it's like to be kidnapped and water-boarded.

Hitchens quickly concluded that the latter was definitely torture, although the bikini wax was more painful.

Asked what it was like to edit the work of Hitchens, Carter said, "He was so erudite, that it was putting in, sort of, declarative sentences for the rest of us, so we'd all be on, roughly, on the same page. But the prose is absolutely perfect. There, you don't need to line edit Christopher, you just need to help him explain it to readers."

"People who were less smart than he," Buckley interjected.

"Yes. Yeah, which includes...," Carter continued.

"All of us, yes," Rushdie said. "He would assume that everybody knew what he knew. And...nobody did."

Not everyone is so generous.

As you might expect, Hitchens has made lots of enemies over the years, including many former comrades on the Left, who have heaped scorn upon him for supporting the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens responded by having himself sworn in as an American citizen by the chief of Homeland Security.

When we spoke to him last month, he seemed to enjoy basking in the venom of his detractors.

"Alexander Cockburn, a former friend of yours, called you 'self-serving, fat-ass, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian,'" Kroft said.

"Well, I don't see what's wrong with that...though he should see my ass now," Hitchens quipped.

Hitchens says he nearly died in January, when the chemotherapy began to destroy his innards. He called it a bad dress rehearsal. He is now in an experimental program with a cutting edge drug that has shown some promise attacking the specific type of cancer cells that are eating away at his body. He is hoping it will produce a long remission, but as usual he is keeping two sets of books.

"I mean, I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living," Hitchens said.

Asked how far he thinks ahead, Hitchens told Kroft, "I hate it when people ask what the expiry date of my credit card is. I noticed it the other day. Someone said, 'What's the expiration date?' I said, 'Who wants to know?'"

Hitchens has been deeply touched by the letters and e-mails he has received, many offering prayers for his recovery What's needed, he says, is a medical outcome that would have to be described - given the poverty of the English language - as a miracle.

But he is placing his faith in science and medicine, not in the existence of a God.

"Is there anything that could change your mind in your weakened state?" Kroft asked.

"Well, I ought to never say there's nothing would change my mind," Hitchens replied. "So, shall I just say that no evidence has - or argument - has yet been presented that would change my mind. But I like surprises."