"It looks like Henry Kissinger and Christopher Hitchens have gone eyeball
to eyeball — and Kissinger just blinked."
"When a man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a
boomerang." - G.K. Chesterton
Introductory Note
After giving the matter a little thought, I have decided that I ought to
give a comprehensive explanation, for the curious, of why I resorted to
law when Henry Kissinger accused me of being a "Holocaust denier". I
made this decision in spite of the fact that over-long defenses or
justifications are apt to arouse suspicion in themselves - the suspicion
of "protesting too much". This difficulty is itself an aspect of the
innuendo about "no smoke without fire." In the past several months,
I have received a number of genuine and non-malicious inquiries, from
people seeking to know how such a controversy got started. It occurred
to me that, if I put the entire record on view, I could save trouble by
referring all questioners to one source. It also occurred to me that the
story might possess some innate interest of its own. Appended to this
note, the reader may find everything I have ever written on the subject
of the Nazi "Final Solution", as well as the complete record of my
correspondence with Henry Kissinger’s lawyers.
The rather
murky antecedent story is as follows. In the mid-1990s I took an interest
in the work of the Holocaust-denial and Holocaust-revisionist writers who
were then beginning to have an impact on unofficial media. I met and
debated with Robert Faurisson, the Frenchman who is the leading "denier",
and I met and debated with David Irving. What I wrote is to be found in
the record that follows. In Irving’s case I took the view that, on First
Amendment grounds of free speech as well as on general principles of
free inquiry, his work should not be suppressed. I also became aware,
through conversations with Deborah Lipstadt, Christopher Browning and
other "mainstream" writers on the subject, that there was a "grey area"
of what might be called Holocaust mythology: an area where it had to
be admitted that certain long-held beliefs were in error. The classic
instance here is the famous rumor of the making of Jews into soap:
Lipstadt told me that she had herself been attacked for agreeing
that this was a wartime propaganda horror-story with no basis in
fact. (The National Holocaust Museum in Washington concurs with
her on this, as do the Israeli scholars at Yad Vashem.) However,
there were those who felt that any admission of this kind could
only give ammunition to the "deniers".
I must have had
numerous conversations about this at the time, and since, and can
remember the details of several of them. I do not remember
discussing the subject with Edward J. Epstein, a New York
journalist whom I have met off and on over the past two
decades. However, he may be right when he claims to have
heard me discussing the topic at a dinner in New York in
1995. I certainly remember his attaching himself, against
my will at any rate, to a restaurant table after a reception.
The other guests were Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, and the
restaurant-owner Brian McNally.
I certainly did not on that occasion or any other describe the
Holocaust as "a fiction", and I am inclined to think that my claim
is borne out by three things. The first is that I don’t believe any
such thing, and have never said any such thing in company or in print.
The second is that neither Ms Wintour nor Mr McNally, when later asked,
could remember my making such a memorable claim. The third is that Mr
Epstein didn’t think it worth mentioning either, until almost four
years had passed. But in February 1999 he contacted the gossip columns
and some other well-chosen sources, with the hot news that Christopher
Hitchens wasn’t satisfied with the evidence for the Holocaust.
I hardly imagine that even the most jaded tabloid editor would have found
this allegation newsworthy in an average week. But in that particular week
I had myself become briefly newsworthy. I had given an affidavit in the
Senate trial of President Clinton, saying that he had - contrary to his
own claims and the claims of his defenders - sought to blacken and defame
female witnesses. I knew this for a fact, but I knew it as result of a
lunch-table disclosure made by one of his aides. I suppose it may
therefore have struck Mr Epstein, and perhaps the Daily News gossip
page, as "ironic" to try and pay me back in the same coin. Anyway,
it got passed zealously along for a few days. (At one point, someone
anonymously or mistakenly faxed me a clip on the subject, with a CC
to both Alan Dershowitz and Sidney Blumenthal.) But as it turned out,
not even my enemies believed the story, and it didn’t check out with
the supposed witnesses, so it died a natural death. Given the
circumstances, and the fact that he never called me before making
his little move, I don’t think that Epstein was honestly confused
as between, say, my defense of David Irving’s free-speech rights
and my own views of fascism. Had I wished to sue him, I think I could
have shown malice as well as reckless disregard for the truth.
I did consider suing him for defamation but thought better of it,
since although he is a very bad writer specialising in paranoid subjects
he is nonetheless a journalist of a kind. And by then, people had learned
to recognise the hallmarks of a Clinton-operation smear. I might add,
though, that if anyone has anything to fear from the repetition of
dinner-table eavesdropping it would be Mr Epstein. If I ever run out
of things to write, I might one day try and recreate the wet-lipped
way in which he boasted of having barely-legal girls supplied to him
on the yacht of the late Sir James Goldsmith, the demented right-wing
media tycoon. "Jimmy" was also a steady source of name-drop material
for Epstein, who is notorious for his inability to attract
female company on his own merits. It was no hardship for me to break
relations with someone who I only knew in any case as a bore and a
sycophant and an abject scraper of acquaintance.
There the matter rested until the spring of 2001, when I went to
William and Mary College in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I had published
a series of articles in Harper’s magazine - now available in expanded
form as a book - in which I made the case for the prosecution of Henry
Kissinger as a war criminal. The students of the college had invited me to
speak at a "teach-in" about the much-contested appointment of Kissinger as
their chancellor. I went, and had a splendid time. But one of Kissinger’s
partisans had gone to all the trouble of distributing, anonymously, a
Xerox of the original Daily News gossip item. Even though this was
self-refuting, containing as it did the denials of Ms Wintour and
Mr McNally, its intention was obviously nasty.
My book duly came out, and Kissinger was inconvenienced by a number
of questions about it. At first, he refused to dignify such a scurrilous
book with so much as a comment. He kept up this pose through a succession
of press inquiries. Then on Memorial Day he was served a summons in the
Ritz Hotel in Paris, by Judge Roger LeLoire, asking him to testify about
his possible complicity with the death-squads of General Pinochet. European
press reports connected this annoyance to the then-recent publication of
my book in French. A few days later - having left Paris in a hurry - he
agreed to speak to Jim Ledbetter of Time and to describe my book as
"contemptible". And a week or so after that, he took to the airwaves
and met a fresh inquiry with the sudden discovery that I had "denied
that the Holocaust existed". Very soon afterwards, as the patient
reader will soon see, he discovered that he didn’t think this any
more, and undertook not to repeat the allegation - which he has not.
Meanwhile, and perhaps coincidentally, a group of manic-depressive
mediocrities repeated the same accusation on a Clintonoid website calling
itself - presumably in honor of its anonymous founders - "Media Whores.com".
This furtive little gang affects great horror at the role played by
right-wing media interests, such as those of Richard Mellon Scaife,
in the persecution of its hero Bill Clinton. But it does not object
to carrying water for Epstein, one of Sir James Goldsmith’s toadies.
(Goldsmith offered, from his huge ranch in Guatemala, a large cash prize
for the exposure of leftist infiltrators in the press.) By a nice
coincidence, Mr "Mack" McLarty, formerly Mr Clinton’s White House
chief-of-staff, became a senior partner in the firm of Kissinger
Associates at about this time. One supposes that their common
interest in Indonesian money provided the cement for this
relationship. It isn’t every day that one’s foes cluster
so conveniently, and so demonstratively, together.
The Media Whores can relax. I won’t sue them, either. They may be sad
hacks and sorry pseuds, but they are journalists of a sort. However, I did
send a lawyer’s letter to Kissinger, and anybody who has heard this filthy
rumor about me from any quarter is now invited to read on, and to examine
the evidence in full.
June 29, 2001 letter to Kissinger
July 3, 2001 letter from Kissinger's attorney
July 17, 2001 letter to Kissinger's attorney
July 18, 2001 letter from Kissinger's attorney
July 24, 2001 letter to Kissinger's attorney
August 2, 2001 letter from Kissinger's attorney
Hitchens's comments on August 2nd letter
August 27, 2001 letter to Kissinger's attorney from Hitchens
Primary Sources:
"Diluting Responsibility for the Final Solution,"
(In Hitler's Shadow), New York Newsday, August 23, 1989
"A German Aristocrat's Resistance to the Nazis,"
(Letters to Freya), New York Newsday, July 4, 1990
"A Monster Inside the Average Man," (Ordinary Men),
New York Newsday, March 25, 1992
"Nuremberg: Judgement by Law, Not by Revenge," (The
Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials), New York Newsday, Oct. 7, 1992
"On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs"
from Prepared for the Worst, pp. 345-357, summer 1988
Minority Report, The Nation, October 3, 1994
"Hitler's Ghost," Vanity Fair, June 1996
Los Angeles Times article of May 20, 2001