He invited me to a dinner at his Washington apartment, where he introduced me to his friend Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist who had become an aide in the Clinton White House. Blumenthal and I discovered that Hitchens was remarkably ignorant of American history for someone who earned money writing about American politics. We spent much of the evening explaining the differences between Whigs and Jacksonians to the British expatriate, and I was not surprised that reviewers found his later book on Tom Paine to be riddled with mistakes. That particular evening ended with Hitchens cornering me at the door on the way out with a boozy harangue about how he was going to come to the defense of David Irving, a right-wing British author who had been denounced as a Holocaust denier. I was grateful to escape.

When, soon afterward, as part of his self-publicizing campaign to save America from Bill Clinton during the impeachment crisis, Hitchens collaborated with Ken Starr and the Republicans in an effort to destroy his former friend Sid Blumenthal, I ceased to hear from him, perhaps because he correctly assumed that I thought his actions were deplorable. The last time I saw him was in New York about a decade ago. We were together on a panel at the New School and he muttered comments in order to attract attention to himself whenever another panelist was speaking.

Several years ago, a readers’ poll done as a joint publicity stunt by Foreign Policy and London’s Prospect Magazine elevated Christopher Hitchens to the title of the world’s leading intellectual. The poll was not only silly but also easily gamed, and in a succeeding year, thanks to votes by conservative Muslims, with wonderful irony, a Turkish Muslim cleric succeeded Hitchens as the world’s leading public intellectual.

But though he played one on TV, Hitchens was not an intellectual, if the word has any meaning anymore. Those known by the somewhat awkward term “public intellectuals” can be based in the professoriate, the nonprofit sector, or journalism. They can even be politicians, like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But genuine intellectuals, as distinct from mere commentators or TV talking heads, need to meet two tests.

First, intellectuals need to produce some substantial works of scholarship, literature or rigorous reporting, distinct from the public affairs commentary for which they may be best known to a broad public. If you do nothing but review other people’s work or write brief columns or blog posts, it is easy to appear to be much smarter and erudite than you really are.

Second, genuine intellectuals base their interventions in public debate on the basis of some coherent view of the world. A dedication to rigorous and systematic reasoning, wherever it may lead, is what distinguishes intellectuals from lobbyists or partisan spin doctors who change their views according to the demands of a special interest or a party. It also distinguishes them from mere “contrarians” — the term Hitchens used to describe himself — who attract publicity by taking controversial stands according to their whims.

Hitchens left behind no substantial scholarly or literary work, and if he had any core principles or values they are hard to discern. He denounced the Gulf War and backed the Iraq War; he supported Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz while continuing to insist that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal.

If he was not really an intellectual, then what was Christopher Hitchens? A decade ago, a British diplomat told me that he was astonished at the reputation Hitchens had attained in the U.S.: “In Britain we think of him as a gossip columnist.”

Quite so (as the British might say). He had more in common with Walter Winchell than with Walter Lippmann. A gossip columnist of genius, Hitchens escaped from the ghetto of little-known leftist writers when he discovered that he could become a celebrity by denouncing bigger celebrities. That strategy for self-promotion, in my opinion, explains his over-the-top attacks on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and Bill Clinton (Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga were spared the Hitchens treatment). When Princess Di and Mother Teresa died within a week of each other in 1997, I remarked to a friend, “I wonder what celebrity Hitchens will make a career out of denouncing now?” We soon found out: Bill Clinton and the biggest celebrity of all, God.

Were the ad hominem diatribes that Hitchens specialized in evidence of his moral integrity and political courage? On the contrary, TV producers and magazine editors love sensational trash talk about media “personalities,” including Jehovah. The philippics of Hitchens were calculated and successful career moves by a gifted publicity hound who spent the last part of his career, appropriately, at Vanity Fair, a magazine best known for models and actors on its covers.

Nothing could have been safer and less iconoclastic than for Hitchens, while on the left, to call Kissinger a war criminal, or, as a newly minted neoconservative, to smear critics of the Iraq War as appeasers of “Islamofascism,” a propaganda term used by the likes of Ann Coulter and David Horowitz. While Hitchens joined the American establishment in rallying behind George W. Bush, those of us who denounced the Iraq War from the beginning were an unpopular minority in Washington’s media and foreign policy circles, dominated as they were (and are) by neoconservatives, liberal imperialists and cowardly careerists with their fingers to the wind.

Hitchens was affirming rather than challenging an elite consensus when, on behalf of atheism, he mocked religious believers as not merely mistaken but contemptible and moronic. The religious are despised and dreaded by upscale Americans, and their British court jester could say what they dare not say themselves — although candidate Barack Obama came close in 2008, when he psychoanalyzed the white working class for the benefit of billionaire donors behind closed doors: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In recent years Hitchens managed to enlarge his celebrity among the college-credentialed lumpenintelligentsia by means of appearances on TV chat shows and the blimpish bellicosity that he brought to the cause of “the new atheism.” But what was so peculiar about his reputation was the extent to which it remained a secondary, derivative fame. To judge from interviews published now and then in middlebrow magazines, which I always read, when I found them, in the hope of learning why anyone would think that he was significant enough to be interviewed, Hitchens was famous for criticizing famous people and for being a friend of other famous people, including Salman Rushdie and the British novelist Martin Amis. He had it both ways in the cases of Gore Vidal and Edward Said, boasting for years of their friendship and then publicly sliming them—or so I gathered from the interviews. I find this sort of thing tedious, but evidently there is a market among editors and journalists for such backstage gossip, a market that was exploited by the master of the shared rumor and the vicious putdown.

The smarmy expatriate British journalist Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” is sometimes alleged to have been based on Hitchens, but others claim that the model was a certain Anthony Haden-Guest. The truth is that there have always been many Peter Fallows in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, from Malcolm Muggeridge a few decades ago to Niall Ferguson today. Most of these, even if they began their careers on the radical left, end up playing the stock character of the harrumphing Tory in their second careers in America. What the British comedian Michael Palin said of Muggeridge, who like Hitchens started on the left and ended on the right, applies to this type as a whole: “He was just being Muggeridge, preferring to have a very strong contrary opinion as opposed to none at all.”

A classic example of the Peter Fallow type is the now-forgotten Henry Fairlie. When I first came to Washington in the 1980s, Fairlie filled the role of snarky British pundit in D.C. that Hitchens later assumed with much greater success. In 2009 Hitchens wrote about him in the New York Times Book Review with a snide condescension that, coming from Hitchens, passed for generosity:

Henry’s closing years were not delightful ones: He ended up quasi-homeless and moved into the offices of The New Republic as an alternative to sleeping rough. He became a shameless borrower of money and unwelcome even in the less fastidious bars around Dupont Circle. I myself think that this indigence was the cause of some of his less admirable journalism: he had to cudgel phony opinions out of his weakening brain and frame in order to finance the next bender. Having partly succeeded him as the Washington correspondent of The Spectator, I caught him out making a slanderous allegation in print that was backed up, when challenged, only by an unimpressive piece of bluffing and blustering. Not long after that, in 1990, before we could even have a reconciling cocktail — and just after he had written an essay (reprinted here) that stole my idea for a satire of those who asked for Perrier water in bars only to demand a handful of Potomac water, in the form of ice cubes, to go with it — he took a bad tumble on his way back to his office/home and died, with distressing celerity, at 66. In the lives of many younger journalists, he had managed to fulfill the two great tutorial roles of enviable example and awful warning.

Christopher Hitchens wanted to be remembered as his generation’s George Orwell. But he was only its Henry Fairlie.

Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller — the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

Hitchens was one of the great contemporary masters of argumentative prose. He had an unerring sense of logical structure, a maniacally precise gift for the mot juste, a huge frame of intellectual reference, and – this is what really pissed me off as a fellow toiler in the syntactical groves – a seemingly automatic ability to write transitions. He could practically do it in his sleep. A pal of mine once saw him drink an entire bottle of scotch at a dinner party, excuse himself, go upstairs, and come down 45 minutes later having filed a letter-perfect piece. At the absolute top of my game, I might briefly be able to keep up that pace on a stretch of level argumentative ground. But at the first transition, the first time a new idea loomed up like a mountain that had to be navigated around, I would be broken down in the ditch while Hitchens would be speeding off at 100 miles an hour, as debonair as James Bond.

Hitchens was not only virtuoso, he was a fearless virtuoso with a mean streak. This is a scary combination. When he attacked someone, there would not usually be a lot of them left for their next of kin to pick up. But if his combative style was his trademark, he was also capable of writing meandering, discursive, thoughtful essays, pieces driven not just by animus or the desire to dominate but carried on their own imaginative and logical momentum. There was a lot of Mencken, Swift and Orwell in Hitchens, but a little Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne as well. The man had a very large mind, and by all accounts a very large heart as well.

One large question mark hangs over Hitchens’ career. For 10 years, whenever his name comes up, people have asked the same question: Why on earth did Hitchens support the Iraq War? And why did he never recant, even after it had become obvious to all but blind ideologues that the whole thing had been a disaster?

I do not have any personal insight into these questions. I met Hitchens a few times, but did not know him. But it appears that it was precisely Hitchens’ big heart, combined with certain eccentricities of judgment peculiar to those former Marxists that Isaac Deutscher called “inverted Stalinists,” that may have led him to go ideologically off the tracks.

An insightful piece about Hitchens by Salon’s Washington bureau chief Jefferson Morley makes clear that Hitchens’ disenchantment with Marxism, and his increasingly (and ultimately problematic) tendency to see politics in deeply personal terms, were closely related. Like many former Marxists, Hitchens had grown weary of the mental contortions (aka the “dialectic”) required to justify Stalinist/Communist tyranny. Morley points out that for Hitchens, flying in the face of left-liberal orthodoxy to embrace victims of injustice, no matter who their oppressors were, became a touchstone for his own intellectual integrity and honesty. Thus, Hitchens – to the dismay of his colleagues at the Nation, but correctly in my view – agreed with Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire.” For Hitchens, just because the despised Reagan said something did not mean that it was wrong.

Hitchens’ insistence on taking principled stands, as in his ringing defense of his friend Salman Rushdie against the death sentence handed down by Ayatollah Khomeini, is admirable as far as it goes. The problem is that he took his principled stands to self-defeating extremes. He was so idealistic, so black and white, so Manichaean in his moral judgments, that he ended up supporting political positions antithetical to his own deeply held convictions. For the world of politics and power cannot be negotiated or defined or dealt with purely in ethical terms. It is a world of grays, of compromises, of ugly regimes that must be tolerated because the alternative is worse. Hitchens was so obsessed with moral principle that it distorted his judgment.

Hence his misguided support for the war in Iraq. On the most crucial political and moral issue of our time, Hitchens took the wrong side. His friend Tom Luddy once told me that Hitchens supported the war simply because he was passionately opposed to fascism, no matter what form it took or where it was found. No one could argue with this. Hitchens also had many Iraqi and Kurdish friends who had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and whom he stood up for. Again, no one would argue that he was not right to do so.

But, of course, there is a world of difference between being opposed to Saddam’s fascism (and contrary to Hitchens’ specious neologism, there was nothing “Islamo” about Saddam’s fascism – he was just your garden-variety Stalinist monster) and supporting an unprovoked invasion that was likely to make things much worse.

I covered two debates between Hitchens and the journalist Mark Danner – one just before the war, one nine months after it began. In both debates Danner argued that war was too risky, while Hitchens asserted that war was both necessary and morally justified because Saddam was evil and dangerous. What was striking to me, particularly in the second debate, was both Hitchens’ moral fervor, and the weakness of his substantive arguments about the threat Saddam posed. Twice, he made flat assertions about the link between Saddam and al-Qaida-like jihadists (“There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism”) that were simply false.

How could someone as knowledgeable as Hitchens embrace such sophistical arguments? And even if we give him a pass for supporting the war in its early days, after it turned into a bloody nightmare, why didn’t he acknowledge he had been wrong?

I suspect the answer has to do with Hitchens’ earlier Marxism. It is hard to escape the conclusion that at some level, Hitchens was indeed an “inverted Stalinist”: a former True Believer who simply transferred the rigid idealism of his old cause into an equally rigid insistence on seeing all politics as a matter of personal morality. As Ian Buruma wrote in the New York Review of Books, for Hitchens, “politics is essentially a matter of character … Politicians do bad things because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” There is much to admire in Hitchens’ moral stance, but it led him into some corners he found himself unable or unwilling to extricate himself from.

But it would be wrong to end this appraisal there – and not just because de mortuis nil nisi bonum (a phrase Hitchens would not have had to Google, as I just did.) He may have made mistakes, as we all have, but his life and work should not be reduced to his sometime political misjudgments. In all ways, Christopher Hitchens was a force to be reckoned with. He was a powerful thinker, a courageous journalist and a superb stylist. In a monochrome world, he was a true original. Somewhere in a heaven he did not believe in, they’re emptying a bottle of the good stuff tonight, and writing an angelic obit on deadline.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)

And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.

Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.

And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism.

On other fronts: His Clinton hatred was something more hysterical than reasonable (his book on the subject has the Lifetime Television Movie-worthy title “No One Left to Lie To”) and his grand campaign for atheism involved a good deal of silliness as well (Bertrand Russell did the case against God earlier and better). He had an unpleasantly boorish attitude toward women, best exemplified by his embarrassing “why women aren’t funny” bullshit. (Hitchens, it should be noted, enjoyed puns rather a lot.) And let’s not forget his immortal review of Wanda Sykes’ White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner: “The black dyke got it wrong.” Positively Butzian.

To the end he refused to admit he was “wrong” on the war, because his justifications for it shifted endlessly. The invasion was a humanitarian intervention “on the right side and for the right reasons” in a 2008 piece, in which he found the space to note that “the largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated,” but did not mention the war’s more than 100,000 casualties.

There was always something cartoonish about old “Hitch” the rakish intellectual character, puffing away on cigarettes and slurring bon mots in interviews, penning furious denunciations of hypocritical public figures while hosting salons and drunken parties at his Washington, D.C., apartment that some of the most powerful and prominent people in the world of politics and media attended. But his most monumental public crusade had devastating consequences that he never fully grappled with.

So a couple of dozen liberal writers and reporters gathered in the backroom of a Connecticut Avenue restaurant to lampoon our fellow hacks and the perennially awful state of Washington journalism. Hitch, as master of ceremonies, rose to skewer not one but a half dozen famous scribes, impugning the likes of David Broder, John McLaughlin and Fred Barnes with obscene glee. Glass of amber fluid in hand, he spun out complex and hilarious scenarios involving fellatio, barnyard animals and Morton Kondracke, and the hangover was pleasurably punishing. When I told my boss, New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, about the debauchery the next morning, he sniffed, “Oh, Sid and Hitch feeling self-satisfied again?”

Kinsley had a point. Sid, of course, was Sidney Blumenthal, then a columnist at the New Republic, who was fast becoming Christopher’s best friend. What they shared, more than left-of-liberal politics and capacious self-regard, was ambition.  But while Sidney’s ambition was naked and sometimes obnoxious, Christopher’s was seductive and provocative. I think he realized he diminished himself a little by deprecating the Osrics of Washington journalism. If they were so dumb, how come they got on the Sunday morning chat shows and Hitch did not?

Christopher aimed to correct that mistake. By the late 1980s, he was spoiling for a fight with the left-liberal milieu in which we worked. I could tell he was becoming an apostate from socialism, at least in the forms that it actually existed in the world. As a longtime Trotskyite, he had spent too many dinner table conversations explaining away why real existing socialism had culminated in the walking corpse known as Leonid Brezhnev. Always a tireless traveler, Hitch would return to the Washington party circuit talking incredulously about “the comrades” in Eastern Europe who could not publish a book or a magazine article while living in cultural capitals like Prague and Warsaw.

Such sympathies did not always win him friends at the Nation, a publication with deep roots in the American communist movement that was adamantly opposed to Ronald Reagan and all that he stood for. While the Nationistas recoiled when Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Hitch admitted to me that he agreed. “It’s not evil like the U.S. in El Salvador,” he said, referring to the CIA’s role in sponsoring death squads. “But it is evil. Wouldn’t you think so if you lived there?”

This relentless casting of the political in terms of the personal was not a pose for Christopher. It was his path to fulfillment, to feeling he was living and writing honestly. Apostasy — the renunciation of prior belief — was becoming his religion. And in June of 1988, I think, he had a conversion experience.

That year, Hitch had introduced me to his friend Joanne Landy, who was running an organization called the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which touted “détente from below” as the solution to the Cold War. Christopher told me, his eyes glimmering with intrigue, of a plan to take on the communist powers that be. The campaign was going to bring together Western anti-nuclear and peace groups with the leaders of underground  human rights groups from across the Soviet bloc for a meeting in Prague, he said. Did I want to come?

At the time, it was an audacious idea. The ideological rigidities of the Cold War, often mentally consigned to the 1950s, continued well through the 1980s in Washington in a way that now seems almost absurd. At the time,  Western leftists were not enamored with anti-communist movements, such as Poland’s Solidarity movement, regarding such forces as inherently reactionary, if actually pawns of the CIA. In the same way, Eastern European writers whom Christopher loved to discuss (especially Vaclav Havel and Lezek Kolakowski) sometimes mistrusted Western leftists, suspecting they might be apologists for the KGB. “It’s all rubbish,” Hitch told me. “They’re comrades.”

Landy’s plan was for delegations from the West to meet up in Prague with delegations from the East and issue a joint declaration of principles. To pay for the ticket to Prague, I wrangled an assignment from Rolling Stone to write a piece about the Plastic People of the Universe, a famous underground rock band that had been banned by the communists for their long hair, harshly beautiful music and complete rejection of socialist stupidity. Fortunately for me, the mother-in-law of the Plastic People’s bass player was a longtime dissident, and she was hosting the East-West summit of radicals  in her enormous ramshackle apartment.

We knew the authorities would break up any public meeting devoted to criticism of communism, so by means of furtive phone calls we contrived to gather for our first meeting. Some 30 people from a dozen countries listened as Jiri Hajek, who had served as the foreign minister during the Prague Spring of 1968, opened the meeting with a halting and eloquent plea for the creation of European Peace Parliament.  It was just like a bunch of liberals dreaming of a nuclear freeze on the Upper West Side — until someone started hammering on the door.

Glances were exchanged and our hostess finally said she had to see who it was. Several plainclothes policemen pushed their way in and insisted we had to disperse. Christopher demanded to see their ID. The leader, a grim-faced cop who didn’t like the looks of a bunch of intellectuals, showed his badge. Christopher demanded a warrant. The cops didn’t have a warrant and didn’t have any patience for this loud-mouthed Brit. “We are lawfully gathered and will not leave,” Hitch declared grandly. He denounced the cops for various violations of international law and for stepping on his shoes.

To no avail. Within about 15 minutes the cops had muscled the pudgy Hitch and the rest of us into the night without violence. Over the inevitable drinks afterward, I sensed Christopher brooding. He wondered if he should have taken a swing at the cop or least fallen to the floor and forced them to drag him out. He looked humiliated. When the dissident groups tried to meet again the next morning at another apartment, the police burst in again and didn’t bother to be polite. We were all arrested, taken to a police station, declared persona non grata, and forcibly expelled from the country — which improved Christopher’s mood immensely. “A badge of honor,” he told me.

To me that was the birth of Hitch the Apostate. He had always been an iconoclastic thinker in the Marxist tradition, but dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of Marx propelled him to Prague and the glory of his arrest. A year and half later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet-style communism he dared to challenge in person was no more. Christopher felt vindicated in his break from socialism. His apostasy had served his ambition: to reach an audience larger than those who already agreed with him.

In the 1990s, his socialist worldview was defunct and so he became a liberal and an advocate of humanitarian intervention in the service of a Marxist-free internationalism. Escaping the leftist ghetto of the Nation, he landed in Graydon Carter’s penthouse at Vanity Fair. Always more convincing as a partygoer than a man of the people, he thrived as a writer and minor celebrity. He fell out with former friends like Blumenthal and Alexander Cockburn, I think, because their ambitions — to serve Bill Clinton and the international proletariat, respectively — seemed too limited.

On Sept. 11, Christopher became an apostate again, discovering a new  enemy — Islamist jihadists — and rejecting his former faith in a liberal international order in favor of bold action against an enemy of a free society. So while people would later accuse Christopher of “selling out” by supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, I always thought he was repeating the grand gesture of 1988. He wanted to put his body on the line against the enemy of a free society, and he wanted people to read about it.

I didn’t agree with him but I felt that he had come to his position about overthrowing Saddam Hussein honestly. Even in the 1980s, when Iraq barely existed in the American political conversation, Christopher spoke of his friends in Kurdistan and Iraq who had suffered from Saddam’s savagery.  After Sept. 11, he wanted to go to war against Saddam, not because it would land him in a TV studio or a right-wing cocktail party (though he regarded both results as condign) but because his Iraqi friends wanted to. I respected that. It was his new friends who were more worrisome. When he assured me, “Paul is a very smart man,” referring to his new pal Wolfowitz, I knew our days of amiable debate were over.

Christopher wound up doing what Wolfowitz and many a brilliant intellectual has done when he (and it usually it is “he”) becomes certain that his admirable goals justify organized violence: He made a stupid mistake. He supported a war that was a disaster for the people it was supposed to help. The model democracy that he predicted would emerge turned out to be a collection of violent factions whose aspirations for self-rule Washington constantly sought to manipulate for its own ends. The jihadists he sought to defeat gained a new battleground (and were only driven out when Gen. Petraeus bribed Saddam’s former allies to do the job for us). When democracy finally came to the Arab world in the awakening of 2011, its partisans were peaceful and — Hitch’s feeble arguments notwithstanding — virtually none of them cited Iraq or Bush as inspiration.

His penchant for apostasy found much more winning expression in his 2007 atheist manifesto, “God Is Not Great.” The nature of belief, not geopolitics, was his strong suit. That’s why I was moved by the passage in his autobiography, “Hitch-22,” where he recounted the story of a young man who had been inspired by his arguments about Iraq to enlist in the U.S. military. After the young man was killed in action, his parents invited Hitchens to a memorial service, which he attended with a combination of honor and humility.

Some might say that Christopher was a warmonger who had helped send this person to a meaningless death. But if the young man’s parents did not think so, how could anyone else? Politically, I thought Christopher’s ambitions in Iraq were dangerous, but as a writer I could not begrudge them. He aimed to move his readers to believe, not in superstition, but in their ideals. For better and worse, he succeeded.

Elsewhere in “Hitch 22″ I looked forward to his account of our long-ago meeting in Prague.  I was disappointed to find only a dismissive line. What had been a memorable and inspiring episode for me stuck in his mind as mostly the equivalent of a boring dinner party — which gave me some insight into the scale of the life he had achieved. He wound up as one of those confident Washington pundits whom younger writers loved to loathe. But for all his ambition I think he stayed true to the ideals of the Osric Dining Society. He might have been wrong but he never resorted to flattery, deference or self-serving vacuity.

We know with certainty that Christopher Hitchens’ body is today dead. Beyond that, nobody — neither believer nor atheist — can say with total certainty if there’s more to this life than this life, or what that might entail. Rick Warren can say he knows “the truth” till judgment day, but that doesn’t make him right. What his statement does, however, prove is the powerful, human need to feel right.

Hitchens certainly came face-to-face with that combative, evangelical desire to be right long before he shuffled off the mortal coil. The man who wrote a book called “God Is Not Great” and championed his atheism to anyone who wanted to debate it publicly cringed when Sept. 20 was declared a “Pray for Hitchens Day.” He likely knew that the Missionaries of Charity order of Mother Teresa, a woman he branded a “fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” would declare they were praying for him and his family after his death. But he also, in his gentlemanly English way, understood that people would pray for him anyway. Well, not quite for him. “Please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries,” he wrote. “Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.” 

I’m a Christian. A skeptical, questioning, frequently disappointed one who makes no pretense of having all the answers, but a Christian nonetheless. I pray every day. But my tacit deal with the universe is that I don’t need anyone I pray for to believe in God, any more than I take offense if someone who has a different belief system (or lack thereof) says he’ll set an intention or cast a spell or simply keep me in his thoughts. A prayer, like a kind thought, or good intention, or whatever you call it, isn’t supposed to be conditional. It can be graciously sent out — and gratefully accepted — without a commitment on either side. It certainly isn’t something one should undertake with a spiteful, I’m-doing-this-even-though-you-don’t-want-me-to-because-I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong-ta-da! flourish. So if you’re the praying type, pray. But don’t take those prayers as irrefutable proof of the existence of a deity, or an opportunity to do some Twitter bragging.

Regarding Hitchens, I’m with writer Tom Jamieson, who observed that it “would be nice to think God does exist, simply for the earful he’s getting right now.” Regarding God, I don’t consider the death of an author as evidence of anything other than what a vicious bitch cancer is. I don’t think it’s cause for a group affirmation of how this proves anything. I just think it’s a cruel loss and the silencing of a great voice. Maybe I’m wrong. But that’s all right, because as Hitchens himself once succinctly stated, “My own opinion is quite enough for me.”