Cockburn tries to paint Hitchens as a latter-day version of Whittaker Chambers for snitching on a friend in the way that Chambers ratted out Alger Hiss, but the comparison seems a bit far-fetched. I agree basically with Frank Rich's assessment on the op-ed page of today's NY Times:

Christopher Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal. Let me get this straight: Mr. Hitchens, a Clinton critic, signs an affidavit saying that his friend of 15 years, Mr. Blumenthal, a Clinton sycophant, aided Bill Clinton's effort to defame Monica Lewinsky. Yet Mr. Hitchens also declares that he'd "rather be held in contempt" than actually testify against Mr. Blumenthal should the Senate put the Clinton aide on trial. The writer Christopher Buckley describes this dust-up as "a Chambers-versus-Hiss moment. . . . the kind of event in which one inevitably must take sides."

Must we? If Mr. Hitchens won't testify, there's no case. Even if he were to testify, the case is still legally weak -- given Mr. Blumenthal's lawyerly testimony -- and is at most a sideshow to the impeachment articles. Where are the huge principles to rally around? The fate of anti-Communism isn't at stake -- nor even the fate of the Clinton Presidency. What is on the line are the guest lists of certain Washington dinner parties, a lot of lawyers' fees and Mr. Hitchens's continued ability to command a spotlight on All Monica talk shows. This catfight isn't Chambers-vs.-Hiss but Beaver-vs.-Eddie Haskell, less suitable for CNN than for Nick at Nite.

Cockburn, Hitchens and Blumenthal all started out the same way, as radical journalists in the 1960s. All three had loose ties to the organized radical movement. Cockburn worked with the Trotskyists at NLR, including Tariq Ali, Mike Davis and Robin Blackburn. Hitchens was a member of Tony Cliff's Socialist Workers Party, a British state-capitalist sect, while Blumenthal wrote for the New Leftist Boston Phoenix.

Cockburn and Hitchens have capitalized on their leftist connections and have become quite successful as "house radicals" at the Nation. Blumenthal shifted to the right in the 1980s, because he was never as anchored to the organized left as the two others. He went to work for Martin Peretz at the New Republic and dropped all his earlier radical pretensions. This made him a candidate for the White House staff of neoliberal Bill Clinton. The most interesting thing about the Hitchens-Cockburn spat is how much energy it has generated. Cockburn is totally consumed with hatred for Hitchens, while Hitchens spends much of his time trying to promote a career as a talking head on Sunday morning television shows, in a manner similar to Nation Magazine heavy hitter Eric Alterman..

It is difficult to regard Cockburn as a leftist stalwart nowadays in light of his own dubious trips down blind alleys over the past ten years. His championing of right-wing populism and Indian gambling casinos can only trouble erstwhile supporters like myself. He has also cultivated an image of backwoods misanthropic crank that summons up poet Robinson Jeffers and other notable American nut cases.

What is the explanation for this sort of odd and repellent behavior? I think the answer lies in the Clinton administration's hegemony. During the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush team rallied left liberals and radicals against a clearly defined enemy. After Clinton took office, the institutional ties between left liberals and radicals continued--mostly through writing assignments, jobs at foundations, etc.--but the political terrain shifted. The big name radicals were slowly losing touch with their radical base, so they tended to write more and more about their private obsessions rather than public concerns. In the old days, Cockburn would write 1 column about his vacation trips or restaurant meals or personal feuds to 10 columns about the mass movement. Now the ratio seems 50/50.

This a tough time for independent radical journalists. Without a vibrant mass movement, they tend to become disoriented. Their careers loom more importantly as approaching middle or old age reminds them about the need to feather their own nest. Quarrels with the IRS, the numbers of pages a column occupies, connections to powerful funding or job sources, etc. take over one's thinking.

The other problem is that ideological confusion crops up more frequently. When volunteers returned from picking coffee beans in Nicaragua and spoke to audiences about how inspiring a revolution could be, this energy seeped its way into left-liberal institutions like the Nation and the Institute for Policy Studies. Without that energy, our radical journalists go off on tangents as they try to explain to themselves what's wrong with socialism, rather than what's wrong with the capitalist system.