I  met Christopher Hitchens in Washington sometime in the 1980s and, almost immediately, fell in love. As a television producer, that is. I was putting out a couple of hundred chat shows each year and, mired as I was in the boilerplate capital of the world, where the fanny-covering language of choice was bureaucratese, I could never find enough good chatters. 

There was fun-loving old John McCain, of course, who was reliably keen to possibilities for self-promotion. So keen, in fact, that he would agree to appear on a show and then, on the way to the studio, call from his …