Long life | 10 September 2015

I remember Sidney Blumenthal from my time in Washington in the late 1980s when I was there as the first American editor of the Independent. He was a smartly dressed, agreeable political journalist, handsome in a donnish kind of way, who had a gracious, dignified manner that seemed to put him a cut above most of his fellow hacks. He was also a liberal of strong political conviction, whose purpose was to help rebuild American liberalism so that it could take on and beat the New Right after its long ascendancy under Ronald Reagan and restore the Democrats to power. It was at around this time, in 1987, that Blumenthal first met Bill Clinton whom he came to regard — rightly, as it turned out — as the Democrats’ best hope for achieving this aim.

In 1993, at the start of Clinton’s first term as president, I went to New York to work on the New Yorker magazine, where I found Blumenthal had been hired by the new editor, Tina Brown, as chief political writer.