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Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God.

Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.

The late Christopher Hitchens had the professional contrarian's fixation on attacking sacred cows, and rather soon after his cancer diagnosis, he became one himself.

I asked him a number of questions and I got some very interesting answers. Ken's heroes, according to Christopher, would be people like John Wayne, of course.

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

'Greatest American Hero,' I really dug that as a kid because it had an alienation to it, where he was given a gift and didn't know why, and yet he was forced to do something with it, and he was very much an out-of-place character who was trying to cope with his own surroundings, and I can kind of relate to that guy.

What can you say about such a man as Christopher Reeve? He embodied all the best that a human being can hope to be.

My all-time heroes are Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two men who had to really work to achieve what they did. And I had the privilege of meeting them both.

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'

A hero is a man who does what he can.