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Did he really get to choose who he debated in these public forums? These things are typically set up by third parties who want participants with some kind of public profile. Who would host or broadcast a debate between Hitchens and some bookish academic from Pennsylvania who nobody had ever heard of?
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Of course he had a choice, but you are right to agree with me - the whole thing was a publicity stunt of sorts. Certainly, he wasn't a rigourous intellectual interested in the truth.
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I agree that his stature in North America was overblown because a public intellectual is almost unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. But would you rather no intellectual have a public profile in North America?
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People liked him because he made them feel like they were on the right side of history. There are many excellent public intellectuals in North America.
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The thing that irks me about Hitchens' public profile in the U.S. is most people know him only as a strident atheist. So I'm not sure the notion of a public intellectual with diverse areas of interest and knowledge even did sink in.
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He was a literary critic of some repute before the whole atheist book-selling phenomenon got started. Other that that, I don't know what else he knew much about. His books on American politics were of third-rate importance, at best.
He really came into his own after 9/11, because he was one of the few pointing out that America had a right to be very, very angry at a group of very blood-thirsty, awful, barbaric criminals.
This burst of moral clarity did a lot of for him, and launched him, almost overnight, to the level of an almost elder statesman in journalism. Before that, he was kind of another CSPAN type.