Oriana, the agitator
Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer and journalist best1
known for her abrasive tone and provocative stances, was for
two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the
mid-nineteen-eighties, one of the sharpest political4
interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the
world’s most powerful figures: Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir,
Indira Ghandi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry7
Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her
was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had
with any member of the press,” said that he had been flattered10
into granting it by the company he’d be keeping as part of
Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon.” It was more like a collection
of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.13
Her manner of interviewing was deliberately
unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied
aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European16
existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald
questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a
sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn’t hurt that she was petite19
and beautiful, with perfect cheekbones, straight, smooth hair
that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy
blue-grey eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice;22
and an adorable Italian accent. During the Vietnam War, she
was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her
rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to25
the Italian Ambassador “if K.I.A.” In these images she looked
slight and vulnerable as a child. Her essential toughness never
stopped taking people — men, especially — by surprise.28
Fallaci’s journalism was infused with a “mythic sense
of political evil”, an almost adolescent aversion to power,
which suited the temperament of the times. “Whether”, she31
would say, “it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected
president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see
power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon… I have34
always looked on disobedience towards the oppressive as the
only way to use the miracle of having been born.” In her
interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become37
known as “Nixon’s mental wet nurse,” and lured him into
boasting that Americans admired him because he “always
acted alone” — like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train40
by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all
alone into the town.” Political cartoonists mercilessly
lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger’s43
memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon (Kissinger
claimed that she had taken his words out of context). But the
most remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci46
bluntly asked him, about Vietnam, “Don’t you find, Dr.
Kissinger, that it’s been a useless war?”, and he began his
reply with the words, “On this, I can agree.”49
Internet: <www.newyorker.com> (adapted).