Oriana, the agitator
Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer and journalist best 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 political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the
world’s most powerful figures: Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry 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 flattered 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.
Her manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European 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 petite 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; 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 to 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.
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”, she 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 have 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 become 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 train 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’s 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 Fallaci 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.”
world’s most powerful figures: Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry 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 flattered 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.
Her manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European 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 petite 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; 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 to 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.
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”, she 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 have 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 become 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 train 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’s 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 Fallaci 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.”
Internet: <www.newyorker.com> (adapted).
From the previous text, it can be inferred that Oriana Fallaci
