Interview with History by Oriana Fallaci

First published:Intervista con la storia, 1974 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Current affairs

Form and Content

A regular contributor to the Italian news magazine L’Europeo and a successful free-lance journalist, novelist, and essayist, Oriana Fallaci became famous primarily as one of the most original and controversial interviewers of her time. The essence of her style is captured in Interview with History (translated into English by John Shepley and published in the United States in 1976), her best-known work of journalism. It might be more accurate, however, to call the genre in which she works “contemporary history,” a term she herself uses in her introduction.

The fourteen interviews in this anthology first appeared in L’Europeo between 1969 and 1974, although most are concentrated around 1972-1973. The dominant news stories from that era are reflected in the interviews themselves: the Vietnam War, the Middle East crisis, the war between India and Pakistan, the military takeover in Greece. The first three interviews rise out of the Vietnam War: Henry Kissinger, shortly before Richard M. Nixon named him secretary of state and put him in charge of peace negotiations, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, and North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap. These interviews set the pattern that Fallaci followed, with some variation, in each of the others: The subject is often a man or woman who is involved in a violent political conflict and works for or against the forces of oppression. Frequently, the interviewee is a public figure from whom it is extremely difficult to obtain an interview, as with each of the first three subjects, and who subsequently tries to disavow his or her careless declarations. Fallaci recounts the story of each interview and its aftermath in brief introductory essays.

The protagonists of the Vietnam War fare badly under Fallaci’s questioning—as is often, but not always, the case. Kissinger’s comparison of himself to a “cowboy who rides alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else” became one of his most famous quotes, a point of ridicule, and almost caused irreparable damage to his relationship with Nixon. Thieu comes across as a puppet dictator, too weak to design a policy that does not come straight from Washington, D.C. Giap is a Napoleonic figure, a brilliant, ruthless military strategist whose ego is in direct inverse proportion to his tiny stature. The interviews with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat, President Ali Bhutto of Pakistan, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, clearly show the hostility, at times bordering on revulsion, that Fallaci often has for her subjects.

In the light of Fallaci’s often confrontational attitude, she herself expresses surprise that so many major figures agree to grant her an interview. Also surprising was the effect some of the interviews had upon publication. The temporary falling out between Kissinger and Nixon is one example. A second example is the near-derailment of peace negotiations between India and Pakistan because of the unflattering things that Indira Gandhi said about Ali Bhutto and the even more insulting things he said about her. Similar immediate effects of the unexpected candor of Fallaci’s subjects have occurred throughout her career as an interviewer. The unguarded honesty of her subjects, who are usually seasoned politicians, has often been held up as evidence of the validity of her controversial methods. Such incidents reverse the traditional role of the journalist, who instead of being a witness to history in the making, actually influences history.

Fallaci’s unusual ability to relate to her subjects as human beings rather than merely as players on the geopolitical scene reaches its apogee in the final interview, of the Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis. He had just been released from prison, where he was held for his role in a failed assassination attempt against the dictator George Papadopoulos in 1967. Panagoulis was clearly the incarnation of Fallaci’s ideal of the revolutionary poet, but their relationship rested on much more than his ability to conform to an idealized image. The entire interview expresses Fallaci’s profound empathy, admiration, and finally love for her subject. They left Greece together after the interview and lived a passionate and turbulent life until Panagoulis was killed three years later. Fallaci chronicles this period in Un Uomo (1979; A Man, 1980), another of her most famous works, which functions as a kind of sequel to Interview with History.

Context

Fallaci has always proudly worn the mantle of militant feminism. In Interview with History, this is shown in a number of ways. She presses her female subjects (Meir and Gandhi) to speak as women, as wives and mothers, in order to break through the façade of the head of state. By making Meir talk about how being a woman has made her try harder for what she achieved or about the condescending remarks made to her by political mentors such as David Ben-Gurion, Fallaci brings feminist issues to the forefront. In a similar fashion, she suggests that Gandhi’s admiration for Joan of Arc is a sign of her determination to succeed in a male-dominated world in spite of being a woman.

In both interviews, Fallaci clearly attempts to bring to light an issue that has dominated much twentieth century feminism: whether the goal of feminism is simply to put women on an equal social and political footing with men so that they can compete effectively, though in a world whose rules were written by and for men, or whether there is a specifically female alternative to the male worldview. Both Meir and Gandhi seem to come across as holding very conservative viewpoints on this issue. They both emphasize that there is no fundamental difference between men and women and that their effectiveness as heads of state is neither diminished nor enhanced by their gender. Gandhi states most emphatically at one point that she is not a feminist. Although Fallaci never explicitly states her own opinion on that particular topic in her questions or introductions, she implicitly suggests that the two women are prisoners of their decision to fulfill political responsibilities in a male-dominated world. Simply by identifying themselves with power, the two women have bought into the system in which male tyranny is the ruling principle.

Again, it must be emphasized that Fallaci does not present such a feminist perspective outright. At no point does she say, for example, that conventional political power and its inevitable corollary, political oppression, are specifically male phenomena. She clearly suggests that resistance to oppression, however, is an activity with which women, as a group, are very familiar. The male subjects of her interviews who are on the side of the oppressed, such as Makarios and Panagoulis, are credited with being more feminine than the more authoritarian leaders whom she interviews, or at least not as completely under the sway of masculine clichés.

The achievement for which Fallaci has received the greatest amount of recognition is having revolutionized the style and function of the interviewer within the journalistic profession. She often uses gender as a means of escaping from what she might term the pseudo-objectivity of traditional interviewing style. For example, she establishes a complicity with her female subjects based on their common experience as women. With male subjects, she will force them to respond to her as a woman, not only as a journalist. Such prominence given to gender in a sphere in which it had never played such an overt role has earned Fallaci the distinction of being perhaps the first feminist interviewer in the history of the genre.

There is much more to Fallaci’s influence on feminism than her journalistic work on “contemporary history.” Among her published books, perhaps the two most relevant to the topic are Il Sesso inutile (1961; The Useless Sex, 1964), a survey of women’s conditions in different parts of the world, and her novel Lettera a un bambino mai nato (1975; Letter to a Child Never Born, 1976), in which she argues in favor of a woman’s right to have an abortion. Many readers have discovered that throughout her entire work, however, Fallaci presents women as having a privileged understanding of the dynamics of oppression and also as having the means to devise effective ways of resisting them.

Bibliography

Arico, Santo L. “Breaking the Ice: An In-depth Look at Oriana Fallaci’s Interview Techniques.” Journalism Quarterly 63 (August, 1986): 587-593. Most of the response, favorable or unfavorable, of the journalistic profession to Fallaci’s techniques has appeared in the popular press. Arico’s article is one of the few to present a more studied and careful critique of Fallaci from the perspective of a professional colleague.

Burke, Jeffrey. “Fallaci Records.” Harper’s 261 (November, 1980): 98-99. Primarily a review of the novel A Man, this article contains many references to Interview with History and provides some useful insights into Fallaci’s career up to that point.

Cott, Jonathan. Forever Young. New York: Random House, 1978. Among Cott’s interviews compiled in this anthology is one with Fallaci which first appeared in the June, 1976, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Of all the interviews given by Fallaci, this is perhaps the most famous. In addition to turning the tables on Fallaci by having her answer questions instead of asking them, this interview is important in that it provided her with a forum to explain and justify some of the techniques for which she became famous.

Griffith, Thomas. “Interviews, Soft or Savage.” Time 117 (March 30, 1981): 47.

Griffith, Thomas. “Trial by Interview.” Time 115 (January 21, 1980): 71. In these two very brief articles, Griffith comments on Fallaci’s celebrity as an interviewer and the controversy that surrounds her. He gives a balanced account of the ethical and professional issues involved and expresses a degree of respect and admiration for Fallaci’s success, both in obtaining interviews from inaccessible people and in expressing her personal style. In “Trial by Interview” he also mentions several other journalists who have contributed to revolutionizing the genre of the interview.