That title didn’t suffer from an excess of modesty, but then, neither did its author. People began to sneer and gossip, saying that Oriana was just a confrontational bitch who used her femininity to get results, and who goaded men into saying incriminating things. I remember having it whispered to me that she would leave the transcript of the answers untouched but rephrase her original questions so that they seemed more penetrating than they had really been. As it happens, I found an opportunity to check that last rumor. During her interview with President Makarios, of Cyprus, who was also a Greek Orthodox patriarch, she had asked him straight-out if he was overfond of women, and more or less got him to admit that his silence in response to her direct questioning was a confession. (The paragraphs from Interview with History here are too long to quote, but show a brilliantly incisive line of interrogation.) Many Greek Cypriots of my acquaintance were scandalized, and quite certain that their beloved leader would never have spoken that way. I knew the old boy slightly, and took the chance to ask him if he had read the relevant chapter. “Oh yes,” he said, with perfect gravity. “It is just as I remember it.”
Occasionally, Oriana’s interviews actually influenced history, or at the least the pace and rhythm of events. Interviewing Pakistan’s leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just after the war with India over Bangladesh, she induced him to say what he really thought of his opposite number in India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi (“a diligent drudge of a schoolgirl, a woman devoid of initiative and imagination . . . She should have half her father’s talent!”). Demanding a full copy of the text, Mrs. Gandhi thereupon declined to attend the proposed signing of a peace agreement with Pakistan. Bhutto had to pursue Oriana, through a diplomatic envoy, all the way to Addis Ababa, to which she had journeyed to interview Emperor Haile Selassie. Bhutto’s ambassador begged her to disown the Gandhi parts, and hysterically claimed that the lives of 600 million people were at stake if she did not. One of the hardest things to resist, for reporters and journalists, is the appeal to the world-shaking importance of their work and the need for them to be “responsible.” Oriana declined to oblige, and Mr. Bhutto duly had to eat his plate of crow. Future “access” to the powerful meant absolutely nothing to her: she acted as if she had one chance to make the record and so did they.
Perhaps only one Western journalist ever managed to interview Ayatollah Khomeini twice. And from those long discussions we learned an enormous amount about the nature of the adamant theocracy that he was bent upon instituting. The second session was an achievement in itself, since Oriana had terminated the first one by wrenching off the all-enveloping chador she had been compelled to wear and calling it a “stupid, medieval rag.” She told me that after this moment of drama she had been taken aside by Khomeini’s son, who confided in her that it had been the only time in his life that he had seen his father laugh.
Do you really remember any recent interview with a major politician? Usually, the only thing that stands out in the mind is some stupid gaffe or piece of rambling incoherence. And if you go and check the original, it generally turns out that this was prompted by a dull or rambling question. Try reading the next transcript of a presidential “news conference,” and see which makes you whimper more: the chief executive’s train-wreck syntax or the lame and contrived promptings from the press. Oriana’s questions were tautly phrased and persistent. She researched her subjects minutely before going to see them, and each one of her published transcripts was preceded by an essay of several pages in length concerning the politics and the mentality of the interviewee. She proceeded, as Jeeves used to phrase it, from an appreciation of “the psychology of the individual.” Thus, a provocative or impudent question from her would not be a vulgar attempt to shock but a well-timed challenge, usually after a lot of listening, and often taking the form of a statement. (To Yasir Arafat: “Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.”)
The commonest and easiest way of explaining the decay of interviewing is to attribute it to the short-term and showbiz values of TV. But there’s no innate reason why this should be true. At the dawn of the television age, John Freeman—a former cabinet minister and diplomat, and editor of the New Statesman—established an inquisitorial style probably borrowed in part from Ed Murrow, and provided astonishing glimpses of hitherto reclusive public figures like Evelyn Waugh. Television allows points to be pressed and repeated: the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman once put the same question a dozen times to a Tory politician who was being evasive. It also brought us the huge advantage of the close-up, which did immense damage to shifty types like Richard Nixon.
Indeed, there is a whole new play by Peter Morgan (writer of The Queen) based on the transcript of the first post-Watergate interview that Nixon “granted,” which was to David Frost. At the time, Frost was much attacked for trading easy questions in return for access (and also for paying Nixon $600,000—more than $2 million today—plus a percentage of the profits for the privilege; this led to a secondary grilling of Frost himself, by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes). However, despite its deference, the interview did elicit a sort of grudging acknowledgment of wrongdoing from Tricky Dick, plus the unforgettable and highly modern claim that “when the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”
Over time, however, politicians learn the business, too, and television interviews become just another part of the “spin” process. (They also become shorter, and more routine, and the test of success becomes the avoidance of any “gaffes.”) Poetic justice occasionally kicks in. Edward Kennedy obviously could not believe his luck when he drew Barbara Walters for his first televised “grilling” after Chappaquiddick—she started by asking him how he’d managed to cope—but he had no idea how bad he was going to look when Roger Mudd asked him in 1979 the equally soft question about why he wanted to be president.
As someone who has been interviewed quite a lot on-screen, I have started to notice a few unspoken rules of the game. Most interviewers know that you positively want to be on their shows, either to promote a book or to explain yourself, or just to avoid having to shout back at the TV. So Charlie Rose, for example, knows you won’t dry up when he opens by saying, very firmly, “Your book. Why now?” (or many more words to that effect). Larry King is, like Sam Donaldson, a master of asking a soft question in an apparently interrogative way. (“So—you got the big advance. Movie rights up the wazoo. Married to a babe everybody loves. Top of your game. What’s with that?”) You soon start to notice when the station breaks are coming—a perfect way of dissolving any tension that may be building up—though Rose isn’t subject to this and can, and sometimes does, decide to surprise you by running long. The most unsettling technique is the simplest: Tim Russert’s matter-of-fact, research-backed question, asked in the mildest tone; or Brian Lamb’s complete composure, which I have only once seen disturbed, when I was on with fellow guest Richard Brookhiser. (“You had cancer?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In the testicles.” . . . “Nebraska—you’re on the line.”) And of course there’s the guilty companionship of the green room, where rivals forgather to remove makeup and more or less behave as if they all know they’ll be back sometime next week. This is why a real TV event, like Clinton’s tantrum with Chris Wallace, is so extremely rare. And in such cases, it’s almost always the interviewee who is making the difference, by departing from the script. The most searching interviewer of all was William F. Buckley in the days of Firing Line. If you left the show’s set wishing you had done a better job as a guest, it was all your own fault. You had had your chance. But then, this was explicitly billed as ideological combat.
An additional reason for the decline of the interview is the increasing ability of leaders and celebrities to condition the way in which they are questioned. “When you were around Oriana, you sensed that something big was going on,” I was told by Ben Bradlee, who had been one of the first editors to see the importance of her material. “Now, a lot of people get interviewed who don’t deserve to be interviewed. And editors don
’t assign enough interviews of the sort that can stand by themselves.” Even when Gary Condit was apparently at his most vulnerable, in the late summer of 2001, he was able to pick and choose among ravenous networks (and to make, wisely in my opinion, the selection of Connie Chung as his fearless interrogator). And then people who become too good at the job get turned down for it and are refused by the subject’s nervous PR people: this happened in Washington to our very own Marjorie Williams, who was just too incisive for her own good. (It has probably happened to Ali G as well, for some of the same reasons.) There came a time when leaders would no longer submit to the risks of a sit-down with Fallaci. She diverted her energies, with some success, into the channel of fiction. And, more and more, she made it her business to point out what she had been picking up in the course of her voyages—that Islamism was on the march. There’s something almost premonitory about her novel Inshallah, which was inspired by the first Muslim suicide bombers in Beirut, in 1983. And as she drew nearer to death she decided that she wanted to be interviewed herself, and to be the Cassandra who warned of the wrath to come.
For all that, she hated doing any listening and was extremely bad at submitting to questions. I went to meet her last April in New York, where she kept a little brownstone, and was more or less told to my face that I might well be the last man on earth she would talk to. By then she had twelve different tumors and had been asked, rather reassuringly, by one of her doctors if she had any idea why she was still alive. To this she had an answer. She carried on living in order to utter rebukes to Islamists, and to make these rebukes as abusive and frontal as possible. Gone was the rather rawboned-looking young woman who had once had her share of romantic involvement with “third world” and leftist guerrilla fighters. Instead, a tiny, emaciated, black-clad Italian lady (who really did exclaim “Mamma mia!” at intervals) ranged exhaustingly around her tiny kitchen, cooking me the fattiest sausage I have ever eaten and declaiming that the Muslim immigrants to Europe were the advance guard of a new Islamic conquest. The “sons of Allah breed like rats”—this was the least of what she said in a famous polemic entitled The Rage and the Pride, written in a blaze of fury after September 11, 2001, and propelled onto the Italian bestseller list. It got her part of what she wanted after the long and depressing retirement caused by her illness. She became notorious all over again, was the subject of lawsuits from outraged groups who wanted to silence her, and managed to dominate the front pages. When someone becomes obsessed with the hygiene and reproduction of another group, it can be a bad sign: Oriana’s conversation (actually there was no conversation, since she scarcely drew breath) was thick with obscenities. I shall put them in Italian—brutto stronzo, vaffanculo—and omit some others. As to those who disagreed with her, or who did not see the danger as she did, well, they were no more than cretini and disgraciatti. It was like standing in a wind tunnel of cloacal abuse. Another bad sign was that she had started to refer to herself as “Fallaci.”
All her life she had denounced clericalism and fundamentalism in every form, yet now her loathing and disgust for Islam had driven her into the embrace of the church. She had, she told me, been given one of the first private audiences with the new pope, whom she referred to as “Ratzinger.” “He is adorable! He agrees with me—but completely!” But beyond assuring me that his holiness was in her corner, she would tell me nothing of their conversation. Four months later, almost at the exact moment when Oriana was dying, the pope did deliver himself of the celebrated speech in which he flailed on about the medieval objections to Islam and managed to set off a furor that moved us a little closer to a real clash of civilizations. This time, though, we did not have the Fallaci version of his views, or the pleasure of seeing him have to explain or defend himself to her. She managed a final “big get,” and then kept it all to herself.
(Vanity Fair, December 2006)
Imperial Follies
Review of Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati; Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by Victor Sebestyen; and Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization by Wm. Roger Louis
FIFTY WINTERS AGO, Russian tanks were demolishing buildings in Budapest, and British warplanes were bombing Cairo International Airport. The coincidence of these two crimes and disasters made a fool out of the nascent United Nations, gave birth to the New Left, put an end to European colonialism, curtain-raised the fall of Communism in 1989, and confirmed the United States as the postwar superpower. In retrospect, the twin episodes of hubris seem almost irrational. Yet hubris has its reasons, too, and they are worth examining.
“If a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state,” wrote Montesquieu in considering the role of chance and contingency in the Roman case, “there was a general cause that made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.” Though this insight may verge on the tautologous, it is nonetheless superior to the view—pungently expressed by one of the pupils in Alan Bennett’s triumphant success The History Boys—that history itself is no more than “one fucking thing after another.” The powder train had been laid across Europe before the random event at Sarajevo, and might almost as easily have been ignited by the confrontation at Agadir in Morocco a few years earlier. If the Confederacy had not been so hubristic as to fire on Fort Sumter, it certainly was hubristic enough to be doomed to make a comparably fatal mistake.
Perhaps this view necessarily applies better to endings than to beginnings: one does not have the same sense of certainty concerning, for example, the open question of which European people would or could have been the first to subjugate and settle the Americas. Hegel’s famous remark about the owl of Minerva—which takes wing only at dusk, and which thus enables one to mark only the closure of a period—is for this reason much over-employed. But the crepuscular theory of history is no less serviceable for being something of a cliché. When General de Gaulle was asked why he was so reluctant to recognize Communist rule in Eastern Europe as permanent, he responded, “Parce que l’avenir dure longtemps.”
Once it is pitilessly conceded that the future has a big future, certain once-epochal events immediately become more manageable and intelligible. In the fall of 1956, one undoubtedly saw the closing moments of two very imposing systems. One of them, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, was ironically almost Rasputin-like in surviving the evidently mortal wound and staggering on for several more decades. The other, the British Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, had already outlived a number of apparently terminal moments but after Suez, expired almost at once. The “verdict” of history was still the same in both cases and was apparent to some clear-sighted people at the time.
It is not often pointed out that in 1956, both the Russian and British empires had recently undergone the psychic experience of another sort of fin de régime, with the resignation of Winston Churchill and the death of Joseph Stalin. Their successors, Sir Anthony Eden and Nikita Khrushchev, had more to prove—and more to fear from invidious comparison—than either might have liked to admit. As these books demonstrate, both leaders felt compelled to act in ways, and in circumstances, in which they were as much the prisoners of events as the masters of them. And sometimes they were acutely aware of the fact. Most people tend to think of Soviet actions in Eastern Europe, for example, as the outcome of petrified bureaucratic thinking that was inclined to reach for repression as the first resort. And so it was in practice. But Victor Sebestyen’s illuminating book shows a surprising degree of self-awareness in the Kremlin, which understood—subjectively, so to speak—that its Hungarian puppets were unloved and incompetent, and might draw the Red Army into a moral and political trap:
Under [Mátyás] Rákosi’s stewardship Hungary’s economy was a disaster, unease was growing, the jails were full to overflowing, the courts were handing out sentences of a severity that could not be justified and Rákosi’s personality cult was appea
ring more and more ridiculous.
When the local Stalinists were summoned in 1953 from Budapest to a crisis meeting in Moscow, it was in order to be told that they were a disgrace to Communism. No less an authority than Lavrenty Beria attacked the excesses of the Hungarian secret police (which must have stung a bit), while Georgy Malenkov, according to Soviet archives, announced sternly:
We, all of us here on our side, are deeply appalled at your high-handed and domineering style. It has led to . . . countless mistakes and crimes and driven Hungary to the brink of catastrophe.
In May 1955, the Soviet Union agreed to evacuate its troops from neighboring Austria, on the grounds that they were no longer needed nor (to put it mildly) wanted in that country. At almost exactly this time, the British Conservatives, recognizing that the end of dominion in India logically reduced their dependence on Suez, had also made the essential concession by evacuating the Canal Zone and admitting that their period of direct rule in Egypt was at an end. Yet in October 1956, the Red Army was a hated invader on the streets of Budapest, and not long afterward, British soldiers were wading back ashore at Port Said. How came such cruel follies to be committed?
The short answer is that neither imperium could face the idea of being replaced by an inimical local government. Hungary had “joined” the Warsaw Pact on the day before the Red Army agreed to pull out of Austria, and Britain hoped to retain indirect control of the Suez Canal by means of a system of alliances with local Arab elites. The patriotism of the Budapest reform-Communists, and the nationalism of the Nasserists, threatened to remove both countries completely from the larger orbits that had held them in place. Superpower self-pity also played a role: Russia and Britain had taken large casualties in living memory in order to rescue Hungary and Egypt from Nazism. And at the back of the minds of both Khrushchev and Eden—the hardened inner-party survivor and the suave patrician diplomatist, both of them political veterans of that same war—there palpably lurked the queasy feeling that their mighty predecessors would never have let things get so far out of hand.