The Opinion Mill

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who just died at 76 after a years-long battle with cancer, was one of the most fearless people on the planet. Petite and disarmingly pretty, yet fiercely distrustful of the powerful, Fallaci would beguile men like Henry Kissinger into agreeing to sit down for an interview, then make them regret the moment they ever heard her name. Her provocative style, alternately teasing and combative, goaded Kissinger into making grandiose, self-infatuated statements that chilled his working relationship with Richard Nixon and kept political satirists in material for years. (He later admitted that talking to Fallaci was one of the dumbest things he’d ever done.) For a great many years, her book Interview With History was never far from my side, and I highly recommend it to any j-school student (or anyone with an appreciation for intellectual firepower) who doesn’t want to slide into the court stenographer mode encouraged by mass-market media.

The New Yorker recently ran an outstanding profile of Fallaci that includes one of the most wonderful Oriana anecdotes I’ve ever seen:

Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ”

Towards the end of her life, Fallaci became distrustful and finally enraged by Muslim immigrants entering Europe, and I’m sorry to say that somewhere down the line she toppled into cranky Pat Buchanan-style bigotry that got her admired in the wrong circles for all the wrong reasons.    

It was a sad finish for a journalist who had never been afraid to ask anyone anything, but in the end failed to ask herself some equally probing questions — questions she would have had a hard time answering.