Word: fallacies
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...interview started as a trial of strength, as interviews by the volatile Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci inevitably must. Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader, said: "I am a man with a goal to reach so I don't give a damn ... Not for the books, not for the interviews, not for the Nobel Prize and even less for you." Fallaci answers: "Listen, Walesa ... if you don't mind, I am the one who asks. Now let's start." Soon Walesa confesses that "I'm tired, bloody tired, and not only in my body...
Without the distracting presence of cameras, Fallaci stress-tests the people she interviews. Her method makes most interviews on American television seem tepid. Only William F. Buckley Jr., with the practiced assurance of a Catholic debater, similarly confronts his subjects as an equal in discourse (and sometimes barely conceals his suspicion that he is the intellectual superior). Bill Moyers is apt to be overrespectful, perhaps because he often interviews people he admires. Mike Wallace so single-mindedly bears in on someone's vulnerability that he rarely shows the person in the round...
...excels Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer of public television. The self-restraint is admirable, but such a style of questioning lacks the articulate aplomb, the audacity that is close to rudeness, favored by British interviewers who put their own country's political figures in the dock, Fallaci-style...
...Fallaci herself gains from the fact that some of her best subjects-like the Ayatullah Khomeini or Colonel Gaddafi-are not used to being questioned so un-deferentially. Almost all American public figures have long since been overinterviewed. Often they have nothing fresh to say. Put them before cameras, and their minds instinctively begin to work on what...
...Fallaci has shown strengths as the grand inquisitor of such disparate leaders as Henry Kissinger and the Ayatullah Khomeini. Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches-and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow...