Trial by Interview

By Thomas Griffith

One price of being a public figure is to be pursued by a persistent journalist demanding private interviews for a full personality study. Dare the public figure refuse? Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President's National Security Adviser, tried and got the treatment. Sally Quinn's three-part series in the Washington Post damaged Brzezinski in passing, but it damaged the Post even more. The Post is one of the nation's best papers, though nowadays it often seems excessively bent on topping its Watergate success.

That may explain the Brzezinski lapse. It didn't help when Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (who is married to Quinn) had to run a box saying it wasn't true that Brzezinski had unzipped his fly in front of a female reporter. Quinn had written this on the basis of a vague recollection, without bothering to recheck. The Charlotte Observer was outraged: "Such errors raise questions about the newspaper's motives as well as its competence." The Post felt obliged to run a letter from nine former members of Brzezinski's staff disputing Quinn's assertion that he had singularly failed to "inspire loyalty or affection or admiration in some group, no matter how small."

Quinn began and ended her series by saying that Brzezinski would consent to be interviewed only if she would move in with him while his wife was away for a few weeks. Brzezinski is generally regarded as a happily married square with an unfortunate taste for jocular banter of the kind that Henry Kissinger, the "secret swinger," used to affect, as if being considered sexy improved on the dour image of being brainy. But reporters always have the advantage: their account of any conversation is what gets printed. Quinn's friends probably put it down as jocular banter when she herself was quoted as having "had to promise my body over and over to the higher-ups" to get an interview with the Shah's wife. But in a book she wrote called We're Going to Make You a Star, Quinn says that her well-publicized failure to make it as an anchorwoman competing with Barbara Walters was mostly the fault of a top CBS producer, whom she names, because she refused to sleep with him. Did Quinn think Brzezinski was making a serious proposal to her? She now says, "Well, I don't know frankly. The first time he said it I was really shocked. I laughed nervously and tried to change the subject. The second time I thought it a clumsy joke."

Brzezinski got burned by refusing to be interviewed. More intriguing is why public figures consent to see reporters famous for making their subjects look bad. Are they challenged by thinking they're clever enough to be an exception? "The stupidest thing" he did, Kissinger has said, was the 1972 interview he gave Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, attributing his popularity to his being "the cowboy who rides all alone into the town ... and does everything by himself." Fallaci, tough and intelligent, is the best interviewer around, if interviews are judged (as journalists usually judge them) not by whether the subject got across what he wanted to say, but by whether he had been goaded into more interesting-- and presumably more revealing--candor. In Interview with History, Fallaci remembers Kissinger as "an eel icier than ice" and says, "I swear that I will never understand why he agreed to see me." Ayatullah Khomeini may have agreed to see her because she had been so rough on the Shah ("Let's get back to you, Majesty. So intransigent, so harsh, maybe even ruthless, behind that sad face"). Fallaci wore a floor-length black chador to interview the Ayatullah, then, getting angry, dramatically announced, "I'm going to take off this stupid medieval rag right now." She told Libya's dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, that she was going to conduct a "kind of trial" of him to find out "why you are so little liked in the world." She says of herself: "I make scenes, I yell and scream." As the Anna Magnani of interviewers, she gets memorable quotes.

But what gives her the right, and the audacity, to assault the powerful? She interviews "with a thousand feelings of rage," she writes, hoping to understand "in what way, by being in power or opposing it, those people determine our destiny." She is convinced they are "not really better than ourselves; they are neither more intelligent nor stronger nor more enlightened." Leaders now safely dead, like Napoleon or Frederick the Great or George Washington, never had to cope with such a phenomenon, which may be one reason why contemporary political leaders often seem so small.

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