Interviews, Soft or Savage

By Thomas Griffith

The 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 ... I'm tired inside, in the soul." Yet he also realizes that in Poland, "the rage that people would like to burst like a bomb must be controlled. And I know how to control it, because I know how to reason though I am not a learned man." He fields questions about his early arrests, his tactics, his dependence on the Polish church, his readiness to die, his conviction that the Soviets won't intervene, then says her difficult questions "give me a headache." At the end of a remarkable interview, however, Walesa has given his trust to her.

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.

One of Barbara Walters' skills is her apologetic whammy number. Her classic use of this tactic was with the Jimmy Carters, insisting that she felt just too embarrassed even to bring up her next question, until Carter, to put her at ease, begged her to go ahead, and--wham!--found himself obliged to discuss whether he and Rosalynn slept in single beds or a double bed in the White House. Walters can talk sense with Sadat, but at other times can ask the most banal of fan magazine questions: "What was your biggest thrill?" Her best performances must occur offscreen, when by exerting charm or power or both she persuades people in the news that they had better be interviewed first by her. Nobody has had such command over celebrities since the columnist Louella Parsons ruled Hollywood.

The condoned babble of celebrities on television has done much to diminish the art of the interview. In contrast to such fluff, Lawrence Spivak in the early days of NBC's Meet the Press set a standard for Sunday talk shows with politicians. He refused to court either the guest or the audience. The aim of such shows, after all, is to inform more than to entertain. In fair, informed and gentlemanly questioning, no one 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 not to say.

Ronald Reagan is the first President to be more at ease on-camera than those who interview him. That showed in Walter Cronkite's interview. When those two top contenders for the title of Mr. Likeable were pitted against each other, the interview almost ground to a halt out of mutual agreeableness. Cronkite soon found himself compelled to question the answers he was getting with a little more sharpness than he usually does. Reagan, as he steps in or out of limousines, is also skilled at throwing out a one-line response to a question about the day's news, as if doing an unseen body of reporters a smiling favor.

Interviews are like riding a seesaw. If a player prevails too easily, one end bangs to the ground. There should be no automatic victors--neither overbearing interviewers nor subjects too slickly practiced in evasion. The real winner is supposed to be a third party, the public.

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