She has flown on a bombing run in Viet Nam and been wounded by gunfire in Mexico. She boldly interrogated Lieut. General Nguyen Van Thieu about the corruption of his regime, and she lured Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into describing himself as a lone gunslinger on a horse. She is Oriana Fallaci, 45, world-roving and world-renowned practitioner of the clawing interview. A small and frenetic figure in slacks and a faded maroon corduroy jacket, she swept into her Rome office from an Athens flight one recent morning, dumped her suitcases on the floor, answered a number of telephone calls (sometimes two at once), ordered a glass of Fernet Branca. Then she turned to TIME'S Jordan Bonfante and submitted herself to what many prominent political leaders already know to their sorrow and awe as a Fallaci-style interview.
Q. Who elected you the great and omniscient critic—what rights and qualifications do you have to criticize so many political leaders?
A. The right of being a historian. A journalist writes history in the best of ways, that is in the moment that history takes place. He lives history, he touches history with his hands, he looks at it with his eyes, he listens to it with his ears. Listen, Herodotus in his day was a damned f__ing journalist.
Q. It's been charged that you fabricate quotations. You've been called Oriana Fallacious.
A. Fallacious, that's just a vulgarity.
It's ridiculous. If I have the tape with the voice, how can they claim they never said what they did?
Q. In your interviews, you are sometimes downright insulting. Why do they sit still for you?
A. I'm never insulting, no, but I can be brutal. When I have a brutal question to put, I always say: "Now I'm going to put you a brutal question." I don't write that because it would be monotonous to read that each time. The questions are brutal because research of truth is a kind of surgery. Surgery hurts.
Q. They say that you work with your elbows, that you are aggressive and belligerent, that you throw tearful scenes, scream and cry.
A. Tearful? Me, tearful? You mean those big white things that come out of your eyes? Not me.
Q. You kick and scream, though, don't you?
A. Oh, yes, a lot. I scream and yell.
But no tears.
Q. What was your most unsuccessful interview?
A. The first one was with Bobby Kennedy, because you cannot interview a person who never watches you in your eyes. For more than one hour he watches his shoes. Each time I put a question to him he blushed. But there is an interview that is worse than that, and that is the one with Kissinger.
Q. You're not eating any words here, are you?
A. No, I swear on my mother, I always said it. I have never understood why the Americans have fallen in love with that interview. I haven't given any importance to the boutade [whim] he said about the cowboy. I thought it was cute, it was arrogant, it portrayed him. But the interview was bad because Kissinger is a very cold man, and he behaved coldly. I was disturbed by his way of receiving me.