Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci (29 June 1929 – 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist and author.

A partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career.

Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy, on 29 June 1929.

Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

During World War II she joined the Italian anti-fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà, part of Resistenza.

She later received a certificate for valour from the Italian army.

Fallaci began her career in journalism during her teens, becoming a special correspondent for the Italian paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1946.

Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Her book Interview with History contains interviews with Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and Henry Kissinger, South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, and North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp during the Vietnam War.

The interview with Kissinger was published in Playboy, with Kissinger describing himself as "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse".

Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press".

She also interviewed Deng Xiaoping, Andreas Papandreou, Ayatollah Khomeini, Haile Selassie, Lech Wałęsa, Muammar Gaddafi, Mário Soares, George Habash, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others.

After retirement, she returned to the spotlight after writing a series of controversial articles and books critical of Islam that aroused condemnation as well as support.

In the 1960s she began conducting interviews, first with people in the world of literature and cinema (published in book form in 1963 as Gli antipatici) and later with world leaders (published in the 1973 book Intervista con la storia), which have led some to describe her as "during the 1970s and 80s the most famous – and feared – interviewer in the world".

Beginning in 1967, she worked as a war correspondent covering Vietnam, the Indo-Pakistani War, the Middle East, and in South America.

For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo, and wrote for a number of leading newspapers and the magazine Epoca.

In Mexico City, during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, Fallaci was shot three times by Mexican soldiers, dragged downstairs by her hair, and left for dead.

Her eyewitness account became important evidence disproving the Mexican government's denials that a massacre had taken place.

In the early 1970s, Fallaci had a relationship with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship, having been captured, heavily tortured and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos.

During her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger stated that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse".

Kissinger later claimed that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press".

In 1973, she interviewed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

She later stated, "He considers women simply as graceful ornaments, incapable of thinking like a man, and then strives to give them complete equality of rights and duties".

After interviewing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, she described him as "one of the most stupid men I've ever met in my life, maybe the most stupid".

In a 1976 retrospective collection of her works, she remarked:

"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon ... I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

After attaining her secondary school diploma, Fallaci briefly attended the University of Florence where she studied medicine and chemistry.

She later transferred to literature but soon dropped out and never finished her studies.

It was her uncle Bruno Fallaci, himself a journalist, who suggested to young Oriana to dedicate herself to journalism.

Panagoulis died in 1976, under controversial circumstances, in a road accident.

Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta and her book Un Uomo (A Man) was inspired by his life.

During her 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she addressed him as a "tyrant", and managed to unveil herself from the chador:

"OF: I still have to ask you a lot of things. About the "chador", for example, which I was obliged to wear to come and interview you, and which you impose on Iranian women.... I am not only referring to the dress, but to what it represents, I mean the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution. They cannot study at the university with men, they cannot work with men, they cannot swim in the sea or in a swimming-pool with men. They have to do everything separately, wearing their "chador". By the way, how can you swim wearing a "chador"?

AK: None of this concerns you, our customs do not concern you.

If you don't like the Islamic dress, you are not obliged to wear it, since it is for young women and respectable ladies.

OF: Very kind (of you).

Since you tell me that, I'm going to immediately rid myself of this stupid medieval rag.

There!"

In 1980 Fallaci interviewed Deng Xiaoping.

Michael Rank described this interview as the "most revealing ever of any Chinese leader by any western journalist", during which Deng spoke about Mao "extraordinarily frankly by Chinese standards" whereas most Western interviews with Chinese leaders have been "bland and dull".