Oriana Fallaci interrogated Kissinger, then sat in the other chair too

Il sabato in cui restarono in due

Sixty minutes, not one more. That is how long the conversation lasts, from the first greeting to the last word, and it is all that Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to Richard Nixon, has to spare that Saturday, November 4, 1972.

The room holds only two people. Between them, on the table, the tape runs in plain sight: no one slips it under a sheet of paper, no one pretends it isn't there.

The telephone leaves neither of them alone. It rings, someone answers, the sentence breaks off, then picks up again where it left off. "Every ten minutes we were interrupted by the telephone, and it was Nixon who wanted something, asked something, petulant, tiresome, like a child." Even outside that room, people would remember a conversation broken constantly, and largely by the president's own calls.

The man sitting across from her is shy, guarded, very cautious. Someone who protects himself. He weighs every word before letting it out, as if each syllable might come back on him.

That is how the hour goes: a question put to his face, a man measuring his words, and between them a tape running that forgets nothing. The two chairs are filled, the roles are plain, and one of the two is paying for those minutes more dearly than he knows.

A door opened by Hanoi

That door almost never opened. Kissinger granted personal interviews "very rarely," entrusting his public word instead to the administration's press conferences. Walking through required more than a recommendation. It required something worth the trade, and that something was Hanoi.

In February 1969 Fallaci had sat across from Vo Nguyen Giap, the general commanding North Vietnam's army. Her account ran in the Milanese weekly L'Europeo, and from there crossed the Atlantic into American hands. A page written in a country at war with the United States landed, by roundabout paths, on desks in Washington.

Nearly four years later, that same page unlocks the room. He tells her so himself, and she writes it down: the appointment comes to her on the strength of the Hanoi interview with General Giap, the one from February 1969. No press office stood between them. It was a conversation held on the other side of the trench.

Between those two poles lay a third stage. Nguyen Van Thieu, president of South Vietnam, receives her "around eight in the morning at the presidential palace in Saigon" — the city still cool, the corridors empty, the heat not yet arrived.

Line up those three chairs and look at them. Facing the first sits the commander of the North's army. Facing the second, the head of state of the South. Facing the third, the man in Washington negotiating that war's end. No press office would ever have assembled such a set, because no press office thinks that way: each chair opened the next, and whoever had spoken with the enemy became, for that very reason, an interlocutor worth receiving.

This is no itinerary. It is an encirclement, worked one capital at a time.

Every Word, Where It Fell

In her idea of it, an interview was a confrontation. Whoever agreed to sit down was doing no one a favor. Politics and diplomacy carry the lie within them: she held this as a conviction and said so without softening it, along with the other half of the argument — those who bear public responsibility sometimes lie out of necessity. From this followed the one task of the person asking the questions: make that lie costly. Make the other man pay for it, in front of everyone, in his own words.

Hence, too, the recorder. In her hands it was no ordinary tool; it was the clause of a contract. Whoever sat down accepted that every sentence would stay where it had fallen, in the order in which it came out, hesitations included. The pauses, the stumbles, the half-sentences a person would want to take back the moment after saying them. She insisted she had published without editing cuts: no sentence shifted to prop up another, no silence stitched away.

The rule she gave herself, when asked what goes in and what stays out, fit on a single line: stay "within the limits of what happened, of what was said." A narrow frontier. Precisely for that reason, a defensible one — whoever wanted to contest it had to contest the tape.

The cowboy who saddled up alone

He gave the image away himself, with no one asking him for it. The lone cowboy in the saddle, ahead of the wagon train, riding into town first and doing everything on his own: that was how Kissinger explained his own popularity. In the moment he said it, it must have struck him as a fine picture.

Outside that room it turned into something else. The mockery arrived at once. And behind the mockery opened the risk of ruining his relationship with Nixon beyond repair.

Then came the challenge. The answers, he said, had been rendered "garbled"; the thoughts, "distorted"; the words, "embroidered." That text was not his own.

The reply was not an argument. It was the threat to have the recordings heard, and then the tapes, actually produced. From that moment the question of what he had said stopped existing.

What remained was the question of why he had said it, and to that he returned for the rest of his life. "The stupidest thing of his life," he called it. In October 1979, in Time, he called it "without doubt the most disastrous conversation I have ever had with a member of the press," granted — he admitted — "in large part out of vanity." In his memoirs he came back to it once more, placing it among the most disastrous decisions of his career.

The horse, meanwhile, kept walking. No denial ever got it back inside the stable: the man who had chosen his own likeness found it riding on his back, from city to city, for years.

The girl called Emilia

There is a point on the map from which everything began, and it is not some foreign capital: it is Florence. In July 1943 a girl walks into the Giustizia e Libertà group of the Partito d'Azione. From that moment she has two names. One her parents gave her; the other is chosen for her by the war, and it is "Emilia."

She serves as a courier. That means carrying from one hand to another what can travel neither by post nor by telephone: messages, directions, people who need escorting. It means crossing an occupied city wearing the air of someone doing nothing in particular. The run lasts months. Nobody signs it, nobody issues her a paper stating where she has been or what she delivered.

Then Florence is liberated, and it is August 1944. The Corpo Volontari della Libertà discharges her with the rank of soldier. The pay comes to 14,570 lire. It is the first money that work ever brings her, but the figure matters less than the paper it is written on: the first recognition of her life set down in black and white, handed to her by an army that, at the very moment it salutes her, is dissolving.

This asymmetry is worth pausing on, because it is the seed of everything. Whoever has fought in hiding is used to the idea that no trace of them should remain: written proof is a risk, memory is entrusted to people, and people get lost. That discharge overturns the rule just this once. Someone writes down a name, a rank, a sum. And the girl who had lived under a false name discovers that a receipt can be had.

From then on it will always be the same demand, on a rising scale: that someone answer, and that the answer last. At first the answers to be wrested out were passwords whispered on a dark staircase; later they will become sentences spoken by men used to saying nothing that truly binds them. The gesture stays the same, though. Show up, ask, refuse to leave until you hold something that outlasts the moment it was said.

Thirty years later, that way of standing before the people in command will look like a profession. At its origin is the run of a courier through the streets of an occupied city, under a name that was never hers, with the early certainty that words, unless fixed somewhere, evaporate before nightfall.

Quando la voce diventò la sua

September 1975. A slim book appears, Letter to a Child Never Born, and something happens that no publisher has planned for: two million copies in Italy, two and a half million around the world, twenty-two languages. Neither a consoling novel nor an essay. A single voice speaking to someone who is not there yet, and millions of people listening.

From then on the writer no longer carries only other people's questions. Her pages become her own theses, and the public follows her everywhere. A Man goes into seven languages. And the twelve books, taken together, reach twenty million copies: a whole library built by a woman who had begun by holding a recorder up to power.

Then comes September 11, and from that day the trilogy is born. The Rage and the Pride passes a million copies in Italy and five hundred thousand across the rest of Europe. The Force of Reason adds eight hundred thousand from 2004 onward. The three titles together, worldwide, reach four million. In France and Germany they climb to the top of the nonfiction lists: two countries that were never hers, two languages that were never hers, and the same recognizable voice line after line.

This is the moment when the mechanism changes direction. For twenty years she had set a chair in front of herself and seated the powerful in it, one after another, the tape turning in plain view on the table. Now the chair is hers. Whoever reads her no longer hears a minister or a general under interrogation — they hear her. And the readers are millions.

L'aula che restò vuota

In France, three associations sued the publisher Plon and the author for incitement to hatred. On November 20, 2002, the press chamber of the Paris tribunal closed the matter without ever opening it: the action was ruled inadmissible for a procedural flaw, a defective notification, an expired deadline. No French judge ever reached the disputed passages. The case collapsed on the threshold, still standing.

That same November, in Switzerland, a judge issued an arrest warrant under the country's laws against racial discrimination. Italy's justice minister, Roberto Castelli, turned down the request, and did so in the name of free expression. What remained was a sheet of paper with a name on it, valid beyond the border and dead on this side of it.

In Italy the path came closer to an actual courtroom. Adel Smith filed a complaint over eighteen passages of "The Force of Reason." The public prosecutor argued against it; the preliminary investigations judge Armando Grasso ordered the indictment anyway. For once, the defendant's chair had a name, a date, an hour attached to it.

The hearing was set for December 18, 2006. The defendant died on September 15. The chair stayed where it was, and no one sat in it.

Over the words that had set Europe alight, there is no ruling on the merits, and there never will be. There is something mocking in that. The woman who had made a career of demanding that others answer in person did not show up for the one appointment where the answering fell to her. Not by choice: by calendar. The questions were written, the place fixed, the hour too. Only the voice was missing.

Le carte rispondono a Firenze

September 15, 2026, will mark twenty years. The papers, meanwhile, are in Florence.

The Fondo Oriana Fallaci was donated by her heir Edoardo Perazzi and is kept at the Regional Council of Tuscany. It is no locked warehouse. You go by appointment: you consult the material, you can book a guided visit, you can request a reproduction of a document or have one mailed to you. First editions, foreign editions, and inscribed copies stay off the lending list.

Behind it lies patient work, the kind nobody sees and that holds everything up. An archival inventory and a catalogue, "Il cuore in Toscana," make the material findable: a mountain of boxes becomes a list you can search. It is the exact reverse of the trade those papers describe. For twenty years she was the one asking the questions, one after another, without mercy. Now her papers sit there, in order, and whoever arrives puts the questions to them instead.

Alongside them stand two more things that look at the same woman from outside. A 2019 documentary, "Illuminate — Oriana Fallaci," directed by Marco Spagnoli. And a biography by Cristina De Stefano, "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend."

The rest is simple. A table, a lamp, a folder waiting to be opened. On one side sits someone with questions ready; the chair across from them, once again, stands empty. The pages answer. They answer in full, with the calm of someone who can no longer stand up and walk out mid-sentence, and every page is a reply nobody can take back.

This is the part of the trade that still bites. The stubborn idea, carried all the way to rudeness, that a person must answer in person for what they say: hand it to no office, leave it to no press release, stay seated until the sentence is finished. The papers in Florence say that someone believed in this enough to preserve every line of it. And each time someone sits down at that table and opens a box, the obligation changes hands.