And Yet Essays – – Christopher Hitchens (1)

The book is called Interview with History. That title didn’t suffer from an excess of modesty, but then, neither did its author. People began to sneer and gossip, saying that Oriana was just a confrontational bitch who used her femininity to get results, and who goaded men into saying incriminating things.

I remember having it whispered to me that she would leave the transcript of the answers untouched but rephrase her original questions so that they seemed more penetrating than they had really been. As it happens, I found an opportunity to check that last rumor. During her interview with President Makarios, of Cyprus, who was also a Greek Orthodox patriarch, she had asked him straight-out if he was overfond of women, and more or less got him to admit that his silence in response to her direct questioning was a confession.

(The paragraphs from Interview with History here are too long to quote, but show a brilliantly incisive line of interrogation.) Many Greek Cypriots of my acquaintance were scandalized, and quite certain that their beloved leader would never have spoken that way. I knew the old boy slightly, and took the chance to ask him if he had read the relevant chapter. “Oh yes,” he said, with perfect gravity. “It is just as I remember it.”

Occasionally, Oriana’s interviews actually influenced history, or at the least the pace and rhythm of events. Interviewing Pakistan’s leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto just after the war with India over Bangladesh, she induced him to say what he really thought of his opposite number in India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi (“a diligent drudge of a schoolgirl, a woman devoid of initiative and imagination . . . She should have half her father’s talent!”).

Demanding a full copy of the text, Mrs. Gandhi thereupon declined to attend the proposed signing of a peace agreement with Pakistan. Bhutto had to pursue Oriana, through a diplomatic envoy, all the way to Addis Ababa, to which she had journeyed to interview Emperor Haile Selassie. Bhutto’s ambassador begged her to disown the Gandhi parts, and hysterically claimed that the lives of 600 million people were at stake if she did not.

One of the hardest things to resist, for reporters and journalists, is the appeal to the world- shaking importance of their work and the need for them to be “responsible.” Oriana declined to oblige, and Mr. Bhutto duly had to eat his plate of crow. Future “access” to the powerful meant absolutely nothing to her: she acted as if she had one chance to make the record and so did they.

Perhaps only one Western journalist ever managed to interview Ayatollah Khomeini twice.

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles Why Orwell Matters No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton Letters to a Young Contrarian The Trial of Henry Kissinger Thomas Jefferson: Author of America Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever Hitch-22: A Memoir Mortality PAMPHLETS Karl Marx and the Paris Commune The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq ESSAYS Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays Arguably: Essays COLLABORATIONS Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner) Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (with Edward Said) When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi) International Territory: The United Nations, 1945–95 (photographs by Adam Bartos) Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend) Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (edited with Christopher Caldwell) Is Christianity Good for the World?

(with Douglas Wilson) Hitchens vs. Blair: The Munk Debate on Religion (edited by Rudyard Griffiths) 1kitap1.com/en 1kitap1.com/en First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2015 First published in the United States in 2015 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2015 by Estate of Christopher Hitchens All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 76011 007 9 eISBN 978 1 92526 873 7 The essays in this book originally appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, Slate, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, The Wilson Quarterly.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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