When I am doing an interview with a so-called enemy, I keep my personal opinions to myself and let my questions tell the story. If the person hangs himself or herself with the answers, I have also done my job. In any case I consider it important for a journalist to be able to present the views of people even our own government can’t, or won’t, talk to. It is a way to learn what we are up against. And yes, if Osama bin Laden wanted to do an interview with me, I would jump at the chance. I think any reporter would.
An interview with a head of state used to be considered a great coup and received a good portion of time on television newsmagazine shows. But since the Britney Spearses of the world and sensational crime stories became the big ratings draws, international political leaders, with few exceptions, have come to be considered dull fare, and their time on the air has been cut short. We really seem to care only if they are outrageous and call our president a devil or declare that the Holocaust never existed. Stand up and scream and we will interview you, or be reasonable and unheard.
World leaders have changed as well. They have become much more ratings savvy. Now before they agree to an interview they want to know how much actual airtime they will be given and what the ratings of the program are. In some cases they’ll refuse to talk unless their interview is presented unedited. Most network newsmagazines won’t agree to that.
Don’t panic. I’m not going to subject you to every one of the heads of state I have talked to. Even I glaze over at the prospect. I’m just going to pick a few sound bites (or book bites, in this case), about some of the most important or interesting leaders I’ve interviewed.
Let’s start small, with one of the more entertaining—I hate to call it entertaining, but that’s what it was—an interview in 1986 with the recently deposed dictator of Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc,” and his glamorous wife, Michèle, disparagingly known as the “Dragon Lady.” The couple was being accused by the new government in impoverished Haiti of stealing as much as $400 million from the national treasury, and the Duvaliers wanted to refute those charges from, of all places, a villa in the South of France.
I knew that Mme. Duvalier was hardly going to dispel the charge of thievery when she sat down for the interview wearing a designer suit, a diamond brooch, diamond earrings, and a diamond ring. Hardly a great public relations move. Baby Doc sat there like a big lump of lard. He barely opened his mouth. But Michèle was like a little buzzing bee—buzz, buzz, buzz, talk, talk, talk. “It is said that I have a collection of furs, that I refrigerate my apartment because of the furs, but how can one wear furs in a tropical country?” she trilled. She didn’t have a special room for her furs, she said, the entire palace was air-conditioned, “because one cannot live in Port au Prince without air-conditioning.”
I almost felt sorry for her when she said that. Almost. Did she not know or care that many Haitians had no running water or electricity, let alone air-conditioning; no jobs; no future? Did she realize what she was saying? But when I asked her these questions, she just looked perplexed. And on we went.
A source inside the new Haitian government had provided us with her bills from jewelers all over the world, as well as canceled checks drawn on the national treasury. After the air-conditioning conversation, I showed these to her one by one and, without blinking an eye, she insisted that all the hundreds of thousands of dollars had gone to decorate the airport in Haiti for a visit from Pope John Paul II in 1983! That must have been some airport.
It astonishes me how many celebrities and even heads of state consent to be interviewed, or seek out an interview, and then don’t realize what they sound and look like. As Mme. Duvalier dug herself into an ever deeper hole, I kept thinking, “Why is she talking to me?” But if she didn’t get it, the viewers certainly did. For weeks after it aired, Haitians stopped me on the street in New York to thank me for exposing the Duvaliers. And while it was true that I certainly wanted to expose their extravagance and their disregard for their own people, it was the couple who damaged themselves.
From an interview with a petty woman to conversations with a woman who was by far the most meaningful to me, a woman whose place in history is assured as one of the most important leaders of our time. I am speaking of Great Britain’s first and only female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She held the office from 1979 to 1990, longer than any other British prime minister in this century, including Winston Churchill. I interviewed Mrs. Thatcher more than any other head of state, starting—and this is important—before she became prime minister. I had been interested in talking with her when she was not in a position of great power, which perhaps accounts for all the interviews she later gave me.
She was a leader in every sense of the word—direct, articulate, and authoritative. She was also very opinionated and to many, tough, which earned her the nickname “Iron Lady.” That was hardly surprising, as she was, for the most part, the only woman in a sea of suits and ties. I can still conjure up images of her at this international conference or that economic summit without a hair straying from her bouffant hairdo, wearing a tailored suit, pumps, pearls, and carrying a purse.
Like her or not, she transformed the social system of Great Britain, the ultimate Conservative. She was, however, a prime minister and not a queen, and as such, she lived surprisingly modestly.
In 1987 she gave me a tour for 20/20 of 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence in London. The downstairs was very grand and imposing. Up a flight of stairs were her living quarters. She and her husband, Denis, a retired chemist, lived, as she described it, “above the store.”
Her living room was small and undistinguished. She was a great admirer of the modern sculptor Henry Moore, and had one of his smaller pieces prominently displayed, as well as some sketches his niece had sent her. “You must conserve your heritage, but some of the modern design I think is fantastic,” she said. She showed me the book she was reading: Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind. The first, she told me, was actually a tree, whose bark produces quinine and cures malaria. “I’m in the middle of tea now,” she said. “I haven’t got on to the potato.”
Speaking of potatoes, the kitchen, where the prime minister cooked for her husband on the weekends, was tiny. “In Britain there is no domestic staff provided for prime ministers. They are expected to have wives,” she said.
Out of the kitchen, she had her own definition of leadership. I sometimes quote her when I am speaking to audiences on the subject. The advice came from her father and an early lesson he taught her: “You never just go and do something because someone else is doing it. That is wrong. You never just follow the crowd for the sake of following the crowd because you don’t like to stand out. You make up your own mind about what is right. And then you try to persuade other people to follow you. It was quite a tough thing for a child, but it was very, very firm in my father’s upbringing. It has stood me in very good stead since.”
Well, Mrs. Thatcher certainly did her own thing, maybe too much so, because she was finally turned out of office in 1990 after a bloody fight within her own political party. Her country didn’t turn against her. Her party did. But unlike in our country where an ex-president and first lady receive Secret Service protection and expenses for an office staff, a former prime minister in Great Britain receives nothing. When she was ousted, Mrs. Thatcher had no living quarters. She ended up in an apartment lent to her by the widow of Henry Ford II, and she paid for her own secretary and assistants. For a while she was deeply depressed, not surprising after all those years of power.
She articulated her feelings in a poignant interview with me four months after she left office. “It’s the habit of years which get you,” she told me. “The telephone goes and immediately you think, ‘Oh goodness me, the United Nations is sitting. I wonder what’s happened.’ You jump up to answer the phone. And then you realize that it’s no longer you anymore.”
This was a very important lesson, one, however, which I thi
nk I already knew. There does come that day for most of us when “it’s no longer you anymore.” That is why you must have good old and loving friends who are truly there when fame and celebrity are gone.
My last interview with Margaret Thatcher was in 1993 when she was in New York promoting her memoir, The Downing Street Years. Her official title by then was Margaret, Lady Thatcher, Baroness of Kesteven, having been elevated to the peerage by Queen Elizabeth. She was her same outspoken self, even criticizing President George H. W. Bush for not pursuing Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. “When you’ve embarked on something, it’s best to finish it and finish it properly,” she said. Saddam Hussein should have been “publicly humiliated” and “made to surrender.” “If you tackle an aggressor or a dictator, which is what Saddam Hussein is, they’ve got to be humiliated,” she said. “They’ve got to be seen as defeated in battle.” Obviously Bush didn’t take her advice.
Since I saw her in triumph as prime minister when her advice was usually taken and in despair when she was turned out of office, it has left me with a particularly soft feeling about her. I feel privileged to have known her as I did.
My interview with Saddam Hussein took place ten years before the first Gulf War. The year was 1981. Israel had just bombed Iraq’s fledgling nuclear reactor, and I went to Baghdad to interview the Iraqi president. It was his first interview for American television, and I did it for ABC’s then Sunday news program, Issues and Answers. I wasn’t frightened of Saddam Hussein, but I was anxious when we came in for a landing to find virtually no lights on the runway. Iraq was in the middle of a war with its neighbor, Iran, and Baghdad was in a blackout. Our interview was conducted in the darkened presidential palace in Baghdad, which would be taken over by coalition forces after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
What do I remember about Saddam Hussein? He wore a black suit and looked serious and imposing. He spoke calmly, rarely raising his voice as he condemned the United States for the Israeli bombing of the reactor. “This aggression was carried out by an American armed weapon,” he said through an interpreter. “And that’s why all the reactions, all the criticisms, and all the decisions to express this anger and this hatred are legitimate. I consider them as aggressors.” He did not even support a Palestinian state in Israel because, to him, there was no Israel. It was all Palestine, and who were the Israelis? Palestinian Jews.
I guess one might ask how I, being Jewish, felt hearing these remarks. The truth is that I felt great concern for Israel but nothing personal. I’d heard similar remarks from Arabs before and would again. To me it went with the territory or the person.
So I was not surprised to hear similar remarks from another bitter enemy then of the United States and Israel, Col. Mu‘ammar Qaddafi of Libya. He and I talked first in January 1989. I had tried for ages to get an interview with him, so I leaped at the offer when he finally agreed.
I had to get a special waiver from the U.S. government to go to Libya because it was then considered a terrorist state and, as such, out of bounds to Americans. The United States had linked the country to the 1986 bombing of a West Berlin nightclub that killed two U.S. servicemen. We responded by launching retaliatory air strikes. Qaddafi’s house in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, had been all but destroyed, his sons wounded, and his fifteen-month-old adopted daughter, Hana, killed.
The exact time and place for the interview had not been set but my producer, Martin Clancy, and I had barely gotten off the plane when uniformed men approached us and said that the colonel wanted to do the interview right away. It is interesting to me how many heads of state wanted to do interviews with me at night, and then usually kept me waiting. Maybe it was when they had the most time or maybe it was a matter of control. But in Libya, our camera crew, mostly coming from London and Italy, had not even arrived. We promised to be ready the next day. “Where,” we asked, “would the interview take place?” “In the colonel’s tent,” we were told.
The colonel’s tent, it turned out, had thick carpets covering the sand and was in a small oasis smack in the middle of Tripoli. You would never have found it except for a guard sitting under a palm tree. Inside the property were more palm trees and adult and baby camels wandering around. (Qaddafi evidently relived his nomadic Bedouin childhood by drinking camel’s milk.) The tent was set up close to the shattered house the Americans had bombed, which was preserved as a kind of shrine. His daughter’s broken crib was still there in the second-floor bedroom, and near the entrance were the helmets of two American Air Force pilots whose planes had been shot down.
The inside of the tent was bright orange and green, green being Libya’s national color and the traditional color of Islam. I was wearing a pink knit suit. Qaddafi arrived wearing a white suit, a green shirt, a white cape lined in green, and white alligator mules. He looked absolutely stunning but all I could think of was that between his white suit with the green, the green-and-orange tent, and my pink suit, the viewers were going to have an awful headache.
I disliked Qaddafi because of his support of terrorist groups and his determination to drive Israel into the sea, but in the two hours we spent taping the interview, he answered every question and betrayed no hostility toward me. Neither did I to him. He did, however, have a curious posture. Never once did he look at me. Occasionally he would look to his left, where his interpreter was sitting (though he seemed to understand a good deal of English and sometimes would correct the interpreter). Still, I would look him in the face, and he would look to the left or down or up, but never once did he meet my eyes. I thought it might be because I am a woman, but my colleague George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed him some years later, told me he had the same experience.
I began my questioning of Qaddafi by asking simply, “What do you think is the greatest misconception about you in our country?” He answered in a long, rambling diatribe against the Western media, which, he claimed, would “show pictures of me next to skulls, to dead bodies, and they’re not reflecting the true picture of me.” I politely disagreed. “Your misconceptions about us,” I said, “are as great as our misconception about you.”
The misconception theme continued, which gave me the opening to ask the question that so many people in my country were wondering about: Was he insane? Seems to me that whenever we don’t like a foreign leader, we question his sanity, but I had to ask. I tried to phrase it so it wouldn’t sound too hostile. “While we are talking about misconceptions, can I ask you something directly which may seem rude? In our country we read that you are mad. Why do you think this is?”
Instead of taking offense he threw back his head and laughed. His convoluted answer about being loved by “the majority of ordinary people in the four corners of the globe” was not necessarily reassuring, but at least he didn’t kick me out. Indeed, he seemed quite satisfied at the end of the interview and asked if there was anything else I wanted. I said two things. First, I wanted to visit what had been reported in America as a factory for creating chemical weapons and other WMD, but which his people told us was making medicines; second, I wanted to meet his family, particularly his wife. “No Westerner has seen them on camera,” I said, “and meeting them might help people understand you.”
On the first request he said that he himself did not have the power to make those arrangements. Oh, yeah? Instead, he would ask the commissioner in charge of the plant if it was possible to visit. It turned out, although we asked again and again during our three-day stay, that it wasn’t. So much for that. As for meeting his family, Qaddafi said he would think about that and let me know.
I waited for five hours in my hotel room, passing the time by eating Libya’s delicious blood oranges. (Tripoli is in fact a beautiful city with a busy bazaar, welcoming people, and beautiful beaches.) Then came the knock on the door. “Come immediately,” said one of Qaddafi’s aides. And back we went to the tent, where Qaddafi’s wife, Safiya, and four of their six young children were waiting.
Safiya Qaddafi, his second wife, was a
tall, stunning woman. Her children, lined up on either side of her, looked at me with hatred and fear in their eyes. I was the dreaded American from the country that had killed their little sister. “Our children consider all Americans like monsters, like Dracula,” Safiya said to me. “When the people here want to get their children’s attention, they say, ‘Look out or the Americans will come for you.’” Safiya, a former nurse in a Tripoli hospital, had met Qaddafi during his recuperation from an automobile accident. They fell in love and married after he left the hospital, and became the parents of five sons and one daughter. “If my husband was really such a villain,” Mrs. Qaddafi said to me, “do you think I would have stayed with him until now?”
At the time of this interview Qaddafi was, as I have mentioned, our sworn enemy. But he has done an about-face. In a dramatic shift in December 2003, our former terrorist foe became our new best friend when Libya announced it would give up its nuclear arms program along with other WMD. Among the reasons for Qaddafi’s change of heart, one columnist wrote, was the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons by U.S. forces in Iraq, and Safiya Qaddafi’s demands that her husband do more to protect their now grown sons from the same fate. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, it wouldn’t be the first time that a strong wife influenced her husband.
The interviews with Saddam Hussein and Mu‘ammar Qaddafi may have been two of the more exotic conversations I have had, but with Jiang Zemin, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission, I met another leader who at the time was hardly considered a pal of the United States. I sat down to talk with him in Beijing in May 1990. A year had passed since the famous fifty-day student demonstration for democratic reforms had been crushed in Tiananmen Square by Chinese security forces. It became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, though no one was sure how many people had died. Heads had rolled in the Chinese leadership, and Jiang Zemin was the new man in charge.
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