Oriana Fallaci

I'd been thinking about Oriana Fallaci a lot recently. I think in the end she became dangerously cranky, demanding an unchanged and unchanging Europe, especially Italy, that would exclude Muslims ("Get off of my lawn, you bastards, I was in the anti-Fascist Resistance!"). But I couldn't argue with her fears that European governments, in making compromises with immigrant groups, may soon come to find their liberal institutions and traditions of equality gravely weakened.

And hell, when she was younger no one could make Henry Kissinger look foolish better than she.

Mr. Kissinger called his experience with Ms. Fallaci “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.” At the height of his power and celebrity in 1972, she had coaxed him to admit that at times he felt like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.” Mr. Kissinger later wrote in his memoirs that the quotation harmed his relations with Nixon.

And I don't know of any other journalist willing to take such liberties with figures such as Ayatollah Khomeini.

A glamorous figure with high cheekbones, a black curl of eyeliner and an ever-present cigarette, she believed that she had the right to ask or say anything, and did so in writings translated into more than 20 languages. In interviews she could be in turn incisive, flattering and blunt, taking her subjects by surprise.

“How do you swim in a chador?” she asked Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, not long after he came to power in Iran. His reply, she wrote in The New York Times, was that she was not obliged to wear one, because it was a garment for proper Islamic women. She tore off her chador, and Ayatollah Khomeini stalked off.