From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
The Perils of the Interview
Bill O'Reilly questioning Saddam? I'd rather have Rather.
Dan Rather has been mauled by critics all week.
His interview with Saddam Hussein, say some, was unpatriotic. That is, of course, a very silly view. Other, non-Neanderthal critics say that while the interview was a great "get" for Mr. Rather and CBS, his performance was lamentable. They accuse him of not being hard enough on the Iraqi tyrant. Nancy Franklin, writing in the New Yorker, called the interview "Operation Desert Kiss-Up"; and Mike Barnicle, to name just one other detractor, remarked in the New York Daily News that Mr. Rather "apparently confused Saddam Hussein with Winston Churchill."
I beg to differ. I thought Mr. Rather served up an instructive hour of television and offered Americans a compelling opportunity to peer, from up close, at a ghoul (a point he hinted at in a piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, two days after the interview aired). Appearing on Paula Zahn's CNN morning show--in the way, so frequent these days, that newscasters are interviewed by other newscasters--Mr. Rather revealed that his next project is to get time on air with another ghoul, Kim Jong Il. If he does that, one can be certain that he will be pilloried again by the commentariat for "coddling" a tyrant.
Mr. Rather's mien is courteous, and he did not depart from it in the time he spent in Saddam's company. One might have wished that his language had been a little more spare, a little less courtly, but those who suggest that he was like some Mitford girl in a suit, gushing before a Hitler, are strangers to the world of nuance.
Years of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews--the anti-Rathers, as it were--have made us accustomed to a particular style of interview, that of barked questions and interjections, of put-downs and one-upmanship. If Mr. Rather had pulled an O'Reilly on Saddam Hussein, one can be sure that the latter would have terminated the interview at once: "Tell me, Saddam, how can you sleep at night knowing that you've gassed all those kids?" Session over.
An episode of that sort would, no doubt, give the aggressive interlocutor certain boasting rights for a while. "Man, I showed that Saddam where to get off." But what of that, beyond the theatrical memory? Mr. Rather chose, instead, to calibrate his questions in a way that would raise serious issues without raising the tyrant's hackles.
In any case, no one could have expected seriously that this would be a forensic exercise. No amount of probing would have made Saddam reveal new information or give us a glimpse of his military strategy. This was not an interview like the one Jim Lehrer had--or might have had--with President Clinton in January 1998, on the day Ken Starr announced that he was investigating allegations that the president suborned perjury. "There is no improper relationship," Mr. Clinton told Mr. Lehrer, of his ties to Monica Lewinsky. Mr. Lehrer let the present tense slip by, unchallenged.
In contrast, Mr. Rather's interview with Saddam had no overtly investigative purpose. It was intended to provide us with a portrait of Saddam. And in giving us the opportunity to watch Saddam perform--I use that verb intentionally--Mr. Rather may have done us all a great favor.
We learned, from the interview, how canny Saddam can be, how much of a dissembler. (How could he not be hiding his weapons, I thought, as I watched him, when he is so good at hiding his real persona?) We knew he was a thug already. What we did not grasp--or, at least, had not seen with our own eyes--was the clinical polish of his menace. The man is not a comic-book baddie, and we needed to learn that--the better to understand the nature of our foe, and of the conflict with Iraq.
There is, of course, a more transcendent question here, which is the one of whether there are men so diabolical that they should not, ever, be consorted with. Would we have stomached an interview with Adolf Hitler in the midst of World War II? In that time, and in the context of an ongoing war, probably not. Besides, the enormity of the man's evil was well understood (although the postwar revelations were still staggering).
In Saddam's case, I am not sure that the American public knows enough about the man against whom we could soon be at war. Watching him talk to one of our own, sensing his mind whir as he plotted his feints and dodges, was like receiving a tutorial on the subject of human darkness. Can anyone say that he does not know Saddam better, or that he dislikes him less, after the Rather interview?
I think not. So let's be grateful for the lesson.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
