How do you interview a dictator? How do you pin down someone unused to being challenged, a leader familiar only with the sound of his own rhetoric echoing off the palace walls?
We saw Mike Wallace try Sunday in a 60 Minutes interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “old hand at journalism,” as Ahmadinejad referred to him, used his trademark gruffness to break down the smiling defenses of the Iranian.
The reviews have been split down the middle. Some thought Wallace was too combative. CBS’s Public Eye blog quoted one of its readers yesterday: “I thought Mike Wallace was out of line and I thought the president did a great job of handling rude, and confrontational questions well.”
Others suggested Wallace hadn’t been tough enough, criticizing him for even conducting the interview in the first place. Again, the Public Eye quotes a reader who represents this view, writing, “It’s a real shame that CBS has no allegiance to the U.S., especially while we’re at war. Why don’t you ever show any of the positive things that are happening because of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of giving a known terrorist a platform to spew his garbage?”
Both these lines of critique seem off the mark. Watching the full, unedited video of the interview, we’ve arrived at our own criticism of Wallace and his interview techniques.
Ahmadinejad himself put it best when Wallace asked him about the deliberations then going on at the United Nations to produce a cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah:
Wallace: Who doesn’t want a cease-fire?
Ahmadinejad: That question tells me that you haven’t read a newspaper recently.
It’s hard for us to agree with a man who has been funding terror and continues to unabashedly pursue a nuclear program while calling for Israel’s destruction, but we can’t really quarrel with him on this point.
It’s not so much that Wallace seemed totally uninformed, but rather that he abandoned substance for style. He certainly did a good job appearing to hammer the Iranian president. Wallace was endlessly cutting him off, waving his hands in the air dismissively and reprimanding the calm Ahmadinejad for giving answers that were too long. To the casual viewer, Wallace seemed to be giving Ahmadinejad a hard time.
But listening to the interview, minus Wallace’s theatrics, the “old hand” never really pressed the president about anything. Instead, Ahmadinejad spun away. Asked about his stated support for suicide bombings, he waxed poetic about the concept of “martyrdom.” Wallace stopped him, but never pressed him on the central point — whether or not Iran supports attacks on civilian targets. Wallace asked him about Iran’s role in Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad went off on the “Zionist entity” and how Hezbollah’s attacks were a response to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. But what about pushing him to explain what occupation he was speaking about? After all, Israel left south Lebanon in 2000.
There were many more moments like that. Wallace struck a defiant pose, but didn’t really pry any answers out of the president. True, Ahmadinejad proved himself to be pretty adept at projecting a public face that seemed charming and accessible, and he answered any potential tough questions with his own line of rhetoric. But this is no reason for Wallace to leave so many openings where he could have asked for clarification or precision.
Wallace even seemed to admit that the interview did not go exactly as he would have wished. In a postmortem he said, “The tone of the interview was set by [Ahmadinejad] … Some people when you talk to them, they in a sense take charge of the interview. He wanted to do that.”
It’s clear to us that he did in fact take charge, and not because it was impossible to corner him. Ahmadinejad took control because he was never really put on the spot.
In another candid moment, the Iranian president seemed to know he was gliding through this one. Looking like he was running out of questions on his list, Wallace just looked at Ahmadinejad, shook his head like a stern grandfather and said, “You’re an interesting fellow, aren’t you?”
Ahmadinejad smiled and answered, “You are trying to get an insight, but with these questions you will not succeed.”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.