The 10 Conversations That Changed Public Life: A History of the Great Interview
The interview has a history, and like most histories of forms, it is also a history of practitioners who understood what the form could do and pushed it further than anyone had before. The conversations below are not the most famous interviews — though some of them are extremely famous — but the ones that changed something: how we understood the subject, how we understood the world the subject inhabited, or how we understood what an interview could be.
1. Alex Haley Interviews Malcolm X, Playboy, May 1963
By the time Haley’s conversation with Malcolm X ran in Playboy in 1963, Malcolm had become one of the most feared and most misunderstood public figures in America. The mainstream media had covered him primarily as a symbol of Black separatism and racial hatred; the actual content of his thought — his critique of American liberalism, his analysis of the economic dimensions of racism, his complex relationship with the Nation of Islam’s theology — had been largely unreported.
Haley’s interview changed this. Working from the principle that Malcolm’s ideas deserved to be engaged rather than dismissed, Haley asked him to explain — at length, with evidence, with the opportunity to respond to objections — what he actually believed. The result was the most nuanced portrait of Malcolm that had appeared in any mainstream American publication.
What the interview revealed — and what the longer engagement that became The Autobiography elaborated — was that Malcolm was not what his opponents had depicted: not simply a purveyor of racial hatred, but a sophisticated analyst of American racism whose rage was, at every point, responsive to specific injustices that the interviewer could verify.
The interview also showed something about Haley’s character: he conducted it as a Black man interviewing a man who shared many of his experiences of American racism but drew different conclusions, and he navigated that similarity and that difference with extraordinary grace.
2. The Paris Review Interviews Ernest Hemingway, Spring 1958
The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” interviews — which began in 1953 and continue today — are the most important archive of writers talking about their craft in existence. The series has included conversations with William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and nearly every significant writer of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The Hemingway interview, conducted by George Plimpton in 1958, established the template that the best of the series have followed: a conversation between a writer who has thought seriously about their craft and an interviewer who has read everything they’ve written. The result is a conversation about process — about how the thing gets made — that is as illuminating about the subject of writing as anything any of these writers produced.
Hemingway on his famous minimalism: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.” He had said this before, in various forms, but the interview gave it the context that made it comprehensible: the iceberg principle was not simply a stylistic preference but an epistemological commitment, a belief that what is left out shapes the reader’s experience as much as what is included.
The Paris Review interviews are one of the most important resources in literary culture — a resource that is free, online, and almost entirely unread by the people who would most benefit from it.
3. Edward R. Murrow Interviews Senator Joseph McCarthy, CBS, 1954
The See It Now episode of March 9, 1954, in which Edward R. Murrow systematically dismantled Joseph McCarthy’s credibility through the technique of confronting McCarthy with his own contradictions — using footage of McCarthy’s own statements, allowing him to hang himself with his own words — is not an interview in the conventional sense. It is a prosecutorial argument that used the tools of broadcast journalism.
What Murrow demonstrated was that journalism’s function is not simply to record what powerful people say but to hold what they say against what they have previously said and against verifiable fact. This seems obvious now. In 1954, with McCarthy at the height of his power and most television journalists afraid of his retaliation, it was not obvious at all.
McCarthy’s response — that Murrow was a Communist sympathizer — was the only response available to a man whose actual claims had been exposed. McCarthy’s power collapsed within months of the broadcast. Whether Murrow’s program caused the collapse or simply marked its beginning is contested by historians; what is not contested is that it demonstrated what broadcast journalism could do when it chose to.
4. Dick Cavett Interviews Muhammad Ali, Multiple Appearances, 1968-1971
Ali’s appearances on The Dick Cavett Show between 1968 and 1971 — during the period when he had been stripped of his boxing title for refusing military induction — are among the most extraordinary documents of that era. What Cavett provided was something most interviewers of the period were unwilling to provide: genuine intellectual respect for Ali’s arguments.
Ali’s case against the Vietnam War — “No Viet Cong ever called me n*****” — was as simple and devastating a political argument as anyone made in that period, and it was an argument that required a certain kind of interviewer to make fully audible. Cavett asked follow-up questions that allowed Ali to develop his position; he did not perform discomfort or suggest that Ali’s politics were inappropriate for a boxing champion to hold.
The interviews also showed something that the boxing footage never quite captured: Ali’s intelligence, his wit, his capacity for sustained philosophical argument. The man who explained to Cavett’s studio audience why he had refused to serve in Vietnam was performing no part of his identity. He was simply, clearly, arguing what he believed. The fact that he was right has become clearer with each passing decade.
5. Oriana Fallaci Interviews Henry Kissinger, New Republic, 1972
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was the most confrontational interviewer of the 20th century — and not in the sense of being merely aggressive. She combined thorough preparation, genuine moral conviction, and an almost theatrical willingness to provoke that produced reactions from her subjects that no one else could.
Her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger is the one Kissinger himself later called one of the most disastrous experiences of his public life — because Fallaci led him, through a sequence of flattering questions about his political philosophy, to compare himself to a cowboy, arriving alone on his horse to resolve international crises. Kissinger agreed enthusiastically with the comparison. Fallaci published it. Kissinger became a global laughingstock.
What the incident demonstrates is a specific interviewing technique: allowing the subject to reveal their own vanity by providing a flattering frame and watching them step into it. Fallaci was the consummate practitioner, and the Kissinger interview is the canonical example of what happens when a vain man meets an interviewer who understands vanity completely.
6. Howard Stern Interviews Eminem, The Howard Stern Show, 2004
The case for Howard Stern as a great interviewer is routinely dismissed by people who have never listened carefully to his interviews, because his reputation as a shock jock obscures his genuine skills: patience, preparation, comfort with silence, and a specific ability to create an environment of such comfortable vulgarity that guests drop the performance of their public persona.
His 2004 interview with Eminem — at the time the best-selling recording artist in the world, known for fierce public defensiveness — is the best example. Stern had prepared extensively, had listened to the albums carefully, and understood the biographical context of the lyrics. Within the first thirty minutes, Eminem was talking about his mother, his mental health, his marriage, and his relationship to his daughter in terms that he had never used in any other public forum.
The explanation is specific: Stern’s studio is a no-judgment environment. His audience expects and enjoys candor; his guests know that they will not be judged by the standards they would be held to in a mainstream media interview. This creates the conditions for genuine disclosure in people who have learned to protect themselves in every other setting.
7. David Frost Interviews Richard Nixon, 1977
The four television interviews David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977 — three years after Nixon’s resignation — produced the most extended public examination of a disgraced political leader in broadcast history. The moment everyone remembers — Nixon’s semi-acknowledgment that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” — was the product of careful strategic preparation by Frost and his research team.
What most accounts miss is that Frost’s team had spent months researching exactly which pieces of evidence, which specific documents, Nixon had not been confronted with and which he could not explain away. The interview was constructed to lead Nixon through increasingly specific questions until he reached the point where his prepared defenses did not apply. The admission, when it came, was the result of a prepared ambush — and it was a masterpiece of adversarial journalism.
The dramatic recreation of the preparation process in Peter Morgan’s play (and later film) Frost/Nixon captures the essential truth: that the interview was a gladiatorial contest between two highly prepared adversaries, and that Nixon, who was the more intelligent and experienced of the two, underestimated what Frost had prepared.
8. Charlie Rose Interviews Toni Morrison, PBS, Multiple Times
The Rose-Morrison conversations across the 1980s and 1990s constitute one of the most sustained engagements between an interviewer and a major writer in American broadcast history. What Rose offered Morrison — who was otherwise not a frequent talk-show presence — was the unusual gift of genuine literary seriousness.
Their conversations about Beloved, about Jazz, about the nature of her project and its relationship to African American experience and to American literature more broadly, produced material that is more illuminating than most academic criticism of her work. Morrison was a brilliant, impatient conversationalist who did not suffer fools — which meant that the quality of the interviewer’s preparation was directly visible in the quality of her answers.
(The later revelations about Rose’s conduct with women in his professional environment do not erase the quality of the conversations; they complicate our relationship to them, which is itself a lesson about the relationship between a person’s work and their character.)
9. Marc Maron Interviews President Obama, WTF Podcast, 2015
When a sitting American president sat in a podcaster’s garage in Los Angeles and talked for an hour about his life and his politics, it was an event without precedent — and it produced something that the formal press conferences and prepared statements had not: a sense of what Obama was actually like in conversation, what he found funny, what frustrated him, what he was uncertain about.
The Obama-Maron conversation worked because Maron is a genuinely good interviewer — curious, self-disclosing, comfortable with vulnerability — and because the garage setting signaled to everyone involved that the normal rules of presidential communication did not apply here. Obama talked about race in ways he rarely did in official settings. He talked about the limits of his power. He talked about his daughters.
The conversation also demonstrated what podcast interviewing can do that broadcast television cannot: because the audience for WTF is self-selected for exactly the kind of long-form, candid conversation the format provides, the guest knows that the performed version of themselves will not satisfy. The audience came for something else.
10. Zadie Smith Interviews Salman Rushdie, Various Venues, 2000s
The onstage literary conversation — two writers, a moderator, an audience of the converted — is often the worst form of interview, because both parties are too sophisticated to say anything unguarded and the audience is too appreciative to push back. The Smith-Rushdie conversations are an exception.
What distinguishes them is that Smith, who is thirty years younger than Rushdie and has read him with critical attention since her own student years, disagrees with him about significant things — about style, about the relationship between politics and literature, about what the novel is for — and says so. Rushdie, who has spent his career being either attacked or defended, finds genuine engagement more interesting than either, and the conversations produce something that neither hagiography nor polemic can: the intellectual friction that makes ideas legible.
The best of these conversations were published in The Guardian and are available online. They are a demonstration that the literary conversation, done with intellectual seriousness, is a form that can produce genuine insight — about the specific writers involved, about literature, and about the arguments that serious readers should be having.
Further reading on Playboy-X: