As the pitcher must Peel Off each pitch with studied skill, the interviewer must pick his words with care. The power of suggestion is too easy to trigger by a blunt or loaded phrase. Pollsters do not ask "How old are you?" - which invites a Jack Benny fib - but "What year were you born?" or "What is your date of birth?" Name-dropping may also color a reply. In 1940, when Charles Lindbergh was unpopular in America, the American Institute of Public Opinion asked subjects, "Lindbergh says that if Germany wins the war in Europe the United States should try to have friendly trade and diplomatic relations with Germany. Do you agree or disagree?" Forty-six 'percent agreed. The same question with "It has been suggested" replacing "Lindbergh says" garnered 57 percent agreement.

It is best to plan the wording of key questions with care. Few interviewers leave the wording to the stir of the moment, under battlefield conditions, the interviewer's prejudices may be irrepressible. If you are doing a story on a possible strike at the local pet food factory, you will have to interview some of the employees who might abandon their duties - and the Alpo generation - if union demands are unmet. You will want an untainted cross-section of opinion, because ultimately the decision to strike or not to strike will depend on the members' vote. A simple, carefully planned question like "Would you go on strike if a call is issued?" should do the trick. But a Johnny-on-the-spot interviewer with a secret sympathy may blurt, "As a member of the union, you would be obligated to go on strike if a call were issued, wouldn't you?" - which stops just short of answering itself.

That is, of course, a leading question, i.e., one that suggests the answer in tone, inflection or phrasing. The leading question may be more statement than question: "You don't care a fig about Roger Ackroyd, do you?" "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" An interviewer who likes to lead when he asks may do so by merely using the definite article "the" rather than the indefinite "a": "Did you see the body?" instead of "Did you see a body?" is provocative.

Exactly what the leading question provokes may depend on the rapport the interviewer has established. A subject tiring of the interview may blurt something he does not mean, and an edgy subject may say something he means all too well. In a terse, talk-to-my-agent interview with Warren Beatty, Rex Reed began a question, "Well, then, would you say -"

"No!" Beatty cut in. "I wouldn't say. I only say what I say."

Alfred Kinsey, the D.A. of sexual research, was a proponent of leading questions, preferably served up in rapid-fire fashion. "The interviewer should not make it easy for a subject to deny his participation in any form of sexual activity," he wrote. "We always begin by asking when they first engaged in such activity."

When they are not gracefully abandoned, however, leading questions can deteriorate from bulldogging to badgering, and produce non-answers Consider this exchange between Theodore Irwin and, Playboy's Hugh Hefner, in Cosmopolitan magazine:

Irwin: At what age do you believe a woman becomes undesirable to men?

Hefner: There's no such age.

Irwin: At what time? At what stage in her life?

Hefner: It simply doesn't exist. In other words, it depends on the woman and it depends on the man.

The leading question requires a subject with a sense of spirit and fight - and an interviewer with a sense of timing. When injected into a touch-and-go exchange, it may disrupt rapport. But in secure surroundings, it may spark a surprisingly honest answer. The difference, perhaps, is in whether the subject sees his interviewer as close-minded or simply un-persuaded The success of the leading question - and the success of much of interviewing - is a matter of trust, of rapport.