Seth Rosenfeld on Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Powe

SETH ROSENFELD
SUBVERSIVES:
The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power
in conversation with Oscar Villalon

Seth Rosenfeld traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Through these converging narratives, the award-winning investigative reporter tells a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists. He reveals how the FBI’s covert operations -- led by Reagan’s friend J. Edgar Hoover -- helped ignite an era of protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically. At the same time, he vividly evokes the life of Berkeley in the early sixties -- and shows how the university community, a site of the forward-looking idealism of the period, became a battleground in an epic struggle between the government and free citizens.

The FBI spent more than $1 million trying to block the release of the secret files on which SUBVERSIVES is based, but Rosenfeld compelled the bureau to release more than 250,000 pages, providing an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation’s history.

Part history, part biography, and part police procedural, Subversives reads like a true-crime mystery as it provides a fresh look at the legacy of the sixties, sheds new light on one of America’s most popular presidents, and tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of secrecy and unchecked power.

Seth Rosenfeld was for many years an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where his article about the free speech movement won seven national awards. He lives in San Francisco.

Oscar Villalon is managing editor of ZYZZYVA. His reviews and essays have appeared in VQR, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR.org. He is former book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.