Archive - August 26, 2012

The August 17, 2012 issue of the Chronicle Review, published with The Chronicle of Higher Education, has an excerpt from Seth Rosenfeld’s new book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rosenfeld was for many years an investigative reporter for both The San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.The book is about Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley’s most notorious campus agitator, and Clark Kerr, the president of the university. It is also about Ronald Reagan and most importantly, J. Edgar Hoover, who in the 1950s and 1960s ran a secret operation within the FBI called the “Responsibilities Program” to hunt down professors whose political views were deemed by J. Edgar as unacceptable. Frustrated in 1964 by the successful uprisings by students at Berkeley, Hoover was eager to find a collaborator in Reagan . . .