A Cautionary Tale about the Dangers of Secrecy and Power: How J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI tried to silence the Free Speech Movement, fire UC President Clark Kerr, and help Ronald Reagan.
Seth Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco and author of the best-selling book Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Subversives traces the FBI's secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960's: the ambitious but neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal University of California's President Clark Kerr.
Subversives is winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; a PEN USA award for research nonfiction; a Ridenhour Award from the Nation Institute; and a national Society of Professional Journalists Sunshine Award.
Rosenfeld was a staff reporter for the San Francisco Examiner from 1984 to 2000, and for the San Francisco Chronicle from 2000 to 2009. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Through rich, converging narratives, Rosenfeld's book vividly evokes the life of Berkeley in the early sixties and shows how the university community became a battleground in an epic struggle between the government and free citizens.
Mr. Rosenfeld's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by CMC's Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' Lerner Lectureship Fund in 1960’s Culture.
Photo credit: Heidi Elise Benson, 2012