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Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power
Subversives traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures who clashed 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 Seth Rosenfeld tells a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists all centered on the nation's leading public university. Rosenfeld vividly evokes the campus counterculture, as 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.
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 reveal more than 300,000 pages, providing an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation.
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 1960s, sheds new light on one of America’s most popular presidents, and tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked secrecy and power.
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 reveal more than 300,000 pages, providing an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation.
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 1960s, sheds new light on one of America’s most popular presidents, and tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked secrecy and power.
752 pages, Hardcover
First published June 5, 2012
80 people are currently reading
2018 people want to read
About the author
Seth Rosenfeld
1 book12 followersSeth Rosenfeld is freelance journalist based in San Francisco. A former reporter for the San Franisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle for 25 years, he is winner of the George Polk Award and other professional honors. Please contact him through this email address:
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
March 11, 2019
Seth Rosenfeld spent nearly three decades researching and writing this impressive book, suing repeatedly to get FBI files under FOIA and encountering agency obstruction all the way. Understandably, as he paints an unflattering portrait of the Bureau’s efforts to stamp out California-Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and its offshoots. Rosenfeld details the development of Berkeley’s student leftists in the ‘50s during its anti-HUAC protests, then its maturation under Mario Savio’s leadership in the mid-’60s and its full-blown radicalization during the Vietnam Era. His portrait of Savio and friends, while not uncritical, is certainly warm and accepting of their idealism, presenting them as a progressive force for change. Arrayed against them are J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, who tries to undermine their influence by means fair and foul (infiltration, wiretaps and poison pen sabotage campaigns), and Ronald Reagan, movie star (and FBI informant)-turned-California Governor whose crude anticommunist, law and order politics made him a hero to conservatives everywhere. Rivals Tom Wells’ The War Within as one of the definitive accounts of ‘60s protest movements and the backlash they generated; if anything, its focus on Berkeley allows for an even richer, more detailed portrait.
February 29, 2024
Just when you thought you knew everything about how foul and loathsome a character Ronald Reagan really was, here comes Seth Rosenfeld’s scathing and meticulously documented history of the Gipper’s collusion with J. Edgar Hoover and their effort to stifle the likes of Mario Savio and other political dissidents at Berkeley and in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Using thousands of pages of declassified material that he won access to in a lengthy court battle with the FBI, Rosenfeld paints a picture of Reagan as he truly was: fink, stooge, reactionary, demagogue. Read along as Reagan and Hoover employ a squad of college-educated goons to spy on and intimidate anyone who steps out of line. Learn how Ed Meese makes his bones busting pot smokers and winds down after a hard day’s work by listening to a police scanner. Best of all, learn how Reagan was colluding with Hoover from day one in his role as SAG union leader, how from the very beginning (despite his own statements to the contrary…) he named names and ratted out his own friends in Hollywood. By turns both nauseating and hilarious. A swell read.
April 6, 2017
New Proof How J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan Stirred Up Violence in 1960s Berkeley
We’ve known for some time that the FBI and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial administration were involved in the sometimes-violent conflicts that roiled Berkeley in the 60s. What we didn’t know — or, at least, what I didn’t know — was that J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan were personally and directly engaged not just in monitoring but in managing the secret government campaigns that helped raise the temperature to the boiling point again and again. Seth Rosenfeld’s exhaustively researched recent book, Subversives, documents this story in often minute detail yet manages to keep it eminently readable.
Anyone who lived through those times as a sentient adult will surely remember some of the seminal events: the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, lodged in memory through the iconic footage of students being fire-hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall; the 1964 Free Speech Movement that pushed the University of California at Berkeley into the forefront of student protest, brought Mario Savio to prominence, and began to change public attitudes about the police; the 1965 Vietnam Day Teach-In that fastened students’ attention on the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam and initiated the public’s disillusionment with the U.S. government; and the violent clash over People’s Park in 1969, which led to the death of young James Rector and confirmed in so many minds the view that law enforcement officials were out of control.
Subversives breaks new ground in several ways because of Rosenfeld’s dogged, three-decade pursuit of classified government files that cast new light on the events themselves as well as the major players whose decisions drove them. The author keeps the story from getting out of hand by maintaining a tight focus on Hoover, Reagan, Savio, and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr.
In Subversives, Rosenfeld relates the roles (hitherto largely undocumented) of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan in these familiar events, demonstrating the ruthlessness with which both men pursued “Communists” and their lack of respect for the truth. We see Hoover aggressively pushing his agents to seek out embarrassing personal details — largely rumors — about Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and their collaborators, illegally passing the information along to Right Wing publications, and later citing it as documented truth in reports to the President and to the public. We see Reagan eagerly seeking out the FBI to inform on his rivals in Hollywood and secretly naming names behind closed doors with HUAC, destroying the careers of talented actors, directors, and writers because he disagreed with their political beliefs. From a vantage-point of half a century, both men appear to be thoroughly unscrupulous and careless about the sometimes tragic consequences of the action they directed from their privileged positions.
Seth Rosenfeld, a winner of the coveted George Polk Award and now a staff member of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, was previously an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.
We’ve known for some time that the FBI and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial administration were involved in the sometimes-violent conflicts that roiled Berkeley in the 60s. What we didn’t know — or, at least, what I didn’t know — was that J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan were personally and directly engaged not just in monitoring but in managing the secret government campaigns that helped raise the temperature to the boiling point again and again. Seth Rosenfeld’s exhaustively researched recent book, Subversives, documents this story in often minute detail yet manages to keep it eminently readable.
Anyone who lived through those times as a sentient adult will surely remember some of the seminal events: the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, lodged in memory through the iconic footage of students being fire-hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall; the 1964 Free Speech Movement that pushed the University of California at Berkeley into the forefront of student protest, brought Mario Savio to prominence, and began to change public attitudes about the police; the 1965 Vietnam Day Teach-In that fastened students’ attention on the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam and initiated the public’s disillusionment with the U.S. government; and the violent clash over People’s Park in 1969, which led to the death of young James Rector and confirmed in so many minds the view that law enforcement officials were out of control.
Subversives breaks new ground in several ways because of Rosenfeld’s dogged, three-decade pursuit of classified government files that cast new light on the events themselves as well as the major players whose decisions drove them. The author keeps the story from getting out of hand by maintaining a tight focus on Hoover, Reagan, Savio, and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr.
In Subversives, Rosenfeld relates the roles (hitherto largely undocumented) of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan in these familiar events, demonstrating the ruthlessness with which both men pursued “Communists” and their lack of respect for the truth. We see Hoover aggressively pushing his agents to seek out embarrassing personal details — largely rumors — about Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and their collaborators, illegally passing the information along to Right Wing publications, and later citing it as documented truth in reports to the President and to the public. We see Reagan eagerly seeking out the FBI to inform on his rivals in Hollywood and secretly naming names behind closed doors with HUAC, destroying the careers of talented actors, directors, and writers because he disagreed with their political beliefs. From a vantage-point of half a century, both men appear to be thoroughly unscrupulous and careless about the sometimes tragic consequences of the action they directed from their privileged positions.
Seth Rosenfeld, a winner of the coveted George Polk Award and now a staff member of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, was previously an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.
January 6, 2013
This is a definitive, meticulously researched account of some of the darker days in our recent history. (The author, honesty compels me to add, is a former colleague of mine). It should be read as an antidote to some of the rosier versions of political hagiography going on about Reagan, portrayed here as a hypocrite who named names during the infamous Hollywood blacklist days (and lied about doing it), used federal resources to spy on the private lives of members of his own family and orchestrated an attack on the University of California, which led to his election as governor, and ultimately, his Presidency. The accounts of the various misteps and overreaching of police and legal authority during People's Park, the activities of a government provocateur in the Third World Liberation Front and the nascent Black Panther Party and Reagan's not-so-secret attempts to depose Clark Kerr as president of UC are particularly chilling. So is the degree to which Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover, at that time our nation's top law enforcement official (since he barely acknowledged the authority of the Attorney General to whom he technically reported) were both seemingly obsessed with the oratory and activities of one lonely political activist: Mario Savio. The extent of this obsession is ironic, to put it mildly, given Savio's obvious decency and the degree to which he distanced himself from the less appealing aspects of the movement he helped spawn on the steps of Sproul Hall.
This should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern protest movement - and the often illegal and morally questionable attempts by government to destroy it.
This should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern protest movement - and the often illegal and morally questionable attempts by government to destroy it.
June 3, 2013
A meticulously-researched look at the underside of politics in Berkley in the 1960's. The author wrested free a vast trove of previously unavailable documents from classified and government sources, and used them to lay out the role of covert FBI investigations in the conflicts between the establishment and more radical groups. The information about Ronald Reagan's personal actions and his administration, described extensively in those files, is particularly startling. As someone who hates conspiracy theories, some of this definitely pushed my prefer-not-to-know buttons, but the author has done an incredible job of both tracking down his primary sources and pulling together the bigger picture. Fascinating in the way a train wreck is fascinating, and a triumph of using the Freedom of Information Act to bring buried truths to light.
December 1, 2012
Just lifting from my facebook status:
Can't recommend this book enough.
Rosenfeld is an award winning San Francisco investigative reporter who tenaciously spent thirty-one years suing the FBI for access to public records (with a rotating cast of pro bono lawyers who were dying of old age as the process dragged on) to flesh out and substantiate a definitive account of the dishonest, illegal and unconstitutional efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronnie Reagan to malign, harass and suppress of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the San Francisco New Left and faculty and administrators at the University of California who stood up for academic freedom.
Special note to my student journo friends: he managed to squeeze this decades-long odyssey into the length of a working career because he started the process as a project for his campus newspaper.
The book is comprehensive, and that means an intimidating length. But it's very readable, totally worthwhile and important context for understanding today's world.
Can't recommend this book enough.
Rosenfeld is an award winning San Francisco investigative reporter who tenaciously spent thirty-one years suing the FBI for access to public records (with a rotating cast of pro bono lawyers who were dying of old age as the process dragged on) to flesh out and substantiate a definitive account of the dishonest, illegal and unconstitutional efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronnie Reagan to malign, harass and suppress of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the San Francisco New Left and faculty and administrators at the University of California who stood up for academic freedom.
Special note to my student journo friends: he managed to squeeze this decades-long odyssey into the length of a working career because he started the process as a project for his campus newspaper.
The book is comprehensive, and that means an intimidating length. But it's very readable, totally worthwhile and important context for understanding today's world.
February 13, 2014
A detailed history of the San Francisco renaissance and the free speech movement. Seth Rosenfeld has completed the definitive story of how a few brave souls who happen to be in a fulcrum point in time can have a lasting effect on history. The story also reveals how those in power act upon their paranoia and anxiety, seeing threats in the least disagreements.
The story begins with the transformations experienced by Mario Savio as he traveled through the south to assist in the civil rights movement. The experience of the gulf between the myths and realities of American culture in the early 1969's and the lessons learned were carried to San Francisco and Berkeley and similar questions asked. The University of California was, and is, one of the greatest achievements of civilization. It was dedicated to the proposition that educational opportunity should be free and universal, a revolutionary concept at the time and now. However, it was on the verge of a struggle to reconcile the conservative duty to preserve and pass on perceived truths, and the obligation to question and critique. The anti-communist ghost of the times haunted the campus and the greater society coloring the struggle.
As strange as it may seem in today's world political discussion was generally prohibited from the campus, at a time when civil rights and Vietnam seemed to make such discussions imperative, and the stage was set for controversy, with Mr. Savio one of the actors.
The main part of the story is the response of J. Edgar Hoover to this subversive threat, including break ins, wire taping and the creation of conintelpro, a massive effort to surpress and disrupt legitimate exercise of constitutional rights. This resonates in the current environment where we have a tepid debate regarding wide spread invasions of privacy by national security agents. The current argument is that if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear, without asking who decides what is wrong.
This book partially answers that question and the answer is not pleasant. All to often the slightest deviation from subservience is interpreted as subversive. In the end one wonders who the subversives were, and fears they were at the seat of government.
The side show is the rise of Reagan and his misuse of power, including his efforts to weaken the University, and his willingness to misuse power to acquire power, beginning with black listing of his fellow actors, and use of government powers to curtail and limit speech and freedom.
The book also presents an interesting discussion of Clark Kerr as he tried to navigate the University,and Universities in general through the tempest, This perhaps deserves a book of its own, as the struggle to diminish the role of knowledge creators continues to the present.
This is a book well worth reading, and thoughts worth pondering, but there may be those who find its message subversive, so for the record I did not write this.
The story begins with the transformations experienced by Mario Savio as he traveled through the south to assist in the civil rights movement. The experience of the gulf between the myths and realities of American culture in the early 1969's and the lessons learned were carried to San Francisco and Berkeley and similar questions asked. The University of California was, and is, one of the greatest achievements of civilization. It was dedicated to the proposition that educational opportunity should be free and universal, a revolutionary concept at the time and now. However, it was on the verge of a struggle to reconcile the conservative duty to preserve and pass on perceived truths, and the obligation to question and critique. The anti-communist ghost of the times haunted the campus and the greater society coloring the struggle.
As strange as it may seem in today's world political discussion was generally prohibited from the campus, at a time when civil rights and Vietnam seemed to make such discussions imperative, and the stage was set for controversy, with Mr. Savio one of the actors.
The main part of the story is the response of J. Edgar Hoover to this subversive threat, including break ins, wire taping and the creation of conintelpro, a massive effort to surpress and disrupt legitimate exercise of constitutional rights. This resonates in the current environment where we have a tepid debate regarding wide spread invasions of privacy by national security agents. The current argument is that if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear, without asking who decides what is wrong.
This book partially answers that question and the answer is not pleasant. All to often the slightest deviation from subservience is interpreted as subversive. In the end one wonders who the subversives were, and fears they were at the seat of government.
The side show is the rise of Reagan and his misuse of power, including his efforts to weaken the University, and his willingness to misuse power to acquire power, beginning with black listing of his fellow actors, and use of government powers to curtail and limit speech and freedom.
The book also presents an interesting discussion of Clark Kerr as he tried to navigate the University,and Universities in general through the tempest, This perhaps deserves a book of its own, as the struggle to diminish the role of knowledge creators continues to the present.
This is a book well worth reading, and thoughts worth pondering, but there may be those who find its message subversive, so for the record I did not write this.
July 25, 2013
This book is perfect for you if you're interested in 1960's politics, if you love discovering new facts about how unlikeable J. Edgar Hoover was, if you find Reagan's rise in politics to be fascinating, or if enjoy learning about the evolution of higher education in the U.S. and California, in particular. I'm four for four on those dimensions. I'm also doing some research on Berkeley in the 60's and have been doing so at a snail's pace for the last six years. So this book was basically made for me.
This is a history of how the FBI investigated students, faculty, and administrators at the University of California-Berkeley, including their respected president Clark Kerr, beginning in the 1940s. Hoover suspected the university was being corrupted by the Communist Party. Although he never found any hard proof that Communists had gained control of the levers of Berkeley - in fact, the vast majority of students, faculty, and administrators were fairly anti-Communist - the interesting part of the story is how Hoover violated federal laws in order to further his investigation. Rosenfeld dips deep into the archives of FBI headquarters to show just how unhealthy Hoover's fascination with Berkeley was.
The story takes an interesting twist when the campus erupts in student protests and revolt during the 1960s. Hoover's men take liberties doing surveillance under the COINTELPRO project that, by any reasonable standards, violated the privacy and constitutional rights of the students and faculty under suspicion. The book's most surprising facts, to me anyway, were how connected Reagan was to Hoover's investigations. Reagan, a political animal and rhetorical genius, figured out how to use Hoover's illicitly gained information to polarize the state and use Berkeley's turmoil to create a groundswell of conservative support for his brand of "tough on rule breakers" politics. A really fascinating part of U.S. history.
This is a history of how the FBI investigated students, faculty, and administrators at the University of California-Berkeley, including their respected president Clark Kerr, beginning in the 1940s. Hoover suspected the university was being corrupted by the Communist Party. Although he never found any hard proof that Communists had gained control of the levers of Berkeley - in fact, the vast majority of students, faculty, and administrators were fairly anti-Communist - the interesting part of the story is how Hoover violated federal laws in order to further his investigation. Rosenfeld dips deep into the archives of FBI headquarters to show just how unhealthy Hoover's fascination with Berkeley was.
The story takes an interesting twist when the campus erupts in student protests and revolt during the 1960s. Hoover's men take liberties doing surveillance under the COINTELPRO project that, by any reasonable standards, violated the privacy and constitutional rights of the students and faculty under suspicion. The book's most surprising facts, to me anyway, were how connected Reagan was to Hoover's investigations. Reagan, a political animal and rhetorical genius, figured out how to use Hoover's illicitly gained information to polarize the state and use Berkeley's turmoil to create a groundswell of conservative support for his brand of "tough on rule breakers" politics. A really fascinating part of U.S. history.
July 30, 2013
A quaint little tale about how our government and some of it's key players were straight up douche-bags.
Reagan, bag. Blacklisted all of his Hollywood friends, just as his star was slipping. As Governor of Cali, he used the witch-hunt of communism to silence those who disagreed with his being a huge dick.
Hoover, bag. This guy! Who knows what to believe, but rest assured he followed everyone he didn't like and tried to, at every turn, expose them.
FBI, bag. These poor fucks thought they were doing their job. Which ended up being illegal almost 9 times of 10. Undercover FBI agent Aoki gave Black Panthers their first rifles. Helped them scare white folks, which in turn illegitimatized their perfectly rational complaint about being treated like animals.
Reading all the confidential files about subversives and the Black Panthers and Mario Salvio and Jerry Rubin and even Berkley president Clark Kerr - makes me happy to be another thorn in the system's side.
Great book for those with a radical heart. Definitely depressed me though. When you realize how much they (FBI) manipulated popular opinion in regards to the threat of Russia and Communism, you can't help but draw a parallel to all of the marginalized folks who have been given a bad wrap today. Muslims, immigrants, again with black people, gays, folks who watch "Two and half men" - they're people too!
Reagan, bag. Blacklisted all of his Hollywood friends, just as his star was slipping. As Governor of Cali, he used the witch-hunt of communism to silence those who disagreed with his being a huge dick.
Hoover, bag. This guy! Who knows what to believe, but rest assured he followed everyone he didn't like and tried to, at every turn, expose them.
FBI, bag. These poor fucks thought they were doing their job. Which ended up being illegal almost 9 times of 10. Undercover FBI agent Aoki gave Black Panthers their first rifles. Helped them scare white folks, which in turn illegitimatized their perfectly rational complaint about being treated like animals.
Reading all the confidential files about subversives and the Black Panthers and Mario Salvio and Jerry Rubin and even Berkley president Clark Kerr - makes me happy to be another thorn in the system's side.
Great book for those with a radical heart. Definitely depressed me though. When you realize how much they (FBI) manipulated popular opinion in regards to the threat of Russia and Communism, you can't help but draw a parallel to all of the marginalized folks who have been given a bad wrap today. Muslims, immigrants, again with black people, gays, folks who watch "Two and half men" - they're people too!
December 26, 2012
..I started reading yesterday and I'm in chapter 5, "The Essay Question." I'm afraid that lots of the tactics that J.E. Hoover used illegally as the head of the FBI are now legal, under provisions of "The Patriot Act." My friends in Occupy feel it. I won't give this a rating yet, but I think its well on its way to 5 stars, for me. I have some new heroes already. I'm going to have to read a biography of Clark Kerr at some point.
This book changed my life. Now when I hear the stories of illegal imprisonment and entrapment of current political protesters in the U.S. I understand a little of the history behind it.
This book changed my life. Now when I hear the stories of illegal imprisonment and entrapment of current political protesters in the U.S. I understand a little of the history behind it.
July 10, 2025
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/...
When Seth Rosenfeld first sought to investigate the FBI’s files on the University of California and the student protesters at UC Berkeley, he perhaps did not realize the long journey upon which he was embarking. Released last year, his Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, is a book 30 years in the making. Those long years of wandering through countless Freedom of Information Act requests culminated in a series of lawsuits totaling just this side of a million dollars brought by the FBI to block the release of documents. Those documents, a trove of 300,000 pages, chronicle the agency’s illegal spying program and form the backbone of evidence for the book.
Yet it is not his own journey, fascinating as it is, that is the subject of Rosenfeld’s book. He does cover it in a brief chapter and alludes to it in occasional asides. The bulk of the book is rather what he learned along the way.
Two people from that moment, that place, are the book’s central characters: Mario Savio and Ronald Reagan. They cross paths and their ideologies collide — they are men of different temperaments and different moral character. We gain much in contemplating their conflict, for it continues today. And it stretches back further than the 1960s to the dawn of the nuclear age.
Seen from the farther shore of our 21st century, the events of World War II — outside the Holocaust itself — seem uncomfortably conceivable. Not morally justifiable, mind you, but conceivable. Its complex machinations — the rise of nation-states, modernism’s kicking to the curb of previous ways of understanding, the sturm und drang of previous wars’ lack of resolution, the last gasp and grasp of an earlier form of colonialism, technology’s overtaking of moral understanding — all coalesce in a horrible logic. Its complexity has kept thinkers tinkering to detail its many small components, often with a telescopic focus. But every machine, whether great or small, promoting life or set on its deprivation, has designers, has operators.
Comparatively, the 1950s cold war paranoia in the United States offers little to logic. There is a general understanding that the nation came out well after World War II: an x in the victory column; no pockmarks in the landscape from the five-year, almost daily barrage on European and Asian shores; and an economy wedded to war, giving birth to consumption whose riches were relatively shared by a large amount of its citizenry. If any people had cause to look frightfully over its shoulder, this was not them. Perhaps Freud, if given enough shovels, could have excavated deep enough to find the roots: traumatic scars of combat, long-standing race, class and gender divides, the faltering of the agrarian into a brave new world of urbanism. Many folks say the threat imposed by Joseph Stalin justified a certain caution, too much caution, an all-engulfing caution. But enemies, as a psychiatrist may posit, are but bugaboos, the fears we envision to mask something far worse.
Then there was the Bomb. An unleashing in a Manhattan Project worse then the global financial disaster of 2008, a destructive power quite at odds with the self-conception of a nation of scruffy, friendly, can-do folk; a little mutt of a nation, that when asked to step up to the plate and develop a curious little weapon based on some obscure physics, damned done knocked it out of the park. “My god, what have we done?” was an afterthought.
J. Edgar Hoover, who begins Seth Rosenfeld’s tale, was a troubled man, born of even earlier troubled times. He was not troubled, to Rosenfeld, for various proclivities suspected and brought to light as the shovelfuls of dirt and worms went about their business of the decomposition of the man. Rosenfeld is a “strictly the facts” kind of guy, as his 200 pages of notes attest. Just the facts, verifiable; leave the psychology to the psychologists. Hoover’s troubles were of overreach, of bald illegalities, of purposefully pursuing “enemies” that were of no danger to the United States.
The bureau’s own investigation into the Free Speech Movement, an organization formed by students at UC Berkeley to promote free speech through acts of nonviolent civil disobedience was a case in point. Curtis O. Lynum, the FBI special agent in charge of the San Francisco office sent Hoover a memo (its language fairly direct for an organization that affirmed plausible deniability), “It would appear from the information available to date that although there were subversives who took part in the demonstration that the demonstrations would have taken place any way and no information has been received or developed to date that these demonstrations were suggested, operated, or controlled by the Communist Party.” It was the first of three memos offering such findings and recommending not to proceed. Hoover ignored all three.
It was this same Lynum who first met with Ronald Reagan at the Governor’s mansion on a gray Monday morning in January 1967. The meeting was held in secret. Lynum was the one who had taken Reagan’s call two weeks earlier asking to meet with the FBI. And again Lynum’s advice to Hoover — to not take the meeting, as the controversy at the university was too politically sensitive — was overridden. Reagan, having declared “’beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates’ were proof of a ‘morality and decency gap’” in California’s Democratic Party, convinced the electorate that the turbulence at Berkeley was a symbol of what ailed the country and won in a landslide against the incumbent Governor Edmund C. “Pat” Brown.
Reagan, Rosenfeld uncovers, was at this point no stranger to the FBI.
Mario Savio, public enemy number one in Hoover’s alternative history, had by the time he arrived at Berkeley shed the rituals of his Catholicism but kept the moral self-searching and a bit of the guilt. His cousin, the scientist Vincent Caleca, had worked on the Manhattan Project, though later was wracked in anguish over the devastation his research had rained upon Japan. Savio’s grandfather was involved with the Italian Fascist Party before immigrating to the United States, adding further assaults to his moral injuries.
Subversives chronicles Savio’s journey, from his time spent in Mississippi where a fellow civil rights worker, Robert Osman, was beaten badly after defensively collapsing to the ground as he had been taught in his civil rights training. The case was left uninvestigated by the FBI (as Hoover told a reporter, the bureau “most certainly does not and will not give protection to civil rights workers”). From there Savio lands to stand defiant atop a police car. He was a stutterer who offered charismatic oratory in crisis, not so much a man trying to control the tides of history, but when pulled into its deepest eddies somehow found within himself the courage to take a moral stand. As he said in an interview with Life magazine, “If you accept that societies can be run by rules, as I do, then you necessarily accept as a consequence that you can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgment of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.” Savio did not know at the time how much his rights were being abridged. Rosenfeld uncovered that Savio was tailed by the FBI from the moment he stepped onto that police car.
The tide pools of history pull a multitude of characters into this telling. Rosenfeld finds le noyau de la phrase, the kernel of the character. For example, the chancellor of UC Berkeley during the heyday of the Free Speech Movement, Clark Kerr: his Quakerism that forgave those who refused to sign loyalty oaths coupled with a general faith to ban Communists whom he felt “were too ideologically biased to fairly present ideas and information contrary to their own.” Kerr attempted to tread a fair path between that one faith and his belief in free and fair speech. When hundreds of students were arrested during an early sit-in, he decided not to expel them. This decision did not sit well with some of the regents and as the protests escalated, he was pushed off his path by both sides: neither meeting the students’ demands nor able to bring calm to the campus. He was soon relieved of his position as chancellor. At the time Kerr felt a personal failure. What was not known until the FBI documents were released in 2002, is that one of the regents, Edwin Pauley, had been in contact with the FBI actively seeking to oust Kerr. Hoover saw Kerr, Savio and the student protesters as problems and hounded them in an effort to find any small violations that could be used to discredit them. Many folks in the California courts refused to go along with these tactics. Hoover identified these “detractors” and found ways to work around them. Having someone trusted by the FBI in the governor’s house would be a great boon to “cleaning up the problems.”
Rosenfeld strives for objectivity in its most idealistic sense, drawing comparisons between Kerr and Reagan: both are confronted by the issue of loyalty, both are strong anti-Communists, both had signed loyalty oaths and both voted for measures declaring Communists unfit to work in their respective fields. Both had volunteered to investigate whether colleagues were Communist Party members and to recommend whether they should keep their jobs. And yet, as a good journalist, Rosenfeld comes to conclusions: “But unlike Reagan, Kerr defended people he believed were loyal but refused to sign the oath as a matter of principle. Kerr supported those independent spirits who, like his father, refused to conform because they believed an individual’s liberty was vital to the university and to democracy.”
Again, Rosenfeld isn’t interested in the subconscious, but the verifiable. His characters enter the stage of the drama, and with a deft sketch, his spotlight warms their pasts and shows their shadows and the ideas that bring understanding to their actions. The narrative, despite its heft, runs along like a 1920s cliffhanger serial, with all due speed (though a deeper moral complexity). Each chapter ends with so many questions nagging at the reader that one must read one chapter more. The notes are left to the back for the scholars to hash over. If the book were merely a report on the happenings at Berkeley in the mid-60s, it is easily one of the best: well-researched and a highly engaging read.
Ronald Reagan’s previous autobiographers have dealt with, but backed off from, the suspicion of his informing for the FBI on fellow actors, having lacked strong verifiable evidence. Rosenfeld finds, in a confidential report on a meeting on December 19, 1947, Reagan being identified as “T-10” — in the bureau’s nomenclature, a temporary number for a confidential informant.
Rosenfeld is even-handed even here. He states, “There is no evidence in FBI files released to date that Reagan was assigned a permanent informant number typically used to designate informers under bureau control, or that he was paid for informing; his motives clearly were not pecuniary but personal and political.”
But Rosenfeld is as fair as Reagan is duplicitous. In one story recounted in the book, two actresses, Gale Sondergaard and Anne Revere, had sought Reagan’s help when they were subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Reagan at the time was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Sondergaard had asked the Guild to declare its refusal to tolerate an industry blacklist. Instead, the board responded with an ad in the industry rag, The Hollywood Reporter, stating that though it wouldn’t support a secret blacklist, any “actor [who] by his own actions outside of union has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable [sic] at the box office,” would not be supported by the Guild. That Sondergaard and Revere were now suspected of being enemies of the State was not a Guild concern. Reagan’s advice to Revere was to “name a couple of names that have already been named.” Neither actress would do so and were blacklisted out of Hollywood. But then Rosenfeld relates the final punch in the gut in a single phrase that ends the episode, shining bright light onto Reagan’s dark character, “Neither Sondergaard nor Revere knew that Reagan already had informed on them.”
For Reagan, the FBI under Hoover was a slush fund of power he’d dip into when it served his political ends. That power was called upon the first moment he entered the political stage, to open his new career with Hoover’s third act of ousting Kerr, and Reagan takes his bow for being the person who will clean up the “problems” at Berkeley. Though Rosenfeld is too even-handed to offer judgment, Reagan comes across as a Hoover-lite. His lower-grade paranoia hardly inspires fear. Worse, he was hardly a being with the moral complexity to pause and question his own undertakings. Just a functionaire with an actor’s charisma.
Looking back at that time, there’s the Bomb and the War, Communism and other such perceived enemies and the United States’ self-image that hangs like a fog obscuring a clear vision of how to justly perceive the world. It is a fog that seems to have not lifted.
If the United States is a lovable mutt, it still has rabid mongrel tendencies. Savio and the Free Speech Movement had the moral courage to make an assault on that image of innocence. Hippies and Yippies and assorted freaks tried to bring about moments of real innocence, childlike, Flower overpowering Realpolitik. For their efforts they received the label of subversives, enemies. As did Communism; the conflation of a political philosophy with the imperialist ambitions of Stalin, continues, at least in the United States, to keep those philosophical ideas out of public discourse. While Capitalism can undertake wars, threaten planetary destruction, and bring the global economy to collapse, it is still believed to hold a moral high ground.
The body count of the latter half of the 20th century dropped dramatically from the first. But can we say it was simply paranoia that kept us all in check? It was not military might that brought about the end of the conflicts in South Africa and Ireland. No drones quietly hovering will bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. It is for us — whether we directly engage day-to-day, or experience that one time “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious” that we speak out — to develop the moral imagination to bring forth solutions to conflicts.
It is for his moral courage that the last 50 years could have used a lot more Mario Savio and a lot less Ronald Reagan.
When Seth Rosenfeld first sought to investigate the FBI’s files on the University of California and the student protesters at UC Berkeley, he perhaps did not realize the long journey upon which he was embarking. Released last year, his Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, is a book 30 years in the making. Those long years of wandering through countless Freedom of Information Act requests culminated in a series of lawsuits totaling just this side of a million dollars brought by the FBI to block the release of documents. Those documents, a trove of 300,000 pages, chronicle the agency’s illegal spying program and form the backbone of evidence for the book.
Yet it is not his own journey, fascinating as it is, that is the subject of Rosenfeld’s book. He does cover it in a brief chapter and alludes to it in occasional asides. The bulk of the book is rather what he learned along the way.
Two people from that moment, that place, are the book’s central characters: Mario Savio and Ronald Reagan. They cross paths and their ideologies collide — they are men of different temperaments and different moral character. We gain much in contemplating their conflict, for it continues today. And it stretches back further than the 1960s to the dawn of the nuclear age.
Seen from the farther shore of our 21st century, the events of World War II — outside the Holocaust itself — seem uncomfortably conceivable. Not morally justifiable, mind you, but conceivable. Its complex machinations — the rise of nation-states, modernism’s kicking to the curb of previous ways of understanding, the sturm und drang of previous wars’ lack of resolution, the last gasp and grasp of an earlier form of colonialism, technology’s overtaking of moral understanding — all coalesce in a horrible logic. Its complexity has kept thinkers tinkering to detail its many small components, often with a telescopic focus. But every machine, whether great or small, promoting life or set on its deprivation, has designers, has operators.
Comparatively, the 1950s cold war paranoia in the United States offers little to logic. There is a general understanding that the nation came out well after World War II: an x in the victory column; no pockmarks in the landscape from the five-year, almost daily barrage on European and Asian shores; and an economy wedded to war, giving birth to consumption whose riches were relatively shared by a large amount of its citizenry. If any people had cause to look frightfully over its shoulder, this was not them. Perhaps Freud, if given enough shovels, could have excavated deep enough to find the roots: traumatic scars of combat, long-standing race, class and gender divides, the faltering of the agrarian into a brave new world of urbanism. Many folks say the threat imposed by Joseph Stalin justified a certain caution, too much caution, an all-engulfing caution. But enemies, as a psychiatrist may posit, are but bugaboos, the fears we envision to mask something far worse.
Then there was the Bomb. An unleashing in a Manhattan Project worse then the global financial disaster of 2008, a destructive power quite at odds with the self-conception of a nation of scruffy, friendly, can-do folk; a little mutt of a nation, that when asked to step up to the plate and develop a curious little weapon based on some obscure physics, damned done knocked it out of the park. “My god, what have we done?” was an afterthought.
J. Edgar Hoover, who begins Seth Rosenfeld’s tale, was a troubled man, born of even earlier troubled times. He was not troubled, to Rosenfeld, for various proclivities suspected and brought to light as the shovelfuls of dirt and worms went about their business of the decomposition of the man. Rosenfeld is a “strictly the facts” kind of guy, as his 200 pages of notes attest. Just the facts, verifiable; leave the psychology to the psychologists. Hoover’s troubles were of overreach, of bald illegalities, of purposefully pursuing “enemies” that were of no danger to the United States.
The bureau’s own investigation into the Free Speech Movement, an organization formed by students at UC Berkeley to promote free speech through acts of nonviolent civil disobedience was a case in point. Curtis O. Lynum, the FBI special agent in charge of the San Francisco office sent Hoover a memo (its language fairly direct for an organization that affirmed plausible deniability), “It would appear from the information available to date that although there were subversives who took part in the demonstration that the demonstrations would have taken place any way and no information has been received or developed to date that these demonstrations were suggested, operated, or controlled by the Communist Party.” It was the first of three memos offering such findings and recommending not to proceed. Hoover ignored all three.
It was this same Lynum who first met with Ronald Reagan at the Governor’s mansion on a gray Monday morning in January 1967. The meeting was held in secret. Lynum was the one who had taken Reagan’s call two weeks earlier asking to meet with the FBI. And again Lynum’s advice to Hoover — to not take the meeting, as the controversy at the university was too politically sensitive — was overridden. Reagan, having declared “’beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates’ were proof of a ‘morality and decency gap’” in California’s Democratic Party, convinced the electorate that the turbulence at Berkeley was a symbol of what ailed the country and won in a landslide against the incumbent Governor Edmund C. “Pat” Brown.
Reagan, Rosenfeld uncovers, was at this point no stranger to the FBI.
Mario Savio, public enemy number one in Hoover’s alternative history, had by the time he arrived at Berkeley shed the rituals of his Catholicism but kept the moral self-searching and a bit of the guilt. His cousin, the scientist Vincent Caleca, had worked on the Manhattan Project, though later was wracked in anguish over the devastation his research had rained upon Japan. Savio’s grandfather was involved with the Italian Fascist Party before immigrating to the United States, adding further assaults to his moral injuries.
Subversives chronicles Savio’s journey, from his time spent in Mississippi where a fellow civil rights worker, Robert Osman, was beaten badly after defensively collapsing to the ground as he had been taught in his civil rights training. The case was left uninvestigated by the FBI (as Hoover told a reporter, the bureau “most certainly does not and will not give protection to civil rights workers”). From there Savio lands to stand defiant atop a police car. He was a stutterer who offered charismatic oratory in crisis, not so much a man trying to control the tides of history, but when pulled into its deepest eddies somehow found within himself the courage to take a moral stand. As he said in an interview with Life magazine, “If you accept that societies can be run by rules, as I do, then you necessarily accept as a consequence that you can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgment of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.” Savio did not know at the time how much his rights were being abridged. Rosenfeld uncovered that Savio was tailed by the FBI from the moment he stepped onto that police car.
The tide pools of history pull a multitude of characters into this telling. Rosenfeld finds le noyau de la phrase, the kernel of the character. For example, the chancellor of UC Berkeley during the heyday of the Free Speech Movement, Clark Kerr: his Quakerism that forgave those who refused to sign loyalty oaths coupled with a general faith to ban Communists whom he felt “were too ideologically biased to fairly present ideas and information contrary to their own.” Kerr attempted to tread a fair path between that one faith and his belief in free and fair speech. When hundreds of students were arrested during an early sit-in, he decided not to expel them. This decision did not sit well with some of the regents and as the protests escalated, he was pushed off his path by both sides: neither meeting the students’ demands nor able to bring calm to the campus. He was soon relieved of his position as chancellor. At the time Kerr felt a personal failure. What was not known until the FBI documents were released in 2002, is that one of the regents, Edwin Pauley, had been in contact with the FBI actively seeking to oust Kerr. Hoover saw Kerr, Savio and the student protesters as problems and hounded them in an effort to find any small violations that could be used to discredit them. Many folks in the California courts refused to go along with these tactics. Hoover identified these “detractors” and found ways to work around them. Having someone trusted by the FBI in the governor’s house would be a great boon to “cleaning up the problems.”
Rosenfeld strives for objectivity in its most idealistic sense, drawing comparisons between Kerr and Reagan: both are confronted by the issue of loyalty, both are strong anti-Communists, both had signed loyalty oaths and both voted for measures declaring Communists unfit to work in their respective fields. Both had volunteered to investigate whether colleagues were Communist Party members and to recommend whether they should keep their jobs. And yet, as a good journalist, Rosenfeld comes to conclusions: “But unlike Reagan, Kerr defended people he believed were loyal but refused to sign the oath as a matter of principle. Kerr supported those independent spirits who, like his father, refused to conform because they believed an individual’s liberty was vital to the university and to democracy.”
Again, Rosenfeld isn’t interested in the subconscious, but the verifiable. His characters enter the stage of the drama, and with a deft sketch, his spotlight warms their pasts and shows their shadows and the ideas that bring understanding to their actions. The narrative, despite its heft, runs along like a 1920s cliffhanger serial, with all due speed (though a deeper moral complexity). Each chapter ends with so many questions nagging at the reader that one must read one chapter more. The notes are left to the back for the scholars to hash over. If the book were merely a report on the happenings at Berkeley in the mid-60s, it is easily one of the best: well-researched and a highly engaging read.
Ronald Reagan’s previous autobiographers have dealt with, but backed off from, the suspicion of his informing for the FBI on fellow actors, having lacked strong verifiable evidence. Rosenfeld finds, in a confidential report on a meeting on December 19, 1947, Reagan being identified as “T-10” — in the bureau’s nomenclature, a temporary number for a confidential informant.
Rosenfeld is even-handed even here. He states, “There is no evidence in FBI files released to date that Reagan was assigned a permanent informant number typically used to designate informers under bureau control, or that he was paid for informing; his motives clearly were not pecuniary but personal and political.”
But Rosenfeld is as fair as Reagan is duplicitous. In one story recounted in the book, two actresses, Gale Sondergaard and Anne Revere, had sought Reagan’s help when they were subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Reagan at the time was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Sondergaard had asked the Guild to declare its refusal to tolerate an industry blacklist. Instead, the board responded with an ad in the industry rag, The Hollywood Reporter, stating that though it wouldn’t support a secret blacklist, any “actor [who] by his own actions outside of union has so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable [sic] at the box office,” would not be supported by the Guild. That Sondergaard and Revere were now suspected of being enemies of the State was not a Guild concern. Reagan’s advice to Revere was to “name a couple of names that have already been named.” Neither actress would do so and were blacklisted out of Hollywood. But then Rosenfeld relates the final punch in the gut in a single phrase that ends the episode, shining bright light onto Reagan’s dark character, “Neither Sondergaard nor Revere knew that Reagan already had informed on them.”
For Reagan, the FBI under Hoover was a slush fund of power he’d dip into when it served his political ends. That power was called upon the first moment he entered the political stage, to open his new career with Hoover’s third act of ousting Kerr, and Reagan takes his bow for being the person who will clean up the “problems” at Berkeley. Though Rosenfeld is too even-handed to offer judgment, Reagan comes across as a Hoover-lite. His lower-grade paranoia hardly inspires fear. Worse, he was hardly a being with the moral complexity to pause and question his own undertakings. Just a functionaire with an actor’s charisma.
Looking back at that time, there’s the Bomb and the War, Communism and other such perceived enemies and the United States’ self-image that hangs like a fog obscuring a clear vision of how to justly perceive the world. It is a fog that seems to have not lifted.
If the United States is a lovable mutt, it still has rabid mongrel tendencies. Savio and the Free Speech Movement had the moral courage to make an assault on that image of innocence. Hippies and Yippies and assorted freaks tried to bring about moments of real innocence, childlike, Flower overpowering Realpolitik. For their efforts they received the label of subversives, enemies. As did Communism; the conflation of a political philosophy with the imperialist ambitions of Stalin, continues, at least in the United States, to keep those philosophical ideas out of public discourse. While Capitalism can undertake wars, threaten planetary destruction, and bring the global economy to collapse, it is still believed to hold a moral high ground.
The body count of the latter half of the 20th century dropped dramatically from the first. But can we say it was simply paranoia that kept us all in check? It was not military might that brought about the end of the conflicts in South Africa and Ireland. No drones quietly hovering will bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. It is for us — whether we directly engage day-to-day, or experience that one time “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious” that we speak out — to develop the moral imagination to bring forth solutions to conflicts.
It is for his moral courage that the last 50 years could have used a lot more Mario Savio and a lot less Ronald Reagan.
April 17, 2018
A life's work of effort went into this shattering expose of neo-liberal tyranny.
February 19, 2017
This book will change how you see the federal government, specifically the FBI, and will change how you see Ronald Reagan. Even if you are familiar with the war waged by the FBI against civil rights activists and peaceniks during the 1960s and understand what COINTELPRO was meant to accomplish, this comprehensive narrative—detailing the abuses of power, hypocrisy, and assault on dissenting speech—is illuminating.
To quote the book's preface, author Seth Rosenfeld "draws on court records, contemporaneous news accounts, oral histories, scholarly works, and hundreds of interviews with activists, university administrators, politicians, present and former FBI agents, and various other officials and observers," as well as confidential FBI files released after three decades of FOIA requests. "There are no anonymous sources and no fictionalized accounts." The result is a terrifying look into J. Edgar Hoover's crusade against dissent in the United States. His illegal and unethical misuse of "intelligence" and FBI resources wielded in the name of fighting Communism. America was so scared of the Red Menace that it provided a perfect excuse to accumulate power in the federal criminal justice and intelligence services.
Much of what went on attacking college students and other citizens for demonstrating free speech and protesting the War in Vietnam was done without official approval or oversight and often was explicitly political in helping more conservative, pro-Hoover politicians and officials gain or maintain power. Lives were ruined and in some cases lost in this battle between the FBI and student radicals.
Reagan's role in all of this was highly-publicized at the time in terms of his own crusade against Communism. But Rosenfeld reveals how closely Reagan coordinated, aiding and abetting the illegal FBI maneuvers, from before he was Governor of California and throughout his political career. Like other conservative politicians of the era, he was a bit naive to Hoover's true power, but was always happy when abuse of power served his interests. Reagan callously took advantage of UC Berkeley's student protests for political success and had little time for facts that disagreed with his view of the matter. Reagan and Hoover's end goals were mutually beneficial and they jumped at the opportunity to use each other's power.
The Subversives is a cautionary tale. It reads like the dystopian novels that are rocketing up best seller lists this spring following Trump's election. However, this is Nonfiction. This really happened. This was the U.S. government and figures like Reagan, who are broadly beloved or at least respected, that eviscerated the fundamental rights of thousands of Americans and enjoyed unchecked power, often supported by their own popularity.
We have seen the resurgence of some of these abuses following 9/11. Terrorism, not Communism, has been the excuse. With low trust in the institutions meant to check each other's power, the responsibility falls disproportionately on citizens, like the book's persistent author Seth Rosenfeld, to monitor our institutions and hold our government and politicians accountable.
To quote the book's preface, author Seth Rosenfeld "draws on court records, contemporaneous news accounts, oral histories, scholarly works, and hundreds of interviews with activists, university administrators, politicians, present and former FBI agents, and various other officials and observers," as well as confidential FBI files released after three decades of FOIA requests. "There are no anonymous sources and no fictionalized accounts." The result is a terrifying look into J. Edgar Hoover's crusade against dissent in the United States. His illegal and unethical misuse of "intelligence" and FBI resources wielded in the name of fighting Communism. America was so scared of the Red Menace that it provided a perfect excuse to accumulate power in the federal criminal justice and intelligence services.
Much of what went on attacking college students and other citizens for demonstrating free speech and protesting the War in Vietnam was done without official approval or oversight and often was explicitly political in helping more conservative, pro-Hoover politicians and officials gain or maintain power. Lives were ruined and in some cases lost in this battle between the FBI and student radicals.
Reagan's role in all of this was highly-publicized at the time in terms of his own crusade against Communism. But Rosenfeld reveals how closely Reagan coordinated, aiding and abetting the illegal FBI maneuvers, from before he was Governor of California and throughout his political career. Like other conservative politicians of the era, he was a bit naive to Hoover's true power, but was always happy when abuse of power served his interests. Reagan callously took advantage of UC Berkeley's student protests for political success and had little time for facts that disagreed with his view of the matter. Reagan and Hoover's end goals were mutually beneficial and they jumped at the opportunity to use each other's power.
The Subversives is a cautionary tale. It reads like the dystopian novels that are rocketing up best seller lists this spring following Trump's election. However, this is Nonfiction. This really happened. This was the U.S. government and figures like Reagan, who are broadly beloved or at least respected, that eviscerated the fundamental rights of thousands of Americans and enjoyed unchecked power, often supported by their own popularity.
We have seen the resurgence of some of these abuses following 9/11. Terrorism, not Communism, has been the excuse. With low trust in the institutions meant to check each other's power, the responsibility falls disproportionately on citizens, like the book's persistent author Seth Rosenfeld, to monitor our institutions and hold our government and politicians accountable.
November 18, 2012
I lived in Berkley during the spring of 1969, toward the end of the era covered in this book. Our apartment was close enough to the action that the National Guard cut off access for those who could not prove they lived in a small area around campus. The national guard blocked off all access to an area near campus while I was at work. Only my love of reading got me home. I didn't have a driver's license at that time, but Berkley library cards had addresses so the national guard soldier who was about my age (20) let me go home.
I participated in one of the large marches, joining in as it passed my home. I was not very aware of the issues. I was not a student. We lived in Berkley because my husband was a conscientious objector doing his alternative service at a Berkley hospital. I was on board for any anti-war event and a huge march filling my street looked like one of those to me. It was really remarkable. I joined in not knowing a single person around me eventually feeling I was the crowd and the crowd was me. Though I later read about the issues and learned I mostly supported them, it jolted me into never spontaneously joining a demonstration again.
With my personal connection to some events, I found this book both fascinating and depressing. I did not read it straight through, reading first about the spring of 1969, then the beginning, the end and chunks of the middle. The library wants it back for another patron, so I'm going to return it. I've had enough.
This book is largely about Mario Savio and Ronald Reagan, alike in some ways but so very different in others.
A quote from each:
Ronald Reagan October 27, 1964:
"You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace is so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery."
Mario Savio on December 2. 1964:
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop."
I participated in one of the large marches, joining in as it passed my home. I was not very aware of the issues. I was not a student. We lived in Berkley because my husband was a conscientious objector doing his alternative service at a Berkley hospital. I was on board for any anti-war event and a huge march filling my street looked like one of those to me. It was really remarkable. I joined in not knowing a single person around me eventually feeling I was the crowd and the crowd was me. Though I later read about the issues and learned I mostly supported them, it jolted me into never spontaneously joining a demonstration again.
With my personal connection to some events, I found this book both fascinating and depressing. I did not read it straight through, reading first about the spring of 1969, then the beginning, the end and chunks of the middle. The library wants it back for another patron, so I'm going to return it. I've had enough.
This book is largely about Mario Savio and Ronald Reagan, alike in some ways but so very different in others.
A quote from each:
Ronald Reagan October 27, 1964:
"You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace is so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery."
Mario Savio on December 2. 1964:
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop."
April 21, 2014
This book is the result of Seth Rosenfeld's painstaking research into the FBI's spying on students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley - spying which went all the way back to the 1940s. It took 30 years and five lawsuits for Rosenfeld to gain access to the FBI files he wanted, and even then some of those files were heavily redacted. He also interviewed scores of people across the political spectrum, from campus activists and 60s radicals like Mario Savio, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to one-time UC president Clark Kerr to FBI agents and Reagan adviser Edwin Meese III. Although his focus is on the student protests of the 1960s, Rosenfeld's early chapters detail the FBI's espionage on campus in the 1940s and the 1950s, giving the reader vital background information. He has uncovered a systematic pattern of FBI use of informers and illegal operations. Four personalities dominate the narrative - J. Edgar Hoover, who saw Communist manipulation at work even when his own agents told him otherwise; Ronald Reagan, the one-time FBI informer who was elected governor of California in 1966 against a backdrop of campus protests, promising to get tough on law and order; Clark Kerr, whom the FBI had long considered suspect; and Mario Savio, the gentle, brilliant, troubled, reluctant leader of the Free Speech Movement who was placed on an FBI index of people to be rounded up and detained in the event of a national emergency. Perhaps the most controversial of the book's findings is that Richard Aoki, a radical activist who provided arms to the Black Panthers, was an FBI informant for 16 years. This is a mighty work, and it's a cautionary tale of what can happen when security agencies see themselves as above the law and move to suppress people's right to dissent. The FBI, particularly under Hoover, spent decades trampling all over Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights. Rosenfeld's book shows how that happened in California and how Reagan abetted it. Sobering reading.
December 30, 2012
As the professional reviewers have pointed out (NYT, SF Chronicle, WSJ), one of the truly remarkable things about this book is the author's persistence. Like me, he is a member of the Cal class of 1981, and he has been battling the FBI through the courts for 30 years to obtain all the documents that made the writing of this book possible. The narrative focuses on four men--Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Clark Kerr, Mario Savio--each powerful and charismatic is his own way, and the way their lives and jobs intersected on those iconic moments of Berkeley in the 60s.
The paranoia of Reagan and Hoover regarding communists and "subversives" (the same in their eyes) seems almost quaint today, but the damage that was wrought from these attitudes prevents the reader from seeing their fears as anything but insidious and danger, not only to freedom of speech advocates like Savio, but to countless others who had been blacklisted and whose careers and lives were ruined by the red-baiting.
Looking at Berkeley and higher education generally today, the likes of Savio and Kerr, though they opposed each other on many issues, won the war, as universities are still largely places where open debate is possible, though many of our students today do not take advantage of these hard-won rights.
While this is not a perfect book, Rosenfeld's research has brought a lot of new information forward that makes this one of the best on the roots of the 60s turmoil in Berkeley and the struggles the students and the university endured to remain independent of a governor and his obsessions.
The paranoia of Reagan and Hoover regarding communists and "subversives" (the same in their eyes) seems almost quaint today, but the damage that was wrought from these attitudes prevents the reader from seeing their fears as anything but insidious and danger, not only to freedom of speech advocates like Savio, but to countless others who had been blacklisted and whose careers and lives were ruined by the red-baiting.
Looking at Berkeley and higher education generally today, the likes of Savio and Kerr, though they opposed each other on many issues, won the war, as universities are still largely places where open debate is possible, though many of our students today do not take advantage of these hard-won rights.
While this is not a perfect book, Rosenfeld's research has brought a lot of new information forward that makes this one of the best on the roots of the 60s turmoil in Berkeley and the struggles the students and the university endured to remain independent of a governor and his obsessions.
September 26, 2012
A fascinating history of the FBIs COINTELPRO, a spying program run for decades against ordinary U.S. citizens who did nothing wrong yet were considered potential "subversives" by proto-fascist J.Edgar Hoover. Researched for 30 years this is the definitive historical look at this program.
June 20, 2018
The best of narrative non-fiction. The story is so well documented, without being mired in the minutiae. A Required reading for any counter-culture.
January 4, 2023
I read this book about 7 years ago and I still think on it frequently.
September 25, 2012
A bit of a time capsule in this one, winding its way back to the campus of the University of California, Berkley during the years 1940 and into the '60s. Details the FBI's obsession with "radicals" and spies on the Berkley campus and how UC's liberal approach to education rankled so many during the red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. Good descriptions of the Free Speech movement of 1964 and the "Filthy Speech" movement that later divided the campus. The FBI typically comes out as a bunch of goons with its starring champion, Governor Ronald Reagan, who came to office determined to "clean up Berkley" by trampling all over the rights that the U.S. Constitution he so supposedly loved, guarantees. Still, I'm not a big fan of the '60s. All the churlish demonstrations, lack of common decency, lack of modesty and basic foolishness that went into and still go into any type of "radical" movement is a big turn-off. Reagan was a tyrant, but sometimes I'm not sure if the radicals were any better. What's surprising is that the FSM's agenda was not actually "radical": the right to distribute literature on campus, for any group. This kind of stuff is taken for granted now, but college campuses were different in the 1960s. It degenerated by the late 1960s into fighting over a piece of land that the university owned that had been absconded by students and turned into "People's Park." Great historical detail about campus life in the '50s, too.
June 15, 2018
This book verges on being dense but is so fun to read. I recommend anyone interested in FBI history or Ronald Reagan read it.
September 12, 2019
This books explains a lot about the political context behind the de-funding of public higher education. It's dense, but engaging.
January 12, 2018
I expected this book to be more like the last third, which focuses more on Reagan in particular. I also expected more of a national narrative. However, I'm not disappointed at all that the book ended up being very different than I expected.
Subversives tells the tale of the political motivations behind the FBI's domestic surveillance program, with a particular focus on California. St. Ronny is, of course, a dick, and it comes across in this book. And the parallel between his rise to power, drawing upon a fear of "the other" and latching onto a culture war held as true as I'd hoped. But I think the real surprise for me was the organic chronicling of the Free Speech Movement. Having attended Berkeley, I had a good sense of the geography, which was neat - but I had no f'ing clue any of the history behind those places, so this history was quite illuminating.
Rosenfeld engaged in a 31 year battle with the FBI over Freedom of Information Act requests to release hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. Because the Church committee proved that the FBI's domestic program was political in nature, these documents did not fall under the exemption for "law enforcement", but because of the embarrassing nature of the findings, the FBI did not give up without a fight. Kudos to Rosenfeld for sticking with it over such a long time so that we could hear this story. It is immensely documented, with about 200 pages of footnotes (so don't despair..the book is only 500 pages of actual text).
Rosenfeld was able to illustrate quite well the organic movement and development behind the FSM, and given the counter-culture political fights of today, I really appreciated seeing that movement-building. He also gave us a good picture of the sixties more broadly, sometimes maybe too much so with a lot of extraneous detail. Still, generally this detail did fill out the story, even if it added to bulk and was a bit of a distraction to the central narrative around the FBI's activities and Reagan's assholish abuse of that power structure.
The book is a bit of a mindfuck - I cannot count the number of times where I thought, "No fucking way. Seriously? These guys are such a bunch of dicks." It is astounding to see just how f'ed the feds were in this time period. At the same time, when Rosenfeld starts going through the shitshow at People's Park, which resulted in the serious injury of innocent bystanders, it's impossible not to see the parallels to police action in Ferguson. Similarly, when viewing the way in which the FBI interfered FOR Reagan and AGAINST Clark Kerr around what was nominally quite similar issues, you can't help but think of the recent Bundy trial, and how much different the outcome of that whole situation is when compared to the Keystone XL protests at Standing Rock.
The only thing that is holding me back on rating this a 5 is that it feels at times like a bit of a knowledge dump. Whether it was because he wanted to make sure that all of his FOIA work ended up in the book or whether it is just a reporter's tendency to color a narrative, there does seem to be quite a bit of extraneous detail, whether that's an FBI investigator's nickname (never to be mentioned again) or the setlist from a random concert played on campus - these things help convey "the scene" at some times, but at others it's just like, "OK, who cares?"
Still, quite glad I read this, even if it wasn't a parallel to today in quite the same way I was expecting. I will still have to get my Reagan narrative at another point, but this had plenty of relevance to what is going on now, and that's ultimately what I was seeking. I'd definitely recommend reading if you're interested in the Free Speech Movement or the movements of the sixties in general, provided you're willing to get in deep. And I guarantee this book will make you go, "Oh hell no that is FUCKED UP."
Subversives tells the tale of the political motivations behind the FBI's domestic surveillance program, with a particular focus on California. St. Ronny is, of course, a dick, and it comes across in this book. And the parallel between his rise to power, drawing upon a fear of "the other" and latching onto a culture war held as true as I'd hoped. But I think the real surprise for me was the organic chronicling of the Free Speech Movement. Having attended Berkeley, I had a good sense of the geography, which was neat - but I had no f'ing clue any of the history behind those places, so this history was quite illuminating.
Rosenfeld engaged in a 31 year battle with the FBI over Freedom of Information Act requests to release hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. Because the Church committee proved that the FBI's domestic program was political in nature, these documents did not fall under the exemption for "law enforcement", but because of the embarrassing nature of the findings, the FBI did not give up without a fight. Kudos to Rosenfeld for sticking with it over such a long time so that we could hear this story. It is immensely documented, with about 200 pages of footnotes (so don't despair..the book is only 500 pages of actual text).
Rosenfeld was able to illustrate quite well the organic movement and development behind the FSM, and given the counter-culture political fights of today, I really appreciated seeing that movement-building. He also gave us a good picture of the sixties more broadly, sometimes maybe too much so with a lot of extraneous detail. Still, generally this detail did fill out the story, even if it added to bulk and was a bit of a distraction to the central narrative around the FBI's activities and Reagan's assholish abuse of that power structure.
The book is a bit of a mindfuck - I cannot count the number of times where I thought, "No fucking way. Seriously? These guys are such a bunch of dicks." It is astounding to see just how f'ed the feds were in this time period. At the same time, when Rosenfeld starts going through the shitshow at People's Park, which resulted in the serious injury of innocent bystanders, it's impossible not to see the parallels to police action in Ferguson. Similarly, when viewing the way in which the FBI interfered FOR Reagan and AGAINST Clark Kerr around what was nominally quite similar issues, you can't help but think of the recent Bundy trial, and how much different the outcome of that whole situation is when compared to the Keystone XL protests at Standing Rock.
The only thing that is holding me back on rating this a 5 is that it feels at times like a bit of a knowledge dump. Whether it was because he wanted to make sure that all of his FOIA work ended up in the book or whether it is just a reporter's tendency to color a narrative, there does seem to be quite a bit of extraneous detail, whether that's an FBI investigator's nickname (never to be mentioned again) or the setlist from a random concert played on campus - these things help convey "the scene" at some times, but at others it's just like, "OK, who cares?"
Still, quite glad I read this, even if it wasn't a parallel to today in quite the same way I was expecting. I will still have to get my Reagan narrative at another point, but this had plenty of relevance to what is going on now, and that's ultimately what I was seeking. I'd definitely recommend reading if you're interested in the Free Speech Movement or the movements of the sixties in general, provided you're willing to get in deep. And I guarantee this book will make you go, "Oh hell no that is FUCKED UP."
August 9, 2020
Incredibly researched book (don't skip the appendix, which details his 30 year quest to pry information from the FBI). Much of this book was no surprise, I've read several accounts of Hoover's FBI, and his paranoia, red-baiting, and dislike of the civil rights movement is well documented.
What I didn't know, however, was that Ronald Reagan was a snitch for the FBI and essentially abused his position as president of SAG to inform on his own members, some of whom were then blacklisted (for refusing to snitch, ironically), lost their jobs, and had to move out of Hollywood. Despite Reagan's appearance in the title and text, however, he's not the main character her, though he's definitely a villain in Rosenfeld's eye. The real story is about the demonization of the FSM by Hoover and other right-wingers.
The parallels to how the Free Speech Movement was treated in the 60's and how the Black Lives Matter movement is being treated today are uncanny. While the FBI is hopefully less political now, the techniques used by right-wing politicians to discredit the movements are quite similar. Rosenfeld's book, of course, doesn't address the present day, ending essentially with his two terms as governor of California.
Rosenfeld focuses most on two key players, Clark Kerr, who served as Chancellor at UC Berkeley and as President of the UC System, and Mario Savio, the somewhat unwilling leader of the FSM. and how they were ill-treated at the hands of Reagan and the FBI, but there is a large cast of supporting characters as well.
The one criticism I have for the book is that I wish more space had been given to the FBI's war on the Black Power movement, which was contemporaneous and active at Berkeley.Also, in addition to Reagan's illegal use of the FBI as a weapon against his political enemies, some additional documentation on the economic harm he did the the UC system would round out the story, as well.
What I didn't know, however, was that Ronald Reagan was a snitch for the FBI and essentially abused his position as president of SAG to inform on his own members, some of whom were then blacklisted (for refusing to snitch, ironically), lost their jobs, and had to move out of Hollywood. Despite Reagan's appearance in the title and text, however, he's not the main character her, though he's definitely a villain in Rosenfeld's eye. The real story is about the demonization of the FSM by Hoover and other right-wingers.
The parallels to how the Free Speech Movement was treated in the 60's and how the Black Lives Matter movement is being treated today are uncanny. While the FBI is hopefully less political now, the techniques used by right-wing politicians to discredit the movements are quite similar. Rosenfeld's book, of course, doesn't address the present day, ending essentially with his two terms as governor of California.
Rosenfeld focuses most on two key players, Clark Kerr, who served as Chancellor at UC Berkeley and as President of the UC System, and Mario Savio, the somewhat unwilling leader of the FSM. and how they were ill-treated at the hands of Reagan and the FBI, but there is a large cast of supporting characters as well.
The one criticism I have for the book is that I wish more space had been given to the FBI's war on the Black Power movement, which was contemporaneous and active at Berkeley.Also, in addition to Reagan's illegal use of the FBI as a weapon against his political enemies, some additional documentation on the economic harm he did the the UC system would round out the story, as well.
May 28, 2024
This book is the history of FBI and its crusade against communism and so called subversive groups. We learn about HUAC and the offshoot in California. The hunt for so called communists in all areas of society especially Hollywood. Enter Ronald Reagan as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He secretly informed on his guild members while denying it publicly. Thus began his relationship with Hoover. They formed a symbiotic relationship of helping each other achieve their respective goals.Reagan saw communism behind the unrest on the University of California Berkeley campus.
Enter Mario Savio and his Freedom of Speech movement on the campus. Reagan railed against Clark Kerr, the president of Berkeley, as allowing communists to take over the school. Reagan worked covertly with Hoover infiltrate the group and paint it as subversive. We learn of Hoover’s COINTELPRO efforts to infiltrate and destroy any group he saw as subversive. Reagan aided these programs and exchanged information between the him and the FBI. They used innuendo and unfounded charges to achieve their goals.
The author also details the civil right violations used by them to achieve their goals. In the end we see that republicans are still using the same tactics of character assassination for their political ends. Reagan is shown as a most despicable character, but is still seen by many as a great leader and person.
Enter Mario Savio and his Freedom of Speech movement on the campus. Reagan railed against Clark Kerr, the president of Berkeley, as allowing communists to take over the school. Reagan worked covertly with Hoover infiltrate the group and paint it as subversive. We learn of Hoover’s COINTELPRO efforts to infiltrate and destroy any group he saw as subversive. Reagan aided these programs and exchanged information between the him and the FBI. They used innuendo and unfounded charges to achieve their goals.
The author also details the civil right violations used by them to achieve their goals. In the end we see that republicans are still using the same tactics of character assassination for their political ends. Reagan is shown as a most despicable character, but is still seen by many as a great leader and person.
April 9, 2020
Long-form magazine-style narrative with some interesting FOIA stuff on Reagan's solid links to Hoover/FBI and how it secured his path to power and hence rise of corporate right and neoliberalism.
It is a focused narrative around UC Berkley and concurrent rise of right and left antagonism; the former having most of the guns, money and billy clubs. 3 protagonists represent center-liberal (Clark Kerr, UCB director); Reagan and Mario Savio, the key speaker in the Free Speech Movement. Its no surprise it ends badly for the latter, and not great for Kerr either.
A lot to like but way too long and a few instances of repeated points/themes gets very tiresome. He has a natural journalistic style and its an important narrative, but it has zero analysis and too much repetition and digression. Reagan was at least a figurehead of the same forces that lead us to today...a deranged neoliberalism where money Trumps all other interests to the point of extinction.
It is a focused narrative around UC Berkley and concurrent rise of right and left antagonism; the former having most of the guns, money and billy clubs. 3 protagonists represent center-liberal (Clark Kerr, UCB director); Reagan and Mario Savio, the key speaker in the Free Speech Movement. Its no surprise it ends badly for the latter, and not great for Kerr either.
A lot to like but way too long and a few instances of repeated points/themes gets very tiresome. He has a natural journalistic style and its an important narrative, but it has zero analysis and too much repetition and digression. Reagan was at least a figurehead of the same forces that lead us to today...a deranged neoliberalism where money Trumps all other interests to the point of extinction.
December 23, 2021
To summarize these 700+ pages: Via multiple lawsuits citing the Freedom of Information Act, the author compelled the release of thousands of pages of previously confidential files concerning the FBI’s interference in student protests at Berkeley in the 60s and, in said files, J Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan massively show their asses.
I appreciated how thorough the author was in the sense that he didn’t expect you to automatically know any relevant events you should know about in order to understand the events he is recounting in the book, and he includes a lot of background information I didn’t necessarily know. And now I know about a lot of really interesting figures that played important roles in this story that I might not have learned about otherwise. This book was surprisingly readable considering how long it is and how specific the subject is.
I appreciated how thorough the author was in the sense that he didn’t expect you to automatically know any relevant events you should know about in order to understand the events he is recounting in the book, and he includes a lot of background information I didn’t necessarily know. And now I know about a lot of really interesting figures that played important roles in this story that I might not have learned about otherwise. This book was surprisingly readable considering how long it is and how specific the subject is.
May 27, 2024
Phenomenal read. Dude basically spent 27 years suing the federal government for all the FBI files related to the Berkeley protests, got them and then wrote the book. Really good profiles on Reagan and Hoover and Mario Savio (student protestor). Some of the Reagan shit is so funny god that man is stupid as shit.
Book goes through the Berkeley protests basically from when they were protesting HUAC hearings, to protesting for free speech on campus and for civil rights, to protesting Vietnam. Shows how insane and extreme FBI “subversive” superviellance was during the time and what an evil bastard Hoover was. Plenty of jaw dropping by stories and insane FBI records. The levels of paranoia and hysteria on display by Reagan and Hoover and the crew was breathtaking. Truly insane people. No one loves making up a left wing conspiracy in their head like Reagan did.
Book goes through the Berkeley protests basically from when they were protesting HUAC hearings, to protesting for free speech on campus and for civil rights, to protesting Vietnam. Shows how insane and extreme FBI “subversive” superviellance was during the time and what an evil bastard Hoover was. Plenty of jaw dropping by stories and insane FBI records. The levels of paranoia and hysteria on display by Reagan and Hoover and the crew was breathtaking. Truly insane people. No one loves making up a left wing conspiracy in their head like Reagan did.
June 4, 2023
Terrific document of Berkeley in the 1960s, and the constant attempts by the FBI to surveil, track, and discredit students who mostly wanted to have their freedom of speech on campus and use their right to protest the war in Vietnam. Locating the narrative in four men—J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, University of California president Clark Kerr and Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio—Rosenfeld uses his vast storehouse of FBI documents (obtained through dogged FOIA lawsuits) to account for virtually every major highlight in an eight-year period. Reagan's FBI informant days stretch back to when he named names in Hollywood, and the agency worked hand in glove with Reagan the politician to demonize and beat back student protesters. Really fine work.
May 15, 2025
What a fantastic book. Uses several decades of student movements at Berkeley to tell the story of how campus repression, surveillance and infiltration were really honed under J Edgar Hoover, as well as how Ronald Reagan came to power. The book provides a detailed account developed over 3 decades via countless FOIA lawsuits. The parallels to today are really incredible, seen in things like how the president of Berkeley and the president of Columbia were completely raked over the coals for not having an iron enough fist etc. My favorite chapter is the one which exposes Richard Aoki, who infiltrated a number of groups and was one of the first to arm the Black Panthers and helped set them on a path of destruction. I think everyone should read it but especially campus activists.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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