The Hunters and the Hunted
Book Review by MATT TAIBBI, NYT
SUBVERSIVES: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power
By Seth Rosenfeld
Illustrated. 734 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40
America never got over the ’60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics. The battle lines are still so painfully visible that 50 years after the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the presidential race this year will come down to a contest between a former community organizer pilloried for supposed ties to ’60s radicals and a former Stanford student who protested against campus antiwar demonstrations.
Moreover, the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old ’60s argument, pitting social conservatives’ unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there’s something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony. These two sides have painstakingly constructed competing versions of recent American history, leaving us without even a common set of historical facts to debate.
It’s important to try to ignore all of this background when reading “Subversives,” the journalist Seth Rosenfeld’s electrifying examination of a newly declassified treasure trove of documents detailing our government’s campaign of surveillance of the Berkeley campus during the ’60s. Rosenfeld spent 30 years fighting to compel the government to release more than 300,000 pages of documents about the illegal spying program, an effort the F.B.I. spent almost a million dollars opposing.
If forced through the typical blue/red “Crossfire”-style propaganda shredder, the sensational material would be debased, both sides using the book’s iconic characters to score quick and easy on-air points. Right-wing screamers like Michael Savage would rail against the book as 700 pages of whining by “red-diaper doper babies” whose idea of changing the world was singing “Yellow Submarine” and hanging Ronald Reagan in effigy. Liberal cable shows, meanwhile, would make great hay over the sordid revelations about Reagan (whom the F.B.I. records reveal to have been petty and cowardly, snitching on a young actress to the F.B.I. just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party).
(More here.)
SUBVERSIVES: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power
By Seth Rosenfeld
Illustrated. 734 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40
America never got over the ’60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics. The battle lines are still so painfully visible that 50 years after the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the presidential race this year will come down to a contest between a former community organizer pilloried for supposed ties to ’60s radicals and a former Stanford student who protested against campus antiwar demonstrations.
Moreover, the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old ’60s argument, pitting social conservatives’ unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there’s something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony. These two sides have painstakingly constructed competing versions of recent American history, leaving us without even a common set of historical facts to debate.
It’s important to try to ignore all of this background when reading “Subversives,” the journalist Seth Rosenfeld’s electrifying examination of a newly declassified treasure trove of documents detailing our government’s campaign of surveillance of the Berkeley campus during the ’60s. Rosenfeld spent 30 years fighting to compel the government to release more than 300,000 pages of documents about the illegal spying program, an effort the F.B.I. spent almost a million dollars opposing.
If forced through the typical blue/red “Crossfire”-style propaganda shredder, the sensational material would be debased, both sides using the book’s iconic characters to score quick and easy on-air points. Right-wing screamers like Michael Savage would rail against the book as 700 pages of whining by “red-diaper doper babies” whose idea of changing the world was singing “Yellow Submarine” and hanging Ronald Reagan in effigy. Liberal cable shows, meanwhile, would make great hay over the sordid revelations about Reagan (whom the F.B.I. records reveal to have been petty and cowardly, snitching on a young actress to the F.B.I. just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party).
(More here.)
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