The paths of the FBI, Ronald Reagan, Mario Savio and UC President Clark Kerr converge in the bestselling new book about UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power.

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear award-winning author Seth Rosenfeld talk about the book and its genesis on Thursday, Jan. 24, 12 to 1 pm in Franklin Lobby 1 Conference Room, the next event in the President’s Speaker Series. He will sell copies of his book at the talk (bring cash or check, please).

A San Francisco–based journalist who was an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle for 25 years, Rosenfeld has received the George Polk Award and other journalism honors.

He was also a writer for the Daily Cal while he was a Berkeley student from the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s. Rosenfeld conducted his research on the book through five Freedom of Information Act requests resulting in more than 300,000 pages of documents and five lawsuits over a period of 31 years.

Here’s a description of the book from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

“Rosenfeld tells a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters and secret detention lists. He reveals how the FBI’s covert operations — led by Reagan’s friend J. Edgar Hoover — helped ignite an era of student protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically. At the same time, he vividly evokes the life of Berkeley in the early sixties — and shows how the university community became a battleground in an epic struggle between the government and free citizens.”

The President’s Speaker Series, On California, was initiated by President Mark Yudof in 2011 to showcase the talent and public contributions of UC faculty, alumni and other prominent Californians in the areas of education, policy/politics and research.

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