Fresh Air with Terry Gross, August 21, 2012: Interview with Seth Rosenfeld; Obituary for Phyllis Diller.

Since its national debut in 1987, Fresh Air with Terry Gross has been a highly acclaimed and much adored weekday magazine among public radio listeners. Each week, nearly 4.8 million people turn to Peabody Award-winning host Terry Gross for insightful conversations with the leading voices in contemporary arts and issues. The renowned program reaches a global audience, with over 620 public radio stations broadcasting Fresh Air, and 3 million podcast downloads each week. Fresh Air has broken the mold of 'talk show' by weaving together superior journalism and intimate storytelling from modern-day intellectuals, politicians and artists alike. Through probing questions and careful research, Gross's interviews are lauded for revealing a fresh perspective on cultural icons and trends. Her thorough conversations are often complemented by commentary from well-known contributors. Fresh Air is produced at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and broadcast nationally by NPR.
(1.) Journalist SETH ROSENFELD. He is a former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle and winner of the George Polk award. He spent three decades pursuing government documents regarding the FBI's undercover operation in Berkeley during the student protest movements of the 1960s. After three Freedom of Information lawsuits, the FBI released 250,000 internal memos. The result is ROSENFELD's new book Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power. He finds that the FBI tapped the phones of protest leaders, and broke into their homes. They also spied on sympathetic professors and college administrators. And ROSENFELD details the secret political partnership between J. Edgar Hoover and the then newly elected California governor Ronald Reagan to get the University's president Clark Kerr fired. (THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES INTO THE SECOND HALF OF THE SHOW). (2.) We remember comic PHYLLIS DILLER who died Monday at the age of 95. We'll listen back to 1986 interview with her.