Government & Politics

In The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea, veteran journalist Steve LeVine writes about the high-stakes political gamesmanship over control of the rich oil resources in that region.

In July 2003, newspaper columnist Robert Novak published the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame — shortly after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece contradicting President Bush's contention that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure yellowcake uranium from the West African nation of Niger.

The three-day March on the Pentagon in October 1967 inspired Norman Mailer to write Armies of the Night and stirred many to action. While the march 40 years ago cannot be considered a turning point in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, it did serve to galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War.

This year the Human Rights First Award for Excellence in Television will be given to a show that "depicts torture and interrogation in a nuanced, realistic fashion." According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.

TV producer Adam Fierro (The Shield), intelligence expert Col. Stuart Herrington and human rights advocate David Danzig discuss TV violence.

Shows nominated for the award include Lost, Criminal Minds, The Closer and The Shield.

In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy." That, as Wills tells guest host Dave Davies, hasn't stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.

Wills, a translator of St. Augustine and author of What Jesus Meant, is an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University; the new book is titled Head and Heart: American Christianities.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this week’s edition (“Shifting Targets”) is about the administration’s shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.

A foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov traces the beginning of the global jihad to Nov. 20, 1979.

It was the first morning of the new Muslim century, and hundreds of fundamentalist gunmen seized Islam's holiest shrine — the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The event and its ringleaders have since inspired militants, including al-Qaida.

Trofimov is also the author of Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu.

For 25 years, author and journalist Ahmed Rashid has covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

He files for English language papers including the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph. Based in Lahore, Rashid is the author of the bestselling books, Taliban and Jihad.

Journalist David Barboza covers business and culture in China as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He joins Terry Gross for a discussion of the recent string of recalls and product-safety scandals coming out of that country.

With the moderating, centrist voice of Sandra Day O'Connor now gone from the Supreme Court, a conservative counterrevolution that had been stymied for 20 years has now begun.

So says Jeffrey Toobin in his new book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. His book is about how this counterrevolution developed. It's also a behind-the-scenes look at the court, its recent decisions and the personalities of the justices behind them.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit him. Among other things, Nixon loyalists burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

On this edition of Fresh Air, we spend the entire hour with Bud Krogh, who went to prison for his role in the Ellsberg affair — and who has a new memoir. It's called Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House.

Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, discusses this week's long-awaited progress report from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top two American officials in Iraq.

Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of the best-selling book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It's just come out in paperback.

We love low prices, sure, but we frown at the things companies do to get us good deals — like paying low wages. In his book Supercapitalism, economist Robert Reich looks at the divided mind of the consumer and citizen.

Journalist and historian Burton Hersh has followed the Kennedy family for more than 35 years. His latest book is a study of the behind-the-scenes power struggles among the Kennedys and longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hersh writes that as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy did his best to keep Hoover — technically his subordinate — on a short leash. But knowledge of Kennedy family secrets gave Hoover, always a master manipulator, the upper hand.

As head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith led the team of lawyers that advises the presidency on the limits of executive power. During his tenure, he battled the Bush White House on the now-infamous "torture memos," as well as on issues of surveillance and the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. Goldsmith resigned his post after nine months.

Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for a series detailing how often President Bush used "signing statements" — controversial assertions of a chief executive's right to bypass provisions of new laws.

Now Savage has written a book describing how the Bush-Cheney administration has expanded executive power. It's called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.

In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.

Walt teaches international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Journalist Connie Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2005 for her work as a columnist for The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland. The judges praised her for writing "pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged." "Pungent" is a good word, too, for the tone of Schultz's new memoir, about being the wife of a political candidate. Her husband, Sherrod Brown, was an Ohio congressman when he decided to run for the U.S. Senate; Schultz took a sabbatical from her job to help him campaign. Her book is . . .

Fresh Air's resident linguist has had some thoughts lately on the language of the recent string of debates among the various presidential hopefuls. On today's show, he talks to Terry Gross about the signifiers he sees encoded in political language. Geoff Nunberg's most recent book is Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. His primary reaction to the debates?