Government & Politics

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 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.

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.

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?

Journalist Frances Harrison has been the BBC's correspondent in the Iranian capital city of Tehran for the past 3 years. She says conditions have gotten worse, especially for women, under the increasing strictures being put in place by the ultraconservative Islamic government. Harrison's husband is Iranian; prior to her posting in Iran, she reported for the BBC from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Malaysia. She's now back in the U.K.

Ayub Nuri was working with foreign journalists in Iraq as a fixer — a war-zone interpreter, guide, source-finder and occasional life-saver. Nuri worked with increasing autonomy until he became a reporter with his own byline. He wrote about his experiences in The New York Times Magazine on July 29, 2007. Nuri is now based in New York City.

Malcolm MacPherson's new novel is Hocus POTUS, a political farce about the shenanigans of White House loyalists in Baghdad's Green Zone, written from the point of view of an American journalist stationed there. The book draws on MacPherson's own experiences as a foreign correspondent for Time and Newsweek magazines, during which time he reported from Baghdad on Ambassador Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

It's been a busy congressional season — contentious hearings with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez in the hot seat, revisions to the nation's domestic-eavesdropping laws, major ethics-reform moves and, of course, debate about what to do about Iraq. Journalist Carl Hulse, who reports on Congress for The New York Times, reviews the legislative session.

Forbes magazine writer Robyn Meredith talks about the economic realities behind her new book: The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us. Previously, Meredith wrote for The New York Times and USA Today.

Mohammed Hafez, author of Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom, says the overwhelming majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are non-Iraqi volunteers. He says the war has unleashed a new generation of Muslim militants who care little about national boundaries. They're driven instead, he says, by the ideal of defending Muslims whoever and wherever they are.

Hafez is a visiting professor of political science at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He's also the author of Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers.

"There is a madness in Gaza now." So says New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger, who joins Terry Gross to talk about the Palestinian power struggle that's erupted recently and how the battles between the Hamas and Fatah factions are affecting life in the West Bank and Gaza.

Erlanger has reported from all over the world, serving in Moscow, Bangkok, Prague and other cities. Prior to his tenure at the Times, he wrote for The Boston Globe.

It's been a year since the start of last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah. We'll discuss life in Lebanon, and the conflict's unintended consequences, with Timor Goksel, former spokesperson and senior adviser for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Goksel now teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Russian arms dealer Victor Bout has armed Islamic extremists and sold weapons to some of the Third World's most abusive and murderous dictators and warlords — and he's known for fueling both sides of conflicts.

His success is rooted in the legacy of the Cold War, whose messy unraveling left him with easy access to massive inventories of weapons and ammunition built up by the Soviets. We talk about Bout with journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, who've co-written a book about him: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.