The recent death at 93 of Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, led us back to this 1995 conversation when he revealed some surprising things about Watergate, Woodward, Bernstein, and their key source known as “Deep Throat.” He played his role as well or better than did Jason Robards in the movie about those events.

Way back in 1974 there occurred a memorable encounter with Abba Eban who served Israel at the UN and ultamitely as Foreign Minister and a great public intellectual. An amusing side impression during this early encounter is Eban’s totally British rhetorical style as he denies any persisting British identity.

Ira Berkow of the New York Times was the most interesting sports writer we ever encountered – not merely for his knowledge of the technical sides of baseball, tennis, football, etc. – but because of his great skill in painting verbal portraits of the performers, brilliant, superhuman, eccentric, or merely human. Essentially he was a novelist let loose upon the field and in the ring. Here he is in a 2002 tale-telling session.

Scott Berg at the age of 33 had a scheduled interview with Hepburn which turned out to be a close friendship that lasted till her death. He then went on to do an insightful and fascinating biography of her as “one smart cookie” who managed to be a movie star for 60 years. Here is our 2003 conversation, including one delightful clip from “The Philadelphia Story.”

The meaning of the title is that both Harry and I experience “awe” when contemplating the oddities and delights of his career as actor, satirist and all-around great mimic. Here he is, seriously kidding around in a 2006 conversation and tracking from Saturday Nite Live to his own show. Simple confession: Harry is one of my favorite show biz people.

Ronald Radosh was raised within that culture and ranks as one of the leading and former “red diaper babies.” He went on as an academic to be one of the major investigators of that culture, its works, ways, and achievements. Here in 2001 he discusses, his book, “Commies: The Old Left, The New Left And The Left-Over Left.”  To this day he remains a controversial figure in American  academic life.

…was, of course, the so-called “Battle of the Bulge .” In 2003 four American veterans of that last great assault share their vivid memories of how the Wehrmacht advanced with massive force and was after a dreadful month of unrelenting combat, routed by the American and British armies led respectively by Patton and Montgomery.

Bernard Lewis has been the single most influential, academically-based scholar of the history, religion, politics and present disorder of the Arab world. Now in his nineties and still productive, he has propounded a general interpretation of “What Went Wrong,” the title of one of his most important books, with the once-flourishing and now-disordered Islamic civilization. Here in 2004 he discusses with us – and in his words – “the roots of Arab rage.”

What’s Putin doing in the title? That’s to remind ourselves that if the first two items don’t totally exhaust our correlated capacities for worry, pessimism and despair, there’s always the reactivated cadaver of the Soviet Union to keep us in persisting dysphoria. There are Russianists and Russianists and lots of them still linger in Fukayamish optimism that at least the “cold war” ended years ago. A few of the best students of the present Russian reality think otherwise and have good and easily demonstrable reasons. One is David Satter who has appeared here on two of our earlier podcasts. Another is Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University who recorded this conversation with us just before the emergence of the ISIS and Ebola nightmares.

Here then is his properly pessimistic reading of Putin and the anti-democratic culture from which he comes and by which he and his happy army of kleptocrats are sustained. In other words, when the Ebola scourge has passed and Islamic Jihadism has finally been brought down to a manageable level, the Russian threat to eastern European societies will still be there and may have done them a good deal more damage than Ukraine has already sustained.