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.

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.”

Those 40 years in the 19th century ended at Wounded Knee with the final defeat of Indian counter forces. A great figure in this extended war was Crazy Horse, who is memorialized in a fine and vivid biography by Joseph Marshall,  himself a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe. He is joined in this 2004 discussion by Brian Hosner, an historian of this epic struggle.