The John Lennon FBI Files

Booklist's review of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files" said in part.."Return with Wiener to another, not necessarily simpler but very different time when governments feared revolution by the young, fomented by a rock star...The documents constitute an impressive display of wrong-headedness..A great period piece."

Dan Rather, CBS Evening News, reporting on the settlement of Wiener v. FBI: "Just when you thought there may be nothing left to say about The Beatles or the Nixon years, the FBI has opened up its secret files on the late John Lennon."

Jon Wiener's first book about John Lennon, "Come Together: John Lennon In His Time" focused on John and Yoko's political activism. During the course of trying to get background information for his book, Wiener found himself up against the FBI's refusal to reveal the truth about their shenanigans where John Lennon was concerned. Wiener went to court, using the Freedom of Information Act as his weapon of choice to try to force the FBI to open their files, minus all the blacked-out sections that they had previously released to him.

The end result of his battle is "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files" - which details Wiener's 14-year battle to win release of John's files in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. One-hundred key pages of the Lennon FBI file will now be available, complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.

The FBI started compiling John's file in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing re-election and when John was living in New York and joining with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" John are the subject of the file.

Just taking my first glance through the pages of the book and seeing the FBI files reprinted with their notes, scribbles and big, black, marker blots gives one the sense of peeking in someone's desk drawer and finding something naughty that one wasn't supposed to find. Can't wait to read the book from start to finish..

Jon Wiener's credentials: Professor of History at the University of California; contributing editor of "The Nation."

The book is published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. And University of California Press,Ltd., London, England.

Visit Jon Wiener's Lennon FBI Files web site here