IK: How did you become interested in the subject for your book? Were you a Beatle fan in the early days?

JW: I'm a 60's person. I was in college during the 60's and I worked for an underground newspaper in Massachusetts and I was one of the people who believed that the Beatles were the 'Good Boys' of rock & roll and the Rolling Stones were the real radicals. I was particularly unhappy with John's song, "Revolution." But, I remained a fan and remember being thrilled by the "Imagine" album and "Gimme Some Truth." Then I became a historian - I teach at the University of California, Irvine. I was just hit very hard by Lennon's murder, like everyone else. Originally, I had not intended to write anything about him, but as I followed the tributes and memorial programs, I became more unhappy that nobody was really telling the story of Lennon's engagement with the social and political questions of the 60's and 70's. Finally, I decided I would have to do it. In the spring of 1981 I began to work on this project. It took me three years to finish it.

IK: The main publicity surrounding the book deals with the FBI files and I had the impression, as probably a lot of people do, that the book was going to deal mainly with those findings, but it actually covers the whole era - it's the whole story of that period of John and Yoko's lives from the political/ protest movement viewpoint.

JW: It's true. The FBI files are the basis for maybe two chapters out of 25 chapters. The publicity focuses on those files partly because my lawsuit against the FBI which was filed a year ago in March, made headlines all around the country and Random House thinks that was important. They also want to distinguish this book from the other books, and this is a hook they've decided on.

IK: You talked to Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seal. Did you have any problem locating these people and did they offer any resistance when you approached them for interviews?

JW: Almost everybody was just thrilled and delighted to talk about their friendships with John. They all had very vivid memories and once they started talking, it was hard to stop them. I could never find Rennie Davis who had played a key role in the preliminaries for setting up this 1972 concert tour that John was interested in. Rennie is living somewhere in Colorado and the people who had phone numbers for him, those phones weren't connected anymore.

IK: So basically, everyone was positive about the book and talked to you freely.

JW: Jerry Rubin in some ways was in the most difficult position since he has completely changed sides in the view of many. John had criticized him quite bitterly in his Newsweek interview of September, 1980. But eventually, Jerry was delighted to talk to me and he went through trunks of memorabilia. His view is: those were great days and these are great days, too, now that he's running a celebrity networking business on Wednesday nights at Studio 54 in New York!

IK: It surprised me that all of these people John had more or less brushed off as having been part of his "phony" radicalism were so positive and didn't sound bitter at all.

JW: This was one of the most interesting things I talked about with Jerry Rubin. He actually had been quite friendly with John and Yoko and had seen them at least every week and maybe more than that for maybe six months, the first six months they were living on Bank Street in New York. He said that he could understand John's bitterness towards him as John and Yoko were really naive about what they were getting into. They didn't realize what kind of a person Nixon was and the risks they were running in challenging him. Jerry and Jerry's friends did know what the stakes were and and Jerry sort of acknowledged that if he were in Lennon's shoes, he might have been bitter too.

IK: You've said that Elliot Mintz and Yoko, and presumably John, hadn't realized how far the FBI had gone to "bug" John. You have to wonder why it took a history professor, ten years later, to uncover all of this information.

JW: John did believe that they were wiretapped and he complained about the aggressive surveillance that he was sometimes subject to in the spring of 1972. He talked about that on the Dick Cavett Show in May of 1972. But it was hard to prove it and he wondered whether maybe he was just being paranoid. You know, 'don't despair, paranoia is everywhere.' After Watergate and after Nixon's resignation, John filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been subject to illegal wiretapping and surveillance and actually made some progress with the suit. The Justice Department never would admit that it actually did carry out wiretapping and in fact, maintained that they didn't - 'it could be that it was somebody else that was doing it; it could be that it was the New York City police; maybe it was the Immigration Service or Army intelligence.' So John had tried to find out with his lawsuit, but eventually after he got his green card, he gave up the suit. He could have filed a Freedom of Information Act request for his own files, but I think that once he got his permanent residency, that was enough.

IK: He didn't want to rock the boat?

JW: Well not so much that, but he'd been fighting for four years and now was over and I think he just wanted to go back to leading a normal life. It had taken enough out of him.

IK: In an early news report about your FBI findings, Elliot Mintz said that the memories of that time in J&Y's history were too painful for Yoko and that although she didn't object to your research on the subject, she didn't want to get involved. Did Yoko ever comment to you about her feelings as you uncovered these files and did she offer any advice, or did she remain a passive observer?

JW: In the times that I've talked to her over the last year, she'll say 'it's incredible how much was going on' but she's also said that they sort of knew it and she wasn't surprised. She said to me that their friends in the Peace Movement were always saying that they should've been doing more, but all of this stuff makes it clear that the government thought that they were doing way too much. So it confirmed a lot of her basic feelings about what was going on at the time. I also think it is basically true from all of the things she's said to me that she does want to concentrate on the future and her life with Sean and she does want to get this Lennon Museum and Archives together and she put a lot of work into Strawberry Fields. Those are her current projects, not this other and more painful stuff from the past.

IK: Is it possible that with all of these embarrassing facts being published about the FBI, that they may begin harassing everyone again, maybe even you?

JW: I doubt very much. They've been completely straight with me. We meet in court once every six months; they submit their briefs and we submit our briefs.

IK: They probably want to put it in the past, too.

JW: They want to argue that the FBI has been reformed, especialy since the death of J.Edgar Hoover and there have been new guidelines issued and it's a different FBI. I think that the FBI retains the potential to engage once again in unconstitutional harassment of dissidents, but at least in this case, I don't see any evidence that they're doing it.

IK: I'm going to ask your opinion about this next subject because so many people keep this question going. Since the FBI and the administration were so paranoid about John, and since some of the same people who were in power in the 70's are still in, or back in power in the 80's, is there any possibility, in your opinion, that on the heels of his reentry into public life, and on the eve of his participation in a protest march in San Francisco, John's death could have been government-sponsored?

JW: I'm familiar with the work of conspiracy theorists who argue that Lennon's murder was some kind of conspiracy that the government was involved in. I don't find any of the evidence that I've seen convincing. I've read everything I've been able to find on that subject. There may well be evidence that might come to light in the future that would be convincing. But on the basis of evidence that has come to light at this point, I'm satisfied that Lennon's killer acted alone and that he was an insane person. The most active conspiracy theorist I know that works on this is a woman named Mae Brussell who's in Northern California and has a radio program. The kind of arguments she makes - she has said, 'We don't know that Chapman's wife was not a CIA control agent.' Well, I don't find that a very convincing argument. If she had any evidence that Chapman's wife might be a CIA control agent, that would be something. But 'we don't know that she's not' is just speculation and that is the kind of material that I have seen. So that's why I say it isn't convincing. That doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means that as far as I'm concerned, the evidence isn't convincing.