Jon Wiener: Difference between revisions

Jon (Jonathan M.) Wiener is an American historian and professor at the University of California Irvine, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and a Los Angeles radio host. He was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its files on John Lennon.

Wiener v. FBI

Main article: John Lennon § Political activism

After John Lennon's death, Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files on Lennon, which document the Bureau's role in the Nixon Administration attempt to deport Lennon in 1972 to stop his anti-war campaign before the Nixon re-election campaign. The FBI acknowledged it had 281 pages in its files on Lennon but would not release most of them, saying they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. After fourteen years of litigation, the FBI released the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favorable decision in their case against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April, 1992, but the court declined to review the case. The Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues in the case outside of court in 1997, when all but 10 of the contested documents were released, following President Bill Clinton's position that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm."

In January 2000, Wiener published the book Gimme Some Truth, The John Lennon FBI Files, after the song by Lennon of the same name. The book contains facsimiles of the documents, incluiding police reports, White House memos, and TV transcripts. The story is told in the 2006 documentary The U.S. Versus John Lennon, by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality," and reported on Lennon's ties with London anti-war activists in 1971, were released in December 2006.

Author and commentator

In 2012 Wiener's book How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America was published by the University of California Press. The book documents Wiener's visits to Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials and examines popular skepticism about America’s victory.

In his 2005 book Historians in Trouble (The New Press), Wiener examined cases of historians accused of misconduct.

His earlier books include Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Random House, 1984), an account of Lennon’s place in the radical politics and counterculture of the 1960s.

Wiener has written for The Nation since 1984. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. His scholarly articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, and Past & Present.

Wiener hosts a weekly afternoon drive-time interview show on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. His guests have included Gail Collins, Jane Mayer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Frank, Pico Iyer, Seymour Hersh, Howard Zinn, Terry Gross, and Ira Glass.

Personal life

Wiener is a graduate of St. Paul Central High School, has a B.A. from Princeton University, a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has taught at UC Irvine since 1973. He lives in Los Angeles and is married to video artist and photographer Judy Fiskin.

Selected bibliography

• How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America. Berkeley: University of California press, October 2012. ISBN 9780520271418
• Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight. Edited with an introduction by Jon Wiener; afterword by Tom Hayden; drawings by Jules Feiffer. New York: The New Press, August 2006. ISBN 9781565848337
• Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Power in the Ivory Tower. New York: The New Press, 2005. ISBN 9781565848849
• Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 9780520222465
• Professors, Politics and Pop. London and New York: Verso Books, 1991. ISBN 9780860916727
• Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. New York: Random House, 1984. ISBN 9780252061318
• Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1865-1885. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. ISBN 9780807108888
• “The Footnote Fetish”. Telos 31 (Spring 1977). New York: Telos Press.

External links

• Jon Wiener website: On the radio and in print
• Biography at The Nation
• Biography at University of California, Irvine
• The John Lennon FBI files website
• "Probing the FBI's Files on John Lennon" Fresh Air with Terry Gross: interview with Jon Wiener