Author vs. FBI: Court to Have Last Word

When the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights revealed two weeks ago that the FBI has for several years been investigating members of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in defiance of congressional restrictions on political surveillance, UC Irvine history professor Jon Wiener wasn’t surprised.

“The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover,” he said in his UCI office recently, “consistently went far beyond its legitimate law enforcement role. This would seem to indicate that in spite of assurances to the contrary, not much has changed.”

Wiener should know. He has been involved in a seven-year battle for release of the FBI’s 288-page file on former Beatle John Lennon. Wiener got about one-third of that information--heavily censored--for a book he was writing on Lennon. When he was refused access to any of the rest, he went to court in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act to force the FBI to release all the information in the Lennon file that didn’t--in the view of the court--endanger national security. Although final arguments were made in Los Angeles County Superior Court almost six months ago, there still has been no decision.

“I think,” Wiener said, “that we showed convincingly that nothing Lennon did, planned to do or talked about doing in any way threatened the national security of the United States. At most, it threatened the reelection of President Nixon.”

Wiener has become philosophical about the waiting. Anticipating that his attempts to get more information might take years, he published the book--”Come Together: John Lennon in His Time” (Random House)--in 1985. When and if new material is released, he’ll amend the book accordingly. Meanwhile, he is dismayed to see the enormous advances in public knowledge represented by passage of the Freedom of Information Act being, in his view, steadily eroded by the Reagan Administration.

“The FOIA,” he said, “is a wonderful thing. No other country in the world has anything like it. It says that not only does the government of the United States belong to the people, but so does the government’s information. Therefore, the government has an obligation to release this information. The law came about during the Carter Administration as an aftermath of Watergate.

“The FBI is frustrating the intent of the act, and this has become steadily more apparent under President Reagan. Trying to pull the teeth of the Freedom of Information Act has apparently been a high priority of the Reagan Administration.”

Wiener pointed out that under the original concept of the law, the government was required to balance the public’s right to know against any possible damage that disclosure might cause. Reagan pushed hard early in his presidency--”when he had his greatest clout”--to get rid of the balancing concept. Congress obliged by rewording the law so that virtually all the government has to do now to prevent disclosure is to profess some basis for danger. That makes it necessary for the public to argue each issue in court--an expensive and time-consuming process.

But Wiener has hung in--with considerable help from the American Civil Liberties Union. Although he had always viewed the Beatles as the soft underbelly of rock music (“they later became much more complex as political figures”), Wiener was hit hard by John Lennon’s murder in December, 1980. Soon afterward, he decided to do a book on Lennon, “not just a popular biography but a serious history. I think the history of youth culture and the New Left belong as a legitimate part of American history.”

That’s when he filed his first request for the FBI’s files on Lennon. He also requested Lennon’s immigration files. Those were sent promptly and completely. “Immigration,” Wiener said, “complied with the act. The FBI took five months to respond and then sent about one-third of the material, and even some of that was outrageously deleted.”

Citizens requesting information under the FOIA are allowed one appeal. Wiener filed his at FBI headquarters and at eight FBI field offices “where the most interesting raw data is kept.” A year and a half later, he received a few more pages--and that was it. His only remaining recourse was a lawsuit, but he did not have enough money to see it through. So he took his problem to the ACLU in Los Angeles “and the people there felt we had a good case of flagrant abuse.”

“It’s the only way to take them on,” Wiener said. “I have a friend who is trying to write a biography of Paul Robeson. The FBI probably has more complete information on him than any other single source, but my friend has already spent $20,000 and has received virtually nothing. Unless you’re independently wealthy--or get the support of someone like the ACLU--they’ll outlast you.”

Wiener is determined that isn’t going to happen to him. A slight, bespectacled man of 43 with the broad perspective of the historian that he is, Wiener takes a rather dispassionate view of his troubles with the government.

“One of the big problems,” he said, “with the information in the FBI files--even if we get it--is that it was collected with the specific intent of proving what Hoover wanted to prove. So dis-information has become a problem for historians in working with this material.”

It is also a problem with the limited information Wiener finally received from the FBI, which showed, among other things, that:

- President Richard Nixon was convinced that Lennon was going to lead a demonstration against him at the Republican National Convention in 1972.

- Accordingly, Nixon ordered the FBI to follow Lennon for many months prior to the convention, hoping to arrest him on drug charges or otherwise “neutralize” him so he could be deported.

- Even though no evidence was turned up of any Lennon plan even to attend, let alone disrupt, the Republican convention, FBI agents monitored all of Lennon’s public appearances, kept tabs on his private life and pursued him relentlessly for several years in an effort to get him out of the country.

“Among the things I finally got that the FBI classified as ‘confidential,’ ” Wiener said, “were the lyrics of a song entitled ‘John Sinclair’ that were printed on the sleeve of a Lennon album.”

Despite all of this legal head-bumping, Wiener said he has never been subjected to any type of harassment by the FBI. “As far as I know,” he said, “it’s all been treated as a bureaucratic thing.”

That wasn’t true of the younger Jon Wiener. He grew up in St. Paul, Minn., where he joined in civil rights demonstrations in the early 1960s while he was still in high school. At Princeton, he helped organize the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963 and was involved in the first anti-war march on Washington in 1965. Later, while working toward his Ph.D. at Harvard, Wiener wrote for an underground anti-war journal.

All of this was carefully noted by the FBI, as Wiener discovered when he requested his own file soon after the FOIA was passed. “They were very thorough,” he said. “They even went back to St. Paul and talked to my high school teachers, who all insisted that I was a good American boy. But Hoover wanted a file on every SDS member so he could make sure none of us ever got a job in government service.”

Wiener, who started teaching at UCI in 1972, still has “the same values and political orientation I had then, but this has never caused any kind of problem at UCI.”

Nor has it made him any less charitable toward the current student generation, which is several light years removed from the radical politics of the 1960s.

“There are very good reasons,” he said, “why students today have more interest in getting jobs than in getting involved in social or political movements. The 1960s were relative boom times. It’s a lot tougher to be a young person on your own today. So they have to be career-oriented.

“Also, today’s young people haven’t seen very many good examples of how they can change things. After all, Reagan has been president for almost half of their lives. In spite of that, I think that a lot of kids today are concerned about the directions this country is taking, but they lack a sense that they can make a difference. Although they have good reasons to feel that way, I see a lot of signs--divestment from apartheid, centers for opposing aid to the Contras, the peace movement--comparable to the early 1960s.”

Wiener has found some causes, too, beyond his court fight with the FBI. He played a key role, for example, in convincing the UCI Academic Senate that such strong conditions should be attached to a campus site for the Richard Nixon Presidential Library that it eventually moved to a more benign location in Yorba Linda. “My concern,” Wiener said, “was to make sure that scholars would have access to all the documents and that it would not simply be a monument to Nixon.”

Wiener has been able to combine his affection for rock music and his struggle for release of the Lennon files in his classroom, where he devotes one lecture to relating rock music to cultural and political affairs in a class called “Americans Since 1945.”

“But now,” he said, “I’m more interested in current pop music figures, especially Bruce Springsteen, who pushes hard for government help for Americans who need it and are being overlooked. Reagan in several speeches has tried to associate himself with Springsteen. I guess that’s progress. It’s certainly a lot better than Richard Nixon, who was so fearful of John Lennon that he tried to have him deported.”

Is he angry about all these years of being waltzed around by the FBI?

“Sure I am. What the FBI and the Reagan Justice Department are doing in withholding information is just plain wrong. They are continuing a cover-up of the Nixon abuses of power--and it’s time to blow the whistle to stop this.”