New Chapter Opens in Battle Over FBI Papers

As the subject for a book, ex-Beatle John Lennon was a perfect choice. Here was a singer from Liverpool who became a member of one of rock ‘n roll’s most successful bands, as well as a social commentator and a key influence in the peace movement during the tumultuous ‘60s.

“I wanted to write about the ‘60s, and I kept thinking about John Lennon and his music. It was my way of writing about that generation,” said UC Irvine history professor Jonathan Wiener, whose research for his 1984 book, “Come Together: John Lennon in His Time” launched him into a decade-long legal battle with the FBI.

On Friday, Wiener won a partial victory when a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the FBI failed to justify why it should not be compelled under the Freedom of Information Act to turn over documents from its investigation of Lennon’s political activism in 1971-72. Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan in New York City in 1980.

In 1983, litigation resulted in the FBI’s releasing more than 100 documents on Lennon to Wiener, who used them as research for his book. But 69 pages, about a third of the entire file, were withheld.

Wiener filed suit, but a lower court supported the FBI’s contention that the materials were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act on grounds of national security, the need to protect federal informants and intelligence methods and possible injury to foreign relations. Wiener then appealed to the federal court.

Wiener and his American Civil Liberties Union attorney interpreted Friday’s ruling as a means of forcing the FBI to provide specific reasons why each of the 69 pages the professor seeks to uncover should be exempted under the Freedom of Information Act.

“We still don’t have any documents, but this means the FBI must now provide us with detailed explanations, page by page. My hope is that this process will hopefully release to us some of the contested pages,” Wiener said.

Wiener’s book, which sold out its hardcover editions, is enjoying a second life as a paperback at college bookstores and is gaining popularity in courses about the ‘60s.

Wiener said that if he eventually gets the contested documents, he might write a new chapter for his book. Wiener said he believes that the Nixon Administration ordered the surveillance for political reasons.

Wiener said the Nixon Administration’s treatment of Lennon is familiar, in view of recent Watergate tape disclosures that Nixon talked with his top aide at a 1971 Oval Office meeting about using Teamster “thugs” to break up anti-Vietnam War protests.

In the first batch of documents released on Watergate, Wiener learned that copies of some surveillance reports were sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and to H.R. Haldeman, then Richard M. Nixon’s chief of staff.

“Haldeman was, as chief of staff, the No. 2 man in the Nixon White House. My assumption is that this is the strongest information linking Nixon to the FBI files,” Wiener said in a recent interview.

“Anyone who has studied (Nixon’s) treatment of Lennon knew he didn’t like his enemies, and he didn’t like criticism,” Wiener said. “I find that Nixon’s campaign against Lennon provides a vivid way to understand the government’s hostility to the anti-war movement . . . it shows that even today it remains an issue.”

But if the contested documents alluded to in Friday’s court ruling are an indication of what remains in the file, Wiener’s long wait for an additional chapter might have been in vain.

Some of the documents described meetings between various activists and “tangential information” on activist leaders such as their habits of personal hygiene and “even the peculiar behaviors of their pets.”

The claim that the release of the documents about a 20-year-old investigation of the dead rock star could somehow endanger national security “is ridiculous,” Wiener said.

Wiener, 47, a self-decribed “radical historian,” grew up in St. Paul, Minn., where his introduction to the political trends of the 1960s began when he joined civil rights demonstrations.

“I was always interested in Bob Dylan and have followed him ever since,” Wiener said of the legendary rock singer from Duluth, Minn. “There is a connection. Lennon was trying to get Dylan to join him in a 1972 demonstration outside the Republican National Convention scheduled for Miami, but Dylan never joined.”

Little of Wiener’s teaching today touches on research for the Lennon book. A teacher at the Irvine campus for 15 years, he sometimes includes the topic in his introductory courses on 20th-Century American History, which “stops at the election of Reagan.”

“Actually, most of these events occurred in 1972, about the time that many of my students were born. They never heard any of these names and groups,” he said.