Lennon Scholar Refuses to Let It Be

Jonathan Wiener was a radical student in the 1960s, fascinated by the turbulent politics, social issues and rock music of his time. He protested, he wrote for an underground newspaper and he idolized the Beatles, particularly the mercurial John Lennon.

Today, Wiener, 48, is a self-described “radical historian,” who still loves the Beatles. But instead of remembering Lennon as a voice on a scratchy album, Wiener has, for the last 12 years, been dogging a paper trail left in the wake of the murdered ex-Beatle.

That trail has led the UC Irvine history professor through a daunting maze of bureaucracy to the uppermost reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community and finally to a victory before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Late last month, the high court ruled that the FBI failed to support its claim that certain documents requested in 1981 by Wiener which relate to a government investigation of Lennon’s political activities were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI, said the court, must turn the files over to Wiener or come up with better reasons why it shouldn’t. The case, which focused on about 69 pages of documents, has been returned to federal District Court in Los Angeles.

“I doubt very much that anything in the Lennon files involved national security,” Wiener said. “Lennon hoped to endanger the reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972, but that’s not exactly a crime.”

“But it does say something about the mentality of the Nixon Administration and the FBI in 1972,” he said. “It is unusual that a pop star, a rock musician, would be perceived by the President as somebody important enough to be the target of dirty tricks.”

It was Lennon’s life, music and political and social activities in the ‘60s that, in part, crystallized that decade historically for Wiener, who parlayed his admiration into scholarly research and finally into a 1985 book, “Come Together: John Lennon in His Time.”

A lifelong political liberal raised in St. Paul, Minn., Wiener may have participated in his first truly radical social act during his high school years when he picketed a Woolworth’s because of that chain store’s policy, in the early ‘60s, of not serving blacks at their counters.

Recruited by Princeton, he majored in sociology and co-founded that university’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. During graduate school at Harvard, Wiener wrote for an underground newspaper, the Old Mole. He marched with SDS on Washington in 1965 and participated in the march on the Pentagon in 1967.

“I was your average ‘60s person,” said Wiener. “But I was more of a politico than a hippie.”

He also became a Beatles fan.

“I was at college, a sophomore, when Beatlemania first hit,” he said. “I remember it vividly. Everyone was a Beatles fan. It was impossible not to love the Beatles, especially after, say, (their albums) “Rubber Soul” or “Sergeant Pepper.” They did things no one had ever thought of doing.”

The rock music world of the ‘60s fascinated Wiener, but he said that he “never thought at the time that it would be a subject for scholarly research into government documents.” But, more and more, the fascination and influence of one particular performer began to occupy the greater part of Wiener’s thinking.

“What was always appealing about Lennon then and in retrospect is the way he rejected the conventional role of the rock superstar,” said Wiener.

“He tried to be more honest, to talk about his successes and his failings. He even quit the biz for a while. He was willing to look foolish. And it was that sort of public struggle to do something with superstardom, something good, something political, that made him such an important person in the ‘60s.”

By 1972, Lennon had come up with a pop culture/politics marriage that, said Wiener, might have become one of the legendary events of the new decade had it not been crushed at birth by the same forces that were, at the same time, engineering what would become the Watergate debacle. And it is this aborted bit of history that would become the locus of contention between Wiener and the FBI.

It was to be a national concert tour, said Wiener, culminating in a huge festival in Miami to be held at the same time as the Republican National Convention there in 1972.

“Lennon and his friends were talking about doing a concert tour to coincide with the 1972 primary election season,” said Wiener. “The reason that that was significant was that was the year that 18-year-olds were given the right to vote. And it was generally assumed that the youth vote was an anti-war vote. And it was also well-known that young voters are the least likely to vote of all age groups. So the problem for the anti-war movement was to register kids and get them to vote.”

“Lennon’s purpose in this planned national concert tour was to combine rock music with an anti-war political message, use the tour to urge young people to register to vote and to vote against the war. This would have been the first national concert tour by any of the ex-Beatles since they waved farewell at Candlestick Park back in 1966, so it would have been a tremendous event.”

Lennon began the tour with a hugely successful concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., in December, 1971. The tour was to conclude, said Wiener, with a “political Woodstock, a giant, free concert and anti-war rally. It was a pretty wild idea, indeed, and something the Republicans very much wanted to stop.”

The FBI learned of the idea, and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) “sent a secret memo to Nixon’s attorney general (John Mitchell) outlining this plan. The memo concluded that if Lennon were to be deported, it would be a strategic countermeasure. And (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service) promptly initiated deportation proceedings against Lennon,” said Wiener.

Lennon had been arrested in London in 1967 for possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor. But, said Wiener, this provided enough ammunition because immigration law barred people convicted of drug offenses from entering the United States.

“This provided the Nixon Administration with a pretext, and Lennon’s lawyers said he had a very poor chance of beating this rap and he’d better not do anything to further offend the Nixon Administration,” Weiner said. “So he canceled all his plans for other musical appearances that year. He never did any more, never went to Miami, and was able to fight deportation successfully.”

Wiener called the incident “a textbook case of the political use of the FBI to silence criticism of the President.”

Nine years later, Wiener wanted to know what the FBI and the INS had found out.

“I got a lot of stuff,” he said. “The INS sent me 26 pounds of stuff. They actually complied with the Freedom of Information Act. They sent me every single document they had. It was an absolute gold mine: (records of) immigration hearings, legal briefs, memoranda, correspondence from kids and fans and outraged citizens. A dream for historians.”

The FBI, however, released about 200 pages of files, but much of it was selectively blacked out. “Some pages,” said Wiener, “were completely black.”

But Wiener wanted it all, and got the support of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in a 1983 lawsuit against the FBI.

The FBI, however, maintained that the information under the black concerned national security and was therefore exempt from the FOI Act. The bureau claimed, said Wiener, that “releasing several of these pages would not only endanger the national security of the United States, but would lead to ‘foreign military retaliation.’ I was thinking, ‘What on earth did they have in mind here?’ ”

His best guess: the information provided about Lennon’s marijuana arrest by Scotland Yard could have been construed as security information provided by foreign governments, which is exempt from the FOI Act.

“Apparently what the FBI had in mind here,” said Wiener, “was that Britain would retaliate militarily against the U.S. for the FBI’s releasing to the public Lennon’s arrest records. The three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court called (the FBI’s reasons) ‘farfetched.’ ”

Wiener said he doesn’t believe that the material under the black will provide any startling new revelations about Lennon. However, he said he thinks it may prove to be an embarrassment to the FBI and some former members of the Nixon Administration, possibly revealing “FBI misconduct, FBI misuse of power, political use of the FBI against the enemies of the President. That’s my guess.”

What will Wiener do with the files if he gets them? Only “if there’s something interesting and significant” in them will he add a chapter to his book on Lennon. Meanwhile, he holds the thought that “the wheels of justice turn slowly. It’s not going to happen fast, is my assumption.”

For the time being, Wiener said, he sees a growing interest on campus in history courses that deal in part with the ‘60s. He teaches one himself, “Introductory Survey of 20th-Century United States History,” in which he gives one of the lectures on pop music. The last class had 400 students, his biggest class ever, and he said that the students can’t get enough of the pop music lecture.

“If anything, they like it a little too much” he said. “I was surprised at how many of today’s 18-to-20-year-olds are actually quite familiar with ‘50s and ‘60s rock. A lot of them listen to ‘classic rock’ radio, which I find a little bit sad. I mean, they’re listening to the music of their parents. What’s wrong with the music of their own generation? When I was a kid, I wasn’t listening to Benny Goodman.”