Jon Wiener

Jon Wiener (born May 16, 1944) is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California.

His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis.

He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon.

Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance, as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is an expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy.

A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation.

He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.

And he spoke with the award-winning novelist Margaret Atwood about “the shocking relevance of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” He also has written on historical topics – on the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, he wrote about the "forgotten hero" who "stopped the My Lai massacre," quoting from his interview for KPFK with army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson.

And he wrote for the New York Times Book Review about how the sixties are remembered in America.

While Wiener is perhaps best known for his battling to expose the FBI's surveillance of John Lennon, he also was instrumental in getting the FBI to release documents about its surveillance of comedian Groucho Marx.

The legal battle between Wiener and the United States government was waged over two and a half decades, and has been examined by other historians.

He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1966, and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he worked with Barrington Moore, Jr. and Michael Walzer, and also wrote for the underground paper The Old Mole.

At the University of California, Irvine, Wiener taught history courses on American politics and the Cold War.

His scholarly works have been published in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, Radical History Review, and Past & Present.

He led students on visits to the Nixon Library.

In the late sixties, many young Americans became opposed to the Vietnam War, and John Lennon became an antiwar advocate who made then-president Richard Nixon nervous about his reelection prospects in 1972.

The consensus view is that Nixon asked the FBI to begin surveillance of Lennon, possibly after Lennon went to New York on a visa and met up with radical anti-war activists.

Government surveillance of Lennon had been extensive, although there was no documentary evidence of wiretapping, and lasted about 11 months.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, acting on a suggestion from Senator Strom Thurmond, and probably at the behest of Richard Nixon, ordered Lennon to be deported in the spring of 1972.

According to Wiener's account, the key issue for the Nixon administration was that Lennon had been talking to anti-war leaders about a "tour that would combine rock music with anti-war organizing and voter registration," possibly as a way to court first-time eighteen-year-old voters, who were believed to have a tendency to vote for the Democratic party.

On December 8, 1972, after Nixon's reelection in November, the FBI closed its investigation of Lennon, partially because Lennon has shown "inactivity in Revolutionary Activities."

According to Wiener, the FBI had succeeded in "neutralizing" Lennon's opposition to Nixon's reelection.

John Lennon was murdered in December 1980.

In 1981, while conducting research for a book about John Lennon, Wiener learned of the FBI surveillance, and that there were either 281 or 400 pages of files on the ex-Beatle.

Wiener requested the release of the FBI's files on Lennon by citing the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI refused to release two-thirds or 199 pages of the files on the grounds that they contained "national security" information.

The pages that were released were heavily blacked out with magic marker, or redacted.

Since 1984, Wiener has been a contributing editor for The Nation magazine, where he has written about diverse topics including campus issues, intellectual controversies, and southern California politics.

His writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times.

Wiener hosted a weekly podcast for The Nation, “Start Making Sense,” and a weekly radio program for Los Angeles radio station KPFK 90.7 FM.

Reporter Adam Cohen writing in 2006 in The New York Times agreed that the FBI surveillance of Lennon had been motivated not only by antiwar concerns but by concerns of a political nature.

According to Cohen, what was most revealing was that the timing of these events suggested there was an underlying political motivation behind the surveillance and deportation proceedings.

Numerous friends, including folk singer Bob Dylan, wrote letters to the Immigration and Naturalization Service advocating that Lennon should be allowed to stay.

Set the Night on Fire (2020) is a movement history of Los Angeles.

The backbone of the book is the story of the civil rights, Black power and Chicano movements, as well as the anti-war movement, gay liberation and women's liberation and the battles between young people and the LAPD on Sunset Strip and at Venice Beach.

The counterculture provides another focus—the Ash Grove folk music club, the LA Free Press, KPFK radio and the Free Clinic.

Wiener was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the son of Gladys (née Aronsohn) and Dr. Daniel Wiener.

He graduated from Central High School and then attended Princeton University where he founded a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society to protest the Vietnam War.

In his journalism, Wiener, writing in the Los Angeles Times at the beginning of 2020, correctly predicted that 2020 would be "The Worst Year of Trump’s Life."

He interviewed Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei about the international refugee crisis—the subject of Ai's film "Human Flow."

He interviewed Georgia's voting rights organizer Stacey Abrams about her work.