page_title: Jon Wiener
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Jon Wiener / Career / Wiener and the Lennon FBI files / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Recording "Give Peace a Chance". Left to right: Rosemary Leary ( face not visible), Tommy Smothers (with back to camera), John Lennon, Timothy Leary, Yoko Ono, Judy Marcioni and Paul Williams
context_page_description: Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles. 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 successfully 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 a recognized expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.
  Set the Night on Fire 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.
context_section_description: 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. 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.
caption: John and Yoko Lennon recording the song Give Peace a Chance in 1969.
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