Gimme Some Truth - Annotated by Jon Wiener (Paperback)

About the Book

Fascinating, engrossing, and at points hilarious and absurd, "Gimme Some Truth" documents the FBI surveillance of John Lennon in 1972 when the war in Vietnam was at its peak. 157 line drawings.

Book Synopsis

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld-along with almost 200 other pages-on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth, 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available-complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.

Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and-in some cases-the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.

Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.

From the Back Cover

"A strident and impermissable effort to second-guess the wisdom of the FBI. . . . A potpourri of conjecture, supposition, innuendo and surmise."--from the FBI's court documents

"Jon Wiener has put together a remarkable compilation of documents. I know of no keener annotations to any documents illustrating government surveillance. Wiener's commentary is as sprightly as the documents are foolish. He is thorough, appropriately droll at times, and rightly focused on the question of whether the FBI and the CIA were keeping to their lawful mandates during the years of abandon and evasion."--Todd Gitlin author of The Sixties

"The book sheds light on many issues far broader than John Lennon--the Nixon administration for example, and, not less importantly, the particular machinations of Clinton, Blair, and other current world leaders. Very few people know how the process of seeking and retrieving documents supposedly available under the Freedom of Information Act really works; Wiener's book makes this all very clear."--Eric Foner, Columbia University

"A classic case study. There is humor here and mystery, too. But most of all, there is hard evidence--in the FBI's own words--of what happens when government substitutes paranoia for law." --Floyd Abrams

Review Quotes

"An excellent account."-- "The Oregonian"

"If only the New Left and the 'youth culture' that coexisted with it had been as threatening to the US government as the latter seemed to believe. That wistful thought occurs while perusing this chronicle of the Nixon administration's harassment of John Lennon for his involvement in radical causes during the early '70's. . . . For all the unintentional humor that pervades these documents, they convey a far more sobering message: how willing the government has been at times to spy on, intimidate, and harass those whom it regards as its most effective critics."-- "Mother Jones"

"John Lennon's deportation case is well known. What Jon Wiener does in Gimme Some Truth is tell two virtually unknown stories--the history of the FBI role in the White House deportation campaign and the fourteen-year battle to force Hoover's heirs to release Lennon's file."-- "Journal of American History"

"Lennon himself isn't the main focus here. Instead, [the] long struggle to get the withheld files released is made an object lesson in the tenacity of government secrecy, which Wiener convincingly depicts as a bureaucratic habit so ingrained that the FBI (or any other government agency) treats the public's right to know--FOIA or no FOIA--as a nuisance to be circumvented whenever possible. That's true even when the materials being protected are trivial, as these turn out to be." -- "Washington Post"

"Return with Wiener to another, not necessarily simpler but very different time when governments feared revolution by the young, fomented by a rock star. . . . The documents constitute an impressive display of wrong-headedness . . . A great period piece."-- "Booklist"

About the Author

Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, author of Come Together: John Lennon and His Time (1994), and a contributing editor of The Nation.