Jon Wiener 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.
Jon Wiener
Jon Wiener with Chinese dissent artist Ai Wei Wei at KPFK, 2017
Wiener with John Waters, an American film director, screenwriter, author, actor, stand-up comedian, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, in 2010.
According to one report, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to Nixon's chief of staff describing Lennon as a sympathizer of Trotskyist communists in England.
Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is a movement history by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener published in April 2020. The authors combine archival research and personal interviews with their own experiences in the civil rights and anti-war movements to tell the story of this transformative decade. The book's purpose is not to present a comprehensive history of 1960s Los Angeles but to dispel the mythology surrounding this era and replace it with the neglected history of the populist social and cultural movements that shifted power away from an entrenched elite and opened up opportunities for radical egalitarian change.
Book Jacket
Angela Davis at UCLA (October 1969) to give her first lecture.
Police violence during the Watts Uprising (August 1965)
Father William DuBay (1968)