Engagingly written by a professional historian, Come Together recreates two decades of rock and rebellion, from the formation of the Beatles in 1960 to the assassination of John Lennon in 1980.
"By setting Lennon squarely within his era, Wiener's study is exemplary. Lennon does not appear 'larger than life,' but as passionately involved in it." -- Michael S. Kimmel, Newsday
"Stands out as one of the few [books] that don't want to deify, dish the dirt about or otherwise exploit the slain former Beatle. A sympathetic documentary history of Lennon's political thinking (which went through many phases), Come Together says that during the counterculture's flowering, rock music had real clout in the American political arena. Certainly some government officials thought so, or they wouldn't have initiated deportation proceedings after Lennon aligned himself with the activist left. Jon Wiener . . . obtained twenty-six pounds of FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service files on Lennon under the Freedom of Information Act, and there is some grim humor in his chapter about this material." -- Stephen Holden, New York Times Book Review
"Documents the campaign of surveillance and harassment against Lennon by the FBI and the involvement of the Nixon Administration at the highest levels in ordering and overseeing this campaign. All the deliberate abuses of power revealed in the Watergate scandal make their appearance here as well." -- Ian McMahan, American Book Review
"When history professor Jon Wiener made a Freedom of Information request to the federal government for the late John Lennon's file, he could hardly have hoped for a richer payoff." -- Time
JON WIENER is a member of the history department at the University of California at Irvine and the author of Social Origins of the New South.
Excerpt
John did not know that a similar "War Is Over" campaign had been launched by Phil Ochs and the Los Angeles Free Press more than two years earlier. Ochs wrote an article for the paper in June 1967 calling for a "War Is Over" rally in Los Angeles, across from the Century Plaza Hotel, where Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to speak at a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner and the Supremes were to entertain. Ochs wrote a song for the occasion: "I Declare the War Is Over." Lots of people came, marched down the Avenue of the Stars to the hotel, and chanted, "The war is over!" Ochs started to sing his song; the police ordered the crowd to disperse and then attacked, beating the marchers while TV cameras, on hand for the President, whirred. Delighted by the extensive TV coverage, Ochs staged a second "War Is Over" demonstration in New York's Washington Square Park in November 1967. Paul Krassner and the Diggers commune helped organize it. This time the police did not attack, but again the press coverage was extensive. The Village Voice ran a front-page story on the event.
Ochs had demonstrated that clever and novel forms of protest could win much more media coverage than traditional antiwar demonstrations. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman grasped the implications of Ochs's "War Is Over" events. Shortly after the Washington Square demonstration, they began to plan an even bigger festival at which their "Youth International Party" would nominate a pig for President outside the Democratic national convention in Chicago the following August.