Jon Wiener is the author of How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, published by University of California Press. He is a contributing editor to The Nation, a professor of history at UC Irvine, and host of an afternoon drive-time interview show on LA public radio station, KPFK. The author of five other books, including Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, which recounts his experiences as a plaintiff in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the FBI, and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, his writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times and he has been a guest on such national TV and radio programs as NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, “Democracy Now”, PBS’s “American Masters”, and CNN’s “State of the Nation”, among others.
The King of Rock became a one-man special force against the East Germans, even as he questioned the validity of the conflict itself. Jon Wiener writes on the Cold War’s celebrity veteran in this excerpt from his new book, How We Forget the Cold War.
