It's well known that the Nixon administration considered John Lennon a troublesome fellow. The FBI placed him under surveillance in 1971 after he appeared at a rally for John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, who'd been imprisoned for selling marijuana. When it was learned that Lennon and friends were planning a concert tour to drum up anti-Nixon support during the 1972 election year, Senator Strom Thurmond forwarded a memo to the White House suggesting "if Lennon's visa is terminated it would be a... countermeasure." Thus began Lennon's immigration woes, a battle ultimately won in 1976.

For most people, that's where the story ends -- but it's just the forward to Jon Wiener's Gimme Some Truth. Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Lennon's files in 1981, when he was working on his Lennon bio, Come Together. Come Together was finally published in 1984, by which time Wiener's request had mushroomed into an Orwellian odyssey of its own. The FBI withheld 70 percent of the Lennon files, claiming their release would threaten personal privacy, confidential source information, and "national security" (10 documents are still being withheld). The ACLU argues the real reason for the FBI's withholding of documents is that they'd reveal illegal -- or embarrassing -- activities by the Bureau.

This is supported by the documents reproduced in the book, in both censored and uncensored versions. One withheld document simply contains lyrics to Lennon's song "John Sinclair," lyrics publicly available since 1972. The ACLU also contended the FBI had no legitimate reason for investigating Lennon; a document describing plans for a peace rally was withheld for reasons of confidentiality, but, as Wiener notes, such rallies are constitutionally protected forms of dissent. But the hands-down favorite is the FBI's eye for detail in a document noting that an activist's parrot "interjects 'Right On' whenever the conversation gets rousing."

Familiar names pop up throughout the story; when the case makes it to the Supreme Court, it's Ken Starr who argues the case for the government. But Gimme Some Truth is less Lennon's story than it is a scathing indictment of the lengths the government will go to in order to justify their blatant disregard of the laws they are supposedly bound to uphold. GILLIAN G. GAAR

GETTING NAKED WITH HARRY CREWS: INTERVIEWS
edited by Erik Bledsoe
(University Press of Florida) $24.95

A writer who owed his reputation as much to his hellraising, dangerous approach to life as his caustic, hilarious, freak-filled Southern fiction, Harry Crews has always been a fascinating subject. Fellow Southerner Erik Bledsoe has compiled 26 interviews that span his career from 1972 (after he'd already published five novels in five years) to 1998 (when his 23rd and last book, the superb retirement comedy Celebration, was published).

Although he has gained more favor in the last dozen years, being heralded by the likes of Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller, Crews has remained an outcast among various groups of people: George Plimpton wouldn't run an interview with Crews in the Paris Review because he did not appreciate Crews' "rough" sort of fiction; fellow instructors at the University of Florida avoided him due to his gruff attitude, late-night drinking with students, tattoos, and Mohawk; and when Crews returned to Georgia to visit after his first books were published, his own mother expressed amazement that people would pay him to "write something that wasn't true."

The interviews in Getting Naked run the gamut. The earliest are informative and well-mannered, with Crews actually seeming slightly appreciative and humble (his self-critiques often ring true). After A Childhood came out in 1978, Crews found that the spiritual and psychological toll of writing about his tragic childhood drove him to alcoholism, drug abuse, and numerous bar fights. Crews did not publish another novel until 1987.

His impatience is evident during this time. When Tom Graves mentions blood sports, Crews (talking about an article he wrote on dogfighting) says, "This article is no defense of it. Rather it is an effort to see whether we tell the truth rather than being hypocritical, hippy-dippy, bullshitting jack-offs about it." Later, when Graves asks him about his use of allegory, Crews goes off: "The greatest saints were some of our greatest sinners, cheaters, fuckers of ladies, dicers, you name it. St. Paul, who was on the road to Damascus, was a real son of a bitch." In another interview, Crews gives a lesson on how not to be a family man: "They send you out for a loaf of bread, and you come back three days later all beat and broken up and full of vomit. They naturally don't like that."

By 1991, our cranky old man is getting cleaned up as he tells of going on the wagon, not eating meat, and even practicing yoga. In a 1996 interview, however, it seems Harry's back on the drink and frisky as ever, telling us how to shoot Dilaudid.

Getting Naked with Harry Crews isn't constantly as engaging or weird as his books, but as a document on the ups and downs of an American writer who went from eating dirt on a Georgia farm to being the bad boy of Southern literature, it's a keeper. KEVIN SAMPSELL