Lennon, John, 1940-1980

John Lennon's first wife died Wednesday at 75. In 1985, Cynthia Lennon talked with Fresh Air about her marriage to John, going on tour to America, and meeting Yoko Ono.

Historian Jon Wiener spent 14 years fighting to gain access to the FBI’s secret files on former Beatle John Lennon. Wiener’s Freedom of Information case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the FBI decided to settle. His new book “Gimme Some Truth” (University of California Press) outlines and reproduces the most important pages of the file, revealing that the Nixon administration plotted to deport Lennon in 1972 and silence him as a voice of the anti-war movement.

TV critic David Bianculli reviewed The Beatles Anthology, which is out on video. This is an expanded 10-hour version of the 6-hour version which aired on television last fall.

On the occasion of what would have been the Beatle's 50th birthday, rock historian Ed Ward considers what bands and song may have influenced Lennon before he started his legendary group with Paul McCartney.

The avant-garde artist has a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Growing up, she divided her time between the United States and Japan, before and during World War II. Her marriage to John Lennon made her a celebrity, but overshadowed her own work.

John Lennon's life and legacy are revisited in a new film and biography. Rock critic Ken Tucker says Albert Goldman's book The Lives of John Lennon is an inelegant hatchet job that portrays the musician in a harsh light; the film Imagine, on the other hand, is little more than treacly hagiography.

Television Critic David Bianculli previews "The Man Who Shot John Lennon," the "Frontline" documentary on Mark David Chapman. The program relies on audiotaped psychiatric interviews with Chapman, and on a close analysis of the novel The Catcher in the Rye, which Chapman followed as though it were a script for Lennon's murder.

Rock historian Ed Ward looks at the songs the Beatles gave away, the songs Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote at the urging of manager Brian Epstein for other Liverpool bands.

Cynthia Lennon was married to John Lennon from 1962 to 1968, and is the mother of Julian Lennon. Lennon has managed to make her a own career as a designer.