“Things just went on hiatus then moved, before long, to backing off,” Craven says. “For all intents and purposes, that was it. There was not going to be anything further.”
The assumption by some was that Lennon felt conflicted because of the pressures of deportation, and perhaps didn’t want to rock that particular boat. Rennie Davis says he was disappointed, but understood.
“The Justice Department came down on John with all fours,” Davis says. “When John Sinclair was released, John [Lennon] was basically threatened with deportation. I have no criticism for John and Yoko for what they did. They stood tall and fought their fight. But the long and short of it was, John withdrew from the plan to go to the convention.”
Going on tour was something Lennon had wanted to do for months, regardless of the political motivation. He liked the idea of a concert being one element of a larger rally for the benefit of New Left ideas, but he also knew what he didn’t want.
“I don’t want to create a riot or a fight in each town,” Lennon said. “I just really want to paint it red.”56
Rubin may have made one too many cryptic, by-any-means-
necessary comments for Lennon’s taste by then, which is not to say that there was any softening of his political views. Leni Sinclair says that the decision to distance himself from Rubin was singular.
“He felt they mislead him and he was not really in agreement with their tactics,” Leni says. “So he disassociated himself from them.”
Lennon told his friend, photographer Bob Gruen, that he wanted no part of Rubin’s disruption-based protests. “John made it clear that he was not in total agreement with his revolutionary friends,” Gruen wrote years later. “In everyday conversations he stuck to his view that the only way to change the system was to do so nonviolently.” Lennon was clear in his convictions of promoting peace, but told Gruen it wasn’t an Englishman’s place to openly support a candidate or partisan platform.
Although Lennon decided not to join Rubin’s anticampaign, he continued voicing his opinions publicly with appearances that included a rainy April 22 antiwar rally in New York’s Bryant Park, a date sandwiched between INS hearing appointments. Lennon told the crowd he remained committed to a campaign for peace.
“I’ve heard the Movement is over—ha-ha!” Lennon mocked.57 It wasn’t over: he was still there, on full display as seen in the next day’s newspapers, joined by demonstrators who had a personal stake in the game, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Among the leaders of that group was a recently returned soldier whose combat decorations included three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. A few weeks prior to the Bryant Park event, Massachusetts activist John Kerry had fronted an Operation POW march to Boston and joined a “ragtag crowd of veterans” who sang “Give Peace a Chance.” Kerry was invited to introduce Lennon in New York, as related in Douglas Brinkley’s biography, Tour of Duty:
“Lennon had seen my Senate Foreign Relations Committee speech on TV,” Kerry recalled. “He liked what I was saying. Our government was giving him some flak because of his antiwar statements. So he asked me to be the guy to introduce him at the New York event. I met him ahead of time. We just hung around and talked.”58
The moment was captured in a photograph of the bomber-jacket-wearing Kerry side by side with Lennon; four decades later, that image hung with pride in Kerry’s United States Senate office. “I love the picture because I love John Lennon,” said Kerry, who transferred his office in 2013 to that of secretary of state.
Lennon stood proud at public rallies, gladly taking stage or raising a fist in support of the cause, well aware that those images would make the newspapers—and surveillance reports. Everything Lennon did was subject to scrutiny, some of which was comically misdirected. In April Apple issued a Lennon-produced LP by David Peel and the Lower East Side Band, The Pope Smokes Dope; Peel’s pro-pot position was attributed to the album’s producer in federal reports. One FBI source asked of Lennon: “Didn’t he say something about the pope should smoke grass?”59
Lennon’s music had long been misunderstood by some, especially those with a hidden agenda. As reported in Rolling Stone, investigators considered the merits of using the man’s music against him as a legal strategy for deportation. The idea was to bring a stereo into court and play “Lennon albums [and] songs supporting such subversions as Irish freedom, women’s lib, the rights of blacks and Indians, the decriminalization of marijuana.”
According to the FBI, feminism and civil rights for blacks and Native Americans qualified as “subversions.”
• • •
Rather than keep quiet and go away, John and Yoko stood strong from a nondescript brownstone in Greenwich Village. Justice appeared to be on their side, or at least willing to give them some time.
On May 2, Judge Bernard J. Lasker signed a temporary restraining order that blocked the INS from holding a scheduled deportation hearing.60 Wildes would be given adequate time to file motions, which would be heard by the court before anyone was ordered out of the country. Typical of court dockets everywhere, it would be a while before the parties went back before a judge.
Distancing Lennon from US shores would not be as simple as the administration initially thought. The INS ruled that John and Yoko were “outstanding artists,” a declaration that—coupled with Yoko’s custody order—could offset the marijuana charge and pave the way to permanent residence.
The New York Times explained the case in an editorial, “Love It and Leave It,” and observed the irony of a government agency attempting to remove an unabashed cheerleader for a city and country.61 True, Lennon rubbed some people the wrong way. The Times quoted a former Liverpool headmaster who told a tale of having to “cane” the fifth-grade future Beatle. He forgot the crime for which corporal punishment was dealt, but recalled Lennon as being “a thorough nuisance.”
Perhaps, the Times suggested, in some people’s minds Lennon was the same “nuisance” as he’d been as a child. Others disagreed passionately, but it didn’t matter—the government was grossly overstepping its bounds and trampling on the First Amendment by penalizing a man for his opinions. The Times echoed the volume of letters that said forcing a separation of family was nothing less than cruelty, absent any sense of justice: “It would be ironic if the guardians of this country’s private morals and public safety were to become known as the authors of a new slogan: ‘America—Love It and Leave It.’ What the Beatles might have done with such a refrain!”
Leon Wildes was justifiably encouraged by the temporary injunction, yet concerned that there was more to the story. Wildes was surprised at the level of importance given the case. INS district director Sol Marks was among those Wildes felt was taking a too-active interest in the matter.
“When the immigration judge rendered his decision, he held a press conference,” Wildes says. “He’d been saying that nothing could be done for Lennon, and he had an obligation as district director to remove or deport every illegal alien. That wasn’t so.”
Wildes encountered opposition that he hadn’t seen in his considerable experience with INS proceedings. A technical error—the name of a federal agency used as a reference for Lennon—created a minor yet telling disturbance.
“The Lennons worked with the American Bar Association, which had a drug function to encourage young people to get off drugs and so on,” Wildes says. During his arguments Wildes mistakenly referred to the ABA’s efforts as being part of Nixon’s antidrug organization. An honest mistake, corrected in later briefs, but the scope of the response told Wildes there was more to the fight than he first thought.
“The FBI went into a tizzy,” Wildes says. “They investigated it with four different officers. It didn’t take much to mislead them.” Wildes watched in amazement as amateur mistakes piled up and revealed a sense of desperation, an unusual amount of effort to deport two relatively harmless individuals.
<
br /> “The director, J. Edgar himself, was on the job and wrote some of the memos,” Wildes said. “They were breathing down our necks, Lennon’s and mine. They were getting nastier all the time . . . we were fighting for our lives there.”
Footnotes:
46“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault, http://vault.fbi.gov/john-winston-lennon. Additional contextual and background information can be found in Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
47Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 577.
48Joe Treen, “Justice for a Beatle: The Illegal Plot to Prosecute and Oust John Lennon,” Rolling Stone, December 5, 1974.
49Peter McCabe, “Some Sour Notes from the Bangladesh Concert,” New York, February 28, 1972.
50Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1990), 182.
51“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault; Wiener, Gimme Some Truth.
52Albin Krebs, “Notes on People,” New York Times, March 4, 1972.
53“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault; Wiener, Gimme Some Truth.
54David Bird, “Lindsay Deplores Action to Deport Lennons as a ‘Grave Injustice,’” New York Times, April 29, 1972.
55“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault; Wiener, Gimme Some Truth.
56Lennon, interview by McCabe and Schonfeld, Tittenhurst Park.
57The U.S. vs. John Lennon, directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld (Paramount, 2006).
58Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (New York: William Morrow, 2004), 399–400.
59Treen, “Justice for a Beatle,” Rolling Stone.
60Albin Krebs, “Notes on People: Lennons’ Deportation Hearing Delayed,” New York Times, May 2, 1972.
61Editorial, “Love It and Leave It,” New York Times, May 2, 1972.
Chapter 5
Wordplay
“John and Yoko . . . face deportation. Deportation is usually reserved for high-ranking Mafia officials.” —Dick Cavett
On May 2, 1972, the day of the restraining order that allowed John and Yoko to remain in the US for the time being, J. Edgar Hoover died.
The impact of Hoover’s death far exceeded the usual disruptions caused by the sudden loss of an agency’s top man; the position Hoover had created for himself over half a century inflated the job to one whose power was surpassed only by the office of the president; some questioned at times who truly held more.
Hoover first chaired a department named the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; in 1935 became first-ever director of what had been rechristened the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Through Prohibition, World War II, the McCarthy fifties, and the civil rights era, Hoover held unprecedented authority in Washington, power that grew with each commander in chief he served.
Hoover’s many critics said he interpreted his job as heading the “Bureau of Intimidation” for his legacy of harassment of Communists, subversive elements, homosexuals, dissenting voices, and anyone else he thought unpatriotic. When conventional information-gathering tactics weren’t enough he created additional resources and authority: it wasn’t until 1971 that the American public learned of Cointelpro, Hoover’s counterintelligence program launched in 1956 to seek out dissenting political opinions, what many would call unwarranted spying. Targets in Hoover’s crosshairs ranged from Charlie Chaplin to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon; the former Beatle was one of Hoover’s final projects.
To succeed Hoover, Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray as the bureau’s acting director. A retired Navy captain turned lawyer, Gray served as a congressional liaison with the Pentagon before he accepted a 1970 Department of Justice appointment. The acting director assumed ownership of Hoover’s many streams of correspondence, although Associate Director Mark Felt supervised day-to-day Bureau operations.
Among Hoover’s final memos were those involving John Lennon. Day one for Gray included a May 3 update on Lennon’s deportation. Any hopes Hoover might have had for a low-key, discreet investigation and forced departure were long gone. Gray inherited a very public battle that would be played out in the newspapers and on national television.
• • •
“John and Yoko were here once before,” Dick Cavett introduced his guests. “They face deportation. Deportation is usually reserved for high-ranking Mafia officials.”62
So began a May 11, 1972, appearance by the Lennons on the Dick Cavett Show, a late-night talkfest helmed by the Nebraska-born writer-comedian. Through the ’60s Cavett had written jokes for Jack Paar, served as a game-show panelist, and hosted a morning chat show before taking a late-night slot opposite Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Cavett’s intellectual inclinations made finding his place on network TV a challenge.
That his guests might be controversial was by design rather than accident; Cavett pursued and welcomed on-air talk more substantial than plugging a new movie, song, or TV show, including a notable June 1971 debate on Vietnam; arguments for US withdrawal by Veterans Against the War leader John Kerry clearly outscored a “we will win” approach. Cavett recalled the backlash in Talk Show, including President Nixon reportedly asking, “Is there any way we can screw [Cavett]? There must be ways.”
Well regarded among rock’s elite—visitors to his stage had included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and a fresh-from-Woodstock Stephen Stills—Cavett had eagerly accepted an invitation in the summer of 1971 to meet with John and Yoko in their temporary St. Regis hotel quarters. They struck a show business quid pro quo: Cavett gamely appeared in one of the many short films made by the Lennons; John and Yoko agreed to guest on Cavett’s show and did so for the first time in September 1971. The episode was all talk, no tunes—a free-flowing conversation that took more than the allotted airtime and was broadcast over two nights. Cavett wasn’t about to cut short reflections on a decade by a Beatle; they had been, he said, “the most written about, most listened to and most imitated musical group of the ’60s . . . unequaled in affecting a decade of what young people looked like and thought about.”
That was then, Lennon said. He enjoyed the ride and was proud of the work, but was now ready for life as an adult, not a teen idol: “When you grow up, we don’t want to be dragged on stage playing ‘She Loves You’ when you’ve got asthma and tuberculosis when we’re fifty. I said I didn’t want to be singing ‘She Loves You’ when I’m thirty; I said that when I was twenty-five which in a roundabout way meant I wouldn’t be doing whatever I was doing then at thirty.”
As he said in January 1971 when interviewed by Red Mole and Rolling Stone, Lennon again pledged his commitment to the Movement on the Cavett show, discussing the roles of youth protest and civil disobedience.
“I don’t believe in violent revolution, which is playing the same establishment games,” Lennon clarified. “We’re revolutionary artists, not gunmen. I’m still for peace, but I’m an artist first, politician second.”
Lennon pointed out that even among supporters of the same cause there were disagreements as to how the goals could be achieved. Equally puzzling was how people who supported pacifist ideals had such disparate ideas about how to stage a proper protest; at the time he had yet to meet David Peel, the Elephants, and Jerry Rubin.
“A lot of people say, ‘We don’t want you to demonstrate for peace that way; we want you to do it our way,’” Lennon reflected.
Eight months later in 1972, Lennon would have another Cavett-hosted conversation, ready to talk about getting involved, life under federal surveillance, and the definition of a controversial word in his new song.
• • •
Before he even took his seat upon returning to Dick Cavett’s stage in May 1972, John Lennon un
knowingly violated a television taboo.
He didn’t realize his somewhat minor mistake, a by-product of his flawed eyesight. Network rules held that guests on the show were not allowed to endorse a political candidate by name. Prior to Lennon’s segment the first half of the program featured actress Shirley MacLaine, who was campaigning that year on behalf of a Democratic presidential hopeful. Equal-time considerations prevented MacLaine from specifically naming her candidate of choice.
Lennon was introduced, strolling onstage with a wave to the audience before shaking hands with Cavett and MacLaine. He noticed a small campaign button she wore, and leaned toward her for a closer look.
“What’s his name?” Lennon asked, squinting at the badge. “Oh, ‘McGovern.’ I thought it said ‘McCartney.’ Bad eyes, you know.”
Thus was solved the not-much-of-a-mystery as to which candidate MacLaine had been talking about for the past half-hour.
“You can say it,” MacLaine laughed. “You’re leaving anyway.”
That, too, was probably something the network executives would have preferred not to be discussed on a talk show; government policy and court cases were best left to the news programs. Cavett, however, encouraged such debate. MacLaine had shared her experiences on the campaign trail, how people across the country were smarter than some wanted to believe. “They want to be told the truth,” MacLaine said. “People think corruption is synonymous with leadership, and that an honest person can’t govern.”
Cavett was up-front with his interest in Lennon, and had previewed his guests’ status during the show’s opening: “Not only is it interesting to see them perform, but they’re involved in a crucial court case to determine whether they can remain in the country or face deportation.”
The Walrus and the Elephants Page 11
