Selects: John Lennon and the FBI

0:00 Hi, everybody. Christmas is in the air because December 3rd, 2020. And you know what's also in the air? COVID. SARS. 19. Is that what it was called? I can't even remember. I think I got that wrong. And I'm glad that I got that wrong because it's not something that I care to remember in that kind of detail. I'm just going to call it the Cove. So we are in December with the Cove at this point. And we did a very fun episode for me, at least, because I'm a big Beatles fan. I know Josh is not, but he indulges me occasionally. With episodes like this, and this one is not just on the Beatles. In fact, it is on John Lennon and the FBI because he was under surveillance by the FBI for a lot of reasons and had a pretty dodgy relationship here in the United

0:42 States at times. So check out this episode right now. I think you'll enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:01 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan out there. Jerry's here. Special guest Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know, the super subversive edition.

1:15 Yeah.

1:17 Which is, I mean, it's subversive, but not coming from who you'd expect. In this case, the subversive people, Chuck, are two of the crookedest, Worst Americans to ever take a breath of life in the United States.

1:34 Yes. Hoover and Nixon, right?

1:38 Yes. Herbert Hoover and Charles J. Nixon. No. Oh, no. Not those two. Was it J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon?

1:49 Richard Milhouse, I think is his name.

1:52 Milhouse. That's right. So you picked this one, right?

1:56 Yeah.

1:58 I think we got help from our buddy. Oh, it was a Grabster article, right?

2:03 This is a Grabster.

2:05 So why did you choose this.

2:07 One, Chuck? I'm just a Beatles nut. I'm reading a massive Beatles book, and I'm always thinking about the Beatles, so this isn't something I knew a ton about. So now I know more.

2:20 What are you thinking about the Beatles right now?

2:26 They could write a song.

2:29 Like they could, like they're really good at writing songs, you mean?

2:31 I think so. I know you're not a Beatles guy, but they're regarded as good songwriters.

2:35 Sure. I'm willing to concede that at least. I'm a grown person. I can concede when I'm wrong or when I've been bested.

2:44 I think we differ on Yoko Ono though. So that'll be, you know, that's where the tables are turned.

2:48 Okay.

2:50 Because you like her singing, isn't that right?

2:52 I appreciate it. I don't know. Like is a pretty strong word, but I definitely appreciate it. There's some songs, like, have you ever heard I Love You, Earth?

3:00 Sure.

3:01 That's a pretty sweet song. I like her singing on that. All right. Have you ever heard her cover of Katy Perry's Fireworks? No.

3:11 I bet that's something.

3:13 She did it at... maybe MoMA or The Met or something like that. And she's just standing there wailing. She's not singing words or anything like that, just wailing. And it was her cover of Katy Perry's Firework. And it's pretty great to see. I'm sure if you look it up on YouTube. But I appreciate a lot of her stuff.

3:32 How about that?

3:33 I appreciate her as a human. And it's always fun to look back at performances, live performances with Lynn Enwin. she would do a full like four or five songs in the row in the middle of like Madison square garden concert. And you could kind of see his, his backing band just kind of like, Oh boy, I can't believe we're doing this. I can't believe she's really doing this.

3:55 Right. Right. Um, and she's actually pretty strongly implicated in this whole thing. We're talking about John Lennon, um, being pursued and, and surveilled and basically harassed by the FBI. Um, in the 1972, actually 1971, 72, I believe, um, for a very specific reason. And it was at a time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono had just gotten married.

4:22 They got married like two, two, three years before. And, um, we're a very famous couple. The Grabster argues that they may have been like the first genuine celebrity activist couple who actually used their celebrity as a way to, um, help, help influence or help causes that kind of thing. Um, And by the time 1971-72 rolled around, Richard Milhouse Nixon was actually running for re-election again. And he decided that he didn't like people like John Lennon running around conceivably swaying the vote, particularly among newly minted voters in the 18 to 21-year-old block.

5:03 Yeah. I mean, he and Yoko had been contributors to causes, working class causes. It's sort of the notion that Lennon was always known as the working class hero, but of all the Beatles, he grew up more solidly middle class than any of the rest of them. And not to say that that was a false persona, but he definitely sort of jumped and sort of leaned into that, as Noel Brown would say, as far as his persona. And I think a lot of people that don't dig deep kind of think that John Lennon grew up with a very hard scrap of life, They're in Liverpool, which is not the case. But as a result of that, he championed the working man. He and Yoko contributed to causes.

5:49 He became, along with Yoko, very much pacifist activists. And if you're a pacifist activist in the early 70s, you're not going to be a big fan of Richard Nixon and he's not going to be a big fan of you because he was not shy about war.

6:06 No, he really wasn't. He'd even campaigned, I think, in 68 on ending the Vietnam War and then actually went the exact opposite direction with that. There was a lot, if you were a pacifist, there was a lot to be upset about in the 60s and early 70s because of Vietnam alone, you know?

6:22 Yeah, for sure. One of the ways I think that got the most press that when people think about John and Yolka's activism is the bed-ins that they had, that is B-E-D-I-N-S, and that is If you don't know what those are, that's when you lay around in bed and you invite the press to come to your room and talk to you while you lay around in bed and why you're laying around in bed. And it looked kind of ridiculous to a lot of people, especially people on the right. But John Lennon's whole kind of point, and he was very tongue in cheek, kind of had a great sense of humor. But I think it all sort of stemmed from that, which is like, hey, all you got to do is stay in bed and not go and start wars. And this is a pretty ridiculous way

7:04 to drive that point home.

7:05 Yeah, yeah. Like, rather than having to, like, go out and oppose violence, you could oppose violence just by laying around in bed and doing nothing. Letting your hair grow, I think, is what they were saying. Sure. Which is pretty awesome. And... The thing is, is it's John Lennon and, you know, Yoko Ono, and they're sitting around in bed with the press in their hotel room. And like that in and of itself is getting press. And then if you say, well, what is all this about? And you read a little further into the article.

7:32 I don't know.

7:32 Maybe it kind of gets you in just the right way. And all of a sudden you start thinking that way, too. And to the people who were, you know, running the whole military industrial complex that I mean, that's a threat, even if it's. just a threat of the threat of saying like, just don't, you don't even have to oppose war, just don't do anything. And that opposes war in and of itself. And that was like kind of the way things were at the time. Like there was a lot of, a lot of people in power who were really opposed to that kind of thinking, who were opposed to people who were opposed to Vietnam or war in general or violence of any kind. There was a big opposition to that.

8:15 And the people who were running the show in the United States were chief among those people. Like we said, Nixon as president and then running for reelection. Then J. Edgar Hoover, who was not shy at all about doing whatever he needed to to quiet dissent. Like he would generate dossiers on elected officials, especially ones who were more liberal, to basically keep them in line by threatening them with blackmail or even the threat of blackmail, you know? there were plenty of hippies who got their heads cracked in.

8:46 There were people who were surveilled. We did an episode on the Black Panthers, if you remember. We talked about COINTELPRO, the whole program to basically undermine and smear the Black Panthers in the public's mind. Like, J. Edgar Hoover was a vicious, terrible human being. And he ran the FBI for decades and was still running the FBI when they started to target John Lennon.

9:11 Yeah, so to set the stage here of kind of how this all worked out was John Lennon had– he was able to enter– the whole thing kind of boils down to whether or not he would be allowed to live in the U.S. or whether or not if he was eventually allowed to live in the U.S., if they could legally deport him. So he was able to enter the U.S. on a work visa in 71. And concurrent with this, Yoko Ono had a custody battle going on.

9:41 She had a daughter from a previous marriage in the early 70s, and she wasn't going to leave at all. She was legally there. They did try and deport her. They didn't know that she had a green card already, which was sort of the first foible in this thing. Right. But they knew that they had a lot of leverage over Lennon because— if they deported him, he would be without his wife, who was going to stay there. So they had this leverage. Lennon loved living in New York City.

10:08 That's where he wanted to make his permanent home.

10:11 So much so that that was also leverage that they had, too.

10:14 Yeah, absolutely. And so Nixon's up for reelection in 72. He would go on to win, you know, in a big, big way against McGovern. But they were, you know, they were an organization. They were an administration that was very paranoid. They would obviously with Watergate, they showed that they were willing to do anything to ensure their victory. And that included being really worried about people like John Lennon. I don't think he was at the top of their list of things to worry about. But he was on their list thanks to Strom Thurmond, of all people.

10:53 Yeah. So Strom Thurmond, the horrible segregationist senator from what? South Carolina, right? He he actually kicked this whole thing off because I guess he noticed that John Lennon was was, you know, he was a left leaning person. rock star activist. He seems to have been one of the first people to notice the activism that was developing among John Lennon and Yoko Ono and to perceive it as a threat to the establishment because all those recently enfranchised 18, 19 and 20 year old voters who hadn't had the right to vote until the 26th Amendment had been passed I don't remember exactly when it was passed, but it was between 68 and 72 because 72 is the first election those younger kids were going to be able to vote in.

11:43 And he apparently saw Lenin as among a group of people who could speak to those kids and sway them to the left and potentially unseat Richard Nixon, which it would turn out is just a total laugh because Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide. But at the time, they didn't know this, and Richard Nixon wasn't going to take any chances either. So the note from Strom Thurmond was very well received in the Nixon administration.

12:08 Yeah, I think what I want to know is who told Strom Thurmond.

12:12 That's what I want to know, too. Because that's the biggest mystery here.

12:15 Yeah, I doubt if Strom Thurmond was too hip to any of this. But somebody probably got in his ear and he sent a note that specifically said they try and get him deported as a, quote, strategic countermeasure.

12:28 Right.

12:29 And that's really kind of what got the ball rolling. We should also mention this other guy, John. I don't know if it's Wiener or Weiner in this case.

12:36 It's pronounced Wienerslave.

12:38 Oh, it is?

12:39 No. Do you remember there was a 30 Rock episode where there's like an HR mediator and he's like this very soft, rosy-cheeked, very calm, mild-mannered man. And Liz Lemon says, well, Mr. Wienerslav. And he goes, no, it's pronounced Wienerslave.

12:57 I miss that show.

12:58 That was a really good moment.

13:00 They had such great fun with dumb jokes like that and blah, blah, blah.

13:05 Yeah, right. No, that was Arrested Development.

13:07 Oh, that's right. That was Arrested Development. They kind of had the same DNA, though.

13:10 Yeah, for sure.

13:11 So Wienerslave was a writer or is a writer and historian still, and he is why we know so much of this. He was writing a lot about John Lennon, writing a lot about the Beatles. he decided to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get a lot of these documents uncovered over the years and eventually was successful in a big dump in 1997 and then in another smaller one in 2006. And if it had not been for his tenacity, I don't know if anyone else would have picked up this mantle. Because, you know, in the end, it's not the most interesting story in the world.

13:52 This is true.

13:53 I say that in a whisper. It's not like some huge like, oh, my God, revelations. It's sort of one of those things. It's like just another example of the small things that authoritarians do in this country under, you know, in the back rooms and in the whispered rooms of the White House.

14:10 Well, you know, I think like that's really true. And that's a really good point is that like if you just look at it on its face, like, you know, the FBI followed around. John Lennon kept tabs on them. And like if you read the files, it's really pedestrian, boring stuff. You might miss like the real story here.

14:27 And the real story here is that a sitting president directed the FBI to get dirt that he could use against a political rival, an activist rock star, to help get him deported. or to figure out what leverage he could use against him so that that sitting president could get reelected. That's the real story here. And that the FBI acted as, you know, this basically a Gestapo-type agency on behalf of Nixon. That's the real story that I think kind of gets covered up by John Lennon and Yoko Ono's celebrity and, you know, the FBI kind of wackily following him around.

15:05 Yeah, it is funny because if you look at some of the files and Some of the reports, like they would go to his concerts and undercover agents would go to the concerts and report things like, you know, for his encore, he's saying, give peace a chance. And we all know about that song.

15:20 Right.

15:20 They would take notes on song lyrics and stuff like that. So it's all just kind of silly. But yeah, I definitely agree that it's just an example of the lengths that Nixon would go to to be a dirty thief. Yes.

15:34 Yes. Well, Chuck, I think we should demonstrate the links that we'll go to to bring everyone a message break. What do you think?

15:40 By just shutting up for two minutes?

15:42 Yep. Okay, so the whole thing started eventually, and it wasn't clear what was going to happen, but the real thing that kicked all of John Lennon's big problems off was that he was arrested in 1968 in London for possession of narcotics. I'm making air quotes you can't see because he was busted with some pot, I think maybe some hash, and like rolling paraphernalia. Some really BS beef that they got him on in London. There was some true believer, zealous anti-drug cop named Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was later jailed, actually, for committing perjury as a police officer. But he was alleged to have planted the evidence that may or may not be true. But it was like a rap that Lennon shouldn't have had on

16:54 him or Yoko shouldn't have had on her, that they just wanted a high-profile bust. And that happened in 1968, and it turned out that that would follow Lenin for years to come and really kind of be the fulcrum that the U.S. government had on him to try to keep him from staying in the U.S.

17:14 Yeah, I mean, he wasn't even doing heroin at this point, I don't think.

17:17 No.

17:18 So they should have waited if they wanted a real case.

17:21 Well, it makes you wonder. I remember hearing in, I think, our Black Panther episode, that the FBI was not above like addicting activists and dissidents with heroin, like turning them on to heroin and then getting them addicted and then just, you know, taking them out of the game like that.

17:39 Yeah, I think Lenin never shot heroin. That was his jam.

17:43 Okay.

17:44 So early 71, like I said, he was able to enter on a tourist visa. And then when Nixon and his cronies get going on the deportation, The whole thing was based on the fact that he had overstayed his visa. But along with that, it was very valuable to them that he had a drug conviction under his belt at that point. So they were surveilling him. They were surveilling other artists around the country, too, who they thought were subversive and sending messages. Lennon, speaking of getting busted for pot, Lennon very famously wrote a song called John Sinclair in support and did a tribute, or not tribute, but a a concert in, I don't know if they were raising money.

18:28 Yeah.

18:29 Or just awareness. Both. Okay. For John Sinclair, who was a poet, he was the manager of the MC5, great, great rock band. And he offered two undercover cops a couple of joints and went to, and he had already had a couple of minor pot offenses, but he went to prison for 10 years for this. And a big refrain in that song, John Sinclair said, which is a cool song and very rootsy and bluesy, not like very Lennon at all, is 10 for 2, 10 for 2 is what they keep saying, 10 years for two joints.

19:03 Yeah, that he sold to an undercover cop, right?

19:06 Yeah, but it worked. He actually was sprung from prison shortly after this concert.

19:10 Yeah, like two days after. And some people say, I think that indicates he was already going to be sprung, that the Michigan Supreme Court knew this was a trumped up charge. But Other people say, no, the concert surely had some impact. But Sinclair is, so the point about Sinclair and John Lennon is John Lennon performed the song.

19:32 He was the headliner at this concert in Ann Arbor. And he had been coordinating with other people in John Sinclair's orbit that were prominent figures in the new left. And at this time in the early 70s, the 60s had ended, the, the, it become clear that flower power hadn't worked. The evil people were still in charge. So what was next? Maybe nonviolent coordination and resistance wasn't the way to go. Now, Lenin and Yoko were were dedicated pacifists.

20:06 They didn't want anything to do with violence. They didn't condone violence. They didn't like violence in any way, shape, or form. But there were elements in the new left who weren't necessarily convinced that that wasn't the only way to change the course of the United States and get rid of people like Nixon and his cronies. And so if you're watching this from the outside, like you're J.

20:28 Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, you're watching the people on the new left and you don't know which way they're going to break. Violent, nonviolent, who knows? But you're treating all of them with suspicion. And all of a sudden, John Lennon, one of the most recognizable and popular people on the planet, is suddenly hanging out with some of these new left cats that you don't know which way they're going to go, violent or nonviolent. And that really drew the attention of the FBI to John Lennon. It wasn't necessarily he and Yoko and their pacifist stuff. Some people think that it was his involvement with genuine bona fide new left activists like John Sinclair or like Bobby Seale.

21:12 Like John Sinclair founded the White Panther Party, which they had a 10 point platform like the Black Panthers platform and the first platform in the White Panther platform. is that it's fully in support of the Black Panther's 10-point platform. So he's hanging out with a bunch of people that had proven themselves as dyed-in-the-wool foes of the Nixon administration.

21:34 That definitely caught the FBI's attention.

21:37 Yeah, and they had big plans. They got together, and I think their first meeting was at the Alamookie Township. That's how I'm going to pronounce it.

21:47 The Scaramoochie Township. In New Jersey.

21:49 In New Jersey. And initially called themselves the Alamookie Tribe, but wisely changed their name to the Election Year Strategy Information Center. And their plan was in 1972 is to host this. And Lennon gave them money. He gave them like 75 grand to kind of get going and said, here, let's do a bunch of concerts with the help of John Lennon all across the country in 1972. We can have different artists performing, different speakers, you know, like pounding home the anti-war message. And then as these concerts roll closer and closer to the election, it'll culminate in a big protest at the RNC in Miami. This is all very legal stuff. It wasn't, they weren't staging riots or anything.

22:32 These were just concerts, awareness, trying to keep Nixon from winning. And Nixon got worried. And he knew that, like you said, the influence that someone like John Lennon could have was like, he didn't have anyone on his side. There was no Scott Baio at the time, wooing the youngsters.

22:51 Bob Blah Blah?

22:52 To the right. Oh, he was Bob Blah Blah, wasn't he? That's funny. So this is all going on, and this is kind of what ramps up the pressure to get Lennon out of there. This custody battle's going on. They know about that. And so their first step was to instruct immigration and naturalization to try and say, hey, you've overstayed your visa. You got to get out of here.

23:17 And Lennon knew this was coming. This was no secret. He had gone on TV shows talking about being followed by the FBI, having his phone tapped, which we still aren't sure if that really happened. I think it says officially that there was no legal phone tapping in the FBI documents. But throwing that word legal in there just kind of makes you think like, well, were there any illegal ones that you're not going to tell us about?

23:42 Yeah, I read an interview online. So this is like the depths of my depravity. I didn't even listen to the interview. I read a Fresh Air interview with John Weiner about this. And he said that the FBI responded and said they found no evidence of illegal wiretapping by the FBI or no legal wiretapping by the FBI. So so.

24:08 whiners like okay does that mean they were doing illegal wiretapping or does it mean that they didn't look very hard for evidence it doesn't mean that they weren't tapping his phone is what he's saying.

24:18 Right uh it at least made Lennon paranoid enough yeah like he wasn't just not he wasn't not sweating this he was this made him very paranoid um and with good reason but he took to going next door at the uh Dakota building so he would let Lennon use his phone in his apartment and to make phone calls, and I guess assist with the calls at the same time a little bit. And then the FBI said, you know what could really help is if we could bust them currently for narcotics in the United States. If we have an active charge, drug charge against them, and Hoover sent it out himself. He said, quote, for info of Bureau, NYCPD Narcotics Division is aware of the subject's recent use of narcotics, which is like every day, and are attempting

25:07 to obtain enough info to arrest both subject and wife Yoko based on PD investigation.

25:13 Yeah, and by this time, I'm thinking he was using heroin. I think that's what they were referencing as his recent use.

25:19 Oh, really? I didn't think that started until later.

25:21 I thought it was the early 70s.

25:24 I thought it happened during his lost weekend, but I may be wrong on that. I'm not that far along in the book yet.

25:28 I'm going to err toward you then, because I'm just surmising here. I'm not the one who has a big old book of Beatles history. So I don't know. They never actually busted him, right? This was all just like they were planning on doing this, but they never needed to?

25:44 I don't think he was arrested in the United States, was he?

25:49 Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't get that impression. But it seemed like everything was kind of barreling toward that. And even like you were saying, the FBI was like, we've let the NYPD know to go do this. So and if you take a step back, like, This is some heat. This is some pressure that they're putting on John and Yoko. They're basically saying, we're going to split you guys up by deporting John because we know that Yoko is not going to leave the country because of this custody battle. She can't afford to. So she has to stay here. So if we threaten deportation to John Lennon, it might actually keep him in line. And the FBI used the word neutralized, that they were seeking to neutralize Lennon.

26:31 And I guess some people who don't dig very deeply into the story are like, they were going to assassinate John Lennon. And John Weiner has pointed out like that's not at all what they meant. They meant like basically making him ineffective, like taking him out of the game basically one way or another, but not killing him, just convincing him through putting this undue, unfair, undemocratic pressure on him to drop his activities with the new left.

27:00 Yeah, and by the way, I think he probably was using heroin in the late 60s and had an on-again-off-again. But either way.

27:08 So that makes sense because I did see that guys like Jerry Rubin and I think Rennie Davis, a couple of like the Chicago 7, like they didn't even like hang out with him because he was doing too many drugs. And I'm guessing that it wasn't like he was smoking so much pot we can't even talk with him anymore.

27:27 Like I think he was shooting dope and they weren't.

27:30 Yeah, well, he never shot it. He always smoked it.

27:32 Or smoking dope.

27:33 But I think he and Yoko were doing heroin actually before the Beatles broke up at the end.

27:38 Okay.

27:39 When they were sort of estranged. Not with the Beatles, not John and Yoko. But at any rate, like I said, these investigations are going on and they're going to his concerts. And they're not even sending back information that really means much. They're even saying some of these informants like, you know what, they're not even really down with, like the new left isn't even down with them. because they think they're just, quote, self-aggrandizing rock stars, or there's little chance they'll accomplish anything because they spend all their time doing drugs. They're kind of sending the message like, you really don't need to worry so much about John Lennon. He's not much of a threat. Kind of one of the funny things about

28:19 this investigation was when, and Lennon was one of the most famous people in the world, one of the most recognizable faces in the world on planet Earth, along with Yoko Ono. And the FBI passes around a sheet with Lennon's picture on it so they can recognize him. But it was the wrong photo. It was of a different human being. It wasn't even John Lennon.

28:41 Yeah, it was a street busker from the West Village named David Peel.

28:45 So funny.

28:46 Who had a record that I guess John Lennon helped produce or something. He looked vaguely like John Lennon, but that was the picture that the FBI passed around to the cops of the wrong guy. The FBI also put out an all-points bulletin searching for John Lennon and said that he's at the St. Regis at 150 Bank Street. St.

29:07 Regis Landscape Supply?

29:09 That's right. I guess that's what they meant because the St. Regis Hotel is on Central Park. And John Lennon was indeed living on Bank Street at the time, but he was at 105 Bank Street. So that all-points bulletin was all kinds of wrong. But this is the level of like– coppery that the FBI was conducting, you know, trying to get John Lennon.

29:31 All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about Lennon's official defense right after this. So All right. So John Lennon is not going to take this lying down. He was he was paranoid. He was going on like the Mike Douglas show and talking about the FBI coming after him. The first thing he did was probably what any really, really rich person would do is he hires a top rate bulldog attorney to try and defend this or at least delay this. And this guy's name was Leon Wilds. And he really did delay this. He was sort of a master at filing these motions. and getting it extended and extended, and Lennon was able to stay in the country longer and longer and longer. But he was also kind of

30:30 instrumental in kind of letting Lennon know that this was a real situation that he was involved in.

30:38 Right. The thing is, is if you are a immigration prosecutor for the federal government of the United States, you know that there is not a ton of resources allocated to your division, right? Or traditionally there hasn't been. And so customarily, the Justice Department has or I guess INS has left it up to each prosecutor to determine how hard they want to prosecute the case. And so if you are a upstanding person who's never posed any sort of threat to the United States and maybe you own a business or you're a productive member of society, There is a chance that the INS is going to look the other way and not actually deport you, even if you are here illegally. You have overstayed your visa or you came to the country illegally. Who knows? And that's

31:29 actually where the Dreamer program came from, DACA. It basically said like these particular immigrants were brought here as children and they pose no threat. Most of them are going to college or college bound or they're in the military. So we're going to not deport them. And what what Lennon's lawyer told him was like, all of this is true.

31:51 And yet they're putting the heat on you like I have never seen. This is this is clearly coming down from on high. Like they want to get you out of the United States. And it's not just this prosecutor. Yeah.

32:03 And the other thing that happens when it comes to a case like this is they have to weigh or they can be decided basically on the value of that an immigrant might bring to the U.S. by being an American or living in the United States.

32:17 Mm-hmm.

32:18 And so there was, you know, it's kind of funny to look back now and think that there had to be a case made that John Lennon brings any kind of value. But they did, and there was a series of letters written by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Joyce Carol Oates, Leonard Bernstein, John Updike, just a series of very famous artists. Mm-hmm. kind of arguing in favor of John Lennon being allowed to live here. It was sort of a flood of public outcry, like what little was known back then, at least. There's tremendous value to letting John Lennon stay in this country.

32:54 Right. And don't forget, John Cage wrote a letter, too. And I'm sure it was kind of like, well, you know, do you want me to write a letter for you, John? He's like, yeah, sure. I'm sure that would help a lot, John Cage. Because I'm sure no one in the Nixon administration has ever heard of you.

33:10 Yeah, probably so.

33:11 So the one kind of the upshot, I'm just going full on using this word now. The upshot of that letter writing campaign was not even just so much to demonstrate the value of John Lennon remaining in the United States. It was if you kick him out, like there's going to be a public outcry and you're going to be held to account and asked to explain why you guys kicked him out. So it did have a bit of that combined with his his attorney's tenacity. It kept John Lennon in the country. He was actually never deported, even though they were he had a he lived for, I think, two or three years with us. You have 60 days to leave the country order. And his his lawyer kept getting it extended and extended and extended. But for three years,

33:57 that was the threat that he was living under. And again, if he was deported, he would leave without his wife, who had to stay in the country for her own custody battle. So that was a lot of strain on him, actually. And the worst part about this whole thing is not that the FBI did this and that the Nixon administration, Singleton Mounder, that it all came down to Strom Thurmond writing this memo to kick things off. It was that it worked. They sought to neutralize John Lennon and his political activism, and he stopped. He actually did. He gave in in August of 1972 by announcing that he was not going to take part in that series of concerts that was going to culminate at the Republican National Convention

34:41 or engage in any kind of activist activities any longer. He was just going to go back to being a musician again.

34:49 Yeah, and by this point, Hoover was dead. L. Patrick Gray died. was the acting director of the FBI. And in that same month, that August, before the election in November, the FBI's New York office reported to Gray that he's no longer going to be involved with these concerts. He's no longer with the new left. We don't really need to worry about him anymore. We're going to basically settle this case and close this case after Nixon wins the election.

35:18 And like we said earlier a couple of times by landslide, so this is all sort of for naught anyway. Gerald Ford ended up overturning Lennon's deportation order in 1975 that was already filed. And in 76, he got his green card and lived in New York very famously in the Dakota for the last four years of his life before he was murdered in the street, which I think we should do an episode on that at some point, maybe in a couple of years once this one is well in the rearview mirror.

35:47 You bet.

35:48 That'd be a good one.

35:49 I agree. So if John Lennon, apparently before he died, he gave a couple interviews and he said of this time, like that it nearly ruined him as an artist. You know, like you said, he wasn't just not sweating it. Like he sweated it every day. It was a big, hairy problem in his life all the time and a source of great stress. So in addition to the stress, it stole his focus. Like it made him think about that and like how much he hated the Nixon administration and how terrible the FBI was for how they were harassing him and possibly tapping his phone. And it just took his mind from his art. And he later said that it almost ruined him as an artist because the work he was producing at the time was journalism, not poetry,

36:37 as he put it, which is a very sad effect. But it's a really real world effect when you've got something just looming in in the front of your mind that you can't get out of your mind, especially if it's dealing with badness. That has a terrible effect on you and your life in general. It can produce an entire bad period of your life, you know?

37:00 Yeah. He was like, I had to let Yoko sing a lot.

37:05 I have something I have to say. I don't want to forget it. In one of the FBI notes at that John Sinclair concert, Mm-hmm. The FBI informant reported that the song, John Sinclair, was not up to Glennon's usual standards. And you get this, Yoko can't even remain on key. That was an FBI informant.

37:25 Yeah, he had a good ear. But, you know, I like the song. It doesn't, like, belong up there with his greatest songs. But it was very clear. It was sort of in the tradition of protest songs. It's got this acoustic slide dobro guitar, and, you know, it's sort of, It fits in with the great folk songs of all time, I think, but not necessarily one of the great Lennon or Beatles songs.

37:50 Is it as good as John Henry was a steel driving man?

37:54 I think it's better. I like it better.

37:55 Really? Yeah.

37:58 And, you know, like we mentioned earlier, the reason we know all this was because of Wiener's reporting. And he eventually got those documents released. And there was, you know, in his circle, there was a big hubbub, like what's going to be in there? what secrets will be revealed. And really not much. What was revealed was embarrassment for the FBI, embarrassment that they released a picture that wasn't even John Lennon, embarrassment that they had a very unethical and perhaps even illegal motivation behind trying to get this person deported. And it was just egg on the face.

38:36 And that's why they tried to keep it under wraps for so many years, hoping that it would not get out. Not because there were some big revealing documents, but they were just like, can we just sort of act like this didn't happen?

38:47 Yeah, so we'll classify everything as a national security risk. And they did. And actually, that last trove of documents, the little handful that trickled out in 2006, was a MI5, a British Secret Service file on London that the U.S. said if they— it was— And that that last bit of document contained a file from a foreign government that had trusted the U.S. to keep it and that it could result in economic, diplomatic and military action if they were to release it. Like the U.K. was just going to bomb the U.S. for releasing their document or their file on John Lennon. That's why the FBI held onto it until 2006. And then they lost a court case. So if there's a hero of the story, it's John Weiner or John Weiner. I don't know how he says his

39:37 name and I'm sorry either way, because he was the one that really stood up, not just for John Lennon, but for The First Amendment, you know, and people's ability to be politically active without, you know, the threat of being intimidated. So good for him.

39:54 Totally.

39:56 You got anything else about this?

39:58 Got nothing else.

40:00 I have an article to direct everybody to is on Pop Matters. John Lennon, colon, revolutionary man as political artist. And it's about all this, sorry, history, but also just a pretty good critical evaluation of him as an activist. And it's just a really good, interesting article. So check it out. And since I said check it out, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

40:25 This is in reference of our haunted real estate. I guess that was a short stuff, right? Had to be.

40:33 Yeah, yeah, it was.

40:35 Please tell me we didn't do 45 minutes on that.

40:37 We could have.

40:39 Hey, guys. Been a listener for years and finally have a good reason to write you. I was listening to the episode on whether you're supposed to disclose whether a house is haunted or not, and it hit close to home. Two years ago, we bought our first house, and I made a point to run a report to see if anyone died in the house. The previous owner had just died within a year, but it didn't say where. I wasn't really worried about someone actually dying in the house.

40:59 I was really just trying to get a big discount. However, the agent said he didn't know, so no big discount. Cut to two years later, I found out from neighbors and research that the previous owner did not die. However, he was a creep who actually had multiple abuse charges. In fact, I found an article stating that he had a woman tied up in our basement who he tortured until she was luckily able to escape for weeks. That's like almost worse than just a regular person dying.

41:30 Is somebody dying of natural causes? It's a million times worse.

41:33 Well, no, I was about to say worse than a murder. I guess they're on par.

41:37 Yeah, well, let's debate that at length.

41:39 I don't want to rank awful crimes. Right. But I think that might creep me out just as much. Let's just say that. Sure. The police searched the house and found oodles of weapons. The charges were eventually dropped. Apparently, he had money, and he redid the entire basement, which is beyond creepy. I don't know if this qualifies as info that should have been provided to us at purchase, but it sure seems like it, huh?

42:02 Yeah.

42:03 That is from Andy, Andy I. Oh, okay.

42:07 Well, thanks a lot, Andy. Is there a heart over the I?

42:12 No, but it's typed.

42:14 Is it? It could be Andy McDowell. I think she spells her name like that. I could see something like this happening to Andy McDowell.

42:22 Sure. I love Andy McDowell.

42:23 Well, whether it's from Andy McDowell or not, we appreciate the email. Thank you. And yes, I agree. I think the realtor should have disclosed that if you ask me.

42:31 Totally.

42:33 If you want to let us know about some way a realtor wronged you or anybody did, we want to hear about it. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.