Selects: John Lennon and the FBI

John Lennon and the FBI

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1:38Hi, everybody. Christmas is in the air because it's 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.

2:09And 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 States at times. So check out this episode right now. I think you'll enjoy it.

2:28Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Celebrity activism and the Nixon administration

2:39Hey, 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. 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

3:10ever take a breath of life in the United States. Yes. Hoover and Nixon, right? Yes. Herbert Hoover and Charles J. Nixon. Not those two. Was it J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon? Richard Milhouse, I think is his name. That's right. Milhouse. That's right. So you picked this one, right? Yeah. I think we got help from our buddy, was it, oh, it was a Grabster article, right?

3:41This is a Grabster. So why did you choose this one, Chuck? I'm just a Beatles nut. I'm reading a massive Beatles book and just, I'm always thinking about the Beatles, so this isn't something I knew a ton about. Yeah. So now I know more. What are you thinking about the Beatles right now? They could write a song. Like they could? Like they're really good at writing songs, you mean? I think so. I know you're not a Beatles guy, but they're regarded as good songwriters.

4:13Sure. 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. I think we differ on Yoko Ono, though, so that'll be, you know, that's where the tables are turned. Okay. Because you like her singing, isn't that right? 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? Sure. 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?

4:49No. I bet that's something. 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 Fireworks, 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. How about that? I appreciate her as a human, and it's always fun to look back at performances, live performances with Lennon when she would do a full like four or five songs in a row in the middle of like

5:23Madison Square Garden concert. And you could kind of see 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. Right, right. And she's actually pretty strongly implicated in this whole thing. We're talking about John Lennon being pursued and surveilled and basically harassed by the FBI in 1972, actually, 1971, 72, I believe, for a very specific reason.

5:57And it was at a time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono had just gotten married. They got married like two, two, three years before and were 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 help influence or help causes, that kind of thing. And by the time 1971, 72 rolled around, Richard Milhouse Nixon was actually running for re-election

6:27again. 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 bloc. 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.

6:58And 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 there in Liverpool, which is not the case. But as a result of that, he championed the working man. He and Yoko contributed to causes. He became, along with Yoko, very much pacifist activists.

7:32And 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. 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? Yeah, for sure. One of the ways I think that got the most press that when people think about John and Yoko's

8:06activism is the bed ends that they had. That is B-E-D dash 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

8:38in bed and not go and start wars. And this is a pretty ridiculous way to drive that point home. 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, I don't know, maybe it kind of gets you in

9:12just 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. Um, 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

9:44of thinking, who were opposed to people who were opposed to Vietnam or war in general or violence of any kind, um, there was a big opposition to that. 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, uh, especially ones who were more, uh, liberal to, to basically keep them in line by threatening them with blackmail or even the

10:19threat of blackmail. You know, um, there were plenty of hippies who got their heads cracked in. There were people who were surveilled. Um, we did an episode on the Black Panthers. If you remember, we talked about, um, COINTELPRO, the whole program to basically undermine and smear the Black Panthers in the public's mind. Like the J. Edgar Hoover was a, a, a vicious, terrible human being. Um, and he ran the FBI for decades and was still running the FBI when they started to target John Lennon.

Visa status and Strom Thurmond's memo

10:49Yeah. So to set the stage here, uh, of kind of how this all worked out was, um, John Lennon had, uh, 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, uh, 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, uh, Yoko Ono had a custody battle going on. Uh, she had a daughter from a previous marriage in the early seventies and she wasn't going

11:24to leave at all. Uh, 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, um, 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, uh, Lennon loved living in New York city. That's where he wanted to make his permanent home. That was so much so that that was also leverage that they had too. Yeah, absolutely. And so Nixon's up for reelection in 72, um, he would go on to win, you know, in a big,

12:00big way against McGovern, but they were, you know, they were, uh, an, I was about to call them an organization. They were an administration that was very paranoid. Um, they would obviously with Watergate, they showed that they were willing to do anything to ensure their victory. Yeah. Uh, and that included being really worried about people like John Lennon. Uh, I don't think he was at the top of their list of things to worry about, but he was on their list, uh, thanks to Strom Thurmond of all people.

12:31Yeah. So Strom Thurmond, the horrible segregationist senator, um, from what South Carolina, right? Uh, he, he actually kicked this whole thing off because I guess I, I, I, he noticed that John Lennon was, was, you know, he was a left leaning rock star activist. He's, I, 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, um, recently enfranchised 18, 19 and 20 year old voters who hadn't had

13:08the right to vote until the 26th amendment had been passed. Uh, 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. And he apparently saw Lennon 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.

13:40So his, his, the note from Strom Thurmond was very well received in the Nixon administration. Yeah. I think, uh, what I want to know is who told Strom Thurmond. That's what I want to know too. Cause I doubt. That's the biggest mystery here. Yeah. I doubt if Strom Thurmond was too hip to any of this, but somebody probably got in his ear and he said, uh, he sent a note that specifically said they try and get him deported as a quote, a strategic countermeasure. Right. Uh, and that's really kind of what got the ball rolling. Uh, we should also mention this other guy, John, I don't know if it's Wiener or Weiner

14:13in this case. It's pronounced Wiener slave. Oh, it is? No. Do you remember there was a 30 rock episode where there's like a HR mediator and he's like this very soft, rosy cheeked, very calm, mild bannered man. And, um, Liz Lemon says, well, Mr. Wiener Slav. And he goes, uh, no, it's pronounced Wiener slave. I miss that show. It's like, that was a really good moment. They had such a great fun with dumb jokes like that and blah, blah, blah.

14:43Yeah. Right. No, that was Arrested Development. Oh, that's right. That was Arrested Development. They kind of had the same DNA though. Yeah, for sure. So Wiener slave, uh, was a writer and, 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. Um, he decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get a lot of these documents uncovered over the years and eventually was successful, um, in a big dump in 1997 and then

15:15in another smaller one in 2006. And if it had not been for his tenacity, um, I don't know if, uh, anyone else would have picked up this mantle to, because, you know, in the end, it's not the most interesting story in the world.

The pedestrian reality of FBI surveillance files

15:30It's true. 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. 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 his face, like, you know, the FBI followed around John Lennon, kept tabs on him. And, like, if you read the files, it's really pedestrian, boring stuff.

16:02Um, you might miss, like, the real story here. 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 re-elected. That's the real story here. And that the FBI acted as, you know, this, um, basically a Gestapo-type agency on behalf of Nixon.

16:33That'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. 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, he, for his encore, he sang, Give Peace a Chance, and we all know about that song. Right. And they would take notes on song lyrics and stuff like that. So it's all just kind of silly. But, um, yeah, I definitely agree that it's, it's just an example of the links that Nixon

17:08would go to to be a dirty thief. 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? By just shutting up for two minutes? Yep.

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Drug arrests and the New Left

20:39Okay, so the whole thing started eventually. 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. It's just 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,

21:14who 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 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 Lennon for years to come and really kind of be the fulcrum that the U.S. government had on him

21:47to try to keep him from staying in the U.S. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't even doing heroin at this point, I don't think. No. So they should have waited if they wanted a real case. Well, it makes you wonder. Like, I remember hearing in our, 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. Yeah, I think Lennon never shot heroin.

22:18That was his jam. Okay. 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. Yeah. So they were surveilling him. They were surveilling other artists around the country, too, who they thought were subversive and sending messages.

22:51Lennon, 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 concert in, I don't know if they were raising money. Yeah. 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,

23:21and 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, which is a cool song and very rootsy and bluesy, not like very Lennon at all, is 10 for two, 10 for two is what they keep saying, 10 years for two joints. Yeah. That he sold to an undercover cop, right? Yeah, but it worked. He actually was sprung from prison shortly after this concert. Yeah, like two days after. And some people say, eh, I think that indicates he was already going to be sprung, that the Michigan Supreme Court knew

23:54this was a trumped-up charge. But other people say, no, the concert surely had some impact. But Sinclair is a, so the point about Sinclair and John Lennon is John Lennon performed this song. 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.

24:25It had 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, Lennon and Yoko were dedicated pacifists. 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

24:59and get rid of people like Nixon and his cronies. And so if you're watching this from the outside, like you're J. 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.

25:31It 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. Like John Sinclair founded the White Panther Party, which they had a 10-point platform, like the Black Panthers platform and the First Platform and the White Panther platform, is that it's fully in support of the Black Panthers 10-point platform.

26:01So he's hanging out with a bunch of people that had proven themselves as dyed-in-the-wool foes of the Nixon administration. That definitely caught the FBI's attention. Yeah, and they had big plans. They got together, and I think their first meeting was at the Alamooki Township. That's how I'm going to pronounce it. The Scaramucci Township. In New Jersey. And initially called themselves the Alamooki Tribe, but wisely changed their name

26:31to the Election Year Strategy Information Center. Right. 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.

27:04This is all very legal stuff. It wasn't, they weren't staging riots or anything. 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. Bob Blah Blah? To the right. Oh, he was Bob Blah Blah, wasn't he? Mm-hmm. That's funny.

Paranoia, wiretaps, and botched police bulletins

27:34So 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. And Lennon knew this was coming. This is 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.

28:06I 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? Yeah, I read an interview. 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

28:37of illegal wiretapping by the FBI, or no, legal wiretapping by the FBI. So Weiner's 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. Right. 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 and with good reason. But he took to going next door

29:07at the Dakota building. So he would let Lennon use his phone in his apartment to make phone calls. And I guess, you know, 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 on a bureau,

29:37NYCPD Narcotics Division is aware of the subject's recent use of narcotics, which is like every day, and are attempting to obtain enough info to arrest both subject and wife Yoko based on PD investigation. Yeah, and by this time, I'm thinking he was using heroin. I think that's what they were referencing is his recent use. Oh, really? I didn't think that started until later. I thought it was the early 70s. 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. I'm going to err toward you then, because I'm just surmising here.

30:08I'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? I don't think he was arrested in the United States, was he? 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. Um, so, and if you take a step back,

30:39like, 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, um, keep him in line. And the FBI used the word neutralized, that they were seeking to neutralize Lennon. Um, and I guess some people who don't dig very deeply into the story are like,

31:10they were going to assassinate John Lennon. And, um, John Wiener, or Weiner, um, has pointed out, like, that's not at all what they meant. They meant, like, basically making him ineffective, like, um, taking him out of the game, basically, one way or another. Um, but not killing him, just convincing him through putting this undue, unfair, undemocratic pressure on him to drop his activities with the new left. Yeah, and they, and by the way, I think, I think he probably was using heroin in the late 60s

31:41and had an on again, off again. But either way, he, So, so that makes sense because I did see that guys like Jerry Rubin and, um, uh, 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, I'm guessing that it wasn't like he was smoking so much pot we can't even talk with him anymore. Like, I think he was shooting dope and they weren't. Yeah, well, he never shot it. He always smoked it. Or smoking dope. But he and, I think he and Yoko were doing heroin

32:12actually before the Beatles broke up at the end. Okay. Uh, when they were sort of estranged. Not the, with the Beatles, not John and Yoko. But, um, at any rate, these, 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, they're not even really down with, like, the new left isn't even down with them because they think they're just, uh, quote, self-aggrandizing rock stars. Yeah. Uh, or there's little chance

32:43that 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. Yeah. Uh, kind of, one of the funny things about this investigation was when, um, 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,

33:13but it was the wrong photo. It was of a different human being. It wasn't even John Lennon. Yeah, it was a street busker from the West Village named David Peel. So funny. Who had a record that I guess John Lennon helped produce or something? And he looked vaguely like John Lennon, but that was the, that was the picture that the FBI passed around to the cops of the wrong guy. They also, 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.

33:44St. Regis Landscape Supply? 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. 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.

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Legal defense and letters of support

36:59All right, so John Lennon is not going to take this lying down. He was paranoid. He was going on like the Mike Douglas show and talking about the FBI coming after him.

37:10The 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 instrumental in kind of letting Lennon know that this was a real situation that he was involved in. Right.

37:42The 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

38:12person 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 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.

38:42Most 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 Lennon's lawyer told him was, like, all of this is true and yet they're putting the heat on you like I have never seen. 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, 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

39:13the value that an immigrant might bring to the U.S. by being an American or living in the United States. 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 John Baez and Joyce Carol Oates, Leonard Bernstein, John Updike, just a series of very famous artists kind of arguing in favor of John Lennon being allowed

39:44to live here. It was sort of a flood of public outcry, like what, you know, what Little was known back then at least. Like, you can't just, there's tremendous value to letting John Lennon stay in this country. 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. Yeah, probably so. So,

40:14the 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 attorney's tenacity.

40:45It 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 a, you have 60 days to leave the country order, and his lawyer kept getting it extended and extended and extended. But for three years, 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

41:15part about this whole thing is not that the FBI did this and that the Nixon administration signal matter, that it all came down to Strom Thurmond writing this memo to kick things off.

The chilling effect on Lennon's art

41:26It was that it worked. Like, 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 or engage in any kind of activist activities any longer. He was just going to go back to being a musician again. Yeah, and by this point, Hoover was dead.

41:56L. Patrick Gray 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. And like we said earlier a couple of times, by a landslide, so this is all sort of for naught anyway.

42:27Gerald 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. You bet. That'd be a good one. I agree. So if John Lennon apparently before he died,

42:57he gave a couple interviews and he said of this time that it nearly ruined him as an artist. Like you said, he wasn't just not sweating it. 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. It made him think about that and how much he hated the Nixon administration and how terrible the FBI was for how they were harassing him and possibly tapping his

43:28phone. 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, 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 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

43:58on you and your life in general. It can produce an entire bad period of your life, you know? Yeah. He was like, I had to let Yoko sing a lot. 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, the FBI informant reported that the song John Sinclair was not up to Lennon's usual standards and, get this, Yoko can't even remain on key. That was an FBI informant.

44:29Yeah, he had a good ear, but, you know, I like the song. It doesn't 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 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. Is it as good as John Henry was a steel-driving man? I think it's better. I like it better. Really?

Declassified documents and the role of John Weiner

45:01Yeah, 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

45:32perhaps even illegal motivation behind trying to get this person deported, and it was just egg on the face, 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? 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,

46:02a British Secret Service file on Lenin, that the U.S. said, if they, it was, 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 on to it until 2006, and

46:33then they lost a court case. So, like, if there's a hero of the story, it's John Weiner, or John Weiner. I don't know how he says his 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. Totally. You got anything else about this? Got nothing else. I have an

47:04article to direct everybody to. It's 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.

Listener mail on haunted real estate

47:23And since I said check it out, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

47:28This is in reference of our haunted real estate. I guess that was a short stuff, right? Had to be. Yeah, yeah, it was. Like, please tell me we didn't do 45 minutes on that. We could have. 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

47:58say where. I wasn't really worried about someone actually dying in the house. I was really just trying to get a big discount. However, the agent said he did no, 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.

48:29That's like almost worse than just a regular person dying. Somebody dying of natural causes? It's a million times worse. Well, no, I was about to say worse than a murder. I guess they're on par. Yeah, well, let's debate that at length. I don't want to rank awful crimes, 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.

49:00I don't know if this qualifies as info that should have been provided to us at purchase, but it sure seems like it, huh? Yeah. That is from Andy, A-N-D-I. Oh, okay. Well, thanks a lot, Andy. Is there a heart over the eye? No, but it's typed. Is it, um, it could be Andy McDowell. I think she spells her name like that. Oh. I could see something like this happening to Andy McDowell, can't you? Sure. I love Andy McDowell. Well, whether it's from Andy McDowell or not, we appreciate the email. Um, thank you. And yes, I, I agree.

49:31I think the realtor should have disclosed that if you ask me. Totally. Uh, 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 favourite shows.

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51:07Depomocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extensure is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extensure is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away

51:37for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection, common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or flu-like symptoms, joint pain, or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extensure. Learn more at Extensure.com or call 1-833-393-3678. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.