Beyond the Multiplex
A fascinating look back at the right wing's sordid attempt to deport John Lennon.
By Andrew O'Hehir
Sep. 14, 2006 | There's a confrontation in the fascinating new documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" that sums up why the most sardonic, most earnest and most intelligent of the Beatles can still drive people nuts, 26 years after his death. It's the early '70s, probably 1972, a year that marked a turning point in Lennon's life and, if you ask me, in American history. Sitting alongside his wife, Yoko Ono, Lennon is locked in heated conversation with Gloria Emerson, then a famous (some would say infamous) foreign correspondent for the New York Times.
The scene is brief but electric. (The same clip reportedly appears in the 1988 film "Imagine: John Lennon," which I haven't seen since its release.) There's none of the star-fucking or ego-fellation that today characterizes celebrity interviews. Emerson and Lennon are both angry, and getting angrier. She finds the Lennon-Ono publicity stunts and peacenik ballads naive and simplistic, and she's letting him know that. Eyes boring into her, Lennon says he doesn't care about that, that his only goal is to end the Vietnam War and save lives. "You can't possibly believe that you've saved a single life!" Emerson says in her exaggerated upper-crust drawl. "Dear boy, you're living in a dream world." Lennon flicks her away like an insect, pointing out that "Give Peace a Chance" had become both a pop hit and the unofficial anthem of the antiwar movement.
As most viewers probably will, I instinctively sided with the working-class Liverpudlian rock star against the Upper East Side WASP lady with the ludicrous accent. But the scene stuck with me and wouldn't go away, and eventually I came to grips with it. First I realized that Lennon and Emerson were engaged in an important cultural debate, and neither of them was exactly wrong. Viewed in hindsight, Lennon and Ono's political theater of the early '70s had a Zen-meets-Dada brilliance and clarity that thrilled and engaged an entire generation. It may well have helped shorten the war and save lives. But Emerson isn't entirely the creep she at first seems to be; she saw their work leading toward an intellectual and political cul-de-sac, and she was right.
After that I became grief-stricken: Pop culture and journalism in our own time have been so thoroughly drained of content, and genuine confrontation, that nothing close to this could happen today. It's nice, I guess, that Bono is working with Paul Wolfowitz on Africa's debt crisis, and that Eminem wants young people to vote. But you're not going to see them arguing with a prominent journalist in front of the news cameras, and no prominent journalist (Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert aside) would even dare.
If Lennon was a dangerous figure to the pro-war American establishment of the early '70s -- and he clearly was -- so was Emerson. Her scathing, mournful reporting from Vietnam, which repeatedly lambasted the idiocy and incompetence of military planners and commanders, did a great deal to cement middle-class opposition to the war (and won her newspaper the lasting enmity of the right wing). Emerson's magnum opus was the 1976 book "Winners & Losers," the best and perhaps only journalistic attempt to capture the war's effects on both Americans and Vietnamese. Like Lennon, she was a spiny and difficult character, and we could use more like both of them. She lived much longer than Lennon, but also departed under painful circumstances. Gloria Emerson committed suicide in August 2004, in her New York apartment, at age 75.
David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's documentary dredges up the sordid and largely forgotten tale of the right-wing attempt -- spearheaded by Strom Thurmond and J. Edgar Hoover, no less -- to get Lennon deported as an "undesirable alien." The reasons are not mysterious and at this late date the history is not in dispute. After the breakup of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, where they became increasingly visible figures on the antiwar left -- and almost immediately targets of the FBI.
Even some of the couple's friends thought that John and Yoko might be imagining that their phones were tapped, or that they were being followed around the city by men in suits. Now that Lennon's voluminous FBI file has been opened, it looks like it was all true. History will have to judge whether Richard Nixon's administration was more paranoid and criminal-minded than the current one, but Nixon's men ordered surveillance of many perceived political enemies, and more extreme measures were contemplated, at the very least. (It seems pretty clear that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by Chicago police and FBI agents in December 1969, but exactly who gave the orders remains a mystery.)
Near the end of 1971, Lennon and Ono headlined a benefit concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., for imprisoned White Panther leader and marijuana activist John Sinclair. The concert made national news (and Sinclair was set free by the Michigan Supreme Court three days later). This concert and similar events drew Lennon and Ono close to several prominent activists, including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Black Panther Bobby Seale. They began to discuss a concert and lecture tour that would follow Richard Nixon around the country during his reelection campaign, galvanizing antiwar sentiment and, perhaps, support for Nixon's Democratic opponent, George McGovern.
That's where Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator and old-time segregationist (then a mere lad of 69), came in. He wrote to the Nixon White House, suggesting that Lennon's career as an antiwar celebrity spokesman could be derailed by revoking his temporary visa and getting him deported to England. As much as all the eloquent lefty talking heads in the film -- from Gore Vidal to Noam Chomsky to Tariq Ali to Geraldo Rivera (yes! a secret pinko, and much less of an idiot than you think!) -- try to dance around the issue, this worked like a charm.
Lennon was never deported, but his struggles with the immigration authorities lasted for three years, long past the end of the Vietnam War and Nixon's resignation. The anti-Nixon barnstorming tour of 1972 never happened. (We should not delude ourselves into imagining that it would have produced a vastly different result that November.) Lennon gradually fell away from active politics and even from music, hardly recording or performing at all between 1975 and 1980.
Leaf and Scheinfeld are working with Yoko Ono's cooperation; she appears in several interview segments and gave clearances for numerous Lennon songs, including unreleased versions of "Attica State" and "How Do You Sleep." This creates the same problem I observed in Ric Burns' new Andy Warhol documentary, made in close collaboration with the Warhol estate. On the one hand, this level of access is invaluable to any researcher. On the other, it means that part of watching the film involves reading between the lines (a mixed metaphor, but you get it).
Emerson was wrong to dismiss Lennon and Ono as naive peaceniks. Their exploitation of their own massive celebrity from 1969 to 1971, combining blunt political-philosophical challenge -- "War Is Over (If You Want It)" -- with conceptual art happenings, was anything but simplistic. Conducting press conferences from inside a large cloth sack (to advocate "Bagism"), or spending an entire week in bed in mock-serious political resistance, are acts of maddening, enlightened idiocy, worthy of a Dostoevski hero, or Marcel Duchamp, or Andy Kaufman.
As Lennon became more closely involved with the semi-official leaders of the antiwar movement, though, his work became more literal-minded, less clownish and adventuresome and interesting. Does anyone today really want to listen to the song "John Sinclair"? (Not to mention "Woman Is the Nigger of the World.") In exploring a little-known story of political persecution, "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" also sheds some unexpected light on the uneven and still undigested career of one of the most paradoxical artists pop culture has yet produced.
"The U.S. vs. John Lennon" opens Sept. 15 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
