All the people that say the movement, the revolution is over.
They ought to see what's going on right here, 'cause it doesn't look over to me.
This is like a dream,
seeing 15,000 people in one place
demanding freedom for John Sinclair.
I was sentenced to 91/2-10 years
in July of 1969
for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman.
All this time that John Sinclair has been in jail
because of his opposition to the government,
that government has dropped 21/2 Hiroshimas a week
every week since July 1969, when John was imprisoned.
And all that time,
Richard Nixon was trumpeting, "The war is winding down."
We had this concert,
and it was broadcast all over the state.
It was the biggest thing that ever happened in Michigan.
Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger,
Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin,
Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers.
All power to the people.
Thank you very much. Right on.
Power to the people.
The stage was set to make a big impact.
"If we can make this concert be huge..."
And then Jerry Rubin talked John Lennon and Yoko Ono
into coming and playing at our concert.
We had no idea that there were FBI agents
writing down the lyrics in the audience.
That's when the FBI began to see
the beginning of the power of John and Yoko.
The power structure, especially during the Nixon administration,
which began in 1968, was extremely paranoid
about anyone who they perceived to be counter-culture,
counter-administration, antiwar,
and, of course, John Lennon fell squarely in that arena.
When somebody in show business
comes and participates in a political rally,
he or she is doing something
that is a very great personal sacrifice,
and even a personal risk.
Certainly, they feared what a figure like John Lennon represented.
Anybody who sings about love and harmony and life
is dangerous to somebody who's singing about death
and killing and subduing.
He was making friends
with a lot of people that our government
wanted to put in jail.
He was a high-profile figure,
so his activities were being monitored.
I think they wanted me to know to scare me,
and I was scared, paranoid.
He believed all of his telephone conversations were being monitored.
"He believed that he was being followed around New York City.
He believed that friends that he had thought were friends
were secret informants for different intelligence communities.
We were just shocked,
and we were really scared.
Another effect of the Sinclair thing
was it probably further alerted the FBI,
John Mitchell, Haldeman,
Ehrlichman, and Nixon as to this threat to them,
that something needed to be done
to neutralize John Lennon.
Childhood was something that, um...
he couldn't shake it.
It was there all the time.
And at night when we were in bed,
he would be talking about it, his mother...
Especially his mother.
He was an orphan, really.
He was abandoned by his father,
and to all intents and purposes,
abandoned by his mother.
Can you imagine growing up
and realizing that neither your mother nor your father
really wanted you?
So it's no wonder he turned out a rebel.
Being born working class, it was a natural...
I knew... I was taught to hate and fear the police,
hate and fear the establishment,
and to fight it.
He had a chip on his shoulder for anybody who would tell him
how to live his life and what to do
and when to talk and when not to talk.
I was always in trouble.
Every school I went to, I was thrown out.
Everything I got involved in, I was always in trouble,
so I was always against the wall.
This is Doug Layton and Tommy Charles
reminding you that our fantastic Beatle boycott is still in effect.
We have not forgotten what The Beatles said.
The Beatles made a statement in all the newspapers
that they're getting more better than, uh, Jesus Himself.
Originally, I was...
I pointed out that fact in reference to England,
that we meant more to kids than Jesus did
or religion at that time.
I wasn't knocking it or putting it down.
I was just saying it.
I think simply on the basis of statistics and fact,
his statement is untrue.
No one is more popular than Jesus.
I just didn't mean what everybody thinks I meant.
I'm not anti-Christ or anti-religion
or anti-God.
So many people have built buildings in the name of Christ,
and what have people done for The Beatles?
What have they done for us?
I'm not saying that we're better or greater
or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person,
or God as a thing or whatever it is.
I just said what I said and it was wrong
or it was taken wrong,
and now it's all this.
We urge you to take your Beatle records,
pictures, and souvenirs
to the pickup points about to be named,
and on the night of the Beatles' appearance in Memphis,
August 19,
they will be destroyed in a huge public bonfire
at a place to be named soon.
It doesn't matter about people not liking our records
or not liking the way we look or what we say.
They're entitled to not like us,
and we're entitled not to have anything to do with them if we don't want to,
or not to regard them.
We've all got our rights, you know?
Clearly, Lennon already was thinking about
this thing of being the lovable mop tops
is not really their goal in life anymore.
Lennon in particular is more willing
to take on a critical stance,
a rebellious stance.
This, I think, is the beginning,
where Lennon sets out on the path
that's going to bring him into direct conflict
with the Nixon administration six years later.
The thing the '60s did
was show us the possibility and the responsibility that we all had.
It wasn't the answer.
It just have us a glimpse of the possibility.
We intend to convince the communists
that we cannot be defeated by force of arms
or by superior power.
I have today ordered to Vietnam
the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces
which will raise our fighting strength
from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.
I joined the Marine Corps out of high school
in September of 1964,
and I volunteered to go to Vietnam.
They could not have sent someone more dedicated.
They could not have sent someone who was willing
to follow their policy more than myself.
While leading my squad across an open area,
I was shot to the right shoulder.
It went through my right lung, collapsed my lung,
hit my spine, and severed my spinal cord,
paralyzing me from my mid-chest down.
Vietnam was not an easily accepted war on the part of the population.
It didn't have a 9/11 that we had.
It didn't have a Pearl Harbor.
It didn't have the motivating factors
that would have encouraged a high degree of patriotism.
So it was an unpopular war,
and got to be more and more unpopular as it lingered
and as people doubted more and more
that it had any real purpose.
Some 2 million Vietnamese died in that conflict.
That did not show life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness at its best.
...2, 3, 4!
We don't want to fight your war!
1, 2, 3, 4!
We don't want to fight your war!
The ferment was considerable,
with a leading role played by young people throughout.
People who were normally supposed to be apathetic
and obedient and passive
were actually entering the political arena
to press their own demands and organizing to do something about it.
In this age of protest,
one of the most recent finds 4,000 Londoners
decrying British support for U.S. Action in Vietnam.
There were a few minor scuffles, but no arrests.
The demonstrators were stopped from approaching
Prime Minister Wilson's Downing Street home.
The whole culture had become radicalized,
and it's in this atmosphere that The Beatles
were being forced to engage with the world.
Do you mind being asked questions?
For example, in America people keep asking you questions about Vietnam.
Does this seem useful?
It seems a bit silly to be in America and for none of them to mention Vietnam
as if nothing was happening.
But why should they ask you about it? You're successful entertainers.
That is the thing...
It's because Americans always ask showbiz people
what they think about this sort of...
The British, you know...
"Showbiz," you know how it is.
But, I mean, you've got to...
You can't just keep quiet about anything
that's going on in the world unless you're a monk.
Sorry, monks, I didn't mean it.
I meant, actually...
The thing you have to understand,
which people don't understand necessarily about John,
is that his thought processes were shifting.
He was in a process of evolution.
Our society is run by insane people
for insane objectives.
If anybody can put on paper
what our government and the American government,
et cetera, and the Russian, Chinese...
What they are actually trying to do
and how with what they think they're doing,
I'd be very pleased to know what they think they're doing.
I think they're all insane.
I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that,
that's what's insane about it.
He was engaged with the world,
and what was happening in the world would change him.
And then, you know,
something quite dramatic happened.
It's sort of hard to describe Yoko because she's completely unique.
She had developed quite a good reputation
as a conceptual artist.
In fact, she used to call her stuff "Music of the Mind."
With my presentation of performance art,
I was always aware that I wanted to inspire people
and stir people so that they can wake up.
She once told me, like,
"If half the people don't get up and leave, I haven't done it right,"
because she wanted to really affect people,
and affecting people sometimes gets them very upset
if they're not used to being aware of their feelings.
She suddenly makes them feel something, they get angry,
and they get angry at her for making them feel something.
I always had this dream of meeting an artist woman, you know,
that I would fall in love with and all that,
even from art school, you know?
And then we met and we were talking and that,
and then I don't know how it happened.
You just realize that she knew everything I knew
and more, probably,
and it was coming out of a woman's head.
It just sort of bowled me over.
I believe that when he met Yoko
he found the rest of his voice.
Yoko gave John this sense
or belief that he could say and do anything
he wanted to say and do without apology.
We crossed over into each other's fields,
like people do from country to pop.
We did it from avant-garde left field
to rock and roll left field.
We tried to find a ground there that was interesting to both of us,
and we both got excited and stimulated
by each other's experiences.
We came from totally different backgrounds,
but we were very, very similar
in a sense that we were totally,
fiercely rebellious people.
What are they doing?
This Japanese witch has made him crazy
and he's gone bananas.
But all she did was take the bananas part of me
out of the closet more.
It was a complete relief to meet somebody else
who was as far out as I was, you know?
That was the real thing.
Would you come out?
No.
Why not?
Because this is a bag event...
Total communication.
Don't you think it's a little bit out of fashion, what you do?
Do you think it's a fashion to stay in a bag?
What is it?
It's total communication.
What is total communication?
An invention of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, or is it...
No. No, it exists.
We're showing you one example whereby...
- Total immersion? - Well, that's your version.
If a black man goes for a job in a bag...
If everybody had to go in a bag for a job, there'd be no prejudice.
You'd have to judge people on their quality within.
And we call it total communication.
When we went to Austria to show it,
we did a press conference there in a bag,
and it was great because all the press came in,
and they never saw us.
We were just both in a bag.
And they interviewed the bag and they're saying,
"Is it really you?" And "What are you wearing?"
And "Will you sing a song?" And that.
"Why us?"
And they said, "What is this?"
I said, "It's total communication."
They said, "But why did you pick on us?
We've never seen a Beatle."
Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly.
Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.
Somewhere I read of the freedom of press.
Somewhere I read that the greatness of America
is the right to protest for right.
It was another kind of atmosphere.
You have to imagine and understand that we the Black Panther party,
we popped up right in the middle
of an already ongoing nationwide protest movement.
Let me tell you something.
Brothers and sisters,
if you wind up on a poverty gig
and you don't save half that money
to buy a gun a week,
then you laggin'.
You jivin'.
I think the Black Panther party probably was dangerous,
but not dangerous in the way
that most people assume it might have been.
Not dangerous because people had guns,
but dangerous because of its ability
to provide an example of the possibility
of standing up to power.
You have to be more politically aware
in a day and age like this.
It's almost impossible to close your eyes to it.
And they're afraid of us because we are...
we are not only a cultural and political threat,
we are a military threat to those generals
that are running that war
and controlling young kids' minds over there.
We're a military threat.
When it gets down to having to use violence,
then you're playing the system's game.
The establishment will irritate you,
pull your beard and flick your face,
to make you fight.
Because once they've got you violent,
then they know how to handle you.
The Vietnam War divided this country
as it had not been divided since the Civil War.
Fuck you, L.B.J.!
Fuck you, L.B.J!
Fuck you...
I was with several paralyzed veterans
in a room at the Bronx Veterans Hospital
on the paraplegic ward.
And I remember we were watching the convention.
Mr. Chairman,
most delegates to this convention
do not know that thousands of young people
are being beaten in the streets of Chicago.
Perhaps John Lennon saw the clubs coming down
on top of the heads of the peaceful demonstrators.
Perhaps John Lennon heard the chants
of "The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching."
The whole world is watching!
And perhaps John Lennon
had tears streaming down his face that night
as I did, too.
I did note the transformation of The Beatles
when their song "Revolution" came out.
When I hear the song "Revolution," even now,
it just chokes me up,
because I remember that...
how hard it was for both of us at the time.
We were both ostracized by the world
and by the fans, too, that we were together,
and also John was daring to speak out.
When John Lennon argued
that revolution was necessary,
but that it should come about through peaceful means,
I don't think that he contradicted
what many activists felt during that period.
It's a mistake, I think,
to assume that revolutions must be violent.
If I'm a revolutionary, or we're revolutionaries,
we're revolutionary artists, not gunmen.
I believe in the Black Panther original statement,
the ten-point program, which is not violent,
which says to defend yourself against attack,
I might consider that,
but anything else I don't consider.
So I'm still for peace, a peaceful revolutionary,
but I'm an artist first and a politician second.
He always believed we had to go about it
in the way that Gandhi did, for instance.
It was very effective, he felt, and we could do it that way.
Stay in bed.
Grow your hair.
- Bed peace. - Hair peace.
Hair peace, bed peace.
They were actually trying to come up with an idea
to have a honeymoon like most people,
a secret, romantic place to go to,
but realizing that they were part of the world media
and that wherever they went the media would want to go.
We're going to stay in bed for seven days.
Instead of having a private honeymoon
it's a private protest...
For the violence that's going in the world.
To say...
We feel that instead of making war,
it's better to just... Let's stay in bed for...
And grow your hair.
For peace?
Let it grow till peace comes.
What the press really wants
is a picture of John and Yoko in bed on their honeymoon.
And then they turned it around and said,
"In that case, let them have a picture
"of John and Yoko in bed on their honeymoon, but put the word 'peace' in it."
They all thought we were going to make love in bed, see?
And all the press from all around the world came,
and we opened the... Helpers opened the door
and they're fighting to get in like this with their cameras.
Then their faces dropped.
We're sitting like angels saying, "Hello. Peace, brother."
All their faces dropped and we were just in bed.
- You were wearing... - We thought it was a great practical joke
that most of the world's headline newspapers,
especially the European and British was:
"Married Couple Are In Bed."
There had never been anything like it.
It was completely original,
the conscious use of one's myth
to project a political and social poetic goal.
It had never happened before.
Up to then, people who were promoting world peace
were kind of like intellectual,
anemic kind of people,
just sort of passing out pamphlets
that nobody wants to read.
John was saying, "No, no."
That's why we wanted to do it this way.
And I think we did a great job.
"Please stop this nonsense.
"Go home. We don't like people like you.
Go to a doctor to be normal."
Are you getting this?
It's great.
Go to the doctor. Be normal.
We're seeing a psychiatrist today,
so maybe he'll fix us up, then.
Bloody marvelous.
When people are creative geniuses,
you have to cut them some slack.
You really have to cut 'em some slack.
England isn't good at cutting slack for working-class boys.
If it works, it is right.
If it doesn't work, it is wrong.
Nobody's ever given it a chance before, have they?
Nobody's ever given peace a complete chance.
Gandhi tried it, Martin Luther King tried it,
but they were shot.
But nobody's...
But you can't get peace in a king-size divan
on floor 802 of the...
We don't expect to.
We're talking mainly to the revolutionaries who think they can get it overnight
by breaking the sy... Breaking down the buildings.
- They can't get it either. - They can't get it.
We thought about this for months.
This is the best possible, most functional and effective way
of promoting and protesting against violence
that our minds combined could think of.
That someone of his caliber had decided,
"Hell, I'm not just going to stand still and do nothing
"while the world around me is in flames.
I'm going to do something."
That action that he and Yoko did,
it was of course attacked and mocked,
and there were contemptuous articles written about them,
but on our generation it had a fantastic effect.
I remember being absolutely thrilled and saying, "At last!
Well done! Great!"
We didn't think of it as we made an incredible success in Amsterdam.
We were totally accused of doing a silly thing, as you know,
and the press, they attacked us, they slashed us, you know?
But this was our mission and we had to do it.
We did it again. We tried to do it in New York,
but the American government wouldn't let us in.
They knew we'd done it in Amsterdam.
They didn't want any peaceniks here,
which is what we heard the department of whoever controls that said.
We ended up doing it in Montreal instead
and broadcasting across the border.
It's a bed-in, folks.
I think they might think I'm going to hot up the revolution.
I want to cool it down.
If we make people laugh, that's enough.
Happiness is a good vibe for peace.
Make love, not war, that's all we're saying.
Just remember that.
Peace, peace, peace, peace,
peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace.
Peace in your mind, peace on Earth,
peace at work, peace at home, peace in the world.
We're selling it like soap, you know?
You've got to sell and sell until the housewife thinks,
Oh, well, it's peace or war. That's the two products.
I remember being invited up to the Bed-in For Peace.
The Smothers Brothers were fairly visible at the time
as anti-establishment spokesmen.
I went up there and had these long conversations.
You don't realize the state and the control
that exists in the United States
in the expression of what you want to say,
to the mildest form of dissent.
There's no space for...
No space or no time for negative thoughts.
We just have to say, "Listen, we're going to make it."
That's all.
We have to make it.
What would you say to people like Richard Nixon?
I'd say, "Do something positive about it
"and it really is economical to have peace, Mr. Nixon,
and you would be really popular if you did."
What should he do?
He should just declare peace.
He reduced it to these very fundamental,
easy-to-grasp concepts
that some people thought were Utopian and naive.
I believe sincerely as soon as people want peace
and are aware that they can have it,
they will have it.
The only trouble is they're not aware that they can get it.
Is it naive to wish for peace?
Is it naive to think that we can change the world?
Sure, probably.
But it's certainly worthy
of the thought process and the art that comes out of it.
That's all I'm saying.
John once said to me,
"When I sing 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand',
hundreds of millions of people hear that.
Why don't I sing 'Give Peace a Chance'?
Because hundreds of millions of people would hear that as well."
All I'm saying!
I thought that was a great phrase.
That's the one that went,
"All we are saying is give peace a chance."
They'd repeat that over and over again.
I thought it was wonderful.
Give peace a chance. Who can be opposed to that?
The administration was.
All right, everybody now!
Keep strong!
They scare people into fighting wars
which we need not fight, should not fight...
sometimes must fight,
but by and large not.
Why not go the other way?
Sing about human community,
sing about love and about peace.
And suddenly that is a frightening voice
for people who want to hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" over and over again,
and "Their eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord."
Yes, again.
Okay, beautiful.
Yeah!
You made it!
Woo-hoo!
The highlight of the Bed-in for me
was the fact that after all the reporters left
and there was a beautiful moon
that was like a full moon,
and from our bed we can see this beautiful full moon
and not one cloud there.
It was a beautiful sky,
and John was saying, "Is this great?" and all that.
And he was saying that, you know,
"We're just going to go on communicating the world together,
"and our song is going to be played all over the world,
and that's how it's going to be."
He was very, very happy about that,
about the fact that we are promoting world peace and love
and we have both.
It seems now more certain than ever
that the bloody experience of Vietnam
is to end in a stalemate.
This summer's almost certain stand-off
will either end in real give-and-take negotiations
or terrible escalation.
And for every means we have to escalate,
the enemy can match us,
and that applies to invasion of the North,
the use of nuclear weapons,
or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300,000
more American troops to the battle.
And with each escalation,
the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.
You see, the war was such a great mistake.
We went into Vietnam in order to preserve a democracy
which did not exist.
The fact of the matter was South Vietnam was a monarchy,
and a rather cruel one.
We were fighting for an already lost cause
before we ever put the first foot into the country.
Never has so much power been used
so ineffectively as in Vietnam.
Lf, after all of this time and all of this sacrifice
and all of this support,
there is still no end in sight,
then I say the time has come
for the American people to turn to new leadership
not tied to the policies and mistakes of the past.
I pledge to you, we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.
He did run with the promise that he had a secret plan
that he was going to unveil
after the election to end the war.
The war was enough to drive you crazy.
People were being drafted.
50,000 American soldiers were killed.
50,000.
40% of all the young Americans who died in Vietnam
died during those four years
after Nixon was elected in 1968.
We have adopted a plan
which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese
for the complete withdrawal
of all U.S. Combat ground forces.
As South Vietnamese forces become stronger,
the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.
I have not and do not intend
to announce the timetable for our program.
We meet today to reaffirm those ageless values
that gave us birth,
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And we meet to declare peace,
to put an end to war not in some distant future,
but to put an end to it now.
I like to be liked.
I don't like to say things that everybody doesn't agree with.
When peace marchers come to Washington,
it would be very easy to say, "I agree with them.
I will do what they want."
But a President has to do what he considers to be right,
because I believe that sometimes it is necessary
to draw the line clearly,
not to have enmity against those who disagree,
but to make it clear that there can be no compromise
where such great issues as self-determination
and freedom and a just peace are involved.
I recall approaching the Treasury Building one evening,
and there were just streams of them coming down the street
and they all had candles.
Some sort of symbolism that they were using.
Back in those days I smoked cigars,
and I recall just walking up to one of them,
grabbing his wrist and taking the candle
and lighting my cigar with it.
And I looked him in the eye and said,
"There, you have a use...
You're useful for some purpose,"
and then went on by.
That was our attitude toward them.
Nixon would put out the line during these demonstrations
that he was watching a football game
or something like that.
He was very concerned with the demonstrations.
They were making a definite impact inside the White House.
Are you listening, Nixon?
Are you listening, Agnew?
Are you listening in the Pentagon?
Well, "Give Peace a Chance,"
I remember photographing a million people
at an antiwar demonstration
singing it with their hands up.
That song became the national anthem
of the antiwar movement
in a way that the folk song "We Shall Overcome"
became the national anthem of the Civil Rights movement before that.
Sing it home!
War is over if you want it.
Peace.
With "War Is Over If You Want lt,"
I said, "Okay, let's do posters."
And then John said,
"No, let's do billboards as well,
in all different cities in the world."
Wow.
He was like that because his arena of communication
was much larger than mine.
So he thought of that.
It's in 11 cities throughout the world.
That's New York, L.A.,
Montreal, Toronto,
Paris, Berlin, Rome,
London, Athens, and Tokyo.
And with a bit of luck,
Port of Spain in the Caribbean.
We met a friend there who said he'd fix it.
Where is the money coming from
for the posters you've got now and the billboards?
It's coming out of our pocket at the moment,
but we've had a few offers to help.
People said, "How much is it?"
I don't know, but it's cheaper than somebody's life.
He was using the fact that the media
had an obsessive affair with him.
Whatever he did, they had to pay attention.
But that doesn't actually mean that you got a coherent idea
of what they were trying to say,
because obviously the media didn't really understand it,
and to the extent they understand it, they didn't like it.
I'm someone who admired you very much.
Well, I'm sorry you liked the old mop tops, dear,
and you thought I was very satirical...
But talking about cashing in on the Beatle...
and you liked "Hard Day's Night," love,
but I've grown up. But you obviously haven't.
- Have you? - Yes, folks.
- What have you grown up to? - I'm now 29.
John was no dummy.
He knew that people would regard him as being a nutcase.
He didn't care.
He thought that whatever people thought about him
was unimportant compared to the cause he was promoting.
If I'm going to get on the front page,
I might as well get on the front page with the word "peace."
But you've made yourself ridiculous!
To some people. I don't care...
You're too good for what you're doing!
If it saves lives...
You don't think you...
Oh, my dear boy,
you're living in a never-never land.
Well, you talk to the...
You don't think you've saved a single life?
Listen, will you tell me,
what were they singing at the moratorium?
Which... Which... - I mean, the moratorium?
Washington.
The one here.
The recent big one.
They were singing "Give Peace a Chance."
- A song of yours, probably. - Well, yes, and it was written...
I knew you'd bring that up.
So they sang one of your songs.
Well, if you...
Great song, sure,
but is that all you can say about that?
The moratorium?
You were saying that in America
they're so serious about the protest movement.
Yes, they are.
But they were so flippant that they were singing a happy-go-lucky song
which happens to be one I wrote.
And I'm glad they sang it.
And when I get there, I'll sing it with them.
April 1970, Nixon invaded Cambodia,
and at that point, the country practically blew up.
Four students on May 4, 1970,
were killed by National Guardsmen
at Kent State University for protesting.
They were protesting against the war.
Okay, you had 18-year-old college kids
without the sense God gave a goose
going around challenging 18-year-old kids
with.30-06 semiautomatic rifles...
Yes, they were in uniform. They were National Guard...
Very little training.
They felt threatened, they were armed.
What did you think was going to happen?
Somehow I thought that this was an irresistible tide
that was going to carry the whole of America with it,
and we didn't quite see the backlash
that was actually already brewing
and quite evident if you were just willing to open your eyes.
Each of the special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
must be ready and capable to meet any challenge.
The security of our nation or the life of a loved one
may depend upon him.
Hoover was a man who had
a slightly different version of democracy
than the rest of us did.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover,
as documents now make clear...
I don't think there's any real debate about it anymore...
Used the FBI as an instrument,
almost as a political police force.
Anyone who was off message became susceptible
to an FBI probe.
They say sometimes that Mr. Hoover is controversial.
Let me tell you something. Anybody who's strong,
anybody who fights for what he believes in,
anybody who stands up when it's tough
is bound to be controversial.
Back in those days,
the FBI would operate affirmatively.
They would not just gather intelligence,
but it perceived as its mission
the disruption of the other side.
Anyone who was involved at that time in any movement
that challenged the government in any way
was aware of the extent to which the FBI
tapped peoples' phones,
engaged in widespread surveillance,
engaged in harassment, framed people up,
used the legal system.
Ours is a just cause.
If we have faith in humanity,
if we seek God's divine guidance,
if we summon the courage of our forefathers,
our heritage of freedom will be preserved.
Yeah, looking back, it was horrible what we did.
The, uh... We were being used by the government
to stop dissent, just... plain and simple.
It was very serious.
It reached as far as political assassination...
Gestapo-style assassination of a leading black organizer
in Chicago, Fred Hampton.
It was what Hoover liked.
It was what Hoover wanted to hear,
that agents were neutralizing these different organizations.
So there wasn't a question
of whether it was right or wrong,
illegal, ethical,
immoral or whatever, as long as it was effective.
America has no place for those timid souls
who urge appeasement at any price,
nor those who chant
the "better Red than dead" slogan.
We need men and women with a capacity for moral indignation,
men and women of faith,
men and women of conviction,
men and women with the God-given strength and determination
to uphold the cause of democracy.
When we went to New York we were so elated.
John was in love with New York City to begin with,
and I, for me, of course,
it was almost like my hometown.
And we met all the artists
and all the sort of underground politicians and everything.
It was just so exciting.
So we started to feel that we should stay.
I just sort of felt at home here
as soon as I relaxed and got over the fact
that I wasn't, you know, in England,
and that I was living somewhere else.
Fortunately, or unfortunately,
they speak English, so I just fitted in.
At that point I think John said it felt like
the center of the creative world
and that in the time of Rome you'd want to be in Rome.
You wouldn't want to be in the suburbs.
In the time of the '70s, you'd want to be in New York.
John wanted to live right here. He didn't want any hassles,
but he came into a cauldron.
He put himself right in the middle of a political firestorm,
and he got singed by it.
The problem with John Lennon was not his music,
but it was with some of the friends
that he began to develop.
They make it so that the Chinese,
they make it so that the Vietnamese,
they make it so the Viet Cong, they're enemies.
But they're my brothers, not the enemies, you see?
Dig it.
We are at war with that empire
that pollutes and tries to destroy the world
and its own young people.
We are at war, Nixon.
Remember that.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were very highly evolved political activists.
They, I hasten to add,
had a sweetness to them, too,
but they were much more hardened by the wars
that they had been fighting now for several years
in a very public environment.
We met them, and we were both very nervous about it.
Yes.
And I thought, I don't want... I want to be careful.
I don't want to meet any bomb-throwing freaks and all that jazz.
And we finally met him. We were very nervous.
And we were both pleasantly surprised
by how they both were not at all like their image,
as we aren't like our image.
And many other people I've met, I believed the newspaper image about them,
although I should know better,
because I've seen a lot of rubbish written about myself that isn't true.
So we met and we found...
We found something in them that was artistic.
Very sensitive.
The first thing we said to them was, "Hey, you're like artists.
"You're writing these books. You're performing theater.
You're like artists."
They said, "Well, you two artists are more like revolutionaries to us."
When they met Hoffman and Rubin,
they were absolutely instruments
in the hands of two political masters.
When John and Yoko came, you know,
"Give peace a chance."
They were going...
"Now I have another weapon to use against the state."
The knife lying on a table is not a threat to anybody.
It requires human responsible agency
to take the knife and use it to cut somebody's throat.
He would be looked upon as a tool.
In this instance, he was being manipulated
in a way that harmed the effort of the United States
to win the war in Vietnam
and to have order and stability here at home.
Yoko and I were lucky enough to meet this man
a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago,
and we found he was a beautiful guy
and he had a lot to say.
He was doing a lot that was not what I had read in the paper about him.
We came straight from England.
There were a lot of these things at the foundation...
Giving food to people,
the programs of education.
We thought, "Well, let's see that side of these people."
The man we're going to introduce
is a good friend of ours,
and also of yours, I hope.
The man is Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther party, and here he is.
What Bobby Seale added to this equation
was a far more dangerous aspect,
a far more immediate, physical kind of threat.
He was much more foreboding and menacing than the other guys.
We can speak of pollution
in terms of the historical pollution of fascism,
the historical pollution of war,
the historical pollution of hunger in the world,
the historical pollution of murder,
the historical pollution that we people,
poor, oppressed people in this world all over
have been subjected to for too many years.
That pollution is the basis of the pollution of the nature,
the world, the universe.
The only solution to pollution
is a people's humane revolution.
Both John and I felt that he was a very, very intelligent guy.
And we communicated on that level.
This is one of those
personalized kind of coalitions.
He was telling me up front,
he says, "I want to help.
"I want to get some money and donate,
"and do whatever we can to help the cause,
because what you're doing"...
He saw what we were about
through me rapping with him and talking to him
and telling him those stories and stuff
and all the things we did.
What is the policy of the Black Panther party?
- Because a lot of people don't know... - Policy?
Maybe you'd like me to talk about philosophy.
Philosophy.
Our philosophy is basically what we call intercommunalism.
We're not nationalists.
We don't believe in nationalism.
Nationalism or nationhood and all it's hooked up with
is akin to superiority, is akin to racism,
- is akin to sectarianism... - That's what I said in my song.
- So we're not that... - "lmagine no countries."
I guess at that point we had evolved to really be friends, you know what I mean?
We liked each other. I liked John, you know?
This guy was defending
something that I thought was necessary and relevant
about those protest movement times.
You know when you put Bobby Seale on the team
that every cop's gonna hate you,
that every law enforcement person on Earth is going to oppose you
and characterize everything you do in the context
of a true enemy of the state.
He could have stayed in music, stayed away from drugs,
kept his mouth shut about what he liked or disliked
about the United States.
"Don't get involved in any politics.
Just sing your songs and keep quiet."
Everything would have been fine.
But when he starts financing the people
that we're trying to put in jail,
then that gets kind of serious.
I mean, the notion that the world's largest,
most powerful imperial nation,
the United States of America,
could be seriously threatened by a writer, an intellectual,
a singer, a painter is laughable.
I mean, it's just a joke,
but it indicates how nervous they were.
The authorities were terrified of him
because he just had so much sway.
Terrified.
See, they weren't frightened of people like Mick Jagger.
That was musicians and silly long-haired gits misbehaving with too much money.
Trouble with John is he...
There was some intellectual force behind the argument.
Anyone who didn't like this country
could either shut up or leave.
And that was the way I think all of us felt.
That's what they would say.
"What is this foreigner doing over here
with his dirty songs criticizing us and our war?"
Patriotism is, as we know, the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Now, we're talking about real scoundrels, like Nixon.
And some present-day people do play the same number.
"Oh, it's unpatriotic.
Unpatriotic."
John Lennon! Yoko Ono!
We came here not only to help John
and to spotlight what's going on,
but also to show and to say to all of you
that apathy isn't it and that we can do something.
Okay, so "flower power" didn't work. So what?
We start again.
This song I wrote for John Sinclair.
I became a cultural activist... community activist
in Detroit 40 years ago.
We wanted to say that they should end the war
and that people should love each other.
So then we started proselytizing
for marijuana legalization
while smoking great quantities,
which was not really the wisest decision.
You should kind of do one or the other, you know,
if you want to be successful at either.
I kept getting arrested for marijuana possession,
and then for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman.
He's been in jail 21/2 years for smoking two joints!
There's such a thing as the solidarity of saliva.
When one pot smoker is in jail,
every one of us is in jail!
I was sentenced to 91/2-10 years in July of 1969,
and sent to prison
and kept under maximum security,
and I was actually declared a threat to society
by the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Okay, "John Sinclair." Nice and easy now.
Sneaky.
1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.
It was a 12-hour concert.
It was broadcast live all over the state.
The day before that concert,
John Sinclair was denied appeal bond.
The Michigan Supreme Court wouldn't let him out.
And then...
everything just skyrocketed,
and the tide of public opinion
turned in my favor almost 180 degrees,
because regular people thought,
"Gee, this guy from The Beatles
"is coming to sing about this guy's case.
There must be something wrong with it."
On Monday morning
the Michigan Supreme Court reversed itself
and let Sinclair out, let him free.
That's when the FBI began to see the beginning
of the power of John and Yoko,
especially John Lennon.
We are certifying the 26th Amendment
to the Constitution of the United States.
That amendment, as you know,
provides for the right to vote
of all of our young people between 18 and 21.
11 million new voters as a result of this amendment
that you now will see certified by the GSA administrator.
So Nixon now is facing a huge electorate
that he has never faced before,
this 18- to 21-year-old demographic,
the heart and soul of John's fans.
See, there was a fear that John could stir,
that John could affect,
that John could imperil the political existence of Richard Nixon.
Well, I suppose, if you want to kind of list your enemies
and decide who is most dangerous,
if I were Nixon, I would put Lennon up near the top.
A few years ago you would have said, "Let's not vote. Voting's irrelevant."
I had that feeling, too. I never did vote in my life.
But now I've met you and a lot of people and you're all saying register to vote.
That doesn't seem very radical to me.
What's the change in...
Two years ago, you would say, "Don't vote," and now you say, "Vote."
This time, since there's 18-year-old vote...
It ought to be reduced to 12.
We think that all young people should vote as a block,
and we shouldn't vote for any candidate
that doesn't automatically withdraw everything from Vietnam,
and we ought to go to both conventions
in Miami and San Diego and nonviolently make our presence felt
and stand on the issues.
They were so heady from the success
of getting Sinclair out of jail from that concert
that there were quite a few meetings, as I recall,
in New York, where they were really planning a tour...
Quite a large tour.
We talked about, you know,
how could we stage a tour, basically,
that would follow Richard Nixon around America
during the presidential campaign of 1972.
Our job now is to tell them
that there is still hope
and we still have things to do,
and we must get out there and change their heads,
and tell them it's okay.
We can change it.
It isn't over just because "flower power" didn't work.
It's only the beginning.
We're just in the inception of revolution.
We're just at the beginning of change.
And they're apathetic because they're young,
and they think, "Oh, it didn't work today, so it's all over."
We must get them excited about what we can do again,
and that's why we're gonna go on the road...
And we were going to end up with a free three-day rock festival
outside the Republican National Convention.
From America it will spread to the rest of the world.
Viva la revolución.
It was our perspective of Lennon
that most of the time he was walking around stoned,
whacked out of his mind.
But he was a high-profile figure,
and so his activities were being monitored.
They knew for a fact that they didn't want hundreds, thousands,
millions of young people attending a counter-convention,
especially where John Lennon would perform.
I don't think he realized the strength of the American political establishment
and how much power it could exert onto him
with regard to silencing him,
or covert ways in which they might follow his activities.
We were certain the phones were all tapped,
and it was...
Like most things, our wildest dreams did not begin to touch
what they were actually doing against us.
Do you think that they are kind of picking on you, John?
Oh, yeah, they picked on me. I'm telling you,
when it first started I was followed in a car
and my phone was tapped.
I think they wanted me to know to scare me,
and I was scared, paranoid.
People thought I was crazy then.
I mean, they do anyway, but, I mean, more so.
You know, "Lennon, you big-headed maniac.
Who's going to follow you around? What do they want?"
That's what I'm saying. What do they want?
I'm not going to cause them any problem.
It surprised me when I heard that Lennon had been under surveillance,
that he'd been wiretapped, just as it did when I heard
that Martin Luther King had been.
These sort of things that came out of the FBI
really caught me as being so unnecessary
and so risky, and why?
I can't prove it.
I just know there's a lot of repairs going on in the cellar.
I know the difference between the phone being normal when I pick it up
and when every time I pick it up there's a lot of noises.
I'd open the door and there'd be guys
standing on the other side of the street.
I'd get in the car and they'd be following me in a car
and not hiding, you see?
That's why I got a bit paranoid, as well.
They wanted me to see I was being followed.
Suddenly I realized this was serious.
They were coming for me one way or the other.
They were harassing me.
I remember John said to me at one point,
"If anything happens to Yoko and me,
it was not an accident."
When we found out
that they were specifically interested in stopping our plans,
that's when we realized that it wasn't just the usual surveillance,
but that they were going to take aggressive steps against us.
This story begins,
at least from the White House perspective,
with a letter that Senator Strom Thurmond wrote.
The Congress is long overdue
in investigating the radical left
for the purpose of devising new legislation
to protect the security of our nation
from enemy subversive efforts.
He was a major figure on the right
as the right became much more of a dominant force
in our politics in this country in the '70s.
Strom Thurmond was a Republican senator
on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee,
and he had been given the information
about the plans that Lennon was making with Jerry Rubin,
Abbie Hoffman, and other people for this national concert tour.
This is what Strom Thurmond wrote the White House about.
And this is where Strom Thurmond
came up with a proposal to stop this.
Strom Thurmond's memo to the White House ends,
"If Lennon's visa were terminated, it would be a strategic counter-measure."
One day somebody knocked at the door,
and we didn't open the door. We said, "Who is it?"
"Lmmigration."
And the person just slipped a paper underneath the door,
because we didn't open the door.
Maybe that's why.
We looked at it and it was a notice...
A deportation notice.
We just looked at each other.
"What are we going to do?"
It was a very frightening moment.
John, what did you say?
You said you felt it was shocking?
Well, yeah, we're a bit shocked.
Do you think that you will be deported?
I've no idea. Maybe it's just a process. I don't know.
We better go in. We're late.
We'll see you when we come out if you want.
Can we talk to you when you come out?
We have a number of matters that we have to take care of.
The lmmigration and Naturalization Service
was planning to stage a huge show trial
and basically get John Lennon
in a very, very public way.
They were going to try and show that he was an undesirable alien
because of his lifestyle, because of his friends,
and because of his politics.
Then they were going to take some of the lyrics
from some of his songs and play them.
And a lot of the songs were very antagonistic
to the Nixon administration.
What do the proceedings make you feel just on a purely emotional level?
Well, I feel like I'm back in school again.
I've been in trouble all my life one way or the other,
and I'm back to see the Head.
This time they don't cane me, that's all.
They don't beat me anymore.
There are two reasons the trial didn't happen.
One is that the investigator, who was the only sober-thinking person in all this,
felt that it was going to alienate
all the youth in America if they did it.
And secondly, it was a big waste of time and money,
because they already had the ability
to get Lennon thrown out of the country.
In the late '60s, there was a head-hunting cop
who was not very high up in the drug department in London,
which was pretty new anyway.
They had two dogs for the whole department.
He went round and bust every pop star he could get his hands on.
Then he got famous.
Some of the pop stars had dope in the house,
and some of them didn't.
It didn't matter to him.
He planted it or did whatever.
Later on... That's what he did to me,
because at that time I didn't have any drugs.
We had no idea that it would come back to haunt us,
in a very big way, too.
I was convicted of possession in England
and fined $100... I mean, 100 pounds.
- Is this an obstacle? - That is the obstacle.
...rather than get into trouble.
- Is that the obstacle to your staying? - Yeah.
His problem seems to be the marijuana conviction.
While that stands, there's no form of relief
that's possible in his case.
If he had four speeding tickets or if he had...
I could make up all the offenses he could have done were he an American citizen,
they would have tried to find a way,
his vulnerable spot, his Achilles' heel,
and that's what that was.
All it was was it gave John Mitchell and that crowd
an opening through which to attack him.
John, why are you being deported?
Well, the sort of official reason
is something about that I was bust in England for pot.
And the real reason is because I'm a peacenik.
You don't think that there's any possibility
that the government is trying to harass the Lennons.
Absolutely not.
This is the kind of treatment we would dish out
to anybody convicted of a narcotics offense.
Our lawyer's name is Leon Wildes, and he's...
He's not a radical lawyer. He's not a William Kunstler.
Nothing like that. We went to an immigration lawyer
who knew about immigration,
and he has really been surprised
because he worked in immigration 15 years.
He's really been surprised
by some of the things that have gone on.
I took the case because it was a challenge,
first of all, because I was impressed with these extraordinary people,
and second, because these were issues
which had never been previously ruled on
in their present form in American courts.
You say you've been in trouble all your life. Why is that?
I've just one of those faces.
- People never liked my face. - Oh, is that why?
Teachers used to get furious about it.
Is it because you're anti-establishment?
I guess it must show on the face.
My original comment to them about the case
was that I thought it was a loser.
Why? Because most of my clients
end up in a deportation proceeding,
and if they lose, that's the end of it.
If they appeal that decision,
they go to the Board of lmmigration Appeals,
and that is hardly ever successful.
With Leon,
he was always kind of suggesting,
hopelessly,
"Maybe you guys should be
a little bit gentler or something."
"We announce the birth of a conceptual country,
"Newtopia.
"Citizenship of the country can be obtained
"by declaration of your awareness of Newtopia.
"Newtopia has no land, no boundaries,
"no passports, only people.
Newtopia has no laws other than cosmic."
"All people of Newtopia are ambassadors of the country.
"As two ambassadors of Newtopia,
"we ask for diplomatic immunity
"and recognition in the United Nations
for our country and its people"...
Newtopian Embassy, 1 White Street, New York, New York.
Yoko apologized to me afterwards and said,
"You have to understand.
When you represent artists, we're not always predictable."
I said, "Maybe not always predictable, but always enjoyable."
What does the flag mean?
Surrender and submission.
It became clear to me
that he was a guy of major principle,
and he understood that what was being done to him was wrong.
It was an abuse of the law,
and he was willing to stand up
and try to show it, to shine the big light on it.
They're even sort of changing their own rules to get us, you know?
Just because we're peaceniks, really.
Do you think it's because of your antiwar action
and not your marijuana conviction, then?
Well, let's say that a few friends of ours in the pop business
have exactly the same conviction as me
and are allowed to come and go as free as they like.
They don't happen to have the same point of view as me, or they don't state it.
Will you now stop speaking out against the war because of this?
Nothing will stop me,
and whether I'm here or wherever I may be,
I'll always have the same feelings and say what I feel.
The world is one big family.
We loved him for who he was,
and who he was to become during that period,
and he marched with us, he walked with us.
He went up against this powerful government
that was terribly wrong,
that had misled us into a deeply immoral war.
He did not back down.
It's great that you came in the rain.
I read somewhere that the war movement was over.
We're here to bring the boys home,
but let's not forget the machines.
Bring the machines home,
and then we'll really get somewhere.
Bring our boys home!
...the only people that can do it.
It wasn't so much
that Lennon was being critical of U.S. Policy.
It's that he was over here enjoying all the benefits
of the success that we were giving him,
the wealth, the... And all the rest of it,
and bad-mouthing us here.
Our attitude was, "You want to do that?
"Go back to London.
Go back to Liverpool."
I like to be here because this is where the music came from.
This is what influenced my whole life
and got me where I am today, as it were.
And I love the place. I'd like to be here.
I've got a lot of friends here,
and this is where I want to be, you know?
Statue of Liberty... Welcome.
I even brought my own cash.
He was under an order
to leave the country within 60 days
for pretty much all of 1972 and on into 1973.
Our reaction to the government's action taken last week
I believe has been very, very succinctly put by The Wall Street Journal
in an editorial of March 28, 1973.
It states, "We find it more than a little hard to believe
"that authorities could find no legal way
"to resolve what is, after all,
"a highly unusual set of circumstances.
"Further, we submit if the law does not reflect the human equities,
it is a law that needs to be changed."
Yes, the case was very difficult at that point,
and what he did was to just keep on extending our stay,
which I thought was very wise,
a very wise tactic.
I don't understand law, as it were,
because it is finite.
And I don't really go, sort of...
I can't express... Dig that scene, you know?
I don't know.
It seems just like to me as somebody once said,
"Kafka-esque." It's just bureaucracy,
and they get going and then what can they do?
They don't know where to turn, I suppose.
The game's started, and we have to play it out.
When I talked to Jerry Rubin
and Abbie Hoffman about this period,
they told me they wanted to try something new,
something they thought would maybe be more effective in stopping the war.
Jerry Rubin was talking about
what he called a political Woodstock
that they would hold outside the Republican National Convention.
They really tried to make us go to Miami,
and we kept saying we're not gonna do it,
but Jerry, for political reasons,
just announced that we're gonna be there.
They think we're going to San Diego or Miami.
We've never said we're going. We ain't going.
They'll be no big jam with us and Dylan
because there's too much going on.
We never said we were going. That's it.
By then John and I realized
that it would have been very, very dangerous for us.
We had a very distinct, clear feeling
that if we had gone to the Republican convention,
we would have been in danger of our lives.
You know, he said,
"The only thing I ever really wanted to do in my life
was to play in a rock and roll band."
And then he said,
"I can't let them take that away from me."
The very core of his existence was threatened
by what they were trying to do to him.
It is now clear that Richard Nixon is the winner of this election.
That's what our trend now indicates,
the President reelected by a landslide.
The fact that McGovern lost,
the fact that Nixon was reelected again
and all that really upset us,
because in the big picture the United States...
the policy of the United States
would affect the whole world.
And from that big picture, we were very depressed.
Once Nixon is reelected,
the FBI loses interest in Lennon,
says, "We're closing our file."
The immigration service, though, is a good bureaucracy.
When they're given a job,
they do their job.
And they kept doing their job.
They kept doing it to Lennon
for another year and a half, two years.
The situation is I'm still appealing.
Every now and then they'll say,
"You got 30 days to get out,"
and then my lawyer will appeal
and we'll go up to another court or something like that.
It will just go on forever.
Terry Southern put it well.
He says it keeps the conservatives happy
that they're doing something about me and what I represent.
And it keeps the liberals happy
because I haven't actually been thrown out.
So everybody's happy.
The easy thing to do would have been
just slink away and go back to England,
but he chose to stand on his rights
and I'm glad that he did.
Lennon and his legal team went on the offensive
and filed a couple of very interesting lawsuits.
I sued the Attorney General, Mitchell,
and a whole slew of other people
who I claimed were involved in a conspiracy
to deny John and Yoko's case
and get them out of the United States improperly.
What do you think your chances are of remaining in this country?
- 99-1. - For or against?
- For. - Why is that?
Because I'm overconfident, as usual.
We ultimately were able to examine the records in the case.
And lo and behold, deep in John's immigration file,
which was a high security file,
were documents reaching all the way up to President Nixon
showing improper interference in an immigration case
and prejudgment.
Probably the most important documents in the Lennon FBI file
are reports addressed to the White House
signed by J. Edgar Hoover.
These were not sent directly to Richard Nixon.
They're addressed to H.R. Haldeman,
Assistant to the President.
Now, Haldeman was the most important person in the White House
if you wanted to get to Nixon.
So when Hoover sends something to Haldeman saying,
"Here's our report on our progress
in trying to kick Lennon out of the country,"
the reason that he's doing that
is that Nixon wants to know.
I would not say that it was integral to the politics
of the Nixon administration
to keep John Lennon from having residence in this country.
I think it was of a piece
with the general nastiness of the Nixon administration.
I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in.
You had the President of the United States, Richard Nixon,
who was running a rogue presidency,
a criminal presidency.
We do know, from Mr. Nixon's long statement of May the 22nd
that he did approve much earlier
a program of wiretapping and even burglary
in national security matters.
Did other presidents break the law,
bend the law occasionally?
I'm sure they did.
Was there wholesale criminality
in any other presidency in our history?
No.
For God sakes,
they committed a burglary, and then they destroyed
the government of the United States, covering it up.
That is the context in which you have to determine and judge
and value what they did to John Lennon.
The case against John Lennon by the FBI
and the lmmigration and Naturalization Service
and by President Nixon and all his people
was that John Lennon was disloyal
to the United States of America
and what it stood for.
The real disloyalty was Nixon's,
Hoover's, the INS,
and all the people who were implicated
in the FBI and the INS and wherever else,
because their perversion,
distortion of the Constitution,
their violation of the basic principles,
that was the greatest disloyalty to this country.
Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency
effective at noon tomorrow.
Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President
at that hour in this office.
Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy
of those who governed the United States.
He was everything they hated.
So I just say that he represented life, and is admirable.
And Mr. Nixon...
and Mr. Bush represent death,
and that is a bad thing.
I have to tell you one little story
about the end of the case.
I got a call from someone in the Court of Appeals,
and he said, "Look, the decision just came in.
You won your Lennon case."
And I called John, and he said,
"Wait, what do you mean we won?
You told us that it was a loser."
I said, "Yes, because I didn't want to build up your hopes too much."
And he said, "Leon, I'm just going over to New York Hospital
"because Yoko is giving birth any minute.
I'll call you from there."
At about 5:30... I was bleary when he called.
And he said, "This is John."
I said, "John who?"
And he said, "John Lennon, and I have a beautiful boy."
That day was his birthday, his new son's birthday,
and he won his case.
I remember John's face.
I remember how he was when we got that news
and when it was his birthday
and when he got the baby as well,
and it was incredible.
I've never seen him like that.
He was like a little boy looking so happy.
- Hi. - Hi.
- I need... - Okay.
John Lennon was finally presented with his green alien card,
which is actually blue,
in the offices of the Assistant Director,
and he talked to the press.
And this was what it was all about.
Finally, after four and a half long years of struggle,
John Lennon got his card, a green card,
saying that he is now a permanent resident of the United States.
Right on, brother.
To come out in court
on the steps of the federal courthouse,
and there he is, and my goodness,
he has defeated John Mitchell and the forces of evil,
and he's gonna be able to stay in the country.
I take this opportunity
to thank all the kids and the fans
who wrote to all their senators
and their petitions and all the rest of it,
that were working behind the scenes for five years
with no pay or no nothing, actually.
Just a smile.
- What? - Do you bear any grudge
against the Strom Thurmonds and the John Mitchells
for putting you through this all these years?
No, I believe time wounds all heels.
John was so proud of Sean,
and there was such an incredible
warm and close relationship between them.
And it was a beautiful time.
I see that you're having your diaper changed.
Is this an enjoyable experience?
Because I do believe some people pay to have this done.
Exactly.
And where did you get that outfit from, may I ask?
I agree entirely. Yes.
It is exciting, isn't it?
John, Sean, and I started to have
such a fantastically sweet and wonderful life together.
There was that feeling of closeness
between all three of us,
and almost a kind of urgency about it,
that every day we wanted to really spend together kind of thing.
And we did.
From Washington,
this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Good evening.
The death of a man who sang and played the guitar
overshadows the news from Poland, Iran, and Washington tonight.
Former Beatle John Lennon, who was 40,
was shot and killed last night
outside his luxury apartment in New York.
The alleged killer is an unemployed security guard
and printer who had lived in Hawaii.
News of Lennon's death touched off a wave
of shock and mourning around the world.
I think the vigil was a very good thing that we did.
It was all of us around the world...
came together in a way.
So we made a ring around the world together.
It was a very strong ring.
Well, I suppose they tried to kill John...
but they couldn't, because his message is still alive.
Everybody now. Come on!
We can get it tomorrow or today!
Loud! Say it loud!
Yes, again!
Okay, beautiful.
Yeah!