The couple had powerful friends who helped them fight and win their
deportation battle with the Nixon administration.
By Jon Wiener
October 8, 2010
In 1972, John Lennon had a problem.
He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been living in New York for a year,
and they wanted to stay. But it happened also to be the year
President Nixon was running for reelection. Opposition to the Vietnam
War had reached a peak, and Lennon and Ono often showed up at antiwar
rallies to sing "Give Peace a Chance" and to tell their fans that
the best way to give peace a chance was to vote against Nixon.
The Nixon White House responded by ordering Lennon deported.
The administration said Lennon had been admitted to the country
improperly. He had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cannabis
possession in London in 1968, and immigration law at the time banned
the admission of anyone convicted of any drug offense.
But unlike most migrants who have problems with their legal status,
Lennon and Ono had powerful friends who petitioned the Immigration
and Naturalization Service on their behalf.
In honor of what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday this month, I
pulled a box from my garage containing documents I obtained through a
Freedom of Information Act request about Lennon's deportation case.
The government's response included copies of hundreds of letters sent
to the INS, and they revealed the different and fascinating ways
artists, writers and others tried to make the case that Lennon, a
rock musician and an antiwar activist, should not be kicked out of the country.
The letters were not a spontaneous expression of enthusiasm. Rather,
they were part of an organized campaign of the country's cultural
elite to stop the Nixon administration from deporting the ex-Beatle.
Joan Baez wrote a letter; Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote one. So did
novelists John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, painter Jasper Johns and
composer John Cage, Leonard Bernstein of "West Side Story" and Joseph
Heller of "Catch-22."
Bob Dylan's offering, written sometime in 1972, was in his own bold
hand. "John and Yoko inspire and transcend and stimulate," he wrote,
and thereby "help put an end to this mild dull taste of petty
commercialism which is being passed off as artist art by the
overpowering mass media." Then he added, "Let John and Yoko stay!"
Some of the letters couldn't help but preach: Baez's handwritten note
informed the INS that "keeping people confined to certain areas of
the world" was "one of the reasons we've had six thousand years of
war instead of six thousand years of peace."
Others were more conciliatory: Oates, who had won the National Book
Award in 1970 for "them," had never been part of the counterculture.
She made that clear in a long letter that concluded, "I certainly
don't endorse many of their publicly-expressed opinions, but I
believe that they, and anyone else, have the right to those opinions."
Heller expressed "horror" at the deportation order, declaring: "The
two of them are among our most valuable cultural assets."
Bernstein's telegram was brief: "John Lennon has been an important
creative force in music and petry [sic]."
Dylan, Baez, Heller and Bernstein were well known as opponents of
Nixon and the war, but Lennon's supporters included some surprising
names. Updike in 1971 had just published a sequel to "Rabbit Run,"
titled "Rabbit Redux," which expressed some hostility toward "the
sixties." Nevertheless, his typewritten letter declared his support
for exemplary counterculture figures. Lennon and Ono "cannot do this
great country any harm," he said, "and might do it some good."
Hollywood people were mostly missing from the list of supporters,
with one notable exception: Tony Curtis, who had starred in more than
60 films by 1972, including "Some Like It Hot" with Marilyn Monroe
and "The Defiant Ones," in which he played a racist convict chained
to Sidney Poitier. His letter was brief: "The presence of John Lennon
and Yoko Ono is of cultural advantage to our country."
Lennon also had some high-profile political support, including New
York Mayor John Lindsay. Lennon and Ono's talent put them "among the
greatest of our time," Lindsay wrote, and "a grave injustice is being
perpetuated" by the deportation proceedings.
Finally there was Corso, the New York poet who was friends with Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote 12 words: "Artisans and
universal megagalactic entities Ergo, let my people go stay
etc." That must have helped.
The "Let them stay in the USA" campaign also included thousands of
ordinary young people. The 1972 Lennon-Ono album "Sometime in New
York City" included a petition for fans to send to the INS, and lots
of them did.
The campaign didn't change Nixon's mind. The Lennon deportation
proceedings continued even after Nixon's reelection in 1972, and then
through the Watergate crisis. In the end, of course, Nixon left the
White House, and Lennon and Ono stayed in the U.S.
In October 1975, 35 years ago this week, a three-judge federal panel
ruled in Lennon's favor, declaring that his conviction in Britain
didn't meet American standards of justice.
"We have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of
liberty and willing to help implement it," the court added. "Lennon's
four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith
in the American dream."
But the resolution of Lennon and Ono's fight did little to loosen the
way immigration officials handle the requests of cultural icons to
visit or stay in the country. In the post- 9/11 world, things have
gotten even tighter, with artists and musicians finding it difficult
to get permission even to come to the United States. Award-winning
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied entry in 2002, and
Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki boycotted the New York Film Festival
in protest. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma testified before Congress in 2006 about
the difficulties foreign musicians face getting visas to perform in
the U.S. Things seem to be better with President Obama in the White
House, but it's not hard to imagine another moment in the
not-too-distant future when leading artists will be petitioning the
immigration service again.
--
Jon Wiener is a professor of history at UC Irvine and author of
"Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files." Copies of the letters
he obtained protesting Lennon's deportation order are posted online
at lennonfbifiles.com.
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