Silencing Lennon

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR :

 + In 1972. the Nixon administration moved to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on trumped-up charges that they’d overstayed the terms of their visa. The real motive was to silence Lennon during the elections because Nixon feared his influence on the youth vote, which was set to include 18 to 20-year-olds for the first time. The idea to target Lennon originated with Joe Biden’s old pal, Strom Thurmond, according to Lennon’s immigration lawyer, Leon Wildes. Thurmond was a member of the old McCarthy Committee, still going strong into the 1970s, which had held closed-door hearings on the subversive threat posed by John Sinclair and the White Panther Party, whom Lennon had supported when Sinclair was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for possession of two joints. After the hearings, Thurmond wrote a memo to Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warning of Lennon’s association with Sinclair and other figures of the New Left, including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale. Thurman wrote that “members of the Chicago 7 had devised a plan to hold rock concerts in various primary election states to recruit persons to come to San Diego for the Republican National Convention in 1972” and that “they intend to use John Lennon as the drawing card to promote their success. If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic counter-measure.”