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Home | Early years: 194057 | The Beatles: 195770 | Solo career | Murder
Political activism
Anti-war activities
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon at the Amsterdam Hilton, in March 1969, as a "Bed-in for Peace" that attracted worldwide media coverage. At the second "Bed-in" in Montreal, in June 1969, they recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in their hotel room at The Queen Elizabeth. The song was sung by a quarter million demonstrators in Washington, D.C. at the second Vietnam Moratorium Day, on 15 October 1969. When Lennon and Ono moved to New York City in August 1971, they befriended peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Lennon performed at the "Free John Sinclair" concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 10 December 1971. Sinclair was an anti-war activist, co-founder of the White Panther Party and poet who was serving ten years in state prison for selling two joints of marijuana to an undercover policeman after a series of previous convictions for possession of marijuana. Lennon and Ono appeared on stage with David Peel, Phil Ochs, Stevie Wonder and other musicians, plus anti-war radical and Yippie member, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers. Lennon performed the song, "John Sinclair", which he had just written, calling on the authorities to "Let him be, set him free, let him be like you and me". Some 20,000 people attended the rally, and three days after the concert the State of Michigan released Sinclair from prison. This performance was released on the two-CD John Lennon Anthology (1998) and the album Acoustic (2004). Lennon later performed the song on the David Frost Show accompanied by Ono and Jerry Rubin. According to former MI5 intelligence officer David Shayler, Lennon gave financial aid to the Irish Republican Army, a claim which Sinn F้in have neither substantiated or denied.
Deportation attempt
In 1972, the Nixon Administration tried to have Lennon deported from the US, as Richard Nixon believed that Lennon's proactive anti-war activities and support for George McGovern could cost him re-election. Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested, in a February 1972 memo, that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. The next month the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings against Lennon, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanor conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the US. Lennon spent the next four years in deportation hearings. While his deportation battle continued, Lennon appeared at rallies in New York City and on TV shows, including a week hosting the Mike Douglas Show in February 1972, where Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale appeared as his guests.
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days, while Ono was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference at the New York chapter of the American Bar Association on 1 April 1973 to announce the formation of the conceptual state of "Nutopia"; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people", and all of its inhabitants would be ambassadors. The Lennons asked for political asylum in the US while waving the white flag of Nutopia; two white handkerchiefs. The entire press conference can be seen in the 2006 documentary released by Lions Gate, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. In June 1973, Lennon and Ono made their last political statement by attending the Watergate hearings in Washington, D.C.
Lennon's order of deportation was overturned in 1975. In 1976, Lennon's US immigration status was finally resolved favourably, and he received his green card. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle. When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president on 19 January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
FBI surveillance and de-classified documents
After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files on Lennon, which document the Bureau's role in the Nixon Administration attempt to deport Lennon in 1972 to stop his anti-war campaign before the Nixon re-election campaign. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon but refused to release most of them, they contained "national security" information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favorable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Bush Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April, 1992, but the court declined to review the case. The Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues in the case outside the court in 1997, when most all of the contested documents but 10 were released, respecting President Bill Clinton's new rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm." In January 2000, Wiener published a book titled Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files which contains facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges". The story is told in the documentary The U.S. Versus John Lennon. The final ten documents in Lennon's FBI file, which had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality," and reported on Lennon's ties with London anti-war activists in 1971, were released in December 2006.