John Lennon and the Politics of Deportation

The new documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" tells the story of Lennon's transformation from loveable moptop to antiwar activist, and recounts the facts about Richard Nixon's campaign to deport him in 1972 in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement. The filmmakers got lots of people to talk about Nixon and Lennon on camera, including Walter Cronkite, Gore Vidal, Mario Cuomo, George McGovern, Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, with G. Gordon Liddy representing the other side; the film also includes archival footage of Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and stars John Lennon and his biting wit and great music. It opens Sept. 15 in Los Angeles and New York City, and nationwide on Sept. 29. The story of Nixon's attempt to deport Lennon is relevant today because deportation, and the larger issue of immigrants' political rights, has become a central problem in American politics.

The Lennon deportation case had an unusual genesis, when Strom Thurmond, Republican senator from South Carolina, sent a letter to the White House in 1972. Thurmond outlined Lennon's plans for a U.S. concert tour that would combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voter registration -- 1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds were given the right to vote, and Nixon was up for reelection and worried about 11 million new voters who were probably all Beatle fans and mostly antiwar. Thurmond's memo observed that Lennon was in the United States as a British citizen, and concluded "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure."

The rest of the story is documented in the Lennon FBI files, which I requested under the Freedom of Information Act in 1981, shortly after Lennon was killed. The FBI declared it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but was withholding most of them, claiming they were "national security" documents. The bulk of those files were released under the FOIA in 1997, after 15 years of litigation -- I was the plaintiff, represented by the ACLU of Southern California and Morrison & Foerster LLP -- and published in 2000 in my book "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files."

The story of Nixon versus Lennon ended, of course, with Nixon leaving the White House, and Lennon staying in the USA. But Lennon was not only world-famous; although he was a "foreigner," he was a white man from Britain. What if he had been a dark-skinned man from a Muslim country? The George W. Bush administration has gone far beyond Nixon in using immigration law to prevent critics of U.S. policy from entering the country, and to get rid of noncitizens whom the White House doesn't like.

Lennon was permitted to enter the U.S. in 1970, but musicians and artists of all kinds seeking to visit the U.S. have faced immense new obstacles since Sept. 11. A new law, the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002, requires that people seeking to travel to the U.S. from one of seven countries appearing on a State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism" undergo extra background checks. The result is not exactly censorship, because in the age of mechanical reproduction these artists' films and music can still be seen and heard here. Nevertheless, the crackdown does represent a form of politically motivated attack on artists the government considers undesirable for political reasons.

Among the most prominent people to be targeted by the INS were the 22 members of the Cuban delegation to the 2002 Latin Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, blocked from attending. One of those denied a visa was jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, who won that year's Latin Grammy for best pop instrumental album. (Cuba has been described by the Bush administration as a nation that has assisted Al Qaeda -- an absurd argument.) Also, the internationally acclaimed Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for "A Taste of Cherry," was unable to get a visa to attend the premiere of his new film at the 2002 New York Film Festival. Kiarostami had previously visited the United States seven times. These cases were more outrageous than Lennon's, not only because Americans were denied the opportunity to see and hear these artists in person, but also because they were targeted by the INS not for any actions of theirs as individuals -- they were targeted only because of their national backgrounds, because they came from countries the Bush administration defined as enemies of the U.S.