zondag 11 november 2012

Look me in the eyes: John Lennon vs Richard Nixon 

Imagine... John Lennon met Richard Nixon
For some years Richard Nixon played a major role in John Lennon's life. Nixon could do with Lennon whatever he wanted to do, like a puppet on a string. Yet he was afraid of the ex-Beatle. While they look so much alike! And then there's that third person who makes this intrigued triangle complete.
 
By Dominique Verschuren
John Lennon
In 1966, John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. Besides burned Beatles records and threats of the Ku Klux Klan, Lennon got the dubious honor of his own FBI file. From the establishment of the FBI in 1924 the zealous director J. Edgar Hoover tried to ensure the state safety as much as possible to collect information of any suspicious person. Lennon's file was not so special, half Hollywood was stored in Washington.           
In October 1968, Lennon was arrested for drug possession. An arrest which brought him in trouble later when he wanted a permanent residence permit for the United States. This drug possession was supposedly the official reason why the U.S. authorities wanted him out of the country in 1972. Of course there was more behind it.
Around 1971 he was no longer that peace guru who laid in bed for world peace only two years before. More and more he began to exchange the soft, utopian ideals for the fierce activism on the streets. Was he doubting about a revolution in 1968 on Revolution, in 1971 he was clear: "Say we want a revolution / We better get on right away / Well you get on your feet / And out on the street / Singing power to the people." So Lennon was more than ever before in the spotlight of Washington. A demonstration in the capital was graced with the slogan "All we are saying is ... get Nixon's ass" on the familiar tune of Give Peace A Chance.
 
In August of that year, John and Yoko went to the United States. Forever. That was the plan.

It's clear that Richard Nixon was definitely one of John Lennon's butts. Maybe he was more concerned about Vietnam or the corrupt system, but Lennon used Nixon's name directly to subside his anger. In Gimme Some Truth: "No shot haired - yellow bellied son of tricky dicky." We're All Water on the political record Some Time In New York City: "There may be not much difference / Between Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon / If we strip them naked." On the cover you can find a photographs of a naked dancing Nixon and Mao, Photoshoped avant-la-lettre. A successful joke which ridiculed Nixon.

Also U.S. government saw that in December 1971. Four months after Lennon had settled in the United States, he joined New Left activists like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. On 10 December he performed at a concert for John Sinclair. Sinclair was the leader of the White Panther Party and was sentenced to ten years for selling two joints. A few days after the concert Sinclair was a free man. A sign of Lennon's influence on public opinion? A week later, the former Beatle played a benefit concert for the victims of the riots at Attica Prison three months earlier.

But that was only the start, according to an FBI agent: "February 1972, a confidential source who has furnished reliable information in the past, advised that Lennon had contributed $ 75,000 to a newly Organised New Left group, formed to disrupt the Republican National Convention."[0] Not only financially he supported the opponents of Nixon. John and Yoko jumped on the car across the country. It would be a kind of political Woodstock crossing the United States, eventually ending in August in San Diego. There would Nixon officially chosen as the Republican candidate for the presidential election in November.
 
John Lennon was undoubtedly politically active in this period. Wiener: "Of course nobody wants to be a "politician ", but John, in seeking to mobilize people against Nixon, was certainly doing politics." [1]  Jerry Rubin: "John was more radical than I was in this period. (...) He was angry, really angry. He ranted and raved about the police. (...) He was not political in the sense of being a planner - but emotionally, in his gut reaction, he was very radical: "It's us versus them. '"[2]
The idea of ​​rock 'n' revolution circus across America was soon abandoned. The Department of Immigration and Naturalization wanted to deport Lennon. Based on his British arrest for drugs in 1968. He was being spied and his phone was tapped. Lennon: "Guys would always be standing on the street opposite. If I got into a car they'd get in cars and follow me blatantly. They wanted me to know I was being followed."[3] The day after he had told this story on television, the threats stopped. But Lennon was warned.
Richard Nixon
So far Lennon's side of the story. Why did Richard Nixon hunt the ex-Beatle? The answer is contained in the character of Richard Nixon. "A neurotic insecure and therefore power-hungry man who had no feeling for what was decent and what not in politics." Thus America expert Maarten van Rossem. "From the first months of his first term, he deliberately lied, polarized and tried to undermine the democratic process. All this because he felt insecure and threatened, even once he was president. It seemed as if his power could never be large enough to take his fears away."[4]
           

Despite (or perhaps because) he was the most power full man, Nixon saw himself always as an outsider. He trusted no one and almost everyone was for him a political enemy. In the White House circulated a blacklist with people who get caught, spying or had to be made suspicious. From the spring of 1971 Nixon took every effort to be re-elected in 1972. Beside that the secret bombing of Cambodia were leaked and to be read on front page of The New York Times. To avoid those kinds of leaks, the so-called Pentagon Papers, and other opposition, his staff asked people to install listening devices at strategic locations. They committed also other illegal activities. On 17 June 1972 some of those employees were caught in the headquarters of the Democratic Party, the Watergate building.
 
John Lennon was no exception in Nixon's policies. Wiener: "None of the documents that has been released was sent to or from Richard Nixon himself. But Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, was kept informed about the progress of the FBI's campaign to 'neutralise' Lennon."[5] It was so normal during Nixon's tenure that the president probably just note that decision. Yet there is a special reason why Lennon was so dangerous for the President.
 
For the first time in history eighteen years old youngsters got the right to vote. This resulted in an additional twelve million new votes. The previous years were the worst in history since the American Civil War over a hundred years earlier. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, the Civil Right Movements and the Vietnam War divided the country to the bone. The counterculture, largely represented by baby boomers who were born after World War II, grew steadily. Nixon did not hesitate to November 1972. After his resounding victory from one day to the other he stopped troubling Lennon. (The Naturalization Service Lennon would still continue to fight until 1975 when they verdict in Lennon's favor.)
 
Had Nixon reasons to fear Lennon's political influence or was he again float by his paranoia? We will never know. Now, more than forty years later, the tendency to relativize John's influence is very large. Then, in the late sixties and early seventies, it looked differently according the established order. Wiener: "In 1969, Time magazine wrote that rock was 'not just a particular form of pop, but... one long symphony of protest... basically moral... the proclamation of a new set of values... the anthem of revolution'. The underground press never made a stronger claim. For once, Nixon wasn't being paranoid - or at least his deliriums were shared by others." [6] Lennon was cool, Nixon wasn't. Nixon was the establishment, good enough to be kicked. Dan Richter: "(John) had only to say 'yes' and he could speak to millions of viewers on primetime. We did not feel we belonged to the underground or outsiders. We represented the reality, the politicians, the military and the people that John wanted to kick him out the country were living in a fantasy world alive."[7]
Nixon abused his power on a large scale. Moreover the struggle of a lonely man against a whole bureaucratic apparatus speaks to our imagination. David against Goliath, as you can indicates from the evocative documentary title The U.S. vs. John Lennon. That doesn't mean that Lennon, at the height of his fame and only three years after he lied worldwide on television in bed for peace, certainly could have made a difference. But Nixon won in 1972 with such an overwhelming majority[8] of the democratic opponent McGovern that it is unlikely that Lennon could changed that.
David Frost
Nixon was paranoid, insecure and burdened with an inferiority complex. Nixon was a pit bull who never gave up. Like pearls in the mud his victories shine alongside a preponderance of political defeats. Portraits of him giving an image of a wronged man who often referred to his humble origins. He was raised by a domineering mother who gave him little affection and "a little man," as Richard his father always described. In the background the ruthless Quaker Faith. In Oliver Stone's film Nixon Kissinger says: "Can you imagine what this man would have been, if he'd ever been loved. It's a tragedy, because he has greatness." Someone with more subtle sense for what's going on around him would put a good face on the matter; Nixon continued to deny that he had anything to do with Watergate. Even though John Lennon and Richard Nixon were two complete different personalities, not without reason diametrically opposed to each other, they also had things in common: a persistent craving for confirmation, because in the core they never got the recognition from whom they needed most. As always, even though they had reached the top, they keep staring to the "folks on the hill". For both, it was never enough.
David Frost meets John and Yoko
A few years after the Watergate scandal Nixon got his last shot from the British journalist David Frost. Frost became famous with the famous satirical program That Was The Week That Was. The Beatles were frequent guests in his own talk show. In his own country he was almost as famous as the Fab Four. The Goon Show, The Beatles, Monty Python, David Frost...: a strong tradition of sharp British humor. Hey Jude premiered in his program, John and Yoko played on television their second avant-garde album to Frost, he seriously tried to listen. Frost interviewed a wide variety of politicians and other celebrities, but his highlight he reached was the tour de force with Richard Nixon. About his successes and errors, about foreign policy and about Watergate. Frost asked the former president to make his apology ​​to the American people. And they received it.
 

After a play they also made a film: Nixon/Frost is a bit romanticized, but the core of the interview remained. In an imaginary scene Nixon calls Frost late in the evening. And then follows:
 
Nixon: "Did the snobs there (Cambridge University) look down on you, too? Of course they did. That's our tragedy, isn't it, Mr. Frost? No matter how high we get, they still look down at us."
Frost: "I really don't know what you're talking about."
David Frost confronts Richard Nixon

Nixon: "Yes, you do. Now, come on. No matter how many awards or column inches are written about you or how high the elected office is for me, it's still not enough. We still feel like the little man, the loser they told us we were a hundred times. The smart-asses at college, the high-ups, the well-born, the people whose respect we really wanted, really craved. And isn't that why we work so hard now, why we fight for every inch, scrambling our way up in undignified fashion? (...) We were headed, both of us, for the dirt! A place the snobs always told us that we'd end up. Face in the dust. Humiliated all the more for having tried so pitifully hard. Well, to hell with that! We're not gonna let that happen, either of us. We're gonna show those bums. We're gonna make them choke on our continued success, our continued headlines, our continued awards and power and glory! We are gonna make those motherfuckers choke! Am I right?
Frost: 'You are. Except only one of us can win."[9]
John Lennon can only responds with one answer. He sings in Working Class Hero: "As soon as you're born they make you feel small/ By giving you no time instead of it all/ Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all." In the first five years of his life Lennon was rejected by his mother and father. He was in the war, his mum was lovely but too young to play a mother. She went out dancing while little John was screaming in his bed. She brought men home which made the sensitive boy even more jealous and insecure. When he was five years old John was taken by his father for a holiday in Blackpool. He had the time of his life. But shortly his mother Julia came. The parents argued about their son. In the end they asked him to choose: his mother or father. John choose his father, Julia disappeared and John started to panic. He ran to his mum and she took him with her back to Liverpool.
During the interview with Frost Nixon admitted he had made mistakes: "I let the American people down. I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life."[10] Unprecedented for someone who was known as uncompromising. Millions saw the close up of the face of someone who was signed by his own legacy. Just like John Lennon David Frost understood the power of the media.
 
 
 
But those two British men had more in common: they fought their way to the top starting from a feeling of inferiority. And as a curious triangle they had also much in common with their striking opponent: Richard Nixon, an empty shell which stood as alienated to himself as John Lennon did. Even though they were respectively the most powerful person on the planet and one of the four most beloved young men of modern culture. Although there was a world of difference between them, when Richard Nixon and John Lennon looked at each other, they looked in a mirror.
 


[0] Phil Strongman, John Lennon. Life, Times & Assassination, p. 153.
[1] Jon Wiener, Come Together. John Lennon In His Time, p. 129.
[2] Jon Wiener, Come Together. John Lennon In His Time, p. 178.
[3] Phil Strongman, John Lennon. Life, Times And Assassination, p. 155.
[4] Maarten Van Rossem, De Verenigde Staten In De Twintigste Eeuw, p. 277.
[5] Jon Wiener, John Lennon versus the FBI, in: Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman ed., The Lennon Companion. Twenty-Five Years Of Comment, p. 194.
[6] Jon Wiener, John Lennon versus the FBI, in: Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman ed., The Lennon Companion. Twenty-Five Years Of Comment, p. 195.
[7] Philip Norman, John Lennon. De Definitieve Biografie, p. 724.
[8] 46, 7 million people voted for Nixon, 28, 9 miljoen for McGovern. Percentage: 61,8 against 8,2. That means: 520 electors for Nixon, only 17 for McGovern, a historical victory. More details: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uitslagen_Amerikaanse_presidentsverkiezingen
[9] Frost/Nixon dvd, 1h 18 min 36 sec.
[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=PkcZAB4_wd4 (8 min 05 sec)

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