Gimme Some Truth

The John Lennon FBI Files

Jon Wiener

Introduction

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." Apparently Hoover wanted to show that although he was no rock fan, at least he knew who Lennon was. When a copy of this letter arrived in response to my 1981 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the entire text was withheld, as were almost 200 other pages, on the grounds that releasing it would endanger the national security. That seemed unlikely. So, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, I filed a lawsuit under the FOIA in 1983, asking the court to order the release of the withheld pages. Fourteen years later, after the case went to the Supreme Court, the FBI finally agreed to settle almost all the outstanding issues of the case, to release all but ten of the documents, and to pay $204,000 to the ACLU for court costs and attorney fees. The most significant 100 pages of the Lennon file are reproduced in this volume.

The Lennon FBI files document an era when rock music seemed to have real political force, when youth culture, for perhaps the first time in American history, was mounting a serious challenge to the status quo in Washington, when President Nixon responded by mobilizing the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to silence the man from England who was singing "Give Peace a Chance" at his first live concert in the United States since 1966. Lennon's file dates from 1971, a year when the war in Vietnam was killing hundreds of thousands, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the antiwar movement. The Nixon administration learned that he and some radical friends were talking about organizing a national concert tour to coincide with the 1972 election campaign, a tour that would combine rock music and radical politics, during which Lennon would urge young people to register to vote, and vote against the war, which meant, of course, against Nixon.

The administration learned about Lennon's idea from an unlikely source: Senator Strom Thurmond. Early in 1972 he sent a secret memo to Attorney General John Mitchell and the White House reporting on Lennon's plans and suggesting that deportation "would be a strategy counter-measure" (see figures 1-3).

That was exactly the sort of thing John Dean, the counsel to the president, had suggested in his famous 1971 memo: "We can use the available political machinery to screw our political enemies." The word was passed to the INS, which began deportation proceedings a month later.1 The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon-their term-to silence him as a spokesman for the peace movement, are the central subject of Lennon's FBI file.

Throughout fourteen years of FOIA litigation over the files, which began in 1983, the FBI maintained that its surveillance of Lennon was not an abuse of power but rather a legitimate law enforcement activity. It's true that in 1972 Lennon associated with antiwar activists who had been convicted of conspiring to disrupt the Democratic National Convention four years earlier. It's true that he spoke out against the war at rallies and demonstrations. But the files contain no evidence that Lennon committed any criminal acts: no bombings, no terrorism, no conspiracies. His activities were precisely the kind protected by the First Amendment, which is not limited to U.S. citizens.

The story of the Lennon files is also the story of the fourteen-year legal battle to win release of the withheld pages, a story about the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations resisted the requirements of the FOIA. The basic issue here was not simply John Lennon. The basic issue was that government officials everywhere like secrecy. By keeping the public from learning what they have done, they hope to avoid criticism, hinder the opposition, and maintain power over citizens and their elected representatives. Classified files and official secrets lie at the heart of the modern governmental bureaucracy and permit the undemocratic use of power to go unrecognized and unchallenged by citizens.

Democracy, however, is not powerless before this practice. In the fight against government secrecy, America has led the world. In 1966 Congress passed the FOIA, which requires that officials make public the information in their files to "any person" who requests it, unless it falls into a small number of exempted categories, including "national security." The Act was substantially expanded in 1974 in the wake of revelations of White House abuse of power during the Watergate scandal. The FOIA, in effect, created a notable challenge to the history of government secrecy; it provided a set of rules and procedures, officials and offices dedicated not to the collection and maintenance of secrets but rather to their release to the public. Journalists, scholars, and activists have used the FOIA to scrutinize the operations of government agencies and expose official misconduct and lying, including the FBI's illegal efforts to harass, intimidate, disrupt, and otherwise interfere with lawful political actions. The John Lennon FBI files provide an example.

Before considering that history, it's important to acknowledge that the FOIA in many respects has been a spectacular success, as Americans have demonstrated animpressive appetite for government information. In 1990, for example, federal agencies received 491,000 FOIA requests and spent $83 million responding to them. The Defense Department received the most, 118,000 requests, while the FBI received 11,000, and the CIA, 4,000. The FOIA further requires that agencies report the extent of their denials of such requests: the agency with the highest denial rate in 1990, strangely enough, was the Office of Ethics, which refused to release 75 percent of requested documents. In contrast, the Department of Health and Human Services denied only 2 percent of the requests it received. The staff at the FBI's Freedom of Information Section processing FOIA requests consists of eight agents and 245 support employees, 65 of whom work on national security declassification. In 1990, 421,000 previously classified pages were released; requesters filed 993 administrative appeals of decisions to withhold documents; 263 requests that had been denied were in litigation.2

The most fundamental justification for governmental secrecy is "national security." Thus the FOIA exempts from disclosure any material "which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security."3 What constitutes a "reasonable expectation" is obviously the issue. Because of the long-standing belief in the legitimacy of keeping secret diplomatic and military information, the claim that releasing any particular document could reasonably be expected to damage "national security" has been difficult to refute, which opens the FOIA to abuse by officials with something to hide. How federal officials have interpreted the national security exemption to the FOIA provides the most important test of government practice, and lies at the heart of the John Lennon FBI files litigation.

The original FOIA of 1966 had no provision for judicial review of "national security" information. The Act exempted material "specifically required by Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy." The law, however, contained no provisions authorizing courts to consider government decisions to withhold documents under the "national security" claim. In a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Potter Stewart pointed out this flaw: the FOIA provided "no means to question any Executive decision to stamp a document 'secret,' however cynical, myopic, or even corrupt that decision might have been."4 The Court went on to note that Congress could establish procedures to permit courts to review such decisions.

This use of the "national security" exemption to conceal government misconduct came to the fore in 1974, in the wake of the Watergate revelations of White House abuses of power. At that time the issue was framed in an apolitical way as a problem of "overclassification of national security information." Congress held extensive hearings documenting the problem and accepted the Supreme Court's suggestion, passing a series of amendments that significantly strengthened the FOIA, especially in relation to "national security" claims. The 1974 amendments instructed courts to determine de novo whether the national security exemption was being properly applied in particular cases. Courts were authorized to conduct in camera reviews of documents for which the government claimed the national security exemption. Most important, courts were empowered to overrule executive officials' decisions classifying documents under the "national security" claim. For the first time, courts could order the release of improperly classified documents. President Ford vetoed the legislation, objecting specifically to the provision empowering the courts to overrule executive branch classification decisions. This provision, he declared, was an unconstitutional infringement on executive power. Congress overrode Ford's veto, and the amendments became part of the FOIA. Nine years later, the ACLU of California asked the court to overrule the Reagan administration's claims that parts of the Lennon FBI file had to be withheld to protect "national security."

Secret government files like Lennon's have a history. The Cold War provided a great impetus to government secrecy, which was justified as a necessary response to Soviet efforts to "destroy our free and democratic system" at a time when their "preferred technique is to subvert by infiltration and intimidation," as the government explained in 1950 in the policy statement "NSC 68." Cold War presidents secretly authorized the FBI to monitor radical activists, who included not just potential spies or saboteurs but "writers, lecturers, newsmen, entertainers, and others in the mass media field" who "might influence others against the national interest," as the Senate's Church Committee explained after Watergate.5

But the federal government began spying on Americans long before the Cold War, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan observes in his book Secrecy. Most of the structure of secrecy now in place, he argues, has its origin in the World War I Espionage Act, passed into law in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. The former Princeton history professor declared in his 1915 State of the Union message that recent immigrants had "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life," and he urged Congress to "save the honor and self respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out." Congress responded with the Espionage Act and, in 1918, the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to "utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States." It also made it a crime to "advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing . . . necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war."6

In fact the first FBI files on people suspected of disloyalty date from before World War I. The bureau was created in 1908; it opened a file on Ezra Pound in 1911, after he published in the first issue of The Masses, a socialist magazine. It opened a file on Max Eastman in 1912 on the grounds that he was editor of The Masses and "a true believer in free love." It opened a file on Walter Lippmann the same year, noting that the recent Harvard graduate was secretary to the socialist mayor of Schenectady. Herbert Mitgang and Natalie Robins have shown that the FBI kept files on at least 150 of the country's leading writers, from Sinclair Lewis to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer and James Baldwin.7 Thus the insatiable appetite of Hoover's FBI for derogatory gossip and malicious trivia, evident in the Lennon file, was nothing new. But unlike other writers and artists the FBI watched, Lennon wasn't persecuted simply because of what he thought or wrote. The Nixon administration was after him because of what he did-and what he planned to do.

The Lennon files constitute a small but significant chapter in the history of the sixties, and of the Watergate era, and also in the history of bureaucratic secrecy and government abuse of power. They confirm Richard Nixon's place in the annals of rock 'n' roll as the man who tried to deport John Lennon, and thus they support the claim that rock in the sixties had some kind of political significance. Of course some have seen Nixon's pursuit of Lennon as a simple case of paranoia, in which the president and the New Left shared the same delusion. But the record shows there was a rationale behind Nixon's campaign to silence Lennon that was not simply nutty. Lennon's plan to mobilize young voters against the war may not have affected the outcome of the 1972 election, but it had a clear and reasonable logic behind it.

The Lennon FBI files include some comic and hilarious moments. The FBI at points looks more like the Keystone Cops than the Gestapo. But the campaign to "neutralize" Lennon wasn't a joke; it was a crime.

The experiences of exaltation and anger that rock music provided in the late sixties were not in themselves political experiences. Lennon knew that. He also knew that rock could become a potent political force when it was linked to real political organizing, when, for example, it brought young people together to protest the Vietnam War. The Lennon FBI files chronicle Lennon's commitment to test the political potential of rock music. They also document the government's commitment to stop him. The investigation of Lennon was an abuse of power, a kind of rock 'n' roll Watergate.

Note: Numbers in text refer to footnotes, which are not available for viewing in the web version.