August 19, 2021 • 31 mins
As John Lennon becomes the most famous political dissident in America, President Richard Nixon becomes increasingly paranoid. Nixon defends his legacy as well as the lengths to which his administration went in order to silence the rabble rousing ex-Beatle. Nixon’s own fears led him to believe that John wouldn’t just sway the youth vote, but that he would violently disrupt the country. Nixon’s tales include wiretaps, riots, and even the Godfather himself, James Brown.
For more info on BLOOD ON THE TRACKS and other great shows, visit the Double Elvis website and follow Double Elvis on Twitter and Instagram.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Blood on the Tracks is a production of I Heart
Radio and Double Elvis. John Lennon was a musical genius
and one of the most beloved cultural figures of the
twentieth century. His songs inspired dreamers to imagine, his search
for the truth gave power to the people. But some
thought he dreamed too much. Others thought he was too powerful.
(00:23):
So he was followed, he was threatened, he was declared
a danger to the United States, and in night he
was assassinated. This is his story told by his so
called friends. This especial agent Jim Steele with the Federal
(00:46):
Bureau of Investigation work in case number double oh nine
dash zero eight dash zero four nine one. Case subject
is Lennon, John Winston on no. This information pertains to
a period ending August seventy four. Interview subject is Nixon
Richard Millhouse interview number zero dash aid zero dash December.
(01:18):
I do not consider myself to be anything but an
average person. None of us should, really, although we all
think we're a little smarter than we actually are to
be at the unhappiest people in the world are people
on the self coase To Ference in Newport and Palm
Springs and Palm Beach, going to parties every night, playing
golf and then bridge, drinking too much, talking too much,
(01:43):
thinking too little, no purpose. I feel the life of
our purpose, life in which an individual is forced to
go against his intuition about what he thinks he ought
to do. That's where life becomes almost unbearable, not having
anything to look for. It could be a dur an experience.
It may have looked like Johnny and believe in the
(02:03):
courage of his convictions. But I believe he was forced
to go against his intuition. He didn't know what he
was doing. What makes life means something? This purpose a gold,
a battle, a struggy even if you don't win it,
even if when you look back on the path you
(02:24):
took to arrive at the end of That's drubble, all
you could see is bought on the tracks h Chapter two.
(02:53):
John Lennon and Richard Nixon. I think it's only human
nature to be myopic. We see things how we want
to see them. We remember things the way we thought
(03:16):
they happened. So of course it's only natural that when
you think about me and my presidency and my legacy,
there are things that immediately come to your mind. There's
a narrative, and in that narrative, I'm either a crook
or a villain, or some sort of metaphorical blight on
the history of our great country. Offered were a little smartly.
(03:40):
I'm an adjective now Nicksonian. And believe me when I
tell you that resigning the opposite of the president was
incredibly difficult. You can't begin to imagine how difficult it was.
I felt like I had no purpose. That's from words
people's able should burrow. The history was truly written by
the victors, and I believe that it is well. The
(04:02):
victors are just as myopic as any of us. The
victors don't remember the remarkable things that I was able
to accomplish as president, the things my administration accomplished. We
extended the Voting Rights Act, We signed the Clean Air
Act into law and the Water Pollution Control Act. We
established the Environmental Protection Agency for crying out aloud, We
(04:23):
made diplomatic progress with Moscow and Beijing. We wanted to
bring the Cold War to an end. We set up
an Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House, expanded
the National Park System, created OSHA, reduced the voting age
to eighteen and dramatically increased funding to the arts and
public broadcasting. Not Kennedy, not Johnson. My administration history is
(04:50):
to find me not as a progressive, but as a boogeyman.
They've been calling me tricky dick for years, ever since
the election in nineteen fifty when I became a state senator.
When I was president, I brought massive health care reform
at the table, and you know what happened. The Democrats
have posted I'm talking sweeping reform, the very kind of
(05:14):
reform that the Democrats have been fighting for for years.
I gave it to them on a silver platter. But
they didn't want it because it came from me, a Republican, sure,
and not just any Republican, but the Republican who had
been beaten in the past by Kennedy and that many
saw as a prior. That's politics, and especially in politics,
(05:38):
people put other people into these predefined boxes, and you
can't ever change because if you change, then you're betraying
the confines of that little box, thereby betraying what has
been defined as you. Now, maybe my own view of
John Lennon was myopic thing what an average person. Maybe
(05:59):
I put him in a box based on who or
what I thought it was. But you must remember this
is a very turbulent time in America's history. The radical
left was encouraging the masses that kildnap ambassadors to hijack
planes to blow up buildings as protest. So many planes
were hijacked in the late sixties in early seventies at
(06:21):
the Secret Service forbade my family from flying on any
commercial airlines. And then that mess with the weather underground
making bombs in the basement of a village townhouse. One
of those damned things won't off and destroyed the building
all four stories. People think I was out of touch,
but I was paying attention. I heard Lennon's song give
Me Some Truth. He's fed up. In that song, he
(06:44):
called politicians psychotic, said we were the blind leading the blind.
He enjoyed attacking me personally. Do you see the back
cover of his album where it's a doctored photo of
me and mild dancing naked together. But that give Me
Some truthful? That was a call to arms. I believe
John wanted to provoke people and get them fired up.
The John Tour to these conditions. He wanted an uprising.
(07:10):
There was a clear and present danger to America, to
me and to my family. All of the songs from
this period recalls to arms. If you think they'd give
piece a chance as a peaceful song, you need to
wake up. That's that myopic thinking again. That is a
song specifically intended to incite a riot, to get people mobilized,
to get people marching on mass to a computation with
(07:32):
the very people they elected. And the ironic thing is
that very few of these people who sang along with
these songs and marched along in these protests, the ironic
thing is that they don't even know what they were
speaking out against. Forced aboard that she's intuition about what
does it she ought to do? They were just following
(07:54):
a famous person down the street, not just famous, but naive.
M This is a man said that I the president
should just declare peace, as if you could do such
a thing. His fans they all thought it was possible,
so they followed it, and they would go wherever he
would lead. I didn't know what he was doing, because
(08:16):
John Oleman was no longer a songwriter. In my eyes,
he was playing the role of a pie piper in
a cultural uprising. And that was a threat. John had
become merely a tool of the radical leftist paramilitary movement,
and that was dangerous. He wrote songs about John Sinclair
and Angela Davis and Attica. He hung around Bobby Seal
and Jerry Ruman and Abby Hoffman. These were well established
(08:38):
threats to democracy, anti Americans. Those men all used John
as their megaphone to march their message up and down
the streets of New York City, and then the streets
of Washington, and then presumably down the streets of Miami,
where myself and all the others in the Republican Party
would be sitting ducks. It's all true. Hoover had John
(09:24):
Lennon and his wife under surveillance in New York City.
They were justified in their paranoia, just like I was
justified in mine. They were followed the planted agents of
the audience every time he made a public appearance or
played a concert for importance, every day. There's no evidence
out there that we authorized the wire tapping of their telephones,
(09:45):
But between you and me and the Wall, I wouldn't
be surprised if Hoover's men made sure little authorization didn't
stand between them and the intelligence They needed to collect.
It was because of the surveillance that we were able
to uncover a very troubling plot, which at Holmes, the
head of the CIA, brought a memo to Hoover, and
Hoover brought it to me. John Lennon wasn't playing the
(10:06):
rock and roll tour in the traditional sense. He was
plotting a direct route from New York to Miami, a
route that directly followed my campaign trail, and then he
was hatching a plot to disrupt the Republican National Convention
in Miami at the end of that route in August.
We needed a strategic countermeasure. That's what Hoover said, and
(10:29):
I trusted him. Of course, he'd been director of the
FBI for almost fifty years, and Hoover was intimately familiar
with what Lennon had been doing for years, Even back
in nine when he and his wife released that unlistenable
album with a filthy cover, the two of them start
really naked. A congressman centered angry letter about such unnecessary
(10:50):
filth to Hoover, and that's probably when the FBI opened
a file. The congressman called it a vulgar display of garbage,
Whover sent some men to tail Lennon when he visited
the States in ninety seventy and went to California. They
were under strict direction together whatever evidence they could to
prove that London was engaged in violent anti war demonstrations
or narcotics. America's public enemy Number one in the United
(11:13):
States is drug abuse. They hit the jackpot when they
caught wind of the plan in to destruct the Republican
Convention in Miami. Lennon put it together with help from
Ruben Hoffman, Sinclair and Alan Ginsburgh. Was there. At the
center of this plan was John Lennon being used as
(11:34):
a tool to so discontent among youth. But he was
forced to god this as a tuition, and now twelve
million new voters would be going to the poll since
we reduced the voting age. John Lennon was not an American,
He paid no taxes, but yet he was here in
this country spreading an anti American message to millions of
(11:57):
impressionable minds. That's what sent red flags up the chain
of command all the way to meet a strategic countermeasure,
Hooever said, the easiest thing was to port John Lennon
as soon as possible. Fort makes slay named something coopish.
John Lennon's status in this country was as a guest
who had made an exception for him to be here
(12:19):
to be with his wife for a brief amount of time.
He wasn't eligible for a visa because of the drug
convection back in England, the one where the drug squad
found cannabis resident in his London flat back in ninety
but nevertheless he'd been able to secure a sixty day
visa with the help of his lawyers. We used that
London drug conviction as a major reason why he should
be told he had a month to leave the country.
(12:41):
This was March of nineteen seventy two. If London did
as he was told, he would be out of the
country long before my campaign trail at to Miami, and
therefore he would not be able to rally his fans
and bring violence and descent to the Republican National Convention.
That was our strategic counter measure that when a little
smarter than actually law. But London had strategies of his own.
(13:05):
He hired an immigration lawyer and fought tooth and nail
to stay. His lawyer applied for permanent status for both
John Lennon and his wife that Yoko Ono, well, she
could get permanent status because she was the mother of
an American child. So if we granted her residence and
then denied Lennon, that same movement that he was mobilizing
would accuse us of breaking up a family could be
(13:28):
showing experience. Yoko Oono sat on a witness chair in
the hearing room at the Immigration and Naturalization Service building
in Manhattan and said, and I quote, they're asking me
to choose between my child and my husband. And then
she said, I don't know if there's any mercy to
plead for because this is an a federal court, but
(13:48):
if there is, I'd like it please. I couldn't believe it.
I was told this was a done deal. They're removing
John London from the United States would be easy board.
That's a tuition. Consider it done. That's what they told me.
And now we're stuck in this impasse. Lennon's lawyer kept
(14:09):
buying him a little more time and then a little more.
How is it possible that you can get these little
extra bits of time? I kept asking Hoover that question,
and I wasn't getting the goddamn answer that I wanted,
and Miami was approaching. I can only imagine how much
anger at John Lennon was becoming, and how much is
hatred of me and my administration had been exacerbated by
(14:30):
our deportation efforts, and that he would funnel that anger
into his so called revolution at the upcoming convention. So
I took matters into my own hands, which is what
you have to do as presidents sometimes, just like I
did in nineteen fifty two when the papers called for
me to abandon my run for vice president over what
they perceived as some secret fund. But in all of
(14:53):
my years of public life, I have never profited, never
profited from public service. I earned every singer I went
on live TV and got my base in my corner.
When I lost the nineteen sixty presidential election to Kennedy,
I didn't mope about it. I hit the road and hustled,
(15:13):
and my efforts helped me get Republicans elected in droves,
the House, the Senate Governors. Fort makes life read something.
It set me up to become president in n and
in all of my years public life, I have never
obstructed justice. But back in v two, taking matters into
(15:36):
my own hands when it was clear that deporting John
Lennon was going to be harder than I thought. I
bent the year of a young White House staffer, a
kid named Tom Houston. I asked him to look into
this whole situation, the bombmakers, the dander get her uppers,
the rabble rousers, and how someone is famous and infelluctual
as John Lennon fit into it all you people in
(15:59):
the world m I asked Tom to come back with
a plan for us to combat the approach, the storm
of resistance. Tom delivered. He may have delivered a little
too much. I think he even scared Hoover. His plan
called for widespread mail, opening of known radicals and something
I've been told was referred to as black bag jobs,
(16:21):
or breaking into residences to install tabs and bugs again
on known radicals. Were these taxics illegal? Well, I'm not
a crop. You're asking the wrong question. The question you
should be asking is what would you do to protect
your country. We'll be right back after this word word
(16:45):
word now. I like music and musicians just fine. The
great R and B artist James Brown played at my
inauguration in nine. He played a trip song of his
called say It Loud, I'm Block and I'm Proud, which,
if I may be so bold, was perhaps one of
(17:06):
the most culturally important songs played her the presidential inauguration ever.
Because James Brown wanted to bring people together with his
music and I wanted to bring people together. James Brown
believed in what I was doing so much that he
even endorsed me when I ran a second time. And
then there was Elvis. Elvis came to see me at
(17:28):
the White House in he told me that he was
on my side, just like James Brown. Before he left,
Elvis asked for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Trucks. Why the hell not, He was a king,
after all. Someone told me later that the only reason
Elvis wanted the badge was because he thought it would
give him carte blanche to carry guns and drugs with
(17:48):
him wherever he went. I don't know if I believe that.
Pressley seemed like a decent fellow to me. John Lennon,
on the other hand, did not. This is how John
Lennon was different in my eyes from other musicians like
James Brown and Elvis Pressley. John Lennon was no longer
a Beatle. He was no longer John Lennon the musician.
(18:11):
As soon as he stepped onto American soil, he changed
such a tution. He became John Lennon the distructor, and
I was his target. Now. The intel about the Republican
Invention business wasn't the first time we had received information
claiming that John Lennon was planning something. Jerry Reuben himself,
when talking to the press about the concert, a bunch
(18:34):
of that we're going to stage at the Republican Party's
presidential nominating convention in San Diego. That was a summer
of se We didn't have to tap any phones or
pull any black bag jobs to get that info. Jerry
Reuben just went ahead and told whoever wanted to listen
talking to so hohover ran with that information and became
(18:55):
increasingly concerned that whatever it was that they were planning
was more than a concert. They wanted chaos, They wanted
me out, that was for damn sure. They wanted the
top of the system as we knew it, as we
still know it today. It was either the Yippies, or
the Black Panthers, or the White Panthers, or just some
(19:16):
hodgepodge all of the above misguided anti war radicals, and
John was part of that mix. Whatever we did to
monitor John Lennon's activity, people he associated with, the meetings
he attended, the ideas he sought to disseminate. We did
it all because we thought we had to. And if
it made him nervous, if it made him paranoid and
(19:38):
cause him to rethink what he was doing and saying, well, good,
so be it. First Lennon thought he heard clicking sounds
on his phone line. Then he thought he heard footsteps
walking behind him on the sidewalk, And then he couldn't
look at any regular person the same way anymore. Mailman,
dog walkers, cab drivers, nanny's pushing babies through men hat
(20:00):
and a stroller. They all look suspect to him. He
couldn't trust anyone. He couldn't turn his back on strangers,
every phone call, every knock on the door, every passing
good morning, pleasantry. Pretty Soon he couldn't take it anymore.
And then, partly through the dress we put upon him,
(20:22):
John Lennon came to his senses. He looked at all
these coked spirits in their eyes. What in the hell
were they thinking? Didn't they remember Chicago in the Democratic
National Convention, the National Guard and the cops and billy
clubs and tear gas? Is that what they wanted? And
if God forbid, they were successful. If this rag tag
(20:44):
group of violent insurrectionists got what they wanted the top
of the system, then what what would they replace it with?
What was the point of all this? I didn't know
what he was doing. Now. Len his decision to bow
out of it all, first to abandon the San Diego
and then abandoned Miami plot, certainly he made that decision
(21:04):
with the safety of his own life on his mind.
I think these other people, Reuben Seal Sinclair, they all
lived this life from the get gods people in the world,
a life of surveillance and danger and the edge never
being edgy enough. And it was a new territory for Lenin.
And let's face it, when it came down to it,
(21:25):
what we exposed in John Lennon is that he was
no revolutionary, He was no activist. He was a dilettante
who was forced to go this a tuition. He even
said so before he died. He did it out of guilt,
guilt for being rich and famous, guilt for not being
a man of the people. As he liked to pretend,
(21:49):
he allowed ourselves to be manipulated by people whose purpose
in life was to minibate a horrible people in order
to get what they wanted. Talking to Bush, well, they
never got what they wanted, but I got what I wanted. First,
we defused John Lennon's influence. And then on Tuesday, November
(22:11):
seventy two, I was re elected President of the United
States over George mccombery. And do you know what, there
was no surge of young voters between ages of eighteen
and one. In fact, it was the lowest voter turnout
in over twenty years. And the Americans that did go
(22:34):
to the polls, they re elected me in a landslide.
I won forty nine states. McGovern got one state, Massachusetts.
The silent majority had spoken up, and they had spoken
up for me. John Lennon's America was not America. The
Hippies America was not America. The Peace and Love movement
(22:57):
was a blip on the radar. There was no revolution.
There was just purpose. And it wasn't John Lennons. It
was America's. It was mine. August nine, o one pm
(23:42):
Eastern time, the White House. Richard Nixon felt the heat
of the excess lighting that had been hauled into the
Oval Office for the purpose of the television cameras. The lights,
the camera, the crew. It all seemed a bit overkilled
to him. Less was more, in his opinion. But what
was actually occupying Nixon's mind and those final seconds leading
(24:05):
up to when the cameraman gave him the thumbs up
and the feed went live into the homes of millions
of his fellow Americans, was that he would sweat like
a pig. That the sweaty image of a disgraced president
throwing in the towel live on national TV would give
his critics even more ammunition with which they could continue
to assassinate his character. But at least it wasn't as
(24:26):
bad as the debates with Jack Kennedy. Nixon had that
going form that was sixty election year, the first time
Nixon ran for president. Kennedy didn't need to do much
to win that first debate. Nixon refused to wear the
customary makeup one wears when one appears on television. He
was unshaven and haggard. Nixon looked so bad that night
(24:49):
that his own mother called him after the debate was
over to ask if he was ill. Nixon had learned
from that mistake, a mistake that cost him the election
by a hair. He didn't contest the like he did
the honorable thing, which was to concede to his opponent,
Jack Kennedy, the man with the hair and the smile.
And then Nixon did the honorable thing again when he
(25:09):
formerly certified Kennedy's election in front of Congress on January
six of the following year. After all, Nixon was vice
president under outgoing President Eisenhower, and so at that moment
that was his role, his purpose. Now, in nineteen seventy four,
staring into the reflection of a camera's lens, Nixon had
(25:30):
a new purpose, and once again it was the honorable thing.
Richard Nixon stared straight into the glassy abyss of the
camera lens and resigned the office of the President of
the United States. Nixon's resignation, of course, was due to
his involvement in an attempted cover up of a nineteen
seventy two break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in
(25:50):
the Watergate Office Building in Washington, d C. It was
Tom Houston's black bag job strategy gone wild. The ensuing
investigation would indict sixty nine people and convict many of
them in high positions of power within Nixon's administration, and
as if that wasn't enough, in the midst of the
Watergate scandal, Nixon's vice president, Spireau Agnew, was embroiled in
(26:14):
a controversy of his own when it was a reveal
that Agnew had been taking cash bribes from engineering and
construction firms for more than ten years, including the years
he served as vice president. He resigned ahead of Nixon
in order to avoid his own impeachment. Nixon and Agnew
were both left to contemplate whether or not they had
any purpose left in life. In Los Angeles, earlier, in
(26:37):
the afternoon of August nine four, John Lennon held up
a copy of the late edition of the Los Angeles
Times for a photographer on the street. Nixon quits read
the headline, will explain decision on TV tonight. In the photo, John,
who was still embroiled in a legal battle over the
status of his US citizenship, looked like a weight had
been lifted off his shoulders, like he had won the fight.
(27:01):
Nixon's re election in seventy two had served as a
major turning point in John's political activism. When John heard
the news that day, boy it nearly killed him. He
wondered if his attempts to mobilize the youth vote were
in vain. The bed ends, the rallies, the marches, the songs.
Didn't the American public know that war was over? If
(27:21):
they wanted it? Did they not want it? In nineteen
seventy two, Nixon had one and John was defeated. John
drank from a tequila bottle until the sun came up
that night, and then, in front of Yoko, in a
whole bunch of party guests, he took a fellow party
goer to bed for a shag. All was lost, it seemed.
(27:42):
He wondered if revolution was nothing but a catchy pop song.
John thought back to San Diego in Miami. Maybe he
should have followed through with the plan to violently disrupt
the Republican Party. Maybe that would have made a difference.
Maybe violence had been the answer all along. Maybe he
joined the weather under round, go build bombs in a
basement in Lower Manhattan, fight fire with fire, or do
(28:05):
what Eldredge Cleaver the Black Panthers suggested, and off the
pig or maybe he'd just say fuck it and just disappear.
He'd go somewhere else entirely, and keep up with a
diet of tequila and cocaine and forget about revolution for good.
People would look at him in point and say, with
equal parts discussed and disbelief, that's John Lennon. He wouldn't
(28:26):
let the comments bother him. He wouldn't let anything bother
him anymore, because what did it even matter anymore? In
a world where Nixon was elected twice, there was no hope,
just nihilism. It made no difference what John did, how
hard he tried, what he said, how he's saying. Things
didn't seem to be getting better all the time. There
was always a mess, It was always a slog, and
(28:46):
there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do about
the carnage left in society's wake. Life just barreled forward fast,
out of control, leaving behind so much Blood on the
Track X all right, everybody, thanks for listening to Blood
(29:17):
on the Tracks. If you like what you hear, be
sure to find and follow Blood on the Tracks on
Apple podcast, I Heart Radio, app, Amazon Music, or wherever
you get your podcasts. On this season two, of Blood
on the Tracks, We'll be releasing ten episodes on the
Incredible Life of John Lennon, with a new episode every Thursday.
You can also binge all ten episodes of season one
(29:37):
on the insane story of the notorious record producer Phil
Spector right now. It's available wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode of Blood on the Tracks was written by
Zeth Lundie and hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan,
also executive produced by Brady sad Story and copy editing
by Pat Healy. This episode was mixed by Colin Fleming.
(29:57):
Additional music and score elements by and Spraker. This episode
featured Dennis Brennan as Richard Nixon. Blood on the Tracks
is produced by Double Elvis and partnership with I Heart Radio.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
com on the Blood on the Track series page. If
you want to chat about this show or hear more
about the other shows, we're making a Double Elvis tap
(30:19):
in on Instagram at double Elvis, on Twitter at Double
Elvis fm, and now on Twitch, where we're streaming three
days a week at Twitch dot tv, slash Double Elvis
Podcasts and Finally, be sure to check out disgrace Land,
the award winning music and true crime podcast that I
also host. Disgraceland is available only on free Amazon Music.
(30:40):
To hear tons of insane stories about your favorite musicians
getting away with murder and behaving very badly, go to
Amazon dot com slash disgrace lamb, or if you have
an Echo device, just say Alexa play the disgrace Land
podcast black Along by Crazy Ir
Blood on the Tracks is a production of I Heart
Radio and Double Elvis. John Lennon was a musical genius
and one of the most beloved cultural figures of the
twentieth century. His songs inspired dreamers to imagine, his search
for the truth gave power to the people. But some
thought he dreamed too much. Others thought he was too powerful.
(00:23):
So he was followed, he was threatened, he was declared
a danger to the United States, and in night he
was assassinated. This is his story told by his so
called friends. This especial agent Jim Steele with the Federal
(00:46):
Bureau of Investigation work in case number double oh nine
dash zero eight dash zero four nine one. Case subject
is Lennon, John Winston on no. This information pertains to
a period ending August seventy four. Interview subject is Nixon
Richard Millhouse interview number zero dash aid zero dash December.
(01:18):
I do not consider myself to be anything but an
average person. None of us should, really, although we all
think we're a little smarter than we actually are to
be at the unhappiest people in the world are people
on the self coase To Ference in Newport and Palm
Springs and Palm Beach, going to parties every night, playing
golf and then bridge, drinking too much, talking too much,
(01:43):
thinking too little, no purpose. I feel the life of
our purpose, life in which an individual is forced to
go against his intuition about what he thinks he ought
to do. That's where life becomes almost unbearable, not having
anything to look for. It could be a dur an experience.
It may have looked like Johnny and believe in the
(02:03):
courage of his convictions. But I believe he was forced
to go against his intuition. He didn't know what he
was doing. What makes life means something? This purpose a gold,
a battle, a struggy even if you don't win it,
even if when you look back on the path you
(02:24):
took to arrive at the end of That's drubble, all
you could see is bought on the tracks h Chapter two.
(02:53):
John Lennon and Richard Nixon. I think it's only human
nature to be myopic. We see things how we want
to see them. We remember things the way we thought
(03:16):
they happened. So of course it's only natural that when
you think about me and my presidency and my legacy,
there are things that immediately come to your mind. There's
a narrative, and in that narrative, I'm either a crook
or a villain, or some sort of metaphorical blight on
the history of our great country. Offered were a little smartly.
(03:40):
I'm an adjective now Nicksonian. And believe me when I
tell you that resigning the opposite of the president was
incredibly difficult. You can't begin to imagine how difficult it was.
I felt like I had no purpose. That's from words
people's able should burrow. The history was truly written by
the victors, and I believe that it is well. The
(04:02):
victors are just as myopic as any of us. The
victors don't remember the remarkable things that I was able
to accomplish as president, the things my administration accomplished. We
extended the Voting Rights Act, We signed the Clean Air
Act into law and the Water Pollution Control Act. We
established the Environmental Protection Agency for crying out aloud, We
(04:23):
made diplomatic progress with Moscow and Beijing. We wanted to
bring the Cold War to an end. We set up
an Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House, expanded
the National Park System, created OSHA, reduced the voting age
to eighteen and dramatically increased funding to the arts and
public broadcasting. Not Kennedy, not Johnson. My administration history is
(04:50):
to find me not as a progressive, but as a boogeyman.
They've been calling me tricky dick for years, ever since
the election in nineteen fifty when I became a state senator.
When I was president, I brought massive health care reform
at the table, and you know what happened. The Democrats
have posted I'm talking sweeping reform, the very kind of
(05:14):
reform that the Democrats have been fighting for for years.
I gave it to them on a silver platter. But
they didn't want it because it came from me, a Republican, sure,
and not just any Republican, but the Republican who had
been beaten in the past by Kennedy and that many
saw as a prior. That's politics, and especially in politics,
(05:38):
people put other people into these predefined boxes, and you
can't ever change because if you change, then you're betraying
the confines of that little box, thereby betraying what has
been defined as you. Now, maybe my own view of
John Lennon was myopic thing what an average person. Maybe
(05:59):
I put him in a box based on who or
what I thought it was. But you must remember this
is a very turbulent time in America's history. The radical
left was encouraging the masses that kildnap ambassadors to hijack
planes to blow up buildings as protest. So many planes
were hijacked in the late sixties in early seventies at
(06:21):
the Secret Service forbade my family from flying on any
commercial airlines. And then that mess with the weather underground
making bombs in the basement of a village townhouse. One
of those damned things won't off and destroyed the building
all four stories. People think I was out of touch,
but I was paying attention. I heard Lennon's song give
Me Some Truth. He's fed up. In that song, he
(06:44):
called politicians psychotic, said we were the blind leading the blind.
He enjoyed attacking me personally. Do you see the back
cover of his album where it's a doctored photo of
me and mild dancing naked together. But that give Me
Some truthful? That was a call to arms. I believe
John wanted to provoke people and get them fired up.
The John Tour to these conditions. He wanted an uprising.
(07:10):
There was a clear and present danger to America, to
me and to my family. All of the songs from
this period recalls to arms. If you think they'd give
piece a chance as a peaceful song, you need to
wake up. That's that myopic thinking again. That is a
song specifically intended to incite a riot, to get people mobilized,
to get people marching on mass to a computation with
(07:32):
the very people they elected. And the ironic thing is
that very few of these people who sang along with
these songs and marched along in these protests, the ironic
thing is that they don't even know what they were
speaking out against. Forced aboard that she's intuition about what
does it she ought to do? They were just following
(07:54):
a famous person down the street, not just famous, but naive.
M This is a man said that I the president
should just declare peace, as if you could do such
a thing. His fans they all thought it was possible,
so they followed it, and they would go wherever he
would lead. I didn't know what he was doing, because
(08:16):
John Oleman was no longer a songwriter. In my eyes,
he was playing the role of a pie piper in
a cultural uprising. And that was a threat. John had
become merely a tool of the radical leftist paramilitary movement,
and that was dangerous. He wrote songs about John Sinclair
and Angela Davis and Attica. He hung around Bobby Seal
and Jerry Ruman and Abby Hoffman. These were well established
(08:38):
threats to democracy, anti Americans. Those men all used John
as their megaphone to march their message up and down
the streets of New York City, and then the streets
of Washington, and then presumably down the streets of Miami,
where myself and all the others in the Republican Party
would be sitting ducks. It's all true. Hoover had John
(09:24):
Lennon and his wife under surveillance in New York City.
They were justified in their paranoia, just like I was
justified in mine. They were followed the planted agents of
the audience every time he made a public appearance or
played a concert for importance, every day. There's no evidence
out there that we authorized the wire tapping of their telephones,
(09:45):
But between you and me and the Wall, I wouldn't
be surprised if Hoover's men made sure little authorization didn't
stand between them and the intelligence They needed to collect.
It was because of the surveillance that we were able
to uncover a very troubling plot, which at Holmes, the
head of the CIA, brought a memo to Hoover, and
Hoover brought it to me. John Lennon wasn't playing the
(10:06):
rock and roll tour in the traditional sense. He was
plotting a direct route from New York to Miami, a
route that directly followed my campaign trail, and then he
was hatching a plot to disrupt the Republican National Convention
in Miami at the end of that route in August.
We needed a strategic countermeasure. That's what Hoover said, and
(10:29):
I trusted him. Of course, he'd been director of the
FBI for almost fifty years, and Hoover was intimately familiar
with what Lennon had been doing for years, Even back
in nine when he and his wife released that unlistenable
album with a filthy cover, the two of them start
really naked. A congressman centered angry letter about such unnecessary
(10:50):
filth to Hoover, and that's probably when the FBI opened
a file. The congressman called it a vulgar display of garbage,
Whover sent some men to tail Lennon when he visited
the States in ninety seventy and went to California. They
were under strict direction together whatever evidence they could to
prove that London was engaged in violent anti war demonstrations
or narcotics. America's public enemy Number one in the United
(11:13):
States is drug abuse. They hit the jackpot when they
caught wind of the plan in to destruct the Republican
Convention in Miami. Lennon put it together with help from
Ruben Hoffman, Sinclair and Alan Ginsburgh. Was there. At the
center of this plan was John Lennon being used as
(11:34):
a tool to so discontent among youth. But he was
forced to god this as a tuition, and now twelve
million new voters would be going to the poll since
we reduced the voting age. John Lennon was not an American,
He paid no taxes, but yet he was here in
this country spreading an anti American message to millions of
(11:57):
impressionable minds. That's what sent red flags up the chain
of command all the way to meet a strategic countermeasure,
Hooever said, the easiest thing was to port John Lennon
as soon as possible. Fort makes slay named something coopish.
John Lennon's status in this country was as a guest
who had made an exception for him to be here
(12:19):
to be with his wife for a brief amount of time.
He wasn't eligible for a visa because of the drug
convection back in England, the one where the drug squad
found cannabis resident in his London flat back in ninety
but nevertheless he'd been able to secure a sixty day
visa with the help of his lawyers. We used that
London drug conviction as a major reason why he should
be told he had a month to leave the country.
(12:41):
This was March of nineteen seventy two. If London did
as he was told, he would be out of the
country long before my campaign trail at to Miami, and
therefore he would not be able to rally his fans
and bring violence and descent to the Republican National Convention.
That was our strategic counter measure that when a little
smarter than actually law. But London had strategies of his own.
(13:05):
He hired an immigration lawyer and fought tooth and nail
to stay. His lawyer applied for permanent status for both
John Lennon and his wife that Yoko Ono, well, she
could get permanent status because she was the mother of
an American child. So if we granted her residence and
then denied Lennon, that same movement that he was mobilizing
would accuse us of breaking up a family could be
(13:28):
showing experience. Yoko Oono sat on a witness chair in
the hearing room at the Immigration and Naturalization Service building
in Manhattan and said, and I quote, they're asking me
to choose between my child and my husband. And then
she said, I don't know if there's any mercy to
plead for because this is an a federal court, but
(13:48):
if there is, I'd like it please. I couldn't believe it.
I was told this was a done deal. They're removing
John London from the United States would be easy board.
That's a tuition. Consider it done. That's what they told me.
And now we're stuck in this impasse. Lennon's lawyer kept
(14:09):
buying him a little more time and then a little more.
How is it possible that you can get these little
extra bits of time? I kept asking Hoover that question,
and I wasn't getting the goddamn answer that I wanted,
and Miami was approaching. I can only imagine how much
anger at John Lennon was becoming, and how much is
hatred of me and my administration had been exacerbated by
(14:30):
our deportation efforts, and that he would funnel that anger
into his so called revolution at the upcoming convention. So
I took matters into my own hands, which is what
you have to do as presidents sometimes, just like I
did in nineteen fifty two when the papers called for
me to abandon my run for vice president over what
they perceived as some secret fund. But in all of
(14:53):
my years of public life, I have never profited, never
profited from public service. I earned every singer I went
on live TV and got my base in my corner.
When I lost the nineteen sixty presidential election to Kennedy,
I didn't mope about it. I hit the road and hustled,
(15:13):
and my efforts helped me get Republicans elected in droves,
the House, the Senate Governors. Fort makes life read something.
It set me up to become president in n and
in all of my years public life, I have never
obstructed justice. But back in v two, taking matters into
(15:36):
my own hands when it was clear that deporting John
Lennon was going to be harder than I thought. I
bent the year of a young White House staffer, a
kid named Tom Houston. I asked him to look into
this whole situation, the bombmakers, the dander get her uppers,
the rabble rousers, and how someone is famous and infelluctual
as John Lennon fit into it all you people in
(15:59):
the world m I asked Tom to come back with
a plan for us to combat the approach, the storm
of resistance. Tom delivered. He may have delivered a little
too much. I think he even scared Hoover. His plan
called for widespread mail, opening of known radicals and something
I've been told was referred to as black bag jobs,
(16:21):
or breaking into residences to install tabs and bugs again
on known radicals. Were these taxics illegal? Well, I'm not
a crop. You're asking the wrong question. The question you
should be asking is what would you do to protect
your country. We'll be right back after this word word
(16:45):
word now. I like music and musicians just fine. The
great R and B artist James Brown played at my
inauguration in nine. He played a trip song of his
called say It Loud, I'm Block and I'm Proud, which,
if I may be so bold, was perhaps one of
(17:06):
the most culturally important songs played her the presidential inauguration ever.
Because James Brown wanted to bring people together with his
music and I wanted to bring people together. James Brown
believed in what I was doing so much that he
even endorsed me when I ran a second time. And
then there was Elvis. Elvis came to see me at
(17:28):
the White House in he told me that he was
on my side, just like James Brown. Before he left,
Elvis asked for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Trucks. Why the hell not, He was a king,
after all. Someone told me later that the only reason
Elvis wanted the badge was because he thought it would
give him carte blanche to carry guns and drugs with
(17:48):
him wherever he went. I don't know if I believe that.
Pressley seemed like a decent fellow to me. John Lennon,
on the other hand, did not. This is how John
Lennon was different in my eyes from other musicians like
James Brown and Elvis Pressley. John Lennon was no longer
a Beatle. He was no longer John Lennon the musician.
(18:11):
As soon as he stepped onto American soil, he changed
such a tution. He became John Lennon the distructor, and
I was his target. Now. The intel about the Republican
Invention business wasn't the first time we had received information
claiming that John Lennon was planning something. Jerry Reuben himself,
when talking to the press about the concert, a bunch
(18:34):
of that we're going to stage at the Republican Party's
presidential nominating convention in San Diego. That was a summer
of se We didn't have to tap any phones or
pull any black bag jobs to get that info. Jerry
Reuben just went ahead and told whoever wanted to listen
talking to so hohover ran with that information and became
(18:55):
increasingly concerned that whatever it was that they were planning
was more than a concert. They wanted chaos, They wanted
me out, that was for damn sure. They wanted the
top of the system as we knew it, as we
still know it today. It was either the Yippies, or
the Black Panthers, or the White Panthers, or just some
(19:16):
hodgepodge all of the above misguided anti war radicals, and
John was part of that mix. Whatever we did to
monitor John Lennon's activity, people he associated with, the meetings
he attended, the ideas he sought to disseminate. We did
it all because we thought we had to. And if
it made him nervous, if it made him paranoid and
(19:38):
cause him to rethink what he was doing and saying, well, good,
so be it. First Lennon thought he heard clicking sounds
on his phone line. Then he thought he heard footsteps
walking behind him on the sidewalk, And then he couldn't
look at any regular person the same way anymore. Mailman,
dog walkers, cab drivers, nanny's pushing babies through men hat
(20:00):
and a stroller. They all look suspect to him. He
couldn't trust anyone. He couldn't turn his back on strangers,
every phone call, every knock on the door, every passing
good morning, pleasantry. Pretty Soon he couldn't take it anymore.
And then, partly through the dress we put upon him,
(20:22):
John Lennon came to his senses. He looked at all
these coked spirits in their eyes. What in the hell
were they thinking? Didn't they remember Chicago in the Democratic
National Convention, the National Guard and the cops and billy
clubs and tear gas? Is that what they wanted? And
if God forbid, they were successful. If this rag tag
(20:44):
group of violent insurrectionists got what they wanted the top
of the system, then what what would they replace it with?
What was the point of all this? I didn't know
what he was doing. Now. Len his decision to bow
out of it all, first to abandon the San Diego
and then abandoned Miami plot, certainly he made that decision
(21:04):
with the safety of his own life on his mind.
I think these other people, Reuben Seal Sinclair, they all
lived this life from the get gods people in the world,
a life of surveillance and danger and the edge never
being edgy enough. And it was a new territory for Lenin.
And let's face it, when it came down to it,
(21:25):
what we exposed in John Lennon is that he was
no revolutionary, He was no activist. He was a dilettante
who was forced to go this a tuition. He even
said so before he died. He did it out of guilt,
guilt for being rich and famous, guilt for not being
a man of the people. As he liked to pretend,
(21:49):
he allowed ourselves to be manipulated by people whose purpose
in life was to minibate a horrible people in order
to get what they wanted. Talking to Bush, well, they
never got what they wanted, but I got what I wanted. First,
we defused John Lennon's influence. And then on Tuesday, November
(22:11):
seventy two, I was re elected President of the United
States over George mccombery. And do you know what, there
was no surge of young voters between ages of eighteen
and one. In fact, it was the lowest voter turnout
in over twenty years. And the Americans that did go
(22:34):
to the polls, they re elected me in a landslide.
I won forty nine states. McGovern got one state, Massachusetts.
The silent majority had spoken up, and they had spoken
up for me. John Lennon's America was not America. The
Hippies America was not America. The Peace and Love movement
(22:57):
was a blip on the radar. There was no revolution.
There was just purpose. And it wasn't John Lennons. It
was America's. It was mine. August nine, o one pm
(23:42):
Eastern time, the White House. Richard Nixon felt the heat
of the excess lighting that had been hauled into the
Oval Office for the purpose of the television cameras. The lights,
the camera, the crew. It all seemed a bit overkilled
to him. Less was more, in his opinion. But what
was actually occupying Nixon's mind and those final seconds leading
(24:05):
up to when the cameraman gave him the thumbs up
and the feed went live into the homes of millions
of his fellow Americans, was that he would sweat like
a pig. That the sweaty image of a disgraced president
throwing in the towel live on national TV would give
his critics even more ammunition with which they could continue
to assassinate his character. But at least it wasn't as
(24:26):
bad as the debates with Jack Kennedy. Nixon had that
going form that was sixty election year, the first time
Nixon ran for president. Kennedy didn't need to do much
to win that first debate. Nixon refused to wear the
customary makeup one wears when one appears on television. He
was unshaven and haggard. Nixon looked so bad that night
(24:49):
that his own mother called him after the debate was
over to ask if he was ill. Nixon had learned
from that mistake, a mistake that cost him the election
by a hair. He didn't contest the like he did
the honorable thing, which was to concede to his opponent,
Jack Kennedy, the man with the hair and the smile.
And then Nixon did the honorable thing again when he
(25:09):
formerly certified Kennedy's election in front of Congress on January
six of the following year. After all, Nixon was vice
president under outgoing President Eisenhower, and so at that moment
that was his role, his purpose. Now, in nineteen seventy four,
staring into the reflection of a camera's lens, Nixon had
(25:30):
a new purpose, and once again it was the honorable thing.
Richard Nixon stared straight into the glassy abyss of the
camera lens and resigned the office of the President of
the United States. Nixon's resignation, of course, was due to
his involvement in an attempted cover up of a nineteen
seventy two break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in
(25:50):
the Watergate Office Building in Washington, d C. It was
Tom Houston's black bag job strategy gone wild. The ensuing
investigation would indict sixty nine people and convict many of
them in high positions of power within Nixon's administration, and
as if that wasn't enough, in the midst of the
Watergate scandal, Nixon's vice president, Spireau Agnew, was embroiled in
(26:14):
a controversy of his own when it was a reveal
that Agnew had been taking cash bribes from engineering and
construction firms for more than ten years, including the years
he served as vice president. He resigned ahead of Nixon
in order to avoid his own impeachment. Nixon and Agnew
were both left to contemplate whether or not they had
any purpose left in life. In Los Angeles, earlier, in
(26:37):
the afternoon of August nine four, John Lennon held up
a copy of the late edition of the Los Angeles
Times for a photographer on the street. Nixon quits read
the headline, will explain decision on TV tonight. In the photo, John,
who was still embroiled in a legal battle over the
status of his US citizenship, looked like a weight had
been lifted off his shoulders, like he had won the fight.
(27:01):
Nixon's re election in seventy two had served as a
major turning point in John's political activism. When John heard
the news that day, boy it nearly killed him. He
wondered if his attempts to mobilize the youth vote were
in vain. The bed ends, the rallies, the marches, the songs.
Didn't the American public know that war was over? If
(27:21):
they wanted it? Did they not want it? In nineteen
seventy two, Nixon had one and John was defeated. John
drank from a tequila bottle until the sun came up
that night, and then, in front of Yoko, in a
whole bunch of party guests, he took a fellow party
goer to bed for a shag. All was lost, it seemed.
(27:42):
He wondered if revolution was nothing but a catchy pop song.
John thought back to San Diego in Miami. Maybe he
should have followed through with the plan to violently disrupt
the Republican Party. Maybe that would have made a difference.
Maybe violence had been the answer all along. Maybe he
joined the weather under round, go build bombs in a
basement in Lower Manhattan, fight fire with fire, or do
(28:05):
what Eldredge Cleaver the Black Panthers suggested, and off the
pig or maybe he'd just say fuck it and just disappear.
He'd go somewhere else entirely, and keep up with a
diet of tequila and cocaine and forget about revolution for good.
People would look at him in point and say, with
equal parts discussed and disbelief, that's John Lennon. He wouldn't
(28:26):
let the comments bother him. He wouldn't let anything bother
him anymore, because what did it even matter anymore? In
a world where Nixon was elected twice, there was no hope,
just nihilism. It made no difference what John did, how
hard he tried, what he said, how he's saying. Things
didn't seem to be getting better all the time. There
was always a mess, It was always a slog, and
(28:46):
there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do about
the carnage left in society's wake. Life just barreled forward fast,
out of control, leaving behind so much Blood on the
Track X all right, everybody, thanks for listening to Blood
(29:17):
on the Tracks. If you like what you hear, be
sure to find and follow Blood on the Tracks on
Apple podcast, I Heart Radio, app, Amazon Music, or wherever
you get your podcasts. On this season two, of Blood
on the Tracks, We'll be releasing ten episodes on the
Incredible Life of John Lennon, with a new episode every Thursday.
You can also binge all ten episodes of season one
(29:37):
on the insane story of the notorious record producer Phil
Spector right now. It's available wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode of Blood on the Tracks was written by
Zeth Lundie and hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan,
also executive produced by Brady sad Story and copy editing
by Pat Healy. This episode was mixed by Colin Fleming.
(29:57):
Additional music and score elements by and Spraker. This episode
featured Dennis Brennan as Richard Nixon. Blood on the Tracks
is produced by Double Elvis and partnership with I Heart Radio.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
com on the Blood on the Track series page. If
you want to chat about this show or hear more
about the other shows, we're making a Double Elvis tap
(30:19):
in on Instagram at double Elvis, on Twitter at Double
Elvis fm, and now on Twitch, where we're streaming three
days a week at Twitch dot tv, slash Double Elvis
Podcasts and Finally, be sure to check out disgrace Land,
the award winning music and true crime podcast that I
also host. Disgraceland is available only on free Amazon Music.
(30:40):
To hear tons of insane stories about your favorite musicians
getting away with murder and behaving very badly, go to
Amazon dot com slash disgrace lamb, or if you have
an Echo device, just say Alexa play the disgrace Land
podcast black Along by Crazy Ir
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!