Video: 'Inside The FBI's Files On John Lennon'

(Friday, February 4, 1972) — U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond sent a secret memo today to William Timmons (in his capacity as an aide to President Richard Nixon) and U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell, with an attached file from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, urging that British musician John Lennon (then living in New York City) be deported from the United States as an undesirable alien due to Lennon’s political views and activism.

The document claimed Lennon’s influence on young people could affect Nixon’s chances of re-election, and suggested that terminating Lennon’s visa might be “a strategy counter-measure”.

Thurmond’s memo and attachment, received by the White House on Monday, Feb. 7, 1972, initiated the Nixon administration’s persecution of Lennon that threatened the former Beatle with deportation for more than four years.

The documents were discovered in the FBI files after a Freedom of Information Act search by Professor Jon Wiener, and published in Weiner’s book Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (2000).[152] They are discussed in the documentary film, The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006).