In 1971, a little before Christmas, I took advantage of my job as a young Talk of the Town reporter for this magazine to spend a very enjoyable afternoon with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the little West Village converted warehouse they were living in at the time. You can read about our conversation here for free.

I spent a fair amount of time with the Lennons throughout 1972 and ended up writing a long “Reporter at Large” piece about their immigration hassles. You have to be a subscriber to access this one, but even if you are I wouldn’t recommend it. Rereading it now, I can’t believe how incredibly dull it is—column after column of stupefying detail about immigration law, administrative hearings, legal technicalities, blah blah blah… Practically its only virtue is the mock-tabloid headline:

POETIC LARKS BID BALD EAGLE WELCOME SWAN OF LIVERPOOL

My sainted editor here, William Whitworth (later editor-in-chief of The Atlantic), and I cooked that up, based on the P.E.N. American Center’s statement of support for Lennon. The statement’s author was Allen Ginsberg. The Poetic Larks were the poets, essayists, and novelists of P.E.N., the Bald Eagle was the United States Government, and I don’t have to tell you who the Swan of Liverpool was.

All that legalistic jive I went on and on and on about was just a smokescreen, of course. I missed the real story: the elaborate, concerted, secret effort of J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., John Mitchell’s Justice Department, and President Richard Nixon himself to use the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get rid of Lennon, whom they saw as a dangerous, “narcotics”-addled subversive. In the piece I could only speculate a little about the likelihood that something of that sort was going on. There’s a passage describing the obvious discomfort of the civil-service I.N.S. prosecutor supposedly in charge of the case against Lennon (which was nominally based on a questionable, years-old English arrest for possessing “cannabis resin”). After telling a gaggle of reporters that it wasn’t his place to say whether deporting Lennon was a good idea, that he himself was a Beatle fan among millions, and that he saw a big difference between “a big drug dealer” and “just a kid who got himself busted for a joint,” i.e., Lennon, the prosecutor, Vincent Schiano,

mumbled, as if to himself, “You know the old saying—sometimes the best guarantee of civil liberties is the inefficiency of government.” Then he said, “I think I’d better stop talking. I’m still healing from some old wounds. I’ve had to sue for every promotion I’ve gotten.”

(The full story is told by the historian Jon Wiener, in his excellent book “Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files,” and in a film partly based on it, “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.”)

The government’s anti-Lennon campaign eased off somewhat after Nixon was safely reëlected and ceased altogether once the affable Gerald Ford was President. The Lennons were honored guests at Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural ball. When Lennon was assassinated, on December 8, 1980, President Carter issued a statement of sorrow—written by me, as it happens. I can’t find it at the moment—it somehow got left out of the official Presidential papers—but, if I recall correctly, it made the point that Lennon had shown his love for this country by insisting on living here.

Now that I think of it, one more passage from that awful thirty-eight-year-old piece of mine may be relevant to the moment:

“I would like to stay in America, yes,” John said. “Yoko was brought up and educated here, and she’s made a convert of me. New York is like Paris in the old days. I always used to dream about van Gogh and everybody being there together. Now everyone’s in New York. I love a lot of places, like France, but New York is more like Liverpool. Even the Brooklyn accent is like Liverpudlian—‘cawfee.’ New York and Liverpool are both full of tough people. They’re both near the water. I’ll go back home when I’m eighty, to Cornwall, maybe, or Wales. We all go home to die, like elephants. But I’d like to spend a few decades around the world first.”

Saturday would have been John Lennon’s seventieth birthday. He never would get to be eighty; he barely even got to be forty. But it’s not quite true that he never got to go home to die. He was already home.