In the spring of 1972, John Lennon woke up every morning not knowing if that would be the day he was forced to leave. Not by choice, not by circumstance, by order of the president of the United States, who had decided that a 31-year-old songwriter from Liverpool was dangerous enough to require removal from American soil.

The deportation order had been sitting on his kitchen table for weeks. His lawyer was appealing it. The appeal might work or it might not. Every morning, John made coffee and waited to find out which. Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election by one of the largest margins in American history. He carried 49 states.

He received 60% of the popular vote. He was by any conventional measure untouchable. And yet, in the months leading up to that election, his administration devoted considerable resources to the removal of a British musician who had been living in New York for less than a year. The memo that started it was written by Senator Stumm Thurman in February 1972 and addressed to the Nixon White House.

It described John Lennon’s plans to combine a national concert tour with voter registration drives targeting the 11 million Americans between 18 and 21 who were voting for the first time in a presidential election. The memo concluded that if Lenin’s visa was terminated, it would be a strategic counter measure.

Two weeks later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings. The official reason given was a 1968 drug conviction in London. Half an ounce of cannabis, a misdemeanor that had been used against Lenon, not because anyone genuinely believed it warranted deportation, but because it was the only legal mechanism available to an administration that needed a pretext. J.

Edgar Hoover had placed Lenon under FBI surveillance immediately upon his arrival in New York in 1971. The phones at the Dakota were tapped. His movements were tracked. Memos passed between the FBI’s New York office and Washington documenting his associations, his appearances, his conversations with anti-war activists.

The logic of the Nixon administration’s fear was straightforward, if not particularly dignified. The 18 to 21 year old demographic was overwhelmingly anti-war. John Lennon had more influence over that demographic than anyone else in the country. If he could mobilize young voters, if he could use the machinery of his fame to turn political energy into actual votes, he might cost Nixon the election.

Getting him out of the country would solve the problem. What they had not accounted for was that John Lennon intended to stay. Jon and Yoko had arrived in New York in August 1971. They had come partly for practical reasons. Yoko was fighting a custody battle over her daughter Kiyoko from a previous marriage and the legal proceedings required her presence in the United States.

But there was something else as well. New York was for both of them the city that made the most sense. It was large enough to provide the anonymity that London no longer could. radical enough to match their politics, alive enough to match their energy. John would say later that he felt at home in New York in a way he had never felt in London, that it was the city he had always been heading toward without knowing it.

The political involvement began almost immediately. Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman, two of the most prominent figures in the American anti-war movement, had been watching Lenin since he wrote Give Peace a Chance in 1969, and they moved quickly to draw him into their orbit. There were meetings, dinners, conversations that extended late into New York nights about Vietnam and Nixon and the possibility of using music as genuine political organizing rather than sentiment.

John was both attracted and cautious. He understood the power of what was being proposed, a national concert tour that would combine performance with political engagement, that would register voters and build momentum against the war. But he had seen what happened to people who made themselves targets of the American government and he was not naive about what that could mean.

He told Jerry Rubin that he would only commit to events that were strictly non-violent. He wanted to use his influence, not be used by it. None of this caution mattered to the Nixon administration. The memo went to the White House. The INS received its instructions. The deportation order arrived at the Dakota. His name was Leon Wales.

And when John Lennon first called him in March 1972, Wales was a respected immigration attorney in New York. With a practice focused primarily on helping ordinary people navigate the complexities of American immigration law, he was not particularly connected to the music industry. He had no particular reason to know who John Lennon was.

Wildest son, Michael, later recalled his father coming home from that first meeting and telling his wife about a new client, a singer named Jack Lemon and his wife, Yokomoto. His wife looked at him as though he had said something strange. “You mean John Lennon,” she said. “Of the Beatles.

” Wildest looked at her for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.” This accidental quality of their partnership turned out to matter. Wilds was not aed by his client’s fame and was not intimidated by the forces arrayed against him. He approached the deportation case with the methodical precision of someone who believed that the law properly applied would produce the right outcome and who was willing to do whatever was necessary to ensure it was properly applied.

His first move was to establish that the drug conviction being used to justify deportation was legally insufficient. He demonstrated that the United States routinely allowed immigrants with similar or more serious criminal records to remain in the country and that the selective application of the rule to Lenin specifically constituted discriminatory enforcement.

He then filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI documents relating to Lenin’s case, a request that the bureau resisted for years, insisting that the files were classified. What Wilds was building slowly and with enormous patience was not just a defense of John Lennin’s right to remain in America. He was constructing a legal argument that would eventually reshape American immigration policy in ways that extended far beyond his client.

Jon lived with the deportation order the way he lived with most things that threatened him by converting the anxiety into work. The years between 1972 and 1975 were among the most productive and also the most chaotic of his solo career. Some is over in New York City was raw and immediate and political in a way that his post Beatles work had not previously been.

Mind games reached for something more internal. Walls and bridges made during what he called his lost weekend, an 18-month period of separation from Yoko, spent largely in Los Angeles with May Pang, was the work of someone trying to locate himself in the middle of a life that had become genuinely destabilized.

Through all of it, the deportation case continued. Every appeal was met with a new order. Every legal victory was followed by a new challenge from the INS. Wild sued the government for the FBI documents. The government refused to release them, claiming national security. Wilds appealed the refusal. The appeals moved through the courts with the deliberate slowness of a process designed to exhaust the people it was supposed to serve.

Jon appeared on television to make his case. He sat on the Dick Cavitt show and spoke with the particular combination of articulateness and barely contained fury that had always characterized him at his most engaged. He was not, he said, asking for special treatment. He was asking for the treatment that the law actually provided.

The same treatment that had been extended to immigrants with comparable or worse records. The treatment that was being withheld from him for reasons that had nothing to do with the law and everything to do with politics. Dick Cavitt later testified on his behalf at an immigration hearing. By April 1973, Jon had been living under the deportation order for over a year.

Nixon had won the election. The concert tour had never happened, partly because Lenin had withdrawn from active political involvement under legal pressure, partly because the strategy had clearly failed. In any case, Nixon had his landslide, and yet the INS continued to pursue Lenin’s deportation as though the political purpose of the exercise had long since expired, but the bureaucratic momentum of it could not be stopped.

J’s response was characteristically theatrical. On April 1st, 1973, April Fool’s Day, a choice he had made deliberately. He and Yoko held a press conference to announce the formation of Nutopia, a conceptual country, they said, with no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. Citizenship was granted by declaration of awareness.

All citizens were ambassadors. As ambassadors, they were entitled to diplomatic immunity. Therefore, the deportation order was null and void. The press laughed. The Immigration and Naturalization Service did not. But the press conference accomplished something real beneath its absurdest surface. It reframed the narrative, transforming Jon from a man fighting a losing battle into a man who refused to take the fight on the government’s terms.

It demonstrated in the way that only Jon could demonstrate things that he was not going to be ground down that he was going to respond to the machinery of state power with the only weapon he had that the state could not confiscate his imagination. Wilds meanwhile continued filing documents. The years between 1973 and 1975 were years of waiting.

Nixon’s presidency collapsed under the weight of Watergate. The Vietnam War ended. The political context that had generated the deportation order dissolved. And yet the order itself persisted, moving through the courts with its own momentum. Jon retreated. The lost weekend in Los Angeles, the return to Yoko, the quiet life at the Dakota that he had always at some level been seeking. He baked bread.

He spent time with Shawn, who was born in October 1975 on J’s 35th birthday. a coincidence that felt to both of them like something more than a coincidence. He made less noise, both literally and politically. The man who had been the most politically engaged rock musician in America became, for a while, almost invisible.

Wildest kept working. In October 1975, 2 days before Shawn was born, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in J’s favor. The three judge panel overturned the deportation order. The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds. Judge Irving Kaufman wrote, “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream.

Jon was standing outside the courthouse when the decision came through. He held an impromptu press conference on the steps. He thanked the kids and the fans who had written to their senators and signed petitions and worked behind the scenes for 5 years with no pay. He said he was glad it was over.

In July 1976, the green card arrived. John Lennon lived in New York for nine more years after the deportation order was overturned. He lived quietly, largely away from the public eye, raising Shawn, making occasional music, existing in the city that had fought over whether to keep him with the simplicity of someone who had been somewhere for long enough that leaving was no longer a question.

Leon Wilds’s fight to obtain the FBI documents from that period continued for years after Lenin’s death. When the files were finally released, they confirmed what everyone had suspected. That the deportation effort had been entirely politically motivated. That the drug conviction had been a pretext.

That the surveillance and the legal harassment had been instruments of an administration that was afraid of a song. The legal precedents established by Wilds during the case became foundations of American immigration law that outlasted both the Nixon administration and John Lennon himself. The Deferred Action Program.

The principle that immigration authorities could exercise discretion in prioritizing cases rather than pursuing every deportation mechanically was established in part through Wild’s work on Lenin’s behalf. Decades later, that precedent would be cited in arguments about immigration policy that had nothing to do with rock and roll.

John Lennon had wanted to stay in America because it was where the music came from. Because it was the country that had given him Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Buddy Holly and everything that had made him who he was. That was what he said when people asked him why he fought so hard to remain. Not politics, not principle, music.

The government had called him a national threat. He had refused to leave and he had been right. Not about the politics which he largely abandoned, but about the music which he did not. The city he had fought to stay in was the city where nine years after the green card arrived, he was killed.