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“The government’s anti-Lennon campaign eased off somewhat after Nixon was safely reelected 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.”
Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker (Oct. 2010)
Full article here.
