When the subject of the Vietnam War comes up, I sometimes can’t resist pulling out the old joke, “I went to ‘Nam.(pause, two, three) Pan Am! Straight to Canada!” The truth is I was too young to even do that. By virtue of being 12 years old in 1970, I got to experience that tumultuous era twice- Once as a kid more concerned with puberty than the pentagon papers. Then again as an adult soaking up books and documentaries that fill in the details my hormone addled brain couldn’t absorb the first time around.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was well aware of the anti-war protest movement. The Black Panthers formed in Oakland across the Bay and the courtroom kidnapping and murder of Judge Harold Haley made Angela Davis a fugitive happened just about a mile from our home in Marin County. I also had two older brothers of draft age who were a few lucky lottery numbers away from an all expense paid trip to the Mekong Delta.
I’ve read excellent memoirs of the war like “A Bright and Shining Lie” by Neil Sheehan and “The Best and the Brightest” by the late David Halberstam that detail the quagmire that killed over 50,000 of ours and 2 million of theirs. But the chaotic and diffuse worldwide movement to end the war is a more unwieldy story to tell.
“The U.S. vs John Lennon” offers a narrow, but illuminating window into that time. The documentary follow’s John Lennon as his musical and personal orbit pulls away from the wholesomeness of the mop top Beatles toward the artsy and subversive influence of Yoko Ono. Living in New York, Lennon bonds with the more radical figures of the anti-war movement including Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seales. This draws the attention of the Nixon Administration and F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover (my father’s employer during this time, though my Russian speaking Dad never spied on hippies as far as I know) who begin to view the granny-glasses wearing Brit as a genuine enemy of the state.
I've heard enough about the less admirable qualities of John Lennon to be annoyed by the hagiography this film becomes, but the excesses of the federal government and the unfair and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deport the singer are downright scary. Asked why the government was so determined to kick him out of the country, Lennon simply says, “Because I’m a peace-nick”. And he’s right. More unsettling are the assurances by Richard Nixon that he will draw down U.S. troops as the South Vietnamese military gets up to strength. That’s one of the many moments in the film to remind you that the architects of the Iraq War don’t remember much about the ‘70’s either.
For me, the most jarring images in this film are the shots of the thousands of college students, parents, and veterans who took time out from their lives to pick up a sign and march against a government they believed was on the wrong course. Current polls show most of us feel that way now, but the only people I see carrying signs about the war are the Bayshore Patriots.
Even though John Lennon wears a halo throughout much of "The U.S. vs John Lennon", the narrators concede he was as much a pawn in the anti-war movement as a leader. The concerts to free drug suspects and the gaudy "bed-ins" with Yoko Ono galvanized the counterculture, but Walter Cronkite's disapprovingly arched eybrow probably did more to shorten the war. It's no spoiler to tell you that the movie ends with Lennon's murder by a deranged loner in 1980. The surprise is that the belief that non-violent protest can end an unpopular war... died with him.