We All Shine On — John & Yoko and the Politics of Stardom

Celebrity activism is a tacky commodity these days. Movie stars and pop divas use causes to safely grab the spotlight and advance their careers. But once upon a time, radical politics was dangerous for those few celebrities who were brave enough to jump into these roiling waters. In By the Light of Burning Dreams, Margaret Talbot and I devote a chapter to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s years of living dangerously. Holed up in a modest Greenwich Village flat between October 1971 and February 1973, the former Beatle and his essential partner escalated their militant activism. They played benefit concerts on behalf of the jailed hippie radical John Sinclair and the families of Attica State prisoners slaughtered on the orders of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller; they aired their radical views about peace, feminism and racial justice on network TV; they hung out with Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert, radical feminist literary critic Kate Millett and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. Most important, Lennon and Ono tried to revive the fatigued Vietnam antiwar movement and defeat President Nixon’s bid for reelection in 1972. Nixon, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and their repressive machinery saw Lennon as a dire political threat — especially in the first presidential race to include 18-year-old voters — and they did everything in their power to “neutralize” him.

John and Yoko’s amazing political journey still hasn’t been fully understood or appreciated, but we tell their remarkable story in our book. When he was assassinated in 1980, Lennon was coming back into the public spotlight with Ono, and planning to become outspokenly active again — this time against the incoming Reagan administration. The Dream Was Over.