John-Lennon.com - The Assassination Of John Lennon
John-Lennon.com
Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins
1969
Life with the Lions: Unfinished Music #2
1969
Live in New York City
1986
What                                are Your Favorite John Lennon Songs?
(Pick                                One or More)
All You Need Is Love
Revolution
You Got To Hide Your Love Away
It's Only Love
Current                              Results
The                                  Assassination Of John Lennon
The                                  scene outside New York's spooky old Dakota apartment                                  building on the evening of December 8, 1980, was                                  as surreal as it was horrifying. John Lennon,                                  probably the world's most famous rock star, lay                                  semiconscious, hemorrhaging from four flat-tipped                                  bullets blasted into his back. His wife Yoko Ono                                  held his head in her arms and screamed (just like                                  on her early albums).
A                                  few yards away a pudgy young man stood eerily                                  still, peering down into a paperback book. Moments                                  earlier he had dropped into a military firing                                  stance - legs spread for maximum balance, two                                  hands gripping his .38 revolver to steady his                                  aim - and blown away the very best Beatle. Now                                  he leafed lazily through the pages of the one                                  novel even the most chronically stoned and voided-out                                  ninth grader will actually read, J. D. Salinger's                                  Catcher in the Rye.
The                                  Dakota doorman shouted at the shooter, Mark David                                  Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?"
"I                                  just shot John Lennon," Chapman replied,                                  accurately enough.
It                                  was a tragedy of Kerkegaardian pointlessness.                                  There was only one apparent way to squeeze any                                  sense from it; write it off as random violence                                  by a "wacko."
"He                                  walked past me and then I heard in my head, 'Do                                  it, do it, do it,' over and over again, saying                                  'Do it, do it, do it,' like that," Chapman,                                  preternaturally serene, recalled in a BBC documentary                                  several years after going to prison. "I don't                                  remember aiming. I must have done, but I don't                                  remember drawing a bead or whatever you call it.                                  And I just pulled the trigger steady five times."
Chapman                                  described his feeling at the time of the shooting                                  as "no emotion, no anger dead silence in                                  the brain."
His                                  unnatural tone sounded all-too-familiar. British                                  lawyer/journalist Fenton Bresler took it as a                                  tip-off. Chapman was a brainwashed hit man carrying                                  out someone else's contract.
"Mark                                  David Chapman," writes Bresler, "is                                  in many ways as much the victim of those who wanted                                  to kill John Lennon as Lennon himself."
Prosecutors,                                  as a loss for motive, opted for the cliché:                                  Chapman did it for the attention- the troublesome                                  American preoccupation with grabbing that elusive                                  fifteen minutes of propels many a daily-newspaper-journalist-cum-pop-sociologist                                  into raptures of sanctimony. But Arthur O'Connor,                                  the detective who spent more time with Chapman                                  immediately following the murder than anyone else,                                  saw it another way.
"It                                  is definitely illogical to say that Mark Committed                                  the murder to make himself famous. He did not                                  want to talk to the press from the very start.                                  It's possible Mark could have been used by somebody.                                  I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him                                  intensely. He looked as if he could have been                                  programmed."
O'Connor                                  was speaking to Bresler, and publicly for the                                  first time. Bresler's book Who Killed John Lennon?                                  Offers the most cogent argument that Lennon's                                  murder was not the work of yet another "lone                                  nut."
Conspiracy                                  theories abounded after the Lennon assassination,                                  many rather cruelly fingering Yoko as the mastermind.                                  Another focused on Paul who, by this line of reasoning,                                  blamed Yoko for engineering his arrest in Japan                                  on reefer charges. The Lennon conspiracy turns                                  up on radio talk shows with some frequency, where                                  hosts fend off callers with the "Why bother                                  to kill that guy?" defense.
Only                                  Bresler's thesis, that Chapman was a mind-controlled                                  assassin manipulated by some right-wing element                                  possibly connected to the newly elected (and not                                  even inaugurated) Reagan apparatus of reaction,                                  transcends the confines of pure speculation, extending                                  into the realm of actual investigation.
Even                                  so, Bresler's book a little too often substitutes                                  rhetorical questions ("What does that steady                                  repetition of a voice saying 'Do it, do it, do                                  it,' over and over again in Mark's head sound                                  like to you?") for evidentiary argument.                                  We can forgive him for that failing. Bresler tracked                                  the case for eight years, conducted unprecedented                                  interviews, and extracted a ream of previously                                  unreleased government documents. But unlike researchers                                  into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin                                  Luther King, he did not have volumes of evidence                                  gathered by any official investigation, even a                                  flawed one, to fall back on. The New York police                                  had their man, the case was closed the very night                                  of the murder - and, anyway, what political reason                                  could possibly exist for gunning down the composer                                  of "I Am the Walrus"?
In                                  building his case, Bresler established some key                                  points that put the lie to any "Who would                                  want to kill an aging rock star?" brush-off.
Richard                                  Nixon, his administration and other right-wing                                  politicians (including ultraconservative ancient                                  Senator Strom Thurmond, who personally memoed                                  Attorney Gerneral John Mitcell on the matter)                                  were fixated on what they saw as the Lennon problem.                                  To them, the politically outspoken singer-songwriter                                  was an insidious subversive of the worst kind,                                  the famous and beloved kind.
J.                                  Edgar Hoover shared their concerns. One page of                                  Lennon's FBI file bears the handwritten, block-lettered,                                  under lined words, ALL EXTREMISTS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED                                  DANGEROUS. The government went all-out to deny                                  Lennon his longed-for permanent U.S. residency,                                  and more than that, to deport him altogether (that                                  was the subject of Thurmond's memo).
Lennon's                                  FBI file - at nearly three hundred pages as chubby                                  as Hoover himself - reveals that he was under "constant surveillance." Nor did the                                  G-men keep a particularly low profile around the                                  ex-Beatle, apparently attempting to harass him                                  into silence or at least drive him nuts, similar                                  to the tactic they had used on Martin Luther King,                                  Jr., a few short but eventful years earlier.
In                                  late 1972, when the "surveillance" was                                  at its peak, Lennon told humorist Paul Krassner, "Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and                                  me, it was not an accident."
The                                  FBI and the CIA tracked Lennon at least from his "Free John Sinclair" concert in 1969                                  until 1976 - even though by then Lennon had won                                  his immigration battle and dropped out of not                                  only political activism but public life altogether                                  into what turned out to be a five-year period                                  of seclusion. His apartment was watched, he was                                  followed, his phone was tapped.
Placing                                  a person under "constant surveillance" and ordering that person executed are admittedly                                  two different things. Nevertheless, Bresler's                                  point is that the government did not consider                                  John Lennon a harmless rock 'n' roller whose awkward                                  entrance into the world of political activism                                  often carried a high cringe factor (as in his                                  Montreal "bed-in").
He                                  was viewed as a dangerous radical who needed to                                  be stopped.
And                                  in a way that official paranoia might have been                                  justified, because as embarrassing as Lennon and                                  Ono's political publicity stunts occasionally                                  became, John Lennon was always capable of seizing                                  the spotlight and speaking directly to millions                                  of young people who venerated him.
With                                  unfettered access to the media, his power was                                  immense, at least potentially so, and recognized                                  by more experienced radicals like Jerry Rubin                                  and Abbie Hoffman, who linked themselves to Lennon,                                  clinging to close that they made the rock star                                  uncomfortable.
Lennon                                  was killed just four years after the intense FBI/CIA                                  surveillance ceased. In those intermittent years,                                  Jimmy Carter was president - a Democrat who kept                                  the two gestapo-ish agencies more or less in check.
But                                  in December 1980, when John Lennon's first album                                  in half a decade was high on the charts, Carter                                  was a lame duck chief executive, having lost his                                  reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. Reagan's campaign                                  was managed by career secret agent William Casey,                                  who under President Reagan became the CIA's most                                  freewheeling chief since Allen Dulles. The new                                  far-right administration would reassemble the                                  intelligence services and grant them a cheerful                                  carte blanche.
The                                  forces that tried desperately to neutralize Lennon                                  for at least seven years lost power in 1976. Lennon's                                  government dossier ends in that year. In 1980,                                  as those forces were preparing to retake control                                  of the government, "dangerous extremist" John Lennon emerged from retirement. Within a                                  few months he was murdered.
The                                  paper trail that might support the conspiracy                                  theory is a little thin, however. It doesn't extend                                  much beyond the airline ticket found in Chapman's                                  hotel room; a Hawaii-New York connection departing                                  December 5. But Chapman had actually purchased                                  a Hawaii-Chicago ticket to depart December 2,                                  with no connecting flight. The ticket found after                                  his arrest had apparently been altered. None of                                  his friends knew that he traveled on to New York.                                  They thought he went to Chicago for a three-day                                  stay.
Bresler                                  concludes that the Lennon assassination, which,                                  as Chapman himself noted in a rare interview, "ended an era," bears similarities to                                  another assassination that took place twelve years                                  earlier: the murder of Robert F. Kennedy.
RFK's                                  apparent lone killer, Sirhan Sirhan, and Chapman                                  (coincidentally?) shared a defense psychiatrist.                                  But while Dr. Bernard Diamond couldn't skirt the                                  obvious fact that Sirhan was under hypnosis (Diamond                                  wrote it off as self-hypnosis), he labeled Chapman                                  a "paranoid schizophrenic."
The                                  court disagreed. Chapman even now has never had                                  more than routine psychiatric care since entering                                  his guilty plea. He was not sent to a mental hospital,                                  but to Attica State Prison. He was judged legally "rational."
Bresler                                  clears up a few widely disseminated misconceptions                                  about Mark David Chapman:
While                                  any mention of his name is now accompanied by                                  the phrase "deranged fan," Chapman was                                  anything but. He was no more or less ardent a                                  Beatles/Lennon fan than anyone of his generation.                                  His real rock hero was Todd Rundgren, a cynical                                  studio craftsman who could not be further from                                  Lennon in artistic sensibility. Notwithstanding                                  Chapman's announcement months after the murder                                  that he "killed Lennon to gain prominence                                  to promote the reading of The Catcher in the Rye," Chapman never exhibited strong feelings about                                  the novel until shortly before the shooting. (Catcher,                                  Bresler muses, may have been used as a device                                  to trigger Chapman's "programming.")
After                                  the murder, major media ran bizarre stories of                                  Chapman's supposed growing identification with                                  John Lennon - at one point he even "re-baptized" himself as Lennon, according to Newsweek. These                                  stories were all quite fascinating, but there                                  was no evidence to back any of them up. (It is                                  true that when Chapman quit his last job he signed                                  out as "John Lennon," then crossed the                                  name out, but Bresler interprets this, reasonably,                                  as Chapman saying, "John Lennon, I am going                                  to kill you," rather than "John Lennon,                                  I am you."
Chapman                                  was not a "longer." He was for most                                  of his life a normally social individual and a                                  camp counselor who had a special rapport with                                  kids.
Bresler                                  also notes that when Chapman signed up for a YMCA                                  overseas program, he selected an odd destination: Beirut - a perfect place, says Bresler, for Chapman,                                  a once gentle soul, to be "blooded," that is, desensitized to violence.
A                                  final note to the mystery of Mark David Chapman:                                  As he was ready to go to trial and his diligent                                  public defender was winding up six months spent                                  assembling Chapman's defense, the accused killer                                  suddenly decided to change his plea to guilty.                                  His lawyer was perplexed and more than a little                                  perturbed. But Chapman was determined. He said                                  he was acting on instructions from a "small                                  male voice" that spoke to him in his cell.
Chapman                                  interpreted it as the voice of God.
John Lennon Message Board
Post | Read
For                                  me, John is still alive. I believe he's still                                  with us,
looking over Yoko, Sean and Julian. If you are                                  reading this John, remember that I will never                                  loose faith in you,
and say hi to George for us. Even though I'm only                                  13,
you're forever going to be my hero,
because of giving your life for Love and Peace.
I'm a great fan of The Beatles, and I beleive                                  that they were
the best rock & roll group in music history.                                  Not many people
my age understand me well. They don't understand                                  why I like
The Beatles and why John Lennon is forever going                                  to be my hero.
They don't understand why a 13 year old girl would                                  be into
The Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison.                                  All I've got to say about this Message Board,                                  is that it helped me in a sort of way,
tell the whole world how I fell about a man, who                                  for no reasons, died.
Remember, War Is Over If You Want It.
Jo, a 13 year old girl from Canada