Lawyer who fought Nixon’s efforts to deport John Lennon dies

LEON WILDES; 1933 - 2024

Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with attorney Leon Wildes as they leave the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, New York, 1972.Credit: Getty

For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Wildes doggedly battled the targeting by the Nixon administration and immigration officials of the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshalling a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden US immigration policy.

Uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials, in practice, can exercise wide discretion in whom they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law.

And he revealed that Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.

Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the stinging decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” and which halted the effort to kick Lennon out of the country.

Attorney Leon Wildes attends the “LENNONYC” premiere during the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, New York, 2010.Credit: Getty

“It was a very frightening moment,” Ono said in the 2007 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.

When the Lennons engaged Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his famous clients. In his book about the case, John Lennon vs. the USA, published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles but that the names of its members had escaped him.

“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting them in their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.

In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He’s not a radical lawyer. He’s not William Kunstler.”

Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War, having recorded the antiwar anthem Give Peace a Chance in 1969, and he had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.

Nixon administration officials feared that he had outsize influence among the young, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered to 18 from 21.

In the paranoid atmosphere then prevailing in the White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, notably the conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, to go after Lennon.

Their case centred on the London marijuana conviction. But the appellate court judge, Irving Kaufman, ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Lennon an “excludable alien.”

Yoko Ono, former Beatle John Lennon and attorney Leon Wildes leave the Immigration and Naturalisation Service in New York, 1972.Credit: AP

The real reasons for the pursuit of Lennon, Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his relentless digging through records. Early in 1972, Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, the agency then in charge of visas.

Of particular concern was the fact that Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.

“If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.

Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be given any extensions of their time to visit the United States,” Wildes wrote in his book.

The administration of US President Richard Nixon tried to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono.Credit: AP

For the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that appeared increasingly ham-fisted as public support for Lennon and Ono grew. Many of the era’s cultural celebrities spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller.

“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon’s desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and a new, much younger electorate getting the vote,” Wildes wrote. “To ensure his grip on power, any ‘dirty tricks,’ including the abusive misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”

The whole time, the FBI was keeping a close watch on Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Wildes wrote.

When Lennon learned of the skulduggery, he was infuriated. “They’re even changing their own rules because we’re peaceniks,” he said in a television interview.

John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, at a news conference at the National Press Club, New York, 1972.Credit: Getty

The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of his New York City home five years later.

In another breakthrough, Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to aid immigration lawyers battling the deportation of non-citizens today.

Throughout what Wildes acknowledged was the all-consuming job of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes encountering them, as others did, in what he called the “wonderful upright bed” in their Bank Street apartment.

“One could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote.

Leon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store.

Wildes earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.

He quickly gravitated towards immigration law, founding the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and going on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

He is survived by his wife, Alice Goldberg Wildes, sons Michael and Mark, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The New York Times

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