When they return to New York, John and Yoko begin preparing right away for what they call the One to One concert (their answer to George’s Concert for Bangladesh) to benefit the mentally disabled, especially those Willowbrook State School residents for whom Geraldo Rivera continues to crusade. Like George’s concert, this one will feature a lineup of other guests—including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Sha Na Na—and consist of two Madison Square Garden performances, a movie, and a record. Rivera tells the New York Post, “We raised about a quarter of a million dollars.” John rewards volunteer fund-raisers and students from the school with $60,000 worth of tickets to the shows and has tambourines distributed so that concertgoers can shake the percussion instruments in time to the music.

*  *  *

“Now more than ever, baby, Nixon now!” Sammy Davis Jr. is onstage at Miami Marine Stadium. It’s August 22, the second day of the 1972 Republican National Convention, and Davis, a former Kennedy Democrat, is debuting for delegates the incumbent president’s campaign song. (“Hate to get personal about it,” a Rolling Stone reporter observes, “but the only other time I ever saw the fellow [Davis] was back in San Francisco” at a fund-raising event for a losing effort by an Old Left judicial candidate.)

“I don’t think the youth vote is in anybody’s pocket,” Nixon tells the assembled party delegates. In Flamingo Park, five thousand “nondelegates” are amassing, though John and Yoko are not among them, being back up in New York furiously getting ready for their charity concert. These “zippies, Yippies, hippies, crazies,” according to a local resident, are protesters reclaiming the ground they’d recently occupied when Miami Beach had also hosted the Democratic National Convention, from July 10 to July 13.

“People who want to have bloody hands go over to the tent on my right,” an antiwar organizer announces from a Flamingo Park soundstage. “People who want death masks go over just behind that. We still need people for the bombing and the dike building.”

When John appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, months earlier, he’d made it clear that he was bowing out of any protest activities planned around the Republican National Convention and would not be attending. Nevertheless, the FBI has agents scouring Miami Beach for the man identified in Senator Strom Thurmond’s report as “a member of the former musical group known as ‘The Beatles.’”