Despite John’s being one of the world’s most recognizable celebrities, a flyer is distributed so that he can be easily identified by the police and FBI. Except it’s not even John’s face pictured on the cheat sheet but rather a publicity still of David Peel (who has his own FBI file) saying, in a speech balloon, “The pope smokes dope”—the title of his 1972 album, released by Apple. In later years, Peel remarks that it was “rock’s greatest flattery” to have been confused with John, though the closest resemblance between them is that both sport long hair and round eyeglasses.

*  *  *

On election night, November 7, John and Yoko can barely watch as the incumbent, Richard Nixon, defeats fifty-year-old South Dakota senator George McGovern in a landslide, carrying forty-nine out of fifty states for a second term in the White House.

“I just really trust him, you know?” a youthful Nixonette says of the chief executive.

John never has and never will.

The one benefit to him from Nixon’s reelection, however, is that the administration no longer seems to consider him a “political enemy.” On December 8, the special agent in charge of New York’s FBI office notifies the Bureau’s acting director that “in view of subject’s inactivity in Revolutionary Activities and his seemingly [sic] rejection by NY Radicals, captioned case is being closed in the NY Division.”

Within a month of Nixon’s reelection, John’s FBI file is closed. But his visa troubles continue.

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

We gotta get out of this place

If it’s the last thing we ever do.

—“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”

It’s time to move.

In February of 1973, John and Yoko’s Bank Street apartment is robbed, which leaves them shaken. They have next to no security at their bohemian loft, plus the lingering effect of the FBI surveillance on top of a decade of international fame and its invasion of privacy—it’s all left John feeling too exposed in Greenwich Village. “You just couldn’t go out the front door, because there would be something weird at the door,” he complains.

His social circle in the Village is also not what it once was. He’s disillusioned with his ability to have an effect on American politics, and his friendship with the Yippies, especially Jerry Rubin, has soured. “As he didn’t lead the revolution, I decided to quit answering the phone,” John states. He’s been feeling used, manipulated, taken advantage of—and his own recent behavior has been worst of all.

Rubin hosted a party on the night of what turned out to be Nixon’s landslide win over McGovern. He recalls John “came into the house screaming” about the defeat, “crazy with rage.”