John’s legal entanglements with the US government can at best be termed a stalemate. The three-year limbo rankles all the more given that one of John’s most treacherous adversaries was convicted on January 1, 1975, of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury relating to the Watergate scandal and is currently serving a thirty-month-to-eight-year prison sentence. That man is John Mitchell, who stepped down from the office of attorney general (in order to head Nixon’s reelection campaign) on February 15, 1972—eleven days after receiving and acting upon Senator Strom Thurmond’s recommendations regarding deportation proceedings against John Lennon.

On June 19, John files suit against Mitchell and officials of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, stating in his affidavit that “I have been the subject of illegal surveillance activities on the part of the government; that as a result, my case” has “been prejudged for reasons unrelated to my immigration status.”

Five days later, on June 23, immigration officials grant a stay on the humanitarian grounds of Yoko’s pregnancy.

“It would have been unconscionable to deport him now,” says an INS spokesman. “Yoko Ono has had a difficult pregnancy.”

*  *  *

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a panel of three judges hears John’s case in open court. It’s October 7, 1975, two days before John’s thirty-fifth birthday. The baby is due any day now. Their attorney, Leon Wildes, argues that “there is substantial reason to believe that official governmental action was based principally on a desire to silence political opposition squarely protected by the First Amendment.”

The judges rule two to one in John’s favor; the twenty-four-page decision is written by Chief Judge Irving Kaufman. Kaufman, a career-long proponent of First Amendment rights, was appointed to the court in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, though he earned his most notorious judicial credential ten years earlier, at the height of the Cold War, when he sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death following their conviction on espionage charges for providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

“The courts will not condone selective deportation based on secret political grounds,” Kaufman finds, adding, “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream.”

*  *  *

John puts out a statement that “It’s a great birthday gift from America for me, Yoko, and the baby,” but his attention is elsewhere when the verdict is issued. After a touch-and-go pregnancy and a difficult delivery, Yoko gives birth to a healthy eight-pound, ten-ounce boy by cesarean section at New York Hospital on October 9. They name him Sean Taro Ono Lennon.

John and his son not only share a birthday, they also share a name (“Sean” being an Irish variation of “John”; Julian’s rarely used first name is also John).

“I feel higher than the Empire State Building!” John declares, beaming at his new son.