John Whitehead's Commentary

There's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. It's easy.
--John Lennon, "All You Need Is Love" (1967)

It was 1969, and the Vietnam War was raging. Protests, riots and societal turmoil were ripping at the seams of the western world. Into this political furnace stepped the unlikely characters of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

John and Yoko married in March, checked into the Amsterdam Hilton in Holland for their honeymoon and, to the surprise of many, immediately announced that a "happening" was about to take place in their bed. This week marks the 35th anniversary of the famous couple's bed-in for peace, which was immortalized in The Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko."

Holland was permissive, but even the chief of Amsterdam's vice squad issued a warning to anyone planning to attend. Despite this, 50 news people crowded outside their hotel room. "These guys were sweating to fight to get in first because they thought we were going to make love in bed. That's where their minds were at," Lennon later recalled.

However, when newsmen entered the room, John and Yoko were sitting in bed, wearing pajamas. And they announced that they would stay in bed for a week as "our protest against all the suffering and violence in the world." The idea was to use the amazing image that Lennon the Beatle possessed in order to promote peace.

For seven days, starting on March 26, John and Yoko conducted interviews ten hours a day, starting at ten in the morning. And for their efforts, a media frenzy ensued.

"We did the bed-in in Amsterdam just to give people the idea that there are many ways of protest," Lennon said. "Protest by peace in any way, but peacefully. We think peace is only got by peaceful methods. To fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good because they always win, and they've been winning for thousands of years. They know how to play the game of violence."

Strangely enough, Lennon raised the ire of both the Left and the Right. Indeed, Lennon's pacifism seemed misplaced to the Left. As one columnist for the Village Voice wrote, "Lennon would never have achieved enlightenment if thousands of his forbears hadn't suffered drudgery far worse than protest marches and cared enough about certain ideals--and realities--to risk death for them."

If the Left was hostile, the establishment press was outraged by the bed-in. "This must rank as the most self-indulgent demonstration of all time," one columnist wrote.

The bed-in is historically important because it represented a very early exercise in New Left media politics. "John and Yoko rejected the view held by many in the antiwar movement," writes Jan Wiener in Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (1991), "that the newspapers and TV were necessarily and exclusively the instruments of corporate domination of popular consciousness. The two of them sought to work within the mass media, to undermine their basis, to use them, briefly and sporadically, against the system in which they functioned."

As a media event, the Amsterdam bed-in (and subsequent ones held by John and Yoko) certainly made the front pages and TV news. But were the bed-ins effective in helping the anti-war movement? In the weeks following the bed-in, Lennon became irritated with the question, "How successful was it?" and gave this example. "Some guy wrote, 'Now, because of your event in Amsterdam, I'm not joining the RAF, I'm growing my hair.'" A skeptical reporter asked whether staying in bed meant anything. "Imagine," Lennon replied, "if the American army stayed in bed for a week."

The second bed-in in Montreal produced one of the great peace anthems of the 20th century when Lennon composed "Give Peace a Chance" in a hotel room. On the evening of June 1, 1969, along with a host of celebrities, Lennon played guitar and sang the song into a four-track tape recorder. Within a short time, the song was playing on radios around the world.

And on November 15 during a peace rally in Washington, DC, Pete Seeger led nearly half a million demonstrators in singing "Give Peace a Chance" at the Washington Monument. "The people started swaying their bodies and banners and flags in time," Seeger later recalled, "several hundred thousand people, parents with their small children on their shoulders. It was a tremendously moving thing."

Later, Lennon was asked what he thought about that day. "I saw pictures of that Washington demonstration on British TV, with all those people singing it, forever and not stopping," he said. "It was one of the biggest moments of my life."

One interviewer noted that some were not taking John and Yoko and the bed-ins seriously, noting they were humorous. Lennon replied, "We stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot."

Just before leaving Great Britain in 1971 to live in America, Lennon told biographer Ray Coleman, "I'd like everyone to remember us with a smile. But, if possible, just as John and Yoko who created world peace forever. The whole of life is a preparation for death. I'm not worried about dying. When we go, we'd like to leave behind a better place."

In 1980, when management at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel heard the news of John Lennon's death, they turned out all the lights in the building as a mark of respect--that is, with the exception of Suite 902, which shone like a beacon over the city. That room is now a museum of sorts with a collection of books, videos and paraphernalia on both Lennon and The Beatles. And fittingly, on the ceiling are the opening words to "All You Need Is Love."

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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